Burns

Today, I decided that I was ready to begin making challah bread for our shabbat again.  (This readiness may be correlated with the fact that all the challah I made and froze before Esther was born is gone.)

While making it, I was rejoicing in her increasing ability to sit by herself in her little rocking chair.  Up until the last couple of days, she has refused to be put down.  At. All.  (When other parents at a class I recently went to said very sweet things about "one thing they had learned" in the icebreaker session, I didn't stop before I answered honestly that I had learned how to ignore her crying.)  But yesterday, she let me shower a full shower without hollering and today she was content while I got through all of the steps of baking up until adding the water and the yeast.

When I got there, I accidentally splashed her with just a few drops of boiling water.

I quickasaflash picked her up before the hollering started and she calmed down quickly enough without even a red mark to show for her mother's negligence.  She spent the rest of the time with me in the Moby wrap (aka "the bag," as in "All right, back in the bag you go!").

The experience made me think of my trip to Africa and my realization that so many children there were seriously burned and scarred.  A side of a face.  A forearm.  A shoulder.  In a society where all meals are cooked on open flames, this is just one more hazard that kids routinely encounter.  I can't imagine that life for my daughter or myself since I would have to watch her be burned so badly.

This type of psychological association is one of the major things that makes motherhood difficult for me.  I have many very run-of-the-mill difficulties: Esther doesn't like to be put down, my body still isn't quite healed yet, Jacob and I are still in different beds since Esther will only sleep for any length of time when she's in the bed with me, frustration with my lack of ability to be productive, middle of the night fears that Esther's not eating enough or that I'm ruining her forever by not practicing tough love and building her character.  (No need to comfort me on those last two: I know they're ridiculous and untrue but 2:30 in the morning is an evil hour for worrying.)

No matter how mundane each of our experiences are, with few exceptions, they produce valid emotions.  Although we can tip over too far into self-pity, for the most part, each of us feels appropriately.  I'm OK with this for the most part, my practice of the spirituality of imperfection generally makes it easier for me to process my emotions without judging myself for having them in the first place (which only compounds any paralysis I'm experiencing).

However, I'm struggling to keep up this practice lately.  I keep comparing myself to moms that have to go back to work and single moms and moms in Africa or Iraq.  My frustrations seem laughable in comparison and my self-perception is gradually shifting to a belief that I am weak because of the paths we are taking or the pace at which we are taking them.  This is not a foreign experience for me but I can't remember how I snapped out of it in the past.

I am going to try to stop doing this.  God gave me this life and it would be ingrateful of me to behave as if I had less blessings than I do.  That is not the truth and I believe Jesus when he says that the truth will set me free.  I think I have already made the first step by making a rule that I am no longer allowed to use the iPad to research parenting tips in the middle of the night.  Instead, I'm reading Game of Thrones while Esther nurses.  I'm feeling better already.

Becoming Ma Joad

What I have managed to collect so far for the baby's nursery.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at an event with a warm acquaintance from grad school. I was delighted to see her because, although circumstances weren't right for us to pursue an actual friendship while studying, I thought she was a neat person and would gladly pursue one now, especially since she has a 5-year-old and a 3-month-old. I would love to build a circle of intelligent women with children who sometimes think about the world the same way I do: through the lens of policy, economics, organizational theory and systemic incentives and limitations. This would calm my fears that I will become unbalanced after my child is born, thinking only about how many poops today and the price of laundry detergent.

So, when she told me that she and another mom from grad school (whom I lovelovelove) were starting a business together and were making a presentation the next week, I didn't think twice about telling her that I would be there. I was a little distracted and didn't ask any questions. I just assumed: two U of C graduates + business presentation = something I would be interested in.

It probably won't surprise any of you that I showed up at her house to find a coffee table arrayed with cleaning supplies, cosmetics and "nutricueticals" and that I then had to sit through an hour and a half of a power-point presentation on the benefits of becoming a preferred customer by buying a subscription for $50-$70 worth of the stuff every month. A good percentage of the pitch was also focused on persuading us to host similar presentations in order to receive a cut of other people's subscriptions.

I was disappointed but not overly so and I was suitably impressed at a meta-level at the presenter's skill and earnestness at making what was clearly the company line sound like she was coming up with it on the spot.  I even thought I would actually sign up until I realized that we just don't spend $50 a month on those types of products.

The experience has me examining who I will be once this baby is born.  What will give my life meaning when I am exhausted but the dust bunnies keep piling up?  How will I keep from becoming selfish and forgetting that Jacob needs a partner, too?  How do I avoid becoming the type of person who sells non-perishable household products for a living even though they used to be passionate about changing the world?

I had dinner with a new friend the other night and she shared with me her trepidation regarding starting a family.  She said she just didn't feel ready.

I remember that once I said that to my own mother, years ago, as she peeled me a pear while I sat at the island in the kitchen and did nothing.  I commented that I didn't think that I would ever be able to serve my children so habitually.  My mom said, "No one is ever ready."

Can I tell you something, though?

I feel ready.

I feel like I've spent the last 8 years of my life acquiring a toolbox to help me realize when I have lost the plot and then to help me adjust and get back on track.  I have been practicing a spirituality of imperfection to come to terms with the fact that - because I am human - I am bound to make mistakes.  This is the way it is supposed to be.  So, I don't have to freak out or deny that I screw up every once in a while (or even every day, or several times a day).  Freaking out or denying won't change the fact that it happened or help me make sure that it won't happen again.  So, I acknowledge and examine mistakes that I make - including any feelings that come along as consequences - and try to mitigate the damage before moving on and trying not to do it again.

And then I do it again.  Because I'm human.

As far as I understand it, that describes parenthood, as well.  We do the best we can and still, we screw up often.

The parents that I do not want to emulate tend to be the ones who freak out or deny that either they or their children could screw up.  They go to great lengths to help themselves believe that they can control the outcomes of their actions.  Then, other people have to walk carefully around them so that they don't snap.

However, the fantastic parents that I know are the ones who laugh at themselves and move on.  Or they cry and move on.  Or they scream in frustration, break things, remember to breathe, call a friend and move on.  They set up loose systems to help calm the chaos and mostly remember not to get so focused on the systems that they forget the goal.  

I think I'm getting pretty good at that.  I feel like I have quite a few successful experiences in my history of rolling with the punches or recognizing when I haven't rolled with the punches and figuring out how to back up and fix whatever had broken because of my rigidity.

With this realization that my Batman Utility Belt is now pretty useful, I begin to get a sense of clarity about who I will become when working professionally to change the world is no longer the center of my life.  Last weekend, I wrote this note to the baby in his/her book that we write weekly notes:

I am just sort of trusting in good faith that spending my days changing the world on a nuclear level by helping you develop into a stable and loved human being will be equally fulfilling [to my professional work].  There will be the logistical tasks of making and keeping house around you, as well as the administrative tasks of creating a culture in which a harmonious family can thrive.  I want you and your father to be able to contribute to our life together as much as you receive from it.  I want to make sure that you both know how integral you are to all three of our lives now.  Life will be less good for all of us if any one of us is unable to be fully ourselves. So, I will work hard at encouraging the two of you - as well as paying attention to my own needs - to make sure this dynamic is possible.

Coming up with this mission statement has been very emotional for me.  It's HUGE.  To live my life for others, peeling pears because it makes their lives more pleasant?  I'm already good at living for myself and will continue doing so.  Professionally, I have been gaining expertise at living my life to achieve an objective (which usually involves helping others).  But to make my primary focus two other people?  There is something very noble and spiritual about that.  However, I am scared of it in the way an alcoholic is scared of getting sober.  I have no idea what my life will look like or who I will be once I start acting on that decision.

There are four, things that make me nervous about making this choice.  The first is that this is such a traditional arrangement.  The woman changes her focus from her career to her family and the man brings home the bacon.  In the case of our kosher home, the man will be bringing home the brisket.  Because the man is bringing home the brisket and this is stressful, he has less time and energy to worry about the social calendar, extended family dynamics and learning exactly which small crunchy snacks the toddler is allowed to eat.  So, because they are partners, the woman becomes the expert in those things to ensure that they are attended to.

I have plenty of friends who switch this up because it works better for their personalities and their earning potentials for the man to safeguard the harmony of the family.  We don't happen to be one of those families.  This should be fine.

However, there is this whole historical precedent that continues to inform a culture where most women must take on this role; they have no choice.  If I choose it for myself and do not oppose the systemic injustice of misogyny that is still institutionalized in our society, am I contributing to the problem?

Ultimately, I will choose what is best for my family but I think I'll always be a little conflicted about it.  This weekend, I attended a conference with other members of my church's leadership team and we got to hang out a little bit with Bruce Reyes-Chow.  The conversation turned to enneagram personality types and I was reminded that I am very clearly a 1 - "The Reformer". Can I really make a choice for my life that will not directly and positively impact the suffering of others?  Is it selfish to have children of my own who will require me to take my eyes off the prize in order to be fair to them?  I can't see myself getting comfortable with this anytime soon.

Another fear that I have is that I will become a little unbalanced since every report of parenthood I've ever heard seems to describe unending exhaustion, isolation and insecurity. This makes me worry that Jacob and I will fall even further into traditional household roles, becoming Everyone Loves Raymond, where I have particular ways that things around the house must be done and Jacob's only option for navigating those obstacles is to become the bumbling husband who sometimes "babysits" his kids so mom can get out for a half-hearted book group that exists for the large glasses of wine served.  I know that women do this because they feel under-valued in their roles and so grasp for whatever power they can get.  This often means that they create territories where they are the expert and defend that territory fiercely, insisting that the dishwasher be loaded in a particular way and that Junior certainly will never be able to fall asleep unless he is sung to in a specific way that dad can't possibly duplicate.  I have always thought Hanna Rosin did an excellent job describing this trend in her article The Case Against Breastfeeding in The Atlantic.

Similarly, I fear going too far with the Defender of the Hearth identity, taking over too many tasks and making Jacob feel infantalized because of my low expectations of him, which might alienate him and drive a wedge between us.  I also want to always have the ability to see those things that make me admire him and respect him.  I don't want to lose my delight in the fact that I actually get to hang out with this hunk of a guy or lose the self-esteem boost that I get because this man thinks I'm awesome or lose the constant sense of gratitude I have that the universe aligned in such a way to help us find each other in just the right moment when we finally able to recognize the benefits of a life together.

Finally, I fear losing my edge and thinking that becoming a direct sales person is a good use of my time.  I love having smart conversations with people about education policy and local politics.  I care a lot about how Christians engage the world on topics of injustice and race.  If I need to make more money, I want to use these unique skills and passions to do so.  At the same time, I can understand how direct sales is appealing.  The more time that you dedicate to using your high levels skills, the more energy that you have to take away from cultivating a safe emotional space for your family to reach their full potential.  If you can work a simple job, all it costs is your time.

What I need to do is let go of these worries and trust that the type of person that I become as a result of my choice to be the glue that holds my family together will be someone that I like.  I like most of the people that I have been in my life and this identity shift will probably not deviate much from that pattern.

My mom told me once that when my younger brother and I were little, the three of us conspired to "surprise" my dad when he walked into the house after work.  We "hid" in the fort we had made of cushions and jumped out and ran over to him when the door opened.  Mom must have thought of it when she heard his car pull into the driveway.  Later, my dad told her that coming home was the best part of his day.

I want to be deliberate like that about the interactions my family members have with one another.  I want to create the space for it.  I included the picture of the nursery-so-far at the beginning of this post because I look at those newly-painted orange walls every day and get excited about the start I have gotten on tending to my family in this new way.

Birth and re-birth

On Sunday morning, I looked at myself in the mirror of a public restroom and thought, "This must be the time of life when women start wearing too much make-up.  Anything is better than nothing."

Many women glow during their pregnancy.  Others, regress to adolescence because the new hormones cause them to produce a lot of oil and they break out in acne.

Guess which camp I'm in.

I do not wear make-up except when I'm dressed all fancy so a fancy face matches or when I'm interviewing for a job.  Even then, there is no foundation or eye-liner involved.  Lipstick, mascara, maybe some eye shadow.  Just enough to enhance the contrasts of my pale skin, dark lips, blue eyes and dark hair.  You know, the Snow White look.  I never have worn much make-up probably because my mother didn't so I never had that kind of time commitment modeled for me.  I am grateful to her for that.

But Sunday morning, I wished for a little something to give a boost to my sales pitch.

I was at a satellite campus of one of the mega-churches that flourishes here in Chicagoland, recruiting volunteers for my organization.

Mega-churches are always so surreal for me.  As I drive around Chicagoland, I am beginning to notice that they are often across the highway from each other since they came into popularity (or, at least, had raised enough money in their capital campaigns) around the same time and so were able to purchase large swaths of farmland as it went on sale at the same time.  It's kind of a neat parallel to the historic downtowns of many midwestern towns where there are mainline Protestant churches and Catholic churches across the street from one another.

However, I tend to like the satellite campuses much better than the main campuses.  The people on stage are less manicured, more like real people, even if the camera-person doesn't ever give the Big Girl on the music team her close-up.  The people milling around the narthex (can you call it a narthex if it's a converted warehouse?) mostly look like people I would actually be friends with, rather than being a homogeneous group of make-up-wearing, skinny suburban moms and their un-intimidating and soft husbands.  Don Miller describes churches like that as going to church at The Gap.  The reference is becoming outdated but I think you get the point.  I'm never quite comfortable at the main campuses, which are generally located in wealthy suburbs, even though I have come to know and love some really good and interesting people from those communities.

(Yesterday, in response to a snarky comment I made similar to the one above describing the members of main campuses, my father wrote back, "Maybe this is a reminder to you and I that we worship a God that NEVER gives up on us no matter how bad we screw up."  I love that my father knows that I make those statements with a tone of self-deprecation because AS I AM SAYING THEM, I know that it's mean and that I am a little bit a bad person for thinking it's funny.  He knows I won't take offense for pointing out that I am "screwing up" in that moment.  I consider the friendships I have with folks who fit that description as the grace God offers me by reminding me that every person is unique and most are quite lovely, regardless of their appearance.)

For whatever problems I have with the evangelical culture, though, I have to admit that they do adult baptisms really well.  Full immersion in hot tubs on stage.  These baptisms, like the revolution, are definitely televised.  You get to witness the emotional experience of the candidates as the jumbo-tron displays their faces in close-up as they tell their story to the pastor who is standing in the tub with them.  During the year that I spent at the evangelical church here in the city, I was really moved by being able to be a part of the worship team for the baptisms that took place in the lagoon down the street.  The physicality of full immersion allows people to access their spirits and let them come to the surface and you can really see just how excited and grateful they are that their life has been changed because of their new-found relationship with God and that transformation has been made public through this ritual.

Jacob and I lay in bed at night and talk about the birth rituals for our baby, including baptism.  In my tradition, we baptize infants as a way of welcoming them into the community and exacting a promise from that community to teach the child what they know about God.  I know that some traditions include a belief that eternal salvation as part of the equation but that doesn't come into for me or for my denomination, as far as I know.

When we first began discussing baptism when the first babies in our church were being baptized, we toyed with the idea of doing the bris or the simchat bat on the same day as the baptism for the convenience of gathering our large community together only once.  Also, I wanted to insist that my in-laws commit to loving and accepting the both-ness of our child by being present for the Christian baptism.

Over time (what a difference a year makes!), I have less need to control my in-laws.  They are good people on their own journey and I'm becoming much more willing to let them take their own lead (and accept their own consequences) in how they interact with me and my children.  For one, I probably don't know how to make sure that everything between us is hunky-dory and for two, I couldn't pull it off anyway.  So, we'll baptize the baby when s/he's a little older and do the traditional Jewish welcome straight.  Last night, we fantasized about the menu of bagels, lox, egg salad and kugel for the celebration.

The baptism on Sunday had me in tears.  However, I can never fully immerse in evangelical worship and sat in the tension of being so happy for these people putting themselves forward for this extremely vulnerable ritual and so moved to "remember" my own baptism but at the same time being completely disgusted that the song the worship team was singing had the recurring back-up vocals of "we crown you, we crown you" while the melody sang, "Kings of kings and Lord of lords."

Ack!  I cannot relax into a theology that puts me, ME, in a position to crown God, to give God the authority to rule, to decree that from here on out, God gets to make all the decisions.

Our covenant with God is not a democracy.  We do not get to elect her out of office if we get tired of her.  The beauty of it is that we will never need to.  God is good and it always turns out to be us who are wrong when we take it into our heads to break the laws that God sets forth.

How could I be the one to make God the King of kings and Lord of lords?  I would have to be pretty powerful myself, wouldn't I? 

And I'm not.  I can only witness the spectacle and report back to others what I've seen.

Now, I do resonate with a theology that puts forth that I have to bow my head and accept God's authority, that I have to acknowledge what has always been true: that God is in charge.

I find this to be terribly liberating.  Because the concurrent realization is that I am not God, which means I don't have to know all the answers and that I'm not responsible for making sure everything turns out OK.  What a weight off my shoulders!  This is a spirituality of imperfection that I practice and that makes claiming the ability to actually confer sovereignty on God as repugnant.

Still, despite the soundtrack, there is no denying that the members of this church were experiencing real transformation.  Given my disgust at looking in the mirror earlier that morning, I was struck by the two women who climbed into the tub, completely devoid of make-up and exposed.  I felt a kinship with them, our physical appearances altered by the expectation of birth and, for them, re-birth.

Aren't we lucky that that we worship a God that NEVER gives up on us no matter how bad we screw up?

Big month

Seriously? It's been a month since I last posted? But I had notes in my journal and everything! I had a lineup of things I wanted to tell you! I was going to get to it! Really, I swear.

All protestations aside, I really am surprised that it has been so long.

Still, it feels like it has been a big month. To start with, we had four weddings to attend in May, two of which required travel, one I was in, and a fourth that I could attend blissfully without responsibility. It was such a sense of almost levitation getting ready for Amy and Chris's wedding because there would only be 6 people that I knew there and all were from church, so I didn't need to have any sort of agenda with my outfit (you know, boobs out for ex-boyfriends, professional for events where some attendee, somewhere might hire me). So, I could just try on dresses for Jacob and let him pick the one he liked best rather than asking his opinion and then telling him why it wasn't the right opinion. Here we are, dancing. I particularly love the dress he chose because I paid $3 for it at the thrift store and it looks classic, even though I know (with my freakish mind for costume analysis) that it is straight out of the early 90s. Seriously, can't you see Andie McDowell with this neckline? Or Elaine from Seinfeld? That photo was taken by the wedding photographer, Gavin Gould. There are more pictures on my Jake and Jess's blog.

Speaking of Jake and Jess, they have asked me to be their birth plan advocate. I went to tour their Alternative Birthing Center with them last week and when we were standing in the room in which they will become parents, I started to cry a little at the profundity of it all.

They want me to be there with them. While they become parents. I will be part of that intimate moment, even if I'm sitting in the corner knitting a hat as it happens. I was the girl that couldn't find friends to go to the Fun Fair with me in elementary school. I was the girl who knew the shapes of the headlights of the people in her youth group because I stared out into the dark wondering if they were going to stop by and see if I could join them while they cruised (life before cell phones = perpetual waiting). I was the girl who almost transferred out of college my first semester because I had missed the window to pair up with my new BFF and it seemed like none of the established groups were looking for new members. Now, I'm the girl that this family wants to be in the room to witness the new life of their child. When my brother's baby was born, he said, "Hold her now, she'll never be this new again." To get to do that again? For dear friends? It's too much of a blessing. I can't handle it when I think too deeply on it.

So, what else? Except for a short fall off the wagon on Saturday, I have felt very calm and with a stable sense of well-being that is so far from my cookie debacle awhile back. I just haven't felt the need to shout. I consider that only a little bit less than miraculous. As Katherine said in a comment to that last post, I have been less hard on myself. My therapist and I believe in a spirituality of imperfection, which teaches that we will not fix ourselves: no human can. All we can do is gently readjust our position so that we're more likely to receive God's grace that will help do less damage than we did before.

Saturday's fall off the wagon involved an impressive upwelling of anxiety regarding my absolute certainty that I am supposed to change the world in a measurable way, in a big way. I believe this more strongly than I believe that my feet will always be stuck to the planet by gravity. It's an internal motivation and therefore impossible to shrug off by saying that it doesn't matter what other people expect, which is how people try to comfort me. This is a huge weight and responsibility and most days I don't notice it. But I think that as I have been slowing down and examining myself, I can't help but notice it finally and respond to this inviolable expectation that I have of myself. It's difficult because as I slow down and quilt a little more often (Josh & Sara, Dan & Mary get ready!), I want this life for myself. I want a life where I'm only responsible for improving the lives of my immediate circle through love, caring and kindness. Systemic change is so all-consuming. It's a little scary.

Having lunch with Shane Claiborne, my nemesis, didn't help much. Nor did going to hear Anne Lamott speak on the same themes of focusing on our small communities and what we contribute. The one-day retreat in a beach house in Michigan, studying Henri Nouwen's, In the Name of Jesus, about his transition from hifalutin Harvard professor to companion of handicapped adults and Bart Campolo's talk at last year's CCDA about how impact might just be impossible to achieve in urban ministry certainly intensified this internal struggle. Sitting on the beach feeling almost too hot in the sun, with my feet shocked occasionally by the cold Lake Michigan water was so perfect, so restful, so uncomplicated. I lived in the now of physical sensations and felt a little transcendent. The daunting challenge of finding that same transcendence in the rest of my life is currently haunting me.

Still, I am happier than I have been in a long time. I am more in love with Jacob than I have ever been and my family is brilliant. My job continues to feel useful and the tasks I am set are mostly interesting. It's hard to complain about that and I don't think I am. But when given the opportunity to write a little bit tonight before I head out to my bi-weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, these are the things that were worth sharing with you.

Quilts are not so very different from marriages

So, all of my professors freaked out about getting their grades in for the early graduation deadline and I was done with my coursework 2 weeks before graduation. So, what have I been doing with all my extra time?

I made a quilt.

My cousin is getting married this weekend and I made her a wedding quilt like I have been making. I started with fabric that I made custom for them at Spoonflower. When I asked for a piece of text that was important to them, they gave me a verse from scripture: "mortals make elaborate plans but God has the last word." I really like that one. When I plugged in Proverbs 16:1 into BibleGateway, I discovered that the English-language translations were all very different and I didn't know which one they would want. So I used them all and added a bunch of international ones to cover my confusion. Gotta love copy/paste!

I splurged on some fancy fabric from the local quilt store because I just couldn't resist. It was so fun and coordinated with itself so well and Megan and Isaac are super-design-forward (like fashion-forward but more about whole life trends) that the currently popular bird motifs and retro-seventies flair would be appreciated. (Normally I try to work with my stash or fabric from Hancock or JoAnn's since quality of fabric and designer brand names aren't necessary to my experience.)

While I was piecing and stitching, I had a few thoughts about the spirituality of quilting. A lot of quilters would be somewhat horrified at my technique. It's very jumblety, lines are rarely straight and there are lots of puckers. I thought, "If I had more practice, this would turn out much better." This could be said about a lot of things in life, couldn't it? But the reality is that we don't get practice for many things in life. We can't afford to just throw away the results of our work so the first time has to count. We just have to jump in and do it. Looking a my upcoming marriage feels like this. I know this is funny to some of you since I have been married before. In fact, Jacob was apologizing recently and said in a voice full of remorse, "I feel like a complete asshole." My empathy kicked in like that Pablo Neruda poem, "so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close." I didn't want him to feel bad anymore and said, "You're not a complete asshole; I wouldn't marry a complete asshole." It took a full minute for me to say, "Oh shit! I did marry a complete asshole." I backpedaled and said something that was nevertheless true, "You're so awesome that you made me forget my first marriage." All of this is to say that I don't consider my first marriage practice. It was such a different creature. I love Megan's engagement because she has been as terrified as I have been about this. So many people getting married that I know have been together for more than five years or are in other ways absolutely certain that their lives are compatible and joyful. Megan is honest about the uncertainty she has and I love her for it. I couldn't wait until I got good at quilts to celebrate her marriage and she and I couldn't wait to get good at life with our men before marrying them.
I have become comfortable with a spirituality of imperfection for my life. This extends to my quilts. Like life, the lines of stiching are rarely perfect. Interestingly, though, when I was quilting on top of the lines of scripture, my lines got more straight. Do I even need to spell out that metaphor? Also, I think that Megan and Isaac should think of any puckers that their fingers find as kisses. Much nicer than thinking about my mis-measurement or inability to keep the fabric smooth under the needle.
Jacob and I have been talking about how difficult it will be to forge a third path of an interfaith family that practices both religions. Lots of quilters use patterns to create their quilts but I've always wondered where the fun was in that. If you work hard and do it all right, you end up with exactly what you expected. I like discovering as I go along. Jacob is still a little dubious but loves me and is willing to trust me until he believes it himself. You know, "Come on in! The water's great once you get used to the cold." I love that man.
When it comes down to it the process of making a quilt is very similar to courtship and marriage. So much work goes into selecting the fabrics, measuring them, cutting them, piecing them, quilting all the layers together and binding the edges. Lots of mistakes were made and cursing happened but we persevered and produced a final product. But the day after the wedding, you finally get to use it. Our partners help keep us warm and secure. They allow us to accomplish goals we could not have accomplished if we were cold and lonely. Our partners delight us every time we look at their bright colors and custom designs. And that is a great gift, indeed.
I wish Megan and Isaac all of the happiness in the world. I appreciate that she timed her wedding so that I could be in Florida immediately after graduating. I'll stay for a week with my family in a rental house on the beach with a suitcase full of books. Jacob can only stay for a few days in order to conserve vacation time for the honeymoon. With that exception, I expect a week of bliss. Thanks Megan and Isaac!

Humility

I firmly believe that God wants us to be in relationships so that we can be fairly constantly interrupted when we start feeling like we've finally got our shit together.

I was a pretty good single person.

I am a terrible partner.

I was a pretty good single person because I was gathering a community of people around me, I was crafting regularly, I was moving towards cooking healthy meals for myself, I was full of peace and calm for the annoying habits of other people because I had enough alone time to reset my equilibrium on a regular basis.

I am a terrible partner. Except for the healthy meals part, none of that is true anymore. Especially the last bit. I am so mean to Jacob sometimes. Then, I feel bad because I've been mean and he still has to sit with me while I'm in a funk.

On Wednesday night, Jacob surprised me with tickets to see Leonard Cohen.

What a beautiful man, right?

So, he asks me before the show starts what songs of Leonard Cohen's he would know.

"None of them."

What a bitch. He pushes me a little for me to give him the benefit of the doubt and I push back, insisting that since none of Leonard Cohen's (it's always both names to me) songs is popular enough to get radio time, he probably won't know them. (Notice the slightly derisive tone for the word popular as I channel the spirit of a music snob.) Just to prove my point that I am cooler than Jacob, I rattle off the names of several titles: Everybody Knows, Famous Blue Raincoat, First We Take Manhattan, Song of Bernadette. I was in such a state that without consciously deciding to, I leave off Suzanne and Hallelujah, songs that do actually get radio time. He asks me to sing one or two and I forget how independent and brave I have become in the last six years and get a little more bitchy at the thought of singing out loud from my theater seat where people could actually hear me and judge me.

Jacob loves me anyway and lets it drop. We move on in conversation and I ask him why he loves me, even though I know it is hard for him to come up with satisfying answers on the spot. He obliges and says sweet things to me until the concert starts. Right before it does, I realize something and say, "Sometimes when we have those difficult moments, I worry that they will make you want to NOT marry me so I think that I think if I make you remind yourself why you love me, you'll remember why you wanted to marry me in the first place." After pausing to process the syntax, he kissed me and told me I was crazy, in a loving way. It's possible that this conversation happened earlier , though, now that I think about it.

What happens next amazes me for the lesson it teaches that, as humans, we can never fully redeem ourselves. We're always going to fuck it up again. First, Leonard Cohen opens with Dance Me to End of Love, which is a song that I have put on every mix I've ever made Jacob (2 so far, with more planned). Not only is it clearly a song from one partner to the other on their Jewish wedding day but the lyrics are gorgeous and appropriate right now. "Dance me through the panic, 'til I'm gathered safely in." That's the thing with Leonard Cohen. He writes like Bob Dylan so you can listen to a song 800 times and enjoy the surface imagery and the melody and then on the 801st time, a lyric will shoot you through the heart and you want to stand up and shout, "That's it! That's exactly how I'm feeling. RIGHT NOW!" I've been having those kind of moments with Dance Me to the End of Love. I first heard it as the final song of Mark and Melissa's wedding and liked it in that way you like songs because you hope that someday they'll apply to your own life. The band that first sang this song to me is the first vendor I booked for our wedding. So, after I stroked Jacob's hand when Leonard Cohen sang the word, "panic," everything in me relaxed a little. After 3 songs in a row with one song leading immediately into the next one when the applause died down, Leonard Cohen stopped and talked just a very little bit about what an honor it was for all of us to be able to gather in such a beautiful place given all the suffering in the world. Then he knelt in the middle of the stage and said,

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.

That broke me wide open. Life is so radically different for me now than it was last year at this time and ususally I don't think I do very well with the sudden (welcome) shift. Being in such an intimate relationship has made me feel so much more broken than I was able to delude myself that I was before. I realize how scared I am of starting a new marriage after the spectacular failure of my last one. I had thought I was pretty well relieved of that particular baggage. I see now that some of the bells that I have rung before in celebration are actually broken.

But ring the bells that still can ring.

Even though the full complement of celebratory emotions and impulses can't be engaged, you should still vigorously participate in those that can.

In planning this wedding, I struggle with a big, fancy event because it is not my first choice: it is Jacob's and my first choice to meet our mutual needs. This religious ceremony and community event - what should be a perfect offering to God - is a compromise and that has been so hard to wrap my soul around.

But forget your perfect offering.

If we wait until anything is perfect before we interact with God, we will be alone forever. The love God offers us is that she wants to interact with us now, even though we hurt her feelings all the time, without even meaning to.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.

What enormous reassurance that is. Everything has a crack in it, not just me. Everyone plays unintentional power games with their loved ones. Everyone doesn't measure up to their own expectations for themselves.

That's how the light gets in.

The tears streaming down me face as he sings this line tells me that it is true. God can only distract me from my narcissism when my imperfections - my cracks - remind me that what's in the mirror is not necessarily the most beautiful thing ever and that maybe I should look around a little. When I do raise my eyes from that purse-sized compact, all I can see is God, because she is so huge. And I feel so grateful to be allowed to see her beauty.

This is a moment of grace.



What did I do with that moment of grace? I fought with Jacob some more. He did such a good relationship thing and said during the intermission, "It was hard to enjoy the first half because I was trying to hard to prove that I DID know some of the songs." Great communication: non-accusatory and full of "I" statements. Plus, he was sharing with me, letting me into his vulnerable places. All my feelings of inadequacy rose to the surface and I defended myself for a little while anyway. Then, I brought up something else to fight about.

This is the human story. We are offered grace and it feels good and then we forget it immediately.

Does anyone have any spare jewelry so that I can just make the golden calf and be done with it?

A couple of days ago, I read this in The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.

Finite beings who thirst for the infinite, desperate creatures who 'want to be God,' all-or-nothing people who go broke on perfection . . . given our limitations, and our tendency to strain against them, how do we learn to put up with ourselves? The sages and saints have not left us without some thoughts on the subject. The Desert Fathers, that marvelous group of imperfect human beings who struggle tirelessly with their own imperfections, discovered quite a bit about learning how to 'put up with ourselves.' The secret, they determined, lies in compassion, which begins with 'putting up with' others.

Because let's remember that Jacob has cracks, too. The other day he was upset in my general direction for a full 8 hours because he had forgotten that we had to get up early so I could get to class on time. But having to put up with each other in these situations makes us better at putting up with ourselves, which makes us better prepared to care for the world, all tikkun alam style. I think that's a pretty neat thing.

God keeps coming back to us. We get a second set of Commandments after Moses breaks the first. And every time I go back to Jacob after he has been unfair and every time he kisses me after I've been crazy, we are reminded that God comes back to us.

Every time.

Spirituality of Imperfection

I just spent 2 and a half hours over very good dinner with Ernie Kurtz, the author of one of the most important books in my life.

It was a wonderful experience: the platonic ideal of dinner conversations. Dr. Kurtz is about 70 years old with a smooth pale gnome face with spectacular eyebrows. He apologized that the heat kept him from wearing a tie but his seersucker jacket showed signs of yellowish foxing at the collar. I was utterly charmed. He's more soft-spoken than I expected him to be but not in a frail way. We talked about ideas and the world, asking questions and listening to answers that required life stories to be complete.

I have a feeling that conversations like this can only really be had amongst students and combinations of the young and the old. Students obviously have a maelstrom of abstract thoughts that need to be spoken out loud to gain shape. The young and the old are at such different stages of life that gossip about the personal details and immediate experiences of birth and death don't get exchanged easily if both participants are of equal footing. If one is ministering to the other (in the literal definition of attending to the wants and needs of others) this doesn't happen as often.

But Dr. Kurtz and I met in an egalitarian space. He had sent me an email after I wrote about his book and asked to meet me when he was in town. I was delighted to be noticed probably as much as he was tickled to be quoted.

So we talked about sin and shame and how those words have fallen away from their true meanings. We talked about emerging Christianity and if it can be sustained in the same way that AA has: decentralization. We talked about getting churches more like AA meetings. We talked about stigma and how it is sometimes necessary to keep a group cohesive. He said "sin is . . ." and I can't remember the rest of the sentence but it was subversive and unexpected and I'm sure I'll wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how I could of forgotten. Or else the concept will become part of my regular worldview and I'll be hard-pressed to remember a time when I wasn't aware of that particular truth. We talked about Judaism and its broadness that can encompass so many different expressions of spirituality. We talked about how the early feminist movement couldn't let women become themselves fully because our society equate strength with power. Therefore, they could not admit any vulnerability for fear of losing the power they were trying to gain. Now that they've had some power for awhile, the rules have changed a little and they can start to admit vulnerability. Because shared vulnerability is what it is all about. The ultimate truth is the acknowledgment that there is something not-right about all of us. We talked about how we can eliminate consumerism without destroying capitalism. He told me that the wisdom of his years brought him to the conclusion that materialism is the ultimate evil; the thing that keeps us from God. He asked me how metaphor influenced my faith.

I read in People magazine once a quote from a celebrity who was asked to describe the best part of an evening and she said. "Who can say which drop was the most enjoyable of a good, hot shower?" I feel that way about my evening. I am so lucky to have gotten to spend this time with someone of such wisdom, acuity and curiosity and to watch his face as he turned over things that I said or asked and generated a newborn thought in response.

When I am sad that I do not have a group of friends to form a daily family to support me and to rely upon me, I remember that what I do have are opportunities again and again to have one-on-one dinners with intelligent, empathetic people and that those social events need space so it's OK that they are not regular occurrences.

I am blessed.

the swell and push of beginning again

Over the last two days during my commute, I have been listening to Rob Bell's sermon from 4/16/08 entitled "Others." This is one of the things he says:

Notice what he says at the end of verse 7 [of Philippians 2]: "all of you share in God’s grace with me." Paul’s god is generous. Paul’s god gives grace. Paul’s god gives peace. His god gives this grace and peace in such a way that others can share in it. This god provides a spirit to give you wisdom, strength and courage and perseverance to actually make sense of your suffering. Paul’s god is generous.

Have you ever had something great happen to a friend of yours and they were celebrating and it was an amazing thing that happened and you were supposed to jump up and down and cheer and send them a card and email: “Thinking of you! Wonderful!” . . . and yet the truth is, deep in your bones you didn’t really want to celebrate. You actually had a little bit of a “erngh” towards this things that had happened to them. Anybody ever have this feeling? And you feel terrible about it. (The rest of you are liars.) :-) And you feel, for a split second, you feel terrible . . . I would argue that sometimes what we struggle with is “Is God generous?” or “Is there scarcity in the universe?” . . . It all stems from a deeply held suspicion we have that the universe is not generous. That because they have gotten good, that somehow means that I am going to be deprived. But Paul’s god is generous.

He goes on to describe trinitarian theology (the idea that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are different and the same at the same time) as an active, fluid, never static interaction between three forms of the Divine in which they give and receive to and from each other in an intricate dance of community. They have always been like this, even before humans were created, actually before time itself. He then says that we were created to join in the dance. To both serve and receive from God. To take things that are offered to us by other people and to offer what other people need to them. To be in community.

During my morning devotional today (i.e. while I took a shit and read The Spirituality of Imperfection), I read this passage:

Thus, when we join groups, we usually do so on the basis of shared strengths. Those who enjoy competing in sports seek out other sports enthusiasts, professors are most comfortable with other academics, coin and stamp collectors, automobile buffs, art appreciators . . . all look for and socialize with those whose interests and skills make possible shared enthusiasms.

But Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step groups are founded on a different truth: Human beings connect with each other most healingly, most healthily, not on the basis of common strengths, but in the very reality of their shared weaknesses. Among those who accept their imperfection there seems to be a special sense of likeness or oneness in the very mutual flawedness - in "torn-to-pieces-hood" somehow shared.

. . .

This sense of shared weakness creates what is truly community. Participants in such a setting learn to appreciate rather than resent the strengths in others because they know that, at bottom, they are the same - flawed and imperfect. Those who do not share weakness find in others' strengths a threat. But those who recognize shared weakness see in others' strengths a hope: the hope that your strengths might also support me. With shared weakness as our common bond, we can rejoice in another persons' strengths rather than be threatened by them.

Do you sense a theme here? The state we are supposed to be in is a state of community. Rob Bell explains that this is why 13-year-old girls talk on the telephone. Even the alcoholics admit this and many of them don't believe in Jesus or the Holy Spirit and think that it's highly possible that God is that doorknob over there. And everyone agrees that real community - satisfying community - is only formed through being vulnerable to one another.

I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? If all we ever showed one another was our shinysmooth face, nothing could stick to us. Have you ever tried to glue two shinysmooth things together? The glue just peels right off. You have to rough them up a little so the glue has something to hold on to.

But Tabitha pointed out to me today that it could be possible that the reason why I feel like I have a history of people pulling away from me when they get too close is because this idea of vulnerability is a church thing. That most people of my generation haven't experienced that kind of vulnerability, that kind of community of shared weaknesses. Instead of being taught that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and so all receive God's love equally, they are taught to always put their best face forward. So, when I feel crestfallen or competitive or conflicted and it shows on my face because I really have no control over that after a lifetime of transparency, they don't know what to do with me and it might just be easier to back away than to figure out what's going on.

I think this is similar to what my mom said when she framed it this way: "You grew up surrounded by people who . . . have values. But between our 60 and your 30 years the world shifted."

And that's true. The friends of my parents, across the board, are good people. Over 90% of them are still married. They have integrity and a sense of responsibility for one another. They don't drink too much to escape and they don't gossip. They enjoy their lives and struggle with sorrow and laugh when they can. They make mistakes. They are vulnerable to one another.

I'm starting to get a fleeting sense that some of the friends I'm making might be these people. The problem is, I never know which ones they are until after I've been vulnerable to them and I learn whether or not they're backing away. And as some back away, I reach out and try to engage new folks that emerge. I'm in the process of doing that right now, just in case. So, when my pastor, Nanette, asked me to read this poem, I cried in relief that she knew me so well.

"Eastering" by Barbara Pescan

Why this sadness toward spring?
Half smiles at the first yellow flowers,
Tears pooling for no reason with each rain and sunset?
Each year this green show
blows wide winter's covering and lets us see
the swell and push of beginning again.
Am I meant to rise too?
To push away what leans against the door of my pinched heart?
I cannot.
Compassion for myself
is a slow growing crop,
however carefully tended
it yields an unreliable harvest.
These resurrections
ask more of me than I can give
every time
this hurts more
than the pains of my body
than the old world full of sorrows
this offering of love
this unbearable gift of another chance.

Somewhere along the way my group stopped trusting each other. Because I had been vulnerable with them, I think they stopped trusting that I wouldn't overreact and then I stopped trusting that they would include me. When the friend I had dated for about two months of our 9 month friendship asked me to give him some space so he could court someone else at school, the rest of them started having to choose between us and, for the most part, they are choosing him. It breaks my heart just a little but I'm pretty used to this particular ache by now. It creaks a little every time it rains. There's still a chance we can pull out of this death spiral and I hope we do. I like these people. I was starting to love them. Regardless, I think I'll hold on to a few and I assume we'll all look back on this year of our lives with fondness. I hope we'll be able to call upon one another professionally once we get out there and start changing the world. Until this sorts itself out, though, I'll live in resignation. And hope. Trying to receive this unbearable gift of another chance that Paul's generous god keeps giving me.

Amends

On Thursday night, I was a Woman Behaving Badly. (I determined that Banana Republic doesn't even have a maternity line.) I was exorcising some demons and, basically, made a scene. I had a great time doing it and you should ask me about it sometime if you want a great story.

My ex kind-of deserved it for having the audacity to tell me that he liked me enough to continue dating me but not enough to stop dating other women and I needed it because I actually agreed to that for awhile. Combined with some of the other indignities I'm facing right now, it was kind of inevitable that my feelings were going to sublimate. However, his other girlfriend did not deserve having to witness it.

If I were her, I'd be pretty pissed. And maybe a little hurt. And definitely I would have had moments of crazy-head-exploding, I-can't-take-this-anymore-someone-get-me-a-truck-to-drive-through-the-wall discomfort.

Yeah.

I didn't really think of that until the next morning.

Empathy is a bitch.

And there is really no way to apologize to her that won't seem insincere and hypocritical. Plus I don't really know her to communicate with her.

And then, to pile it on, this morning in The Spirituality of Imperfection I read:

For humility signifies, simply, the acceptance of being human, the acceptance of one's human being. It is the embrace of the both-and-ness, both saint and sinner, both beast and angel, that constitutes our very be-ing as human . . . humility involves learning how to live with and take joy in that reality.

So, now I feel bad because I did not treat someone else as I would want to be treated and I feel bad because I cannot take joy in that reality.

Yeah.

I'll go do my homework now.

Marry Him!

I just finished reading “Marry Him!” by Lori Gottlieb in this month’s Atlantic. (via Erika and Amber) I’m all sorts of torn, which is good because it means I’m getting closer to my ideal of living realistically in a grey world rather than seeing everything in black and white. But it’s unsatisfying. I would like to be able to shout, “No! She’s wrong! True love and partnership are out there for me!” or “Yes! Finally! Someone who speaks about the real world and not the movies!” But I can’t. Most of this has to do with how well she writes. She openly acknowledges that touting the benefits of “settling” for a partner rather than a lover is unpalatable, especially since it is advice she is giving to younger women (my age) from the perspective of missed opportunity since she no longer possesses the physical ability to attract men worth settling for anymore. But even in taking this stance, she admits the possibility that the sense of longing that would result from settling might have spoiled everything with any of those men. She describes a friend:

“At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: ‘If I’d settled at 39,’ she said, ‘I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.’”

But her point is that raising a child without a tag-team partner is hard. And being lonely is hard. And facing the prospect of growing old alone is hard.

“[Women who complain about their husbands], like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.”

I don’t disagree with anything she’s said. I can see that in a few years my criteria could and probably should change. I should be willing to knock “chemistry” and “the ability to understand my spiritual desires” lower on the list of priorities so that they live underneath “caring” and “stable.” Most of my unwillingness to do that right now stems from already having married a man with whom I had no chemistry and being unwilling to go back to a Woody Allen life of bad sex and not enough of it. As my eggs get older, I might reconsider. It’s also possible that I will make the same decision Ms. Gottlieb did to have a baby on my own and just live with the consequences.

The biggest problem that I have with her essay is her implication that there were plenty of men that she dated in her 30s who she dumped when she shouldn’t have:

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship.

Where are those men in my life? Of the five men I’ve been in a dating relationship with since my divorce, only one could qualify as being someone “I might otherwise have ended up marrying” if I hadn’t left him. I would probably have joined my life happily with the other 4 (and only one would have been a total mistake). Why didn’t I?

They didn’t want to. They were classic male commitment-phobes. Or to be more generous, they weren’t ready to settle for me yet. One felt like he needed to work out his own dysfunctions alone before offering himself up for partnership. One just didn’t feel a spark even though he loved spending time with me. Two were still working through the early stages of their own divorces and were unwilling to tie themselves to someone else so soon after being set free. In all cases, even amidst the pain and jealousy of re-creating my life without them at the center, I was thankful they hadn’t let me settle.

Hell, I was willing to work things out with my ex-husband, even after learning that he had lied to me about who he was on our first date and kept up that habit throughout our 7 years together, even after I learned about the other woman, even after I learned about the drugs. Only his own horror at having to face himself saved me from that fate.

I want a relationship. I want a father for my child. I want a companion to grow old with. I used to want this no matter what the cost.

But not anymore. Because what I really want is to feel like I haven’t wasted a minute of this life. That every minute mattered, even if it was mistake. I’m not into delayed gratification. If something doesn’t have inherent value, it’s not worth doing, regardless of the ultimate rewards. The best way to make God laugh is to tell her your plans. I’d rather listen to her as she tells me what to do next. The only way I know how to do this is to get quiet every once in awhile and ask. Usually, a thought bubbles up from somewhere around the base of my sternum and pops just behind my eyelids and I can see what next step will have inherent value. Often, it’s the opposite of what I wanted before and often it doesn’t make any sense. But she has yet to steer me wrong, although it would be misleading to say that what God wants for me doesn’t involves hard work or suffering. Sometimes it does, but it always leads to joy.

To this end, I want someone who thinks I’m the most important person in the world, without hesitation. I want someone to respect and be proud of, flaws and all. I want someone who is actually a partner, willing to sacrifice his own comfort for my needs. I want someone that will make me a better person through my own desire to sacrifice my comfort for his needs. I want someone who is vulnerable to me and with whom it is safe to share my deepest secrets. I want to feel passionate about someone in whom I arouse passion. This has inherent value. The rest is just logistics.

Spouses die. God help us, children die. In the cost-benefit analysis, how does settling pay off then?

Anything other than honest partnership will leave me feeling trapped. Like someone tied my left arm to my waist rather than offering a second set of hands to help finish my project.

Ms Gottlieb writes,

“I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever. That’s not a whole lot of choice.”

She’s right. It’s not a whole lot of choice. But I’m not willing to accept her premise just yet. I’m not sure she does either, despite a clear thesis and persuasive structure in her writing. One of her last sentences belies a willingness to accept that this desperation that has set in now that she’s older is simply the monkey-mind trying to deny her the happiness of spiritual contentment: "I also acknowledge the power of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon, and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage."

I respect Ms. Gottlieb’s willingness to live in mystery, not pinning down an absolute black or white on an issue. There are no choices that make life perfect and there is no way of knowing what life would have been like if we had made different choices. But we can make choices that spread the risk of hardship, investing time and energy into a network of partners, and working toward a spirituality of imperfection that helps us find joy in and add color to the mottled black, white and grey lives that are available to us.

Holy Content

When the inevitability of my divorce had only been confirmed for about a month, I went to a friend's wedding. At a moment when a group of women I knew from my church were crowded around her asking to see her ring and making that joyful conversation that makes brides feel so special and that makes wives remember their youth, I stumbled in and stuck my hand out saying, "Look, I have a new ring, too." I showed them the silver geometric ring with a blue stone that I had bought so that the indentation on my left-hand ring finger did not remind me all the time that it was naked.

I can't tell you when I became ashamed of myself for stealing that moment from my friend. I don't know if it was immediate or if I realized it later. I was in such a fog of grief that I couldn't control my behevior nor could I reflect on it very well.

When I told this story to my mother eventually, she said in a tone that communicated sadness, compassion, experience and wisdom: "You'll never be able to take those moments back."

I didn't ask her to tell her own stories. I walked away from that conversation and held onto the words. It was enough to know that someone else knew the mortification I felt and believed me that it was big enough to ache for a lifetime.

Tonight at my book group that is discussing Eat, Pray, Love, we talked about the search for contentment, which the author says is the goal of yogic practice. Tim didn't like this; pointed out that Jesus would not have said this. I agree with him, if we define "content" as almost synonymous with happy. But I talked a little bit about The Spirituality of Imperfection and its advice that we must learn to live in the moment of our emotions. Beating ourselves up for feeling sad when we have so many nice things or for feeling jealous when we don't really want him anyway doesn't make us stop feeling that way. It simply adds another layer of emotion on top, which increases our chances of satisfying our own needs before the needs of others since they seem so voluminous. By being content with our emotional responses, we acknowledge them and they lose control. We can not think about them without thinking, "I'm not thinking about that," which is otherwise entirely futile as anyone can attest who has raced to get to their destination when they had to pee.

Also, when we are content with the chemical/animal responses we have to stimuli, we are experiencing the life God intended for us, instead of trying to experience the life we think we should have. As the rabbi of Porissover said, "When God sends bitterness, we should feel it."

Interestingly, when I got home I found that Baraka had posted on this same topic.

Deepening the obsession with Iceland is Eric Weiner. After spending a year traveling to nine countries in search of the good life (including Bhutan, Thailand, and Qatar), Eric Weiner, the author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World has this to say about Iceland:

If you had to choose one of those happiest places to live in that you visited, which would you choose, and why?

I’m tempted to say Bhutan, but I’m going to go with Iceland, actually. It’s just a remarkably cozy, creative, crazy place. And it’s a place that embraces failure — you can just do whatever you want, and if you fail, they might like you all the more because of it.

The capital, Reykjavik, is just sort of the perfect-sized city of about 120,000 people, so you can get anywhere you need to go by walking for 15 minutes. And they are happy, but they are also in touch with their sadness. One local musician told me: “I’m happy, but I cherish my melancholia,” which struck me as kind of profound, this notion that you can be happy, and yet, especially if you are an artist or a creative type, have this part of you that’s melancholy at the same time.

Living in Prozac Nation, that is pretty profound. The search for continuous happiness, for a life wholly without reflection, melancholy, or pain strikes me as unrealistic and, well, sad.

A French friend of mine pointed out that melancholy has a negative connotation here in the US, whereas in France “mélancolie” is considered a necessary and natural cycle of reflectiveness between life’s ups and downs, essential to experiencing it fully.

Plus, I rather like the longing in my heart for a permanence which is impossible in this life and only possible in the next. I wouldn’t want any pill to blot that yearning out.

I am trying to be content with one of those moments that you can't take back right now.

On my way home, driving on the expressway, I was so caught up in my thoughts that although I registered that a mother was walking through the snow on the shoulder away from her hazrd-light-blinking car, getting her three-year-old daughter through by holding her up by one arm, I did not think to help them until I had passed the exit they were headed toward. On this cold night, surely they would have accepted a ride to the gas station and possibly one back to their car. I said, "I'm sorry, God," when I realized my lack of servant opportunism, which is a posture commanded by Christ. Although I took the next exit and backtracked, I was unable to help them.

Just as you can't take gaffes back, neither can you go back and pick up missed opportunities. You just have a loose end hanging off you that can't be tucked in. I am trying to be content with this fact and learn from it.

We are not alone

Several months ago, I attended an evening with Spencer Burke and others (find summaries of this meeting here and here) and we talked about whether or not this emerging Christianity thing is getting "shrink-wrapped" because it is now marketable. In other words, have we gotten too popular for our own good? Will the possibility of making money off of our conversations begin to bind us into a certain form because that is what is expected of us?  

I think that one of the things that will save us from that fate is maintaining awareness that we're not the only ones who think this way now and we're not the only ones who have ever thought this way.

This point was driven home to me over the holidays when I got to have a 15 minute conversation with Phil Jackson, a nationally-recognized innovator in the field of urban youth ministries.

I like Phil a lot. He's terrible with names but he wants to get it right and every time he sees me, he tries out a new white-girl-suburban name to see if it fits. Elizabeth. Jessica. Jennifer.  Maybe even once Veronica. I love it and mock him for it all at the same time.

While we were talking, he began to ask me good, solid pastor questions about the church that I'm attending.  Or, maybe he didn't.  I'll talk at length about Wicker Park Grace at the drop of a hat lately.  I also talked a little about the emerging Christianity movement.  He did ask me good questions about that.  Finally, he asked about whether urban churches were part of the movement because "they're been emergent for a long time because they had to be."

You best believe I'm going to figure out a way to sit that man down for lunch to get him to talk about that more.  I'm seriously more interested in the potential of a partnership between CCDA and the emerging Christianity movement than I am in the things I'm studying at school, which are supposed to be my future.  Here's hoping I can apply my policy skills to  fostering conversation and action if it turns out that God wants me to follow up on my interests.

On the similar theme of not becoming insulated within the dominant circles of this "movement,"  I'm going to a conference in two weeks in New Mexico, led by Father Richard Rohr about Jesus and Buddha that involved much contemplation, information about how to live more spiritually and even some yoga.  Nothing in the description uses any word that starts with "emerg . . ."

The ulterior motive of the trip involves giving me some space to re-set my spiritual center through worship and study.  I know.  I know.  I should have done that over break.  But apparently, I didn't.  I keep making bad decisions.  In the resultant emotional turmoil, I keep fucking things up.   Little things that I normally have control over.  Like parking.  Or planning a morning with more than two activities.  Or sharing a lane at the pool.  I just can't get it right. I feel like I've lost my center so I can't catch the balls that are flying at me unless they come right to my glove. I'm trying to balance on one leg so I keep falling when I don't want to let the ball that's a little over my head get past.  

Finally, I was jolted into this final realization that my network doesn't have a monopoly on postmodern thoughts about the Divine.  I was reading The Spirituality of Imperfection, a book that has made a profound impact on my soul to the point that it sits in my bathroom to give me daily reminders about how to look clearly at this adventure we call life. 

This is what I read:

Those who think of themselves as "spiritual rather than religious" tend to equate religion with belief, and therefore with doctrine and authority; with worship, and therefore with the organization of community and its boundaries; with rewards and punishments, and therefore with greed and fear. Such negative consequences need not always follow from the religious impulse: they are indeed perversions of it. But as historian of theology Jaroslav Pelikan confessed with more than a little pain: "Religious belief is notorious for encouraging a sense of 'us' against 'them.' . . . The words of the hypocrite in the New Testament, 'God I thank thee that I am not as other men as,' are, unfortunately, a prayer that has been uttered, or at any rate felt, everywhere."

How does spirituality differ from this? In the first place, spirituality has nothing to do with boundaries: Only the material can be bounded, and the first thing that "the spiritual" is not is material. The term spirituality was first used in ancient times as a contrast to materialism and signified attention to spiritual as opposed to material realities. "Spiritual realities" were understood quite simply as those that, like the wind or the frangrance of the rose, one experienced but could not literally see, touch, or especially, possess in the sense of command.

Look at that distinction between a set of things that must be believed and living in a way that gets us closer to God's intent for our lives.  Look at that description of the modern world in which everything needs to conquer (command) everything else versus the postmodern world in which discovery is the objective.  Did Brian McLaren write this?

This book is actually written by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham and is about the underlying theology that is celebrated in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.  In watching my brother and his friends, I have often said that if more churches were like AA meetings, everyone would go to church.  Recovering alcoholics know and continuously remind one another that they are broken simply because they are human and therefore, they need to submit to God, even if she is represented by that doorknob over there.  They find strength to work towards being better (at everything) in their mutual admission of not being very together in the first place.

People in churches often talk about being broken before.  But then they found Jesus and now everything is shiny.  But that's not the truth.  We continue to be broken even after we realize God's grace exists.  But we don't find strength in that truth because we don't admit it. 

 

When you glue things together, often you rough up the two surfaces before applying the glue so that the glue has something to grip.  If you try to glue two smooth surfaces together, the glue often peels off.

When we try to create community by only offering our shiny and smooth sides, the bonds we form with other people are not very strong and can be broken easily by applying pressure from a different angle.

In the emerging Christianity movement, we have a lot to learn from the experience of others: urban churches, Catholic contemplatives, and recovering alcoholics.  I'm excited to get started.

Because my old one is woefully out of date. Because my ability to pee in the woods is no longer quite so important in my life.

100 Things About Me

1. I live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago, IL.
2. My church and my new best friend are only a few blocks away. My job is only 5 miles away and I can get there on the El.
3. I haven’t lived in this kind of geographic community since I was in college 8 years ago.
4. I’m 29 years old.
5. I have recently had lunch with a couple of daughters of men that I work with. It feels like not too very long ago that friends and colleagues of my father were having lunch with me as a favor to him.
6. I’m worried this means that I’m grown up now.
7. I’m worried that being grown up means that I need to know what I’m going to do with my life now. Is being a fireman still an option?
8. I’m going to grad school in the fall because I want to know more about urban community development and education. I’m going to the University of Chicago because I want to know really complex things that I can’t figure out just by reading books on my own.
9. I’ll have a Master’s Degree in Public Policy when I’m done after two years.
10. I get asked a lot, “What kind of job will you get with that degree?”
11. I don’t know.
12. I keep being drawn to the stories of people that live radical lives of simplicity and loving their neighbors. Their stories just resonate as right, like the sweet harmonies of the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.
13. However, my skill sets don’t seem suited to living that life successfully. I’m afraid I won’t be very good at it and so my story would not ultimately sound like I want it to. I might end up dissonant.
14. This is why Shane Claiborne is my nemesis.
15. I’ve been reading a lot of Christian books lately. Blue Like Jazz. Plan B. Renewing the City. Walking With The Poor. Irresistible Revolution. Let Justice Roll Down. Velvet Elvis. Reconciliation Blues. Geez Magazine. Sex God.
16. This is unusual for me.
17. I think I’m starting to forgive other Christians for being such assholes.
18. I have read a book called The Spirituality of Imperfection and I won’t claim that it changed my life with a shaft of heavenly light and angel choruses. However, in combination with conversations with people who truly believe that they are broken and need help from God and other people, I’ve found a new peace with my broken self and my place in the world.
19. I have spent a lot of time with people in Alcoholics Anonymous since moving to Chicago. They're pretty cool. I think Christians should behave more like recovering alcoholics.
20. I moved to Chicago a year and a half ago from Orcas Island.
21. I had a tough time with the transition from a world of trees, mountains, ocean, dolphins, eagles, hippies, artists, and organic farmers to a world of dirty snow, garbage, traffic, skyscrapers, panhandlers, and catcallers.
22. I'm mostly OK with it now.
23. I moved back to Chicago because I didn't like only seeing my family twice a year. They would call me on Sunday afternoons and they'd all be at my parents' house having fun without me. Now that I think about it, once I moved back, they stopped getting together on Sunday afternoons.
24. If just one brother had moved to Seattle, I could have stayed on the island.
25. I have three brothers: Paul, David and Daniel.
26. I fit in between David and Daniel.
27. I'm the only girl.
28. That's right. I'm the princess.
29. I live with my brother Daniel.
30. We're partners against the world. We always have been. It makes it very easy to be roommates.
31. We watch a lot of wrestling at our apartment. Daniel pays the extra money to get the WWE 24/7 On Demand channel so he feels like he needs to get his money's worth.
32. My favorite wrestlers are C.M. Punk (His only addiction is competition) and Matt Striker, a former New York public school teacher who wears sweater vests and tiny little matching panties. Sometimes, he wears pleated khaki pants, just like every social studies teacher/coach you ever had. He's an excellent heel.
33. My mother thinks we're losing brain cells quickly over here.
34. In the rest of my spare time, I am a dilettante of crafts, a jill of all trades, as it were. I do a lot of different things to a very shallow degree. So, I knit, but only hats. I make jewelry, but nothing complicated. I quilt, but only using squares of fabric. I also have some other, more eclectic crafts that I make when the mood strikes me like little wire-wrapped dolls with handmade clothing and snow-globes. I've found that life is a little better if I'm making odd and whimsical things in my spare time.
35. On my best days, I consider myself a compilation artist.
36. But what I really like to do is read books.
37. I would prefer to read books rather than just about anything.
38. This includes cooking. I have four bachelor meals that I make on a regular basis: eggs on mayonnaise toast, frozen pizza, macaroni and cheese with peas please and tuna fish salad on toast. Everything else is either take-out or leftovers. That gives me time to read more books.
39. For a long time, I read mostly science fiction and fantasy books.
40. I intend to name my first-born son Isaac in honor of my favorite author, Isaac Asimov.
41. I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on science fiction and post-modernism, using The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy as my main illustrative text.
42. I got an A- from Dr. O'Gorman, the toughest grader on campus. She told me science fiction wasn't real literature at the beginning of the semester.
43. I still enjoy a good near-future, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction novel, but my fervor seems to have tapered off in the last several years.
44. I read a lot more literature lately (I just read The Invisible Man for the first time), as well as the aforementioned Christian books.
45. I attend River City Community Church. It is the last place on Earth I expected to be going to church. It's full of The Beautiful People. Everyone is young and we sing Contemporary Christian Music a lot of the time. But God says I'm supposed to be there (it's a long story) and I'm actually pretty excited to be a part of something very different. The church is only three years old and still very small. It has three pillars that are important: worship, reconciliation and community development. The reconciliation part is really difficult but makes my life experience feel a little more authentic. The community development aspect is completely in line with my intellectual interests (see #8). Plus, the sermons are phenomenal. I've also met some people that aren't assholes.
46. What I want out of life is to be surrounded by people that are willing to look me in the eyes and trust me enough with their feelings to speak the truth to me, even if they think I'm not going to like it.
47. I'm starting to find some of those people here in Chicago in this season of my life.
48. I'm starting to worry about moving to Hyde Park in the fall because it will be a whole new season in my life and I'm only just beginning to like this one.
49. My best friend from college might move to Hyde Park with me. She lives in the Quad Cities now but once she has her teaching certificate, she might want to teach urban kids. She'll be good at that.
50. I used to teach urban kids.
51. I loved it but the school administration burned me out and I had to go teach suburban kids for a while. Their parents burned me out and so I went to go live on an island for a little while.
52. I can't shake the feeling that I'm supposed to teach urban kids again sometime. Luckily, once you free yourself from the idea that tenure is a good goal and that you'll live off a civil servant's pension in your old age, you can go back and teach whenever you want.
53. Currently, I work for one of the largest para-church organizations in the country.
54. I had to sign a statement saying that I believed that Jesus Christ was my Lord and Savior in order to work there. That made me a little itchy but since it's true, I sucked it up and signed.
55. I run a teacher resource center that gets companies to donate office supplies to me so that I can give them to Chicago schoolteachers for free.
56. I also run a program that helps churches, rehab centers, neighborhood organizations and after school programs with personal care products that have been donated.
57. I was hired to build capacity in both of these programs and although some days I don't feel very productive, overall I feel like I'm doing a good job. Sometimes, I feel like I do a great job.
58. That's a good thing because basically, I work for Jesus. He can see when I'm surfing the internet instead of writing proposals.
59. I'm usually surfing urban community development blogs, which could legitimately be considered research.
60. I've had this blog for about 2 and a half years.
61. I think I've got about 12 readers.
62. My dad is my biggest fan. Hi Dad!
63. My dad also works in urban community development. I get to talk to him almost every day and Jesus doesn't even mind because it's about business. I think that's pretty cool.
64. I believe that Jesus died to forgive everyone's sin. I don't believe that he died just to save the people that acknowledge what he did. I think everyone's sin is forgiven and that everyone is going to heaven eventually.
65. I think that the reason we should try to do what God tells us to do now shouldn't be because we fear hell but because heaven is something we can experience sooner if we align ourselves with God's idea of what a good life is.
66. I get a lot of flak for these beliefs.
67. I can take it.
68. The tricky part for me is loving everyone. I want to do it because Jesus is a pretty good role model. It's hard because I don't actually like most people. They're often boring or annoying. Usually, I think that's because they remind me of parts of myself that I don't like.
69. I'm working on it, though.
70. I wish I prayed more. I think loving people would be easier if I prayed more.
71. I don't beat myself up over it, though. I accept my broken nature for what it is and just keep putting one foot in front of the other whenever I can.
72. Usually, that's what I do. Sometimes, I beat myself up over it. But then, the cycle of self-forgiveness begins again. It's a weird touchy-feeling oubouros.
73. Baking cookies is one of my top five skills.
74. Reading, interacting with teenagers, and analyzing communication for effectiveness are three of the others.
75. You'll have to know me a lot better before I tell you the last of my top five skills. Trust me, it's a good one.
76. I tend to like pop culture that gets cult followings without actually becoming part of that cult following. For instance, you won't find many people who appreciate Joss Whedon's TV work more than I do. However, you will find people that have memorized more dialogue and been to more conventions than I have. Other examples include the Star Wars universe, the movie Labyrinth, Neal Stephenson and the Muppets.
77. Pepe the King Prawn is my favorite Muppet. My favorite old-school Muppet is Rolf the Dog.
78. I'm not currently dating anyone.
79. I'm relationship-bored but I'm being very deliberate not to chase anyone down just because life has a little more verve when it's got a romance in it. I'm waiting until it's something worth my time and energy.
80. I'm not friends with any of my ex-boyfriends.
81. I'm really uncomfortable with that but it is out of my control. So, I try to accept the situation for what it is and just keep putting one foot in front of the other whenever I can.
82. The only piece of wisdom that I have actually earned for myself is that friendships are ephemeral. In different seasons of our lives, we have different friends. All of the other wisdom that I have has been learned from books. Universal truths! Woohoo!
83. I remember coming home from pre-school and saying to my mother, "Yesterday Carrie said she wanted to play with me but today she said she didn't want to be my friend anymore. Why?" I was three years old. I remember that my mother explained how some girls were just like that and I shouldn't take it personally.
84. I am still friends with Carrie. I'm having dinner with her, her husband and her toddler in a couple of weeks. She can claim most of the credit for our continuing relationship. How's that for irony?
85. Recently, I began spending time with my best friend from high school after living separate lives for the last 10 years or so. She lives in the city and we meet downtown to go to museums and free concerts in Millennium Park. She brings her toddler and we have a good time.
86. I have a best friend for this season, too. We met at a church party a year ago when I heard her say, "I have come to the decision that my personality does not mix well in large groups." It was just the kind of slightly awkward, totally wordy thing that I would say and when she began asking me a lot of slightly intrusive questions with an utterly charming sincerity later in the evening, I let down my defenses a little to talk to her. We communicate in some way every day.
87. That brings the total to four once you include my friend Erika, who cannot be linked to any particular season. I feel fairly flabbergasted to have four best friends in my life all at the same time. I used to believe that I would not ever have one. When I was in the 6th grade, I gave one of those charms that were hearts that you can break in half to say "be fri" and "st end" to a girl and she said she probably wouldn't wear.
88. I absolutely refuse to rank these friends in any sort of a hierarchical way. I simply enjoy them.
89. I like living in the city because of my ability to participate in all sorts of culture, like museums and free concerts in Millennium Park.
90. Sometimes, I usher at theaters so that I can see the shows for free. It's the best racket in town.
91. I also lucky enough to have a friend that works for the Lyric Opera, so sometimes I can get free tickets there, too. The last one I went to see was a stinker, though. If someone offers you tickets to the Dialogues of the Carmelites (except the title is in French), spend the evening washing your hair. You'll thank me later.
92. The most recent cultural event that I have discovered is fiction readings, which I like much better than poetry readings. It's basically just story-telling. Who doesn't like to be told a story? Plus, they are often in bars and bars have gin and tonics. What could be bad about that?
93. I wear a black hood that my brother David gave me almost every day of the week.
94. I try to acquire my clothing at thrift stores because the idea of sweatshops gives me the willies. It's not very loving to make people work 16 hour days in hellish conditions just so I can have cheap clothes.
95. I totally recognize that this is my personal issue and never want to push it on anyone else. God gave us all the gift of intelligence and it is disrespectful of me not to let other people go through their own discovery process regarding what is important to them because I had the freedom to go through my own discovery process.
96. I can hear both the El and the bus from my apartment windows. Both talk. They're not very good conversationalists, though.
97. Sometimes, I practice yoga. I prefer Iyengar. Lately, though, I haven't made any time for it.
98. I'm taking Calculus as a pre-req for my grad program and it takes up a lot of my time. It's also a lot like running alongside a horse with the intention of jumping on at some point. Right now, I'm just trying to keep a hand on the reins so that it doesn't get away from me.
99. I haven't sat in a math class in 12 years. The calculus isn't the problem; the algebra is.
100. I am glad that it is finally getting warmer. Now I don't have to walk around all day saying, "hatehatehate" in my head.