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  The reference is becoming outdated but I think you get the point.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?

Welcoming an interfaith baby

On Saturday night, the family we spent the week with in Kansas City treated us to an amazing French dinner at Cafe Des Amis, which I cannot recommend enough if you are ever visiting the area. Because our hosts are friends with the owners, they made several special dishes for my husband's family, including a kosher bouillabaisse that Esther LOVED.

 I, however, had the scallops.

When I put the first forkful into my mouth, I moaned a little and my sister-in-law laughed, remarking that every dish so far seemed to be a religious experience for me. She was not wrong and I turned to Esther and joked about how sad I was that I would never be able to share the experience of scallops with her.

But that sacrifice is such a small one to make. There is so much good food that IS kosher plus it is about the only sacrifice like that I will make in raising our interfaith daughter.

 Now that her first birthday has passed, I want to document the choices that Jacob and I made for how to welcome Esther into this world in the traditions of our families.

We began with a Jewish naming ceremony when she was about 2 months old. This Simchat Bat ceremony has been gaining popularity in the last decades as an equivalent to a bris, which happens for a boy on the 8th day after his birth. Thus, there are very few guidelines for how they are structured. Some communities do them during regular Shabbat services but both the bris and the naming that I have attended were intimate ceremonies held in the home of the grandparent, which is slightly more traditional for brises. Since my parents had been willing to host the bris if Esther turned out to be a boy, we followed the same plan for her naming.

Our rabbi sat down with us before Esther was born and then again after her birth to talk about our intentions for spiritual life and the origins of Esther's name. He leads a congregation of non-denominational folks in an inclusive congregation focused on Jewish spirituality. We gather with them for the holidays and occasionally for Shabbat services in his living room, which lots of folks to whom I describe this to assure me is how every synagogue started. Our rabbi would have co-officiated our wedding but he was busy creating a Jewish community at the Burning Man festival. If this does not give you enough insight into his persona, I will share that he asked during preparation, "Do I need to wear pants?" which was a humorous question I understood to mean, could he wear his kilt?  He wears one daily and actually, he has a glorious three-piece kilt but he didn't want to offend anyone in Jacob's family.  I was so glad he wore it.


Our rabbi is actually a little bit more inclusive than we are when it comes to ceremonies.  He has the luxury to do this because he is all-Jewish and a rabbi.  Since we want to keep our spiritual practices separate and distinct, our conversation with Menachem are often about finding a balance between making an event feel authentically Jewish and making an event reflect our spiritual advisor's desire to explore a new Judaism.  I love this tension.

The service itself involved a procession of the grandparents and each held Esther for some part of the ceremony.

We said many blessings and our rabbi gave a sermon on the origins of Esther's name, the Torah portion for the week and the Torah portion from the week of her birth.  These sources led him to talk about tithing (which is a value Jacob and I share) and the word, "nistar," which is the root of her first name and means hidden and her middle name, which means tree in Hebrew.

I had asked Menachem if we could give thanks for a healthy delivery and I had meant that he would give thanks and he thought I mean that I would give thanks so I was put a little on the spot with nothing planned and blubbered my way through it.  I was still healing on both the physical and emotional level from Esther's birth so I'm OK with being that much of a mess in front of the people I love.

We also totally forgot to bring the cash for Esther's first tithe of her gift money to the Ounce of Prevention Fund so had to wing that part of the ceremony, as well.  This is the story of our lives, isn't it?

Also, we had the timing a little off for Esther's sleep cycles and so she screamed through the entire thing.

But people were so loving and the food was amazing.  It was exactly what I wanted to say to the world -and to her when she got older- that this child was welcome in the Jewish community, which is theology that I have come to believe is true through a lot of studying.  Actually, we liked her name because it would help her fit in at a synagogue, as well as a church.  I try to explain this with many more words all the time and Jacob cuts in and says, "We named her after a strong woman in the Bible."  That's true to and so much more succinct, don't you think?

When we discussed a possible bris if the baby had been a boy, our rabbi expressed that he would be happy to do it and his conversations with his favorite mohel indicated that it would be fine to perform a conversion when the child was a little bit older and able to handle full immersion in water.  Earlier in my marriage, I would have bristled at this implied statement that the baby would not already be considered Jewish.  Didn't this non-denominational guy know that the Reform movement has recognized patrilineal descent for 25 years?  But maybe pregnancy mellowed me or maybe marriage had, but in that moment sitting at an outside table at Cafe Sel Marie, the condition of conversion didn't raise a single hackle.  I trusted our spiritual advisor and was willing to follow his understanding of what was necessary.

So, when Esther was 11 months old, we had her formally converted by meeting with a beit din, a jury of three Jews, who asked us questions about our intent and then went through the immersion in the mikvah, which is a ritual bath that is maintained to strict kosher standards.  The make-up of the beit din was a compromise with the rabbi.  He believes that Jews should go back to the scriptural requirement that only specifies that the jury be made up of Jewish people.  We wanted to observe the current custom of having Jewish clergy, again so that Esther would later know that we had observed all of the customs on her behalf if she chose to identify as Jewish.  However, as the rabbi said, "Since I'm not Orthodox, Israel won't recognize this conversion and if she want to marry a hasidic man someday, God forbid, she'll need to be re-converted anyway."  So, our beit din was made of our rabbi, a mohel (who is also a cantor) and one of Jacob's friends.  It was just coincidence that they were all dudes. The mikvah lady explained that immersion marks a time in one's life between who you were before something important happens and who you are after.  People visit the mikvah before their marriages, before trips to Israel and Orthodox women go after their periods are over every month.  What Christians call Jesus's baptism was actually a mikvah and it was only after Christianity was established as a separate religion that it was seen as what we now call baptism.

Jacob acted as a divine surrogate for Esther and showered, brushed his teeth, cleaned under his nails and took out his contacts to be sure that nothing would come between him and the spirit of God, represented by the water.  He put on paper slippers so that he wouldn't pick up any dirt between the shower and the pool.

While that was happening, I undressed Esther and handed her to him when he came out.  They stepped down into the pool and the doors above it were opened to the beit din and Jacob's mother so that they could witness.

Esther screamed the whole time.  I have no explanation for why since we took swim lessons and she loves the water.  (By the way, the swim lessons were totally for my comfort level in watching someone dunk my baby.)

Jacob whispered a blessing in her ear from both of us, read a special blessing for the immersion from a card on the wall and we all said a shehecheyanu, which thanks God that we have lived long enough to see a special event.

Afterwards, the was much joyful kibbitzing while Jacob dressed and our beit din signed Esther's certificate of conversion and naming.  I created my own certificate since all of the ones I could buy were aimed at female adult converts.  (Boo to that truth revealed through capitalism.) I hope to frame it with pictures of the event for Esther's wall.  For reference, if you are considering a similar ceremony, here is the text of her certificate.  The rabbi also wrote in her Hebrew name to reflect her earlier Simchat Bat.

This is to certify that Esther Alanna has been dedicated to live by the principals, values and practices of Judaism. She has fulfilled the Mitzvah of Tevilah and we, the undersigned, have found her family to be of sincere intention. We do hereby accept and welcome her into the Covenant of the Jewish people on May 23, 2012 and the corresponding Hebrew date, the 2nd of Sivan, 5772, in the community of Wilmette, IL.

A week later, we had Esther blessed during the regular Sunday service of our church.  We considered baptism and attended a joint naming and blessing for our friend's baby facilitated by the Interfaith Union but found that individual ceremonies reflected our spiritual life better, in addition to being more comfortable for many members of our families, who are still getting used to our inter-faithness.  I made Esther a bonnet out of the same fabric from my wedding dress to mark the occasion.

Our Christian congregation is founded on inclusion of people with any beliefs to participate with us as we explore Christianity and how to live out the teachings of Jesus.  Our pastor and I worked together to create a liturgy that would make everyone present feel like an insider, even if they weren't Christian. 

The portion of the service with the blessing took my denomination's traditional elements and tweaked them a little.  Esther was introduced by a member of the Leadership Co-op, questions of commitment were asked of us as her parents and as a congregation, she was prayed over by the pastor and her hands were anointed with oil.

We asked people to write blessings on fabric and I was so pleased that every single person in attendance did so, many of them stepping outside of their comfort zones to do so.  We displayed the wedding quilt that I made from squares contributed by guests and this might have helped people participate since they could see an end result.

We applauded for her and she tucked her head in pleasure at the sound.

Then, anyone was invited forward to have their own baptism remembered by having their foreheads anointed or to have their hands anointed like Esther's if they had never been baptized.

We sang many songs, including my request of "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

I have the bulletin in PDF form if anyone is interested, but this text represents the flavor of the liturgy:

Jacob and Rebecca plan to continue practicing both of their religions as a family, encouraging Esther to participate as she is able so that as she grows and discovers her own with relationship to God, she will have the spiritual resources of both communities available to her to determine her own identity and the practice that brings her closest to God. Although infant baptism is part of Rebecca's religious heritage, out of respect for Jewish customs and laws that Esther may one day value, her parents have decided to let Esther choose that step for herself in the future, if it seems right to her.

Today, we welcome Esther into a gathered community of Christians to ceremonially declare that she -like all of us- is loved by God simply because she exists.  Recognizing this helps us to remember that God also loves us simply because we exist and not for anything we do or do not do, can or cannot accomplish.  God's love is unconditional.

We also gather today to promise that we will teach Esther about our own experiences with God, however God has manifested Godself to us. This storytelling and sharing of our own lives and experiences will give Esther not just words, but inspiration and guidance that will shape her life.

I had to negotiate a little bit with my pastor for this, as well.  She has been part of a national committee of the denomination that is learning from rabbis about how to live together in the world and they said that one of the ways to be respectful was to stop baptizing their babies.

And apparently, I'd been having these very sophisticated discussions with all sorts of people about how our family is an interfaith family but I had failed to explain it sufficiently to my pastor.  She had been thinking that we were raising her as a Jewish kid in a house that celebrates Christianity, as well.

So, when we were still considering baptizing her as part of my tradition's way of welcoming her into the community (rather than for conversion or as a ticket to heaven, which are problematic rationale in the history of Jewish-Christian relationships), she was very uncomfortable with the idea.  Symbolic acts are powerful for a reason, after all.

So, over the course of those conversations, I convinced her that Esther is like a bi-racial kid and when she asks, "No wait, what am I: Jewish or Christian?" we will answer with a third option.  Hopefully, we will have done the hard work to make sure she feels at home in each community, rather than an outsider in both.  It's the best we can do.

And over the course of those conversations, she convinced us that blessing Esther would accomplish better things spiritually for our family than a baptism would.

So, it was a lot like the scallops.  In a perfect world, it would be nice if I could share that experience with her.  But she probably won't miss it much since there are so many other good experiences that we will share.

After the ceremony, we shared a potluck meal, like my community always does.  My mom brought a ham because -much like we want our Jewish experiences to be authentically Jewish- we wanted this Christian ceremony to be comfortable being totally Christian.

As I ate my ham sandwich, I reflected on how powerful it had been for me to be asked, "Rebecca, do you promise to live following the example of Jesus, to renounce the powers of evil in the world and to teach Esther the life and Way of Jesus?"  This is a standard question for rituals in my denomination and I have answered it before.  This time, I was surprised at how important this ritual had been to my personal practice: to my own relationship with God.

Esther contributes to the communion liturgy. This is my favorite picture of my fierce daughter.

It was a powerful thing to dedicate my own daughter to the rhythms of my own spiritual life.  It is what Christians do and what I have watched Christian parents do my whole life.  My own parents had done it for me.  I was brought closer to God by doing it.

I had been so focused on what was best for Esther and my marriage that I hadn't even thought about what was best for me.  What a surprise to find that what's good for those two turned out to be the best thing for me, as well.

Take Me To The River

I was reminded on Sunday why I go to church. So often, the pursuit of an interfaith practice or and emergent expression of Christianity is an intellectual pursuit for me. I get passionate about systems and infrastructures and just-how-it-will-be-done. For instance, writing the program for the wedding was by far my favorite activity, except for maybe writing the ketubah. Both spent a lot of time finding rationales and laying out frameworks for the spirituality and relationships that will grow upon it and within it.

But often, church is a quiet place to go, hug a bunch of people, laugh at some conversation, meditate for an hour and then have potluck dinner with some cool people. This is a lot and my work as Treasurer and on the Leadership Co-op help to make it happen. But most of the time for me, it's just a good party.

And then God wallops me one on the side of the head and I'm struck down by her grace for my shitty little blase apathy.

We had our first baptism this past Sunday and I was a hot mess. I cried throughout the ritual. I had asked to be the elder who presented the candidate for baptism and I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I could barely finish her full name.

I'm not sure what it was. Some of it was grief that I might not get to baptize my babies. Jacob and I haven't decided what we will do when it comes to that but as of right now, there are definitely still things about Christianity that feel threatening to him. Although he was out of town on Sunday and missed the show, I would be comfortable betting the nest egg that baptism is one of those threatening things.

I was also struck by what this act meant for our community. We had watched Emily grow with Satchel in her belly. We had thrown her a shower. We had crouched over the baby carrier when she was first brought to meet us all. I have gotten to swoop in after services and simply tote her around on my hip as I set out the dishes and cutlery for potluck while her parents socialize. That last act is something from my childhood at church: the un-self-conscious ability to simply lay claim to a baby without even considering that I might be infringing on quality family bonding time, which is the opposite of the experiences I have usually had in my adult life when visiting with parents and their new babies.

On that note, I would say that a majority of the powerful emotion seems to have been a profound feeling of continuity. On Saturday, I had answered a bunch of my friend's questions about my identity as a Presbyterian emergent Christian since he was writing a paper on the topic. I dug down a little to think about my history in the Presbyterian church and how exactly it has shaped me. This is an example:

- What does it mean to you to be Presbyterian? Is that identity important to you at all (especially as a lay person)?
For me it's more of mindset and a personality than a theology. I like order. I like study. I like that I come from a staidness that did not adapt well to contemporary Christian praise songs, although they tried very very hard. I like liturgy. I like knowing what will be next in the service. I like hearing the bulletin rustle when a section of the service requires a page turn. I was told when I was little that Presbyterian churches dedicated more square footage to classrooms to sanctuary space. This excited me. I like representative democracy. I like flannelgrams. I also really resonate with the idea of being reformed and always reforming. I like that there were strong female pastors in my upbringing.

Having this identity is great for jokes. But if there were not an emergent Presbyterian church, I would look to another denomination. The liberal Episcopalians appeal to me. I like smells and bells, too. However, Lakeview Presbyterian would probably feel like home, as would 4th Presbyterian. I would just get different things from them. When I lived in LaGrange as a young, married suburbanite, I was a deacon at the Presbyterian church there. I picked it after visiting all the churches within walking distance twice. No one spoke to me anywhere else. Twice, they welcomed me there. Also, other churches like UCC mess with the words to the hymns. No good.

With these memories so close to the surface, I was then immersed in the ritual that I have been a part of my entire life.

Powerful stuff.

The Presbyterian version is very simple but asks the congregation if they will accept responsibility for raising the child to know God.

Powerful stuff.

To be reminded that a group of people agreed to envelop me with that care when I had no personality, no language skills, little cognitive ability and almost no motor skills - in short, the things that I believe make me likeable - is a reminder of grace. In the Church, we are known before we know ourselves and that knowledge leads people to accept us as one of their own. God is very present in promises like that.

Powerful stuff.

I was a sniffly and weepy and seepy witness to the welcome we are just starting to extend to the next generation of this emergent thing we're trying to do. I got to make her a blanket that everyone signed. I got to run my fingers through her crazy hair, made stringy with water and oil. I got to sit in the presence of God and my community and know that I contribute as much as I receive.

Digging wells

On Monday night, Jacob and I went to a support group for interfaith couples who are not yet married.

I don't know how to sum it up.

I liked it in that way that I like humanity and I like it when people are vulnerable to each other. Many of the personalities that I got to observe were enjoyable. I felt like Jacob and I were super-advanced and my ego likes that while my soul hangs its head in premonition of the work its going to have to do to clean up that mess.

We're in a very peaceful place right now and I am reveling in it. The wedding still has to be implemented and a job still has to be found but we're no longing fighting and having quite so many discussions. My mom says she can hear a difference in my voice when she talks to me. There are still things to be worked out about how our interfaith life will look but, honestly, Jacob's doing most of that work right now, examining his insides. He recently read the book Nothing Sacred and I think it blew his mind a little. He keeps quoting it in different formats, like the interfaith group and at Torah study on Saturday morning. I am reading Common Prayers, even though I protested it for awhile since no one ever seems to recommend any inverse books by Jewish interfaith partners who find their spirituality deepened by their exposure to Christianity. After two different people responded sarcastically to my complaint with "Oh, wah. It's hard being part of the dominant culture, isn't it?" then I decided I should actually read it.

So, with all of this reading and the research we did before we got married, we are very prepared with answers to dilemmas that get brought up in a group like the one on Monday night, which I am glad about personally. However, in the context of the group, it really reinforced to me that every interfaith couple has to come to its own decisions; there is no template that works for everyone. One couple had been dating since high school with a long-distance interval during college and are starting this conversation now that they are considering marriage. It was interesting to listen to their concerns about baptism and conversion and their struggle since it is important to them both that children undergo these rituals and that both of them considered the rituals mutually exclusive. This isn't an issue for Jacob and I and so I had no wisdom to offer. I could only tell our story.

I also interjected at one point in the large-group discussion and commented on the repetition of the word, "belief." I didn't want to be too much of an evangelist for the emergent movement but did want to share the sense of liberation that I feel because I've stopped focusing so much on beliefs and shifted my attention to practice and transformation. So, I told my story.

I was attending a hip, young evangelic church in the city that emphasized social justice. To become a member of the church, you had to download a form from the website that had a list of 12 statements that you had to "believe." If you could agree with these statements, you signed on the line at the bottom, met with someone to discuss it and were then considered part of the club. I couldn't agree to all 12 and, in fact, outright disagreed with several points. I sat down with the pastor to discuss this and said that I believed in this community of people and what they were trying to accomplish. Could I still participate in community activities? I specifically mentioned continuing on the worship team and starting a nursery for all of the babies that were being born. To both he told me that he would be uncomfortable with me being involved because there was a fear of "wrong teaching." That hurt a lot because I was starting to feel like I was forming real relationships with some of the people at that church. To be pushed to the fringes because of "beliefs" seemed unfair and contrary to the truth of the bonds we were forming as fellow human beings. In attempt to heal this pain, I did research and found a movement of people who were trying to explore spirituality in a post-modern context that acknowledged that all of us see God differently because we're all looking through the lens of our individual experience. To expect everyone to believe the same things in counter-productive since it negates the commonality we have as humans in that most of us are all trying to move toward God in whatever way we can. I described this article that uses the metaphor of Australian cattle ranching versus American ranching. Americans build fences to keep cattle together since the boundless lushness lures them to wander. Since Australia has so little water, ranchers dig wells to keep cattle in one place. They never wander far from their source of life. This metaphor allows spiritual communities to redefine who is a member. Instead of those who have all come to the same conclusions banding together for safety and putting a fence (or numbered list) around those conclusions, a community can be defined as people walking toward the water. You can be part of the community if you are in the process of exploration and transformation because knowing that God is bigger than our vision means that you have no choice but to keep discovering new ways that we are wrong about what we believe. People on different paths can reach across the paths and hold hands while they walk.

This is incredible liberating to me and makes an interfaith relationship very easy to consider. My struggle is making sure that I keep my behavior with Jacob loving by making room for his struggles since he comes at this from a different place.

I wish that I could reach into the heads and hearts of all interfaith couples that are struggling and shift their spiritual paradigm in the same way that mine was shifted. Once beliefs become secondary to building community (while remaining primary for personal practice) discussions regarding rituals change and become less combative. Of course, I don't have the power of paradigm shifting, only the power of storytelling and storylistening. I tried my best at both.

I loved listening to another couple that described attending another young, hip, urban church. When there were a couple of sermons that made it clear that the Jewish partner wouldn't be welcome, the Christian partner immediately agreed to find a new church home but was still concerned about doing as God commands him in his practice. This kind of flexibility reflects how good Jacob has made me feels when he adopted my organic lifestyle, despite its increased costs and the intensification of his spiritual journey that he chose in order to accommodate my presence in his future.

We'll keep going back to the group after we're married. I'm curious to see the transformation in the lives and perspectives of these people and I like the atmosphere that affirms raising children in both religious traditions since, like being bi-lingual, this will only enhance their ability to communicate with God.

Institutionalizing fluidity

When I tell the story of my faith journey, sometimes I begin to doubt that I was rejected as much by traditional church people as much as I felt like I was. Sure, I have some specific anecdotes. For instance, I clearly remember being told by my friends from youth group that marrying my first husband was wrong because we would be unequally yoked and realizing that such an unsupportive comment was indicative of a deeper judgment that those friends felt for me. I remember being angered by Sunday School classes where volunteer teachers insisted that the interpretation of Revelations in their book were the only possibility. I remember arguing with the new youth director when he brought in a guest speaker who cared more about declaring "right teaching" than about how unwelcome he was making my friend Nels feel. I remember the condescending tone of voice of the member of Intervarsity who told me I used scripture incorrectly in the fundraising letter I had written as a favor to him. I also have a slew of experiences with my extended family (who I am quite close to) where they used dirty argument tactics to try to convince that my liberalism wasn't right in God's eyes. My aunt once told me that if it was right to make condoms available in schools then everything she believed was wrong. That's a heavy weight to put on an 18-year-old's shoulders if she wants to stick to her convictions. An uncle was so insulting as he argued that we celebrated the Sabbath on Sunday because it was literally the day that Jesus was raised from the dead that my father left the table in and announced his protest of the way I was being treated.

However, the vast majority of experiences that I have had with traditional church people have been strikingly positive. I have felt safe and loved and supported in most of my life. People who welcomed me into this world at my baptism are on my Christmas list and show delight at seeing me when I show up at Christmas Eve services. The church I attended in my early twenties welcomed me and valued my participation in the choir and asked me to be a deacon.

Still, by then, I was learning only to bring part of myself to church. I had doubts regarding the fallibility of translation or my thoughts about homosexuality not being a sin or my discomfort with the idea of good people going to hell simply because they hadn't acknowledged Jesus as their lord and savior. I knew, just knew, that if I discussed these thoughts, I would be labeled "heretic" and a gulf in the relationship would widen between the church person and myself because I would now be viewed as the sheep who had wandered from the flock and needed to be rescued rather than being part of the in-crowd. Since I was desperately looking for community, I left these parts of myself at home when I went to church. I did this with all of the churches I attended before I found the emergent movement. And it didn't work.

I was still lonely.

Unless I was being loved for my whole self, it just wasn't enough to feel like actual community.

However, once I reached adulthood, I didn't give any of those three churches even the chance to love me. I had my defenses up and didn't want to give them the chance to hurt me with their rejection. So I don't really know how they would have responded.

So, I come back to my original statement that I wonder sometimes if I'm not remembering my history with the bias that comes from my insecurity. Once bitten, twice shy, you know? Do I think that my experiences were worse than they really were?

The reality is that it doesn't matter if people were as inhospitable as I thought they were. What does matter is that I perceived them to be that way and acted on that perception. If I felt that way even though most people were nice to me most of the time, then other people are also feeling alienated from God and alone in this world even though most Christians are nice to them most of the time. (And this doesn't include people who feel alienated from God and alone in this world because most Christians think they are an abomination just for being who they are.) If I felt this way when maybe I shouldn't have and other people feel this way when they don't have to, they why do so many people feel disaffected with the Church?

For my experience (which is probably generalizable), I believe my fear of being rejected stemmed from two sources:

1. A growing sense that I didn't like the person I was becoming when I did things that traditional Christians were supposed to do. The greatest shame of my life is telling my best friend that I thought she was going to Hell. In addition to feeling remorse that I had hurt her, I slowly (so slowly) began to realize that I was damaging all of my relationships by practicing a faith that was so judgmental. So, I feared rejection from other Christians because I myself had been repeatedly judgmental.

2. The larger Christian culture and the traditional institutional framework that churches function within emphasize insider and outsider statuses as a means of reproduction and survival. They need people to profess the same beliefs despite different experiences, and those beliefs need to create an "other" so that folks within the community will bond together more cohesively. This is the definition of ideology, isn't it? A system of living that protects individuals from the hard work of dealing with a changing environment? Traditional church policies ensure that our experience with God is predictable: we will be buried the way everyone else we know was buried, we can raise their children the way we were raised, our spouses expect the same things out of life that we expect. And for most of history, this worked for Christians because the world changes only gradually. However, with the introduction of instant communication, the world changes quickly and traditional church paradigms no longer comfort everyone but instead push out more and more people for the sake of the few who remain within. So, I feared rejection from other Christians because Christian ideology made it very clear that I could be rejected for the sake of the group.

So, although it's possible that many of my fears would never actually come true, I believed they would and that caused me to leave part of myself at home when I went to church, a completely unsustainable habit if I ever wanted to feel fulfilled.

I have since found a church and a movement that are trying to create new Christian norms and new church infrastructures that do not rely on some people being on the inside and other people being on the outside. These inclusive churches try to make everyone feel welcome to bring their whole selves to church, without fear that they need to change in order to be fully loved. These churches know that encounters with God rarely leave folks unchanged but we are content to leave that work of transformation to God and focus on the task we have been given: to love one another.

I have found great healing in being part of this movement and being part of the leadership team of my church, which might be a model for a new generation of churches that are trying to remove the systemic obstacles that our culture has put up to block access to God except to those who are "approved" and safe.

I know that I have healed deeply from my fear of rejection because I have recently begun re-engaging Christians who still function within the old model. I am meeting monthly with a group of pastors who have good hearts and are friendly and want to serve the poor with humility. They know that my theology is comfortable with being married to a Jewish man and they know that I am active in the emergent movement but I'm comfortable enough in my differences from them that I don't need to throw it in their faces.

Occasionally, though, I get surprised. Today I was talking about the new community of young people in which one of the young men was participating. He earnestly described for me his struggle to keep them from "heretical ideas." I think I did a physical double-take. I have spent so much time now with emergent folks who sometimes reclaim the label "heretic" to make jokes about themselves, like gay people call themselves queer or women call themselves bitches. I have spent so much time with people who believe that our understanding of God will never be complete and so the only way to know right from wrong is to be in community, groping for the right path while we keep in sight of each other to make sure that no one goes haring off down the wrong path. I have spent so much time in this new paradigm that I forgot people still talk about "heretical ideas."

I said, "Wow. That is so outside of the framework that I work in that I'm intrigued but don't want to start a fight." (Yeah. I really do talk like that.)

He acknowledged my motives and I asked him for an example. He said that yesterday was the celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is the celebration that Mary was also born and lived without sin and so was as divine as Jesus.

He expressed discomfort that by saying that Mary was also divine, folks were putting her between them and Jesus. He never used the word, "idol," but I think that's what he meant.

My mind was swirling because I live in this spiritual place where I see Christ as a tool that God used to communicate infinite love and to bring people closer to God. Again. After trying to communicate love and to bring people closer to her in a billion other stories throughout the Old Testament. I guess I don't see Christ as an end onto himself so if some Latino Catholics can get to God through the female-friendly door of an immaculate Mary, I don't really mind if that bypasses Christ.

I expressed some of this and expressed my discomfort with the idea of heresy since it created a divide between people on the inside and people on the outside. I said that if it were my community, I would wonder why people needed to define Mary that way and examine whether or not the God we were worshiping was too small to fulfill them since it was a strictly male god.

He agreed with me that God was neither masculine or feminine but protested that our theology should not be informed by our experiences. I asked him to expand on that chicken and egg idea. He expressed that theology (what we believe about God) should come from what we find in the Bible; that we shouldn't change the Bible to suit what we think the world should be like. I agree with the idea that we shouldn't just justify our desires with new interpretations of Scripture but I do not agree that Scripture is straight-forward enough to extract God's will from it whole, like Athena being born from the head of Zeus. I'm a mystic at heart. I think you can only glimpse truth with peripheral vision. So to believe that Scripture alone can dictate doctrine is a heinous denial of the human element of interpretation. And once you deny that humans are involved in the process of creating doctrine, all sorts of exploitation and oppression can get by unchallenged.

At this point, I must have given off some non-verbal cues of consternation that maybe made him fear a little bit. Or, at least, he should have picked up that vibe because I was nearly bursting to tell him how wrong he was. I am relieved I was able to refrain from talking about translations of the Bible and how they can be used as tools of the hegemony or no one knows what the Bible really means and we're all doing selective interpretation and isn't that a cotton/poly shirt he was wearing and doesn't Leviticus tell us that is an abomination, also? I stayed quiet, though.

Before I could figure out what to actually say, he quickly changed tacks and asked if he could give background about why he was saying those things. I really respected his desire to let me actually see inside of him instead of just insisting he was right. He talked about how he was an Anglican (which set me raging on the inside again but I am constantly groping for a non-judgmental habit so, again, was relieved that I said nothing) and told me a few stories about his experiences that lead him to be disgusted with the Episcopals on their side of the schism. He said two things that sounded like alarmist propaganda and would surprise me very much if they were true. He sounded like a little kid complaining to his parents that his 58-year-old, established, much-beloved grandma of a teacher told him he was dumb and would never amount to anything. It just doesn't make sense within the larger framework of what I know is true. She wouldn't be all of those other things if she went around telling little kids they were dumb and would never amount to anything. The child's statements shouldn't be dismissed out of hand but they should be evaluated with skepticism about his motives. So, the man today said that Episcopals are now stating that unless you are Episcopal, you are not going to heaven. Then, he said that Episocpals have literally re-written the Bible to make it fit their world-view about homosexuals. Actually, I don't think he ever mentioned The Gays out loud but since that is what caused the schism, I'm not sure what else they would have re-written the Bible to support. Neither of these extreme acts seem to fit within the context of what I know about the Episcopal denomination. It felt like the complaint of someone who was trying to recruit others onto his bandwagon because he is feeling a little unstable up there alone.

So, I actually could have gotten pretty righteous at this moment since I would definitely qualify as someone who literally re-wrote the Bible because I look at the historical context of those 6 Bible verses that seem to oppose homosexuality and come to the conclusion that they are not describing homosexuality as we know it in our culture. Luckily, a few more people arrived and I was able to thank him for his story and blow him off a little about finishing the conversation later. Actually, now that I think of it, that wasn't very loving of me. I should probably try to have coffee with him soon and give him a chance not to reject me.

That kind of growth and chance for more healing is why I want to stay with this group, in addition to the other good things I get there. I'm not afraid of their rejection anymore because my spiritual home accepts my whole self. If they reject me, I have a safe place to retreat to.

My church is the kind of place that I want to support and also to dive headlong into building infrastructure to build capacity so that it is sustainable and can make a lot more people feel as safe as I have felt. My pastor calls it institutionalizing fluidity and no one has figured out yet how to do it. I want to try. It's crucial if we want everyone in this world to have equal access to God. It's work worth doing.