thanksgiving hopping

Thanksgiving is approaching and my entire school is buzzing with the formation of plans. Some students are going home; some are planning small, swanky soirees; others are hosting giant potlucks. Of course, with so many plans happening on one day, there are many students who are invited to many Thanksgivings. Some say ‘yes’ to the first invitation that comes their way, or to the one with their closest friends. Others agonize over where to spend the day. But there’s another category: Thanksgiving hoppers.

I imagine the habit of Thanksgiving hopping started—painfully, gruelingly—with divorce situations. For many of my friends, it’s considered a fun way to spend the holiday. Often it means getting in as many Thanksgivings as possible; other times it means planning to be with one group for lunch and another for dinner, splitting the day between friends.

I find the practice infuriating. As a hostess and a friend, yes, of course, but even more so as a spiritually conscientious person. Because Thanksgiving hopping is the opposite of giving thanks. A proper Thanksgiving means being right where you are with deep gratitude, about savoring the rich quality of food and drink and relationship, about being in a moment of eternity because there is nowhere else to be. Thanksgiving hopping is about gluttony, sacrificing quality for quantity, and watching the clock to get to wherever you promised to be next.

By attempting to be with everyone, you’re really being with no one. You’re with the pain in your gut from too many side dishes, you’re with the clock on your phone trying to gauge how long you can stay without offending the host of the next event. You don’t stay put long enough to allow the slow build of relationship and relaxation to culminate in the quiet joy of deep contentment. You’re missing out on what’s right in front of you, and worse, you’re depriving your friends of the gift that is you and your full presence.

We spend every other day of the year rushing from one place to the next. Take this one day to slow down and really be where you are. Give us this day to give thanks with you. Give us this day to give thanks for you.

gratitude now!

Recently, I was in the checkout line at the grocery store when I noticed the cover of the latest Real Simple Magazine.

What especially caught my eye was the circled blurb on the side of the cover: “feel grateful now,” it lures. “12 ways to live in the moment,” the promise continues.

I burst out laughing. Heads turned. But really, what a truly absurd marketing strategy. Who is hooked by the commercialization of gratitude? Are we Americans really so out of touch with slow practices of gratitude that we think our hollow inconsiderateness can be fixed in a few steps? Are we so consumeristic that we think we can buy our way to inner serenity at the newsstand? Are we really so out of touch with our souls?

The demand to feel grateful immediately is not a way to cultivate gratitude. Gratitude is a slow noticing, it is a practiced living into the moment, is recognition of desire for exactly what is present. GK Chesterton wrote that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. Henry Van Dyke said that gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. There are many ways to describe gratitude and its working within our beings, but none of its descriptions have a sense that it’s something you can demand, instantly. An old Seinfeld episode loops through my head, slightly altered: everyone is screaming “Gratitude now!”

Gratitude can’t fall under the category of instant gratification and can’t be bought because accumulating is fundamentally at odds with gratitude. When you are grateful, you measure your hearts desires with your life and surroundings and find that they match. There is no need to add more when you are grateful for what you have. The wish for more—whether “more” is a shiny magazine,or the promise of gratitude itself—the wish for more is what murders gratitude.

My first step to feeling grateful in this moment: recognizing that my both my bookshelf and my life are whole without a quick-fix magazine.

rule of life

Last year, as an assignment for Prayer, Presence & Practice, I received the assignment to write out my Rule of Life. While not exactly a Rule, what I turned in are some principles that I try to live by, and I share them here for whoever might find them helpful.

• Have a voice. Know yourself.
  • Commit to living out the image of God that is within you, to allowing identity to overflow into actions.
  • Follow your joy.
  • Be interested in growth.
    • Allow events to change you.
    • Ask basic, stupid questions, and find unexpected answers.
    • Ask complex, interesting questions, and research for the most satisfying answers.
    • Look for more livable ways to define and live the good life.

This piece stems from my practice of silence, in which I not only learned the power of my voice but how to handle it with care and strength for both others and myself. My search is not simply for a career but a vocation, which I understand as identity-in-action. No one can tell me what this is; I must know and hear my own voice. It is not sufficient to have a self that is only a self in relation.

• Have courage.
  • Courage to say no, courage to say yes. Remember that saying yes “to will the one thing” means saying no to lots of other things.
  • Remember that we all suffer. Keep going.
  • Lean into the pain, find what it has to teach you.

As someone who knows narrative and is intuitive, I often know where a trajectory will take me before I get there. I must remind myself that all good stories require conflict. Often, the work that must be accomplished requires leaning into the pain of my story. It’s those moments that I want to stop that I must find courage to keep going into the discomfort and hurt—nothing has taught me this more clearly than  writing. Additionally, I must have strong boundaries in order to accomplish what I’m meant to rather than becoming distracted in others’ callings.

• Be vulnerable.
  • Pursue relationships that might not work out.
  • Show hospitality that will likely never be returned.
  • Risk emotionally.
  • Laugh, loudly.
  • Cry, openly and without shame.
  • Believe in the holy contour of life.

Relationships are important for a full life. My life is not only about my work but about being with others well, which requires such openness and risk for a certain level of intimacy.

• Be grounded in physicality; know your embodiment.
  • Sweat often. Sweat is your prayer.
    • Practice yoga. Run. Practice krav maga. Go dancing.
  • Breathe deeply and mindfully. Breath is your prayer, too.
  • Drink lots of water. Eat colorful plants that died just recently.

Beginning to articulate body as prayer has been a theme in this term’s other papers, so I won’t reiterate here.

• Value your creative process.
  • Mantra: good artists borrow, great artists steal. Keep a swipe file.
  • You are powerful enough to make new words and new symbols.
  • Listen attentively and carefully.
  • Take field trips.
  • Remember. Carry a notebook and pen. Write things down. Revisit journals.
  • Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Fail faster.
  • Collaborate. Everyone has something to offer.

I do believe that writing is a task I am mean to be working at. Guidelines are helpful in achieving that, in figuring out the way and the content.

• Live with simplicity.
  • Know kinship with creation.
    • Garden. What you do the earth, you do to yourself.
    • Enjoy the sun. Sit in the grass. Enjoy rainy days, too.
  • Don’t be cool.
    • You don’t need more clothes, gadgets, social media presence, or anything else trying to sell a false version of the good life. Consume less.
    • In general: reuse, repurpose, and make what you can
    • The pursuit of [material] happiness is the source of much unhappiness.
  • Find a rhythm of work and rest.
    • Daily, weekly, yearly.
    • Keep a daily routine… but don’t be rigid. Stay up late when ideas are happening. Get out of bed when they wake you up. And keep human! See people, go places.

I’m concerned about the consumer-driven narrative of today’s culture; there are other ways to live that have been livable and well lived for centuries and centuries.

• Find a third way.
  • It’s not just about looking forward to Resurrection on the other side of Death, it’s about finding a third way, a way in-between the black/white paradigms.
  • Think in terms other than good/bad, or find other ways to define those terms.
  • Follow your joy.

I’ve always struggled with darknesses; this past year has been especially difficult and I don’t expect that to go away as I start to work on putting words on pages. I need to find a way to navigate, a way to hope more than I despair and to know glory without being overwhelmed by it.

silence and selfhood

By the end of the first week of classes, I am in tears. Half of my conversations make it obvious that I am a woman in a man’s world, or at least a man’s program. The other half of my conversations make it clear that I am no longer fully a student; my peers expect me to be something more—the opinion of women everywhere, the voice of a movement, at once leader and sacrificial lamb. In my last class of the week, the professor is discussing issues of women’s initiative and agency. It is exactly what I have been attempting to bring out of the mostly-silent women of my cohort, the parts of myself I have been expending on the students’ behalf. I am exhausted.

I share this with the professor after class; she understands completely, even better than I do. “It’s very bad to be exhausted at the beginning,” she states. I nod and unsuccessfully try to keep even more tears from falling. “I wonder,” she begins, slowly, with care, “if the strength that is in you could be for you.” Earlier, I would have claimed that others needed my strength on their behalf more than I needed it for myself, but it’s too obvious that that is no longer true, if it ever was. When she suggests that I practice silence, something in me feels the unfamiliar pull of hope. From my first weeks in this building I had been deemed The Woman Who Speaks (or, more often spoken, The Girl Who Talks). Silence feels like a good practice, one in which I could learn other ways to be engaged with the material, where I could find space within myself for peace, where I could demand others to allow me the silence they maintain, all while inviting those unheard voices to fill the space I leave open.

Silence is capacious. In silence, there is room for me. In silence, room is made for others. I hope that silence would also allow space for God to encounter me. I know myself to be too tired to chase after God. Still, I could make room for the Divine to come in, I could be watchful for moments to welcome such a Being.

I adopt the practice of silence in every class, and often outside of it as well. Even in moments when I want to speak, I allow my silence to fill the room. I notice my breathing. In extended silences, lying in bed at night, or observing the descent of rain while the heat of my morning tea passes into my palms, I put tiny breath prayers with my pneuma, my breath, my spirit. Most often, my prayer is the characters of the Ineffable Name: inhale yod, exhale he, inhale vav, exhale he. In moments of frustration, I use another Hebrew word associated with breath, and more commonly linked with meaninglessness, the soon-vanishing vapor of expelled ether, hebel. Both Hebrew words are scripted over my rib cage, and I watch them rise and fall through the shower steam as I contemplate God within this broken body.  I focus on sensation, I practice mindfulness. I feel cool air welcomed into my body, warmed, allowed to leave as space is made for another benevolent breath. When I eat, I try to really taste. As I fold laundry, I touch the texture of each garment. I knit and notice the delicate softness of the wool as I tangle it into a big and beautiful knot.

Each Sunday evening I drag myself to my version of church: the yoga studio. It is a safe space, an hour and a half in which no one expects me to speak brilliantly, no one looks to me for wisdom nor guidance. Unlike traditional churches, no one asks me to volunteer, host, lead, or give of myself—as though self is something with which I can part, a sweater to shrug off. One week my thoughts drift away during shavasana, as they are wont to do, as my mind begins to realize how beautiful this corpse pose is, how stunning that I, who can barely relax my muscles around those with whom I am intimately involved, choose to let go of all tension and awareness while surrounded by strangers. I am vulnerable, entirely exposed, and my eyes are shut. Despite my years of martial arts training, if anyone wanted to kill me right now, they could. I am thinking this, without anxiety, when I feel the warm palms and thin fingers of my instructor encapsulate my ankles. My inhale catches in my throat and ocean drops roll down my temple and God is with us, between us, in us. The same vulnerability that could lead to my death also opened me up to such warm, unexpected, and tender kindness. I am undone.

In school, silence continues. Nearly halfway through the term, people start wondering about it. One student approaches me while I am working at the front desk and says, “I’ve been missing your voice in Theology,” where we had been discussing feminist theologies. I choose my words carefully to convey appreciation that I was noticed, but underneath I feel the tug of the rope around my neck, students leading me to slaughter. The next Theology class, the conversation turns towards feminism once again. A couple students talk about how to find space for women to speak, the professor rightly points out that creating space can’t just be something that happens out in other places, it needs to start in this classroom, between each of us. “How can we be with one another, make space and find space?” We’re about to go on break, the conversation will end here—as it always does, as if asking the question is enough. I tentatively start raising my hand, put it back down, start putting it up again, lower. The professor sees me and starts unpinning her own microphone in urgency to make room for me to speak; she, too, has been both aware and supportive of my silence.

When I take the microphone it feels heavy and suddenly unfamiliar. “I haven’t spoken yet in this class,” I say, and realize the semester is half over. My pulse races, my breath quickens. This is unlike me; I’m familiar with the amplification of my voice in this room. “I hope that those of you who are often silent feel my silence as an invitation,” I look around to some of those women’s faces; their eyes are in their laps. I persevere, “I hope you feel that space is being made for you. And those of you who often talk, who speak every thought you have,” I’m very selectively making eye contact with certain students, “I hope you hear my silence as an invitation to join me in making space.” I shakily turn off the mic, we go on break. The next week is a jumble of processing, outspoken men thanking me for confronting them, quiet women avoiding me and their boyfriends explaining that they feel like I’m forcing them to speak, others just thanking me for explaining—my silence had been tangible and unknown.

I’m processing, too, but it’s tiring and trying and needs to stop. It’s early and will probably rain any minute, but I lace up, throw on a hoodie, run along the canal. The trees shine against the layered grays of the sky, branches sway in front of the stable lines of the bridge. The occasional biker whirs by, the whisper of leaves cuddling against one another, occasionally huddling tightly enough to offer glimpses of the water. It’s quiet. I run until my breath overwhelms my aural space and the sensation in my lungs overtakes all. The leaves are getting brighter and invite me farther down the path.

Suddenly the trees open up and there is a clearing leading to the water. I turn, leave the trail, allow my pace to slow as I approach the waves. I stretch the tightness out of my hamstrings and watch the inky blue shallows carry leaves as though they’re golden treasures, unexpectedly inherited and loosely held. I don’t know where they’ll be carried, but they’re here right now, and they’re beautiful. The water falls towards its unknown destination; it does not care how many gold pieces join it. A half dozen ducks glide by, or appear to. I know they’re not really gliding; under the calm surface, they’re paddling like mad, just like the rest of us. I decide I’d rather be the water than the ducks, held by the firm steadiness of the rock riverbed, with effortless and natural direction. I wonder if a duck can choose to stop paddling, allow the water to carry it, and survive.

The images stay with me for days. When I try to explain to my husband the warm darkness of the water, the brilliance of the leaves, the rocks that hold the stream and give it direction without ever moving—I can’t find sufficient words. I choke up. He understands, I think, or at least he surrounds me with his arms, and that’s enough.

Perceptions of me are changing. Previously, my struggle, tears, sadnesses had been viewed with a kind of courageous vulnerability. One woman told me, that first semester, that she wanted to sit at my table to see when I cry, because that would signal to her that she should be feeling more than she is. When even my emotions, my falling-apart-ness, were viewed as leadership, I was always on display. When I pointed out that such pedestals are tall and shaky and easy to fall off, people thought that even the falling was beautiful and taught them about themselves, so I was never allowed to fully crash off the pedestal. When I cried that it’s lonely on a pedestal, people said they were there for me, but it was clear that they were there to keep me on the pedestal. Now, students are finally starting to see that my struggle is real and the cost is deep. They still come to me with problems and questions, but more quietly. Most no longer approach me as a rockstar sage, but come to me as a person. They ask how I’m doing, too.

Back in the large classroom for Theology, and the professor is teaching on sin. She summarizes a feminist understanding in which sin for women is not pride, but is essentially a lack, underdevelopment, or negation of self, a dependence on others for self-definition, a deficiency of a center. Not owning one’s self and agency can be an affront to God. And such a shortfall often manifests in service and silence. I recognize this sin in many of my classmates. Is this my silence, too? No: my silence is on the far side of self-hood, a practice in centering and developing my self in order to find my place within community. I recognize that this is not a sinful way of being, it is a spiritual and God-directed practice.

Still, it’s clear that soon I will need to continue to move forward, to allow the waterway to carry me beyond this clearing. Practices and prayers may fit for a time, but they should lead us to a new place, a new way of being. Prayers are a practice of becoming. We each must be ever-moving towards the self we were created to be, the forgotten person we already are.

This paper was written in Fall 2012 for Pat Loughery’s class “Prayer, Practice & Presence.” Students were asked to discuss their spiritual growth and process through the term. It has taken me a year to publish this because I still cry whenever I try to edit it.

The Sun Salutation

For whatever reason, God has felt distant. I’m from West Michigan, where it’s not unheard of to go multiple weeks without a glimpse of sun. God feels like that lately: I know she must be there, but there have been too many dreary days since I’ve experienced warmth on my skin, since I’ve seen a ray of sunhope to spark serotonin-certainty in my cerebrum.

In an effort to clear the clouds and re-establish contact, I purchased a book of common prayer. The first few days I read from it regularly—morning, midday, and evening—telling myself that even though I didn’t feel anything beyond the words, I would if I could just stick with it. Soon it became a twice-a-day habit, then down to one. At that point, it seemed to have proven itself unhelpful to me, and I stopped attempting to force it.

It was then that I looked closely at those obscuring clouds blocking me from my Creator that I realized they weren’t made of vapor, at least not any less figuratively so than anything else under the sun. Their darkness is a locust swarm of ink smudges, wasp words buzzing, moths teeming toward the light. The mass is the accumulation of words around God, years of it from the Christian publishing industry, the words of many pastors, centuries of liturgies, manuscripts dating back millennia. The prayer book is just my most recent layer, each page creating moth-flies flocking toward the light. I needed to move beyond the words.

My yoga mat was waiting for me in the corner of my closet. I had tried to practice on my own since moving to Seattle, but never felt revitalized, couldn’t keep committed. There’s something to be said for a faith community, for a leader in liturgy. I’ve known for the last year that I needed to find a studio of good people with whom I could practice, but kept putting it off. Knowing this paper was due soon, I used it as an excuse to commit the time and money to reinvigorating my spiritual practice. Sunday night I arrived at a studio to find the temple hidden on my yoga mat, held within my body.

I didn’t know a single person in the studio, yet—as is often the case with yoga classes—there was an immediate sense of unity. In the first few moments, we align our breathing. I think of the tetragrammaton tattooed on my ribs and recite the Sh’ma in my head: Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad. The still-scabbed four-character name of God was inked the week prior, put on my skin as a reminder that every breath and sigh is an utterance of the name of God. As I use my inhales to lengthen my spine and exhales to bend deeper, it feels true.

As with other spiritual practices, the community sustained me. There are times when I, on my own, wouldn’t have held a pose so long, would have allowed the weakness in my thighs and biceps to win. But I look around at the others in their practice, spine-arches on a ceiling, from my inverted perspective, and I persevere. We breath together. I borrow their energy; I lend them mine. We’re all in this together, I think. We all suffer. Keep going.

We end our practice as dusk is deepening and the golden hour makes the room shine warmly.  Together, we inhale, and together, we exhale an ‘om’. It was powerful – a sound so large, warm, and round that it echoed not only through my vocal chords but my lungs, my body, my very being. My deep contralto grounded the higher notes, an interweaving between us that brought out resonances that were more than the sum of the parts. I choked on a sob, the ‘om’ not the same without me but going on nonetheless. My participation isn’t vital, but it is wanted. And when I can’t participate, the community sustains me. I have never attended a church as openly and calmly supportive.

I don’t think that my spiritual dry spell is over; I’m not naive enough to believe that one yoga class is enough to both clear away the swarm and destroy the nests. I think back to the time period of my conversion: it began with weekly yoga classes, grew to include running, and as I shaped my life around formative practices it exploded to include church service, krav maga, more regular yoga, a young adults group, strength training, becoming church leadership… . No, the problem isn’t solved, and I can’t re-trace the journey that’s behind me. Still, this feels like a move in the right direction, a place to be supported, sustained, and to listen for what God is calling me to next.

This piece was originally written for course called Prayer, Presence, & Practice, taught by Pat Loughery. Students were asked to reflect on their current spiritual practices as they are.

September 11 Eucharist

In discussing what we could possibly say on this September Eleventh, the other pastors and I talked about the ways that the events of that September Eleventh twelve years ago  threw us into chaos, the ways we didn’t know how to respond as individuals and as a country, the ways in which our narratives failed us.

Our experience is not unlike, after the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were traveling on a road, lost in their despair. Nothing had prepared them for the violent and humiliating death of their teacher. In times of great stress and trauma and pain, we lose the ability to make sense, reason fails us, we don’t know how to narrate.

But there’s another way to be. From a distance, Mary stands pondering the crucifixion. She does not wail, does not protest. Scripture tells us she stood there. Ronald Rolheiser notes that for a Hebrew, to stand is a position of strength. Standing, Mary ponders, but not with the intellect; she ponders in the biblical sense, which means to hold, carry, and transform tension so as not to give it back in kind.

And that’s what Mary does. She holds, carries, and transforms the tension so as not to give it back hurt for hurt, anger for anger, an eye for an eye. Sometimes, in doing the work of holding, carrying, and transforming, there is nothing to say. All we can do is stand, in silent strength, waiting until the work of transforming means we can speak and act in ways full of grace and peace.

We invite you to witness and ponder–not ponder with the intellect, but ponder as Mary did on the hill, ponder by holding events and images in the heart–without the cohesive narrative, without resolution. We invite you to hold, to carry, to transform, amidst all the brokenness and chaos. We invite you to notice where God is present in the broken bread, that the Divine is present and inhabits even the brokenness of creation.

Where is God present in your life?

This is what I read in leading The Seattle School community in Eucharist today.

the human movement

For the first time, I dropped a class. After one session.

Still, I learned something.

I learned that you can be a respected editor, a decent writer, an in-demand speaker, and keep company with Impressive People–and still be the kind of person I wouldn’t want to be. In fact, it might even require a strand of arrogant narcissism to become such a success. I learned that what matters most to me is the character of an individual, not their list of successes and achievements.

In another class, while giving introductions, we were asked to share what we hope to do after graduating. After half a dozen men shared their career aspirations, I hesitated, then stated that after graduation I hope to be a gardener, and a writer, and a mother, and a good friend, and maybe spend some time attempting to articulate the ways that our bodies teach us about the Divine in ways that words do not.

I am ambitious in that I want to do good work, but I am not ambitious in a career-oriented, worldly, everybody-look-at-me sense. I don’t want to promote my blog. I don’t want to follow people hoping they follow me back. I don’t want to cultivate a persona. I want to live a full life and be a whole-hearted person, and our current society does not measure ambition nor success on such criteria.

There are times–more than I’d care to admit–that I worry I’m failing the feminist movement. And I probably am. And yet, perhaps I am furthering the human movement, the movement that does not place the burden on doing it all—whether it’s “gain all the money and power” or “do all the housework and childrearing” or “gain all the career goals AND be the perfect wife/mother”—but instead places equal emphasis on doing and being. That’s something, I believe, that would benefit women and men and culture and the world.

After writing this, I heard Arianna Huffington’s commencement address in which she states that our current definitions of success aren’t working for women, aren’t working for men, and aren’t working for polar bears. Listen to it here.

god/body map

SELF

I was raised to be a good soul trapped in an inconsequential body.

The soul was what mattered. It lived on forever, it was judged by a white guy up in the sky, it journeyed to some far-away paradise after death.

The body was merely an imprisonment. “This life is only to determine where you’ll spend eternity,” my father was fond of stating with certainty. After the decision was made, all that’s left is to wait for the body’s expiration date, and perhaps help move that date closer. Breakfast in my house was a giant class of diet Coke and a chocolate-iced doughnut.

“If it tastes good, it’s bad for you,” another favorite phrase from my parents. I remember the first time I bit into a fresh pear, handed to me by a friend’s mother. I was overwhelmed with the sweetness, surprised by the juice and the contrast of soft flesh within tough skin. A few years later, when I tried to lose weight, I ate toast, thinking the bland taste meant it was good for me. All the things my body and taste buds craved—crisp broccoli, fresh berries, raw almonds—had been deemed ‘bad for me’ by my parents’ rule.

It was difficult to reach down to tie my shoes.

In college, my violin instructor banned dairy from my diet and demanded protein (a foreign word I had to research) at each meal. Post-college I began a weekly yoga practiced and, for what felt like the first time, felt my body.

As my body taught me about my self,

As my body changed and my self along with it,

As I changed and the body reflected the difference,

I had to rethink the way I understood my self.

Obviously, everything was so much more interconnected than I had been taught. When I began eating food designed by the Creator rather than the corporation, my relationship with the environment around me changed. As I began to taste food in its particularity instead of as a means to fullness, I also found each person to hold a particularity that had previously gone unnoticed. As my soul moved into my body, I stopped barricading myself so strongly within my intellect. I allowed myself to feel, even when feeling hurt. I stopped being a soul and a body. I became one person.

Which is not to deny my complexity. I don’t think of myself as nothing more than an accumulation of cells. I am a body, but when I slice open my arm there is no confusion that it’s my intelligence seeping out. When I confer within myself, there’s no confusion at hearing multiple voices. I am in relationship with myself. Understanding myself as an integrated unity opened up more freedom within me to be in such a relationship. There are no clearly-defined borders of mind, body, soul; there is only relationships, on-going, ever-building in complexity, differentiating, integrating, including, transcending.

Don’t be misled by my frame. I am a big self.

——————————————————-

THE DIVINE. DIV(I)N(THRE)E.

I’m wary of using the word ‘God’. No one means the same thing by it. It’s often used (and capitalized) as though it’s a name, proper noun. It’s not. It’s a description, just as ‘Spirit,’ ‘Divine,’ or ‘Be-ing’, is. That said, I will use the word, but please, just as I do not want you to put your preconceived stereotypes about ‘white’, ‘women’, or ‘Michigander’ onto me, I do not want you to think you know the essence of this God Being.

Everything is included in God. Everything is transcended, surpassed, gone beyond by God. There is nothing that is not God. Just as your body includes organs such as your lungs, heart, and brain, you are more than the accumulation of your organs. You include all of them, but you also transcend all of them. God includes everything, but also transcends, and from that beyond-place, God calls creation to be more than it is, calls humanity to be more than we are. Why do we cringe to think of the way scripture was used to justify slavery but continue to use it to justify domestic violence, gender inequality, ethnocentrism and exceptionalism?

In some way, a first-century Jewish man embodied everything it was to be human while also embodying everything it is to be God. I do not pretend to understand this. What I do know is that this man prayed, and God responded. Which can be confusing. God responding to God’s own self?

Oh, whispers a warm internal voice, you know what that’s like.

That’s different, another I responds. We aren’t God. 

Well then what do you do with imago Dei? Chimes in that snobby theological intellectual that won’t go away, no matter how much the rest of us shun him.

On some level, I’m aware I might be making God into my own image, but I’m not without tradition in doing so, and the company isn’t terrible.

Or maybe it really is the other way around, and my inner relationality reflects something of God’s inner workings. Not that it helps; I still can’t claim any solid understanding of God nor of the way my inner self works.

So I put words to it as best I can with a giant shrug. We could be wrong, the voices agree.

——————————————————-

SELF AND DIVINITY

The best image I have to begin describing any of this is not an image at all. It was something that was barely understood to exist until just a few centuries ago: air.

We tell ourselves that air is all around us, it’s the thing in which we live. What we forget is that there are times the air believes humans to be the thing around it, that we are the thing in which it exists. Which is to say: we inhale.

I had a pastor who once explained that the reason the tetragrammaton—the four-letter Hebrew name for God that we lamely translate as Lord—is unsayable is that it’s actually unpronounceable. “They’re breathing sounds,” he says. He talks about pneuma meaning both breath and spirit. Another friend, also a pastor, likes to say that the answer to the question “Where is God?” is only an inhale and exhale away.

Inside me, that affirming voice resonates warmly. Breath and spirit are connected. God is in all people, even when they aren’t aware of it. Each inhale, the spirit is being lent to us, and with each exhale we return it to the creation. With breath, God is in everyone. And the animals, they breathe. Plants, too, in their way. All the green plants, all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground–everything that has the breath of life in it—holds a piece of God.

At times, God feels far away; I try to get close. I recite from prayer books, I force myself out of bed to church, I taste the bread dipped in the cup. This is all a chasing after the wind, only to eventually discover the wind is held in my own lungs.

I must take care of the spirit that is lent to me with each inhale. To do otherwise, to waste this fragile life breath by breath, is to take the LORD’s name in vain 28,000 times a day.

I have questions about how breathing works. Is my diaphragm pulling air in, or does the air enter thus move my diaphragm? Put theologically, it’s a question of who is initiating: am I inviting God in, or is God entering into me? The answer, as it often seems to be in God matters, might be: Yes.

But I could be wrong.

——————————————————-

SELF AND EVERYTHING ELSE

If God is in others, I must be kind to them. I must see them in their particularity. They carry a piece of God, and I can only have eyes to see if I forget God and any other notions I have of what lies behind the face in front of me.

Animals are included in God, too. I’m not sure what to do with that, but I do have the sense that we are are to take care of them. Genesis agrees with me: ruling over the creatures is God’s first commandment to humanity. I also have the sense that raising them on food they weren’t meant to eat, in group sizes they don’t naturally live in, for the purpose of slaughter and consumption, all does not fall under the category of ‘taking care’.

The rest of the environment, as well. God includes and transcends all. Nothing is an accident; everything is beloved. I share air, breath, and therefore spirit with the tree that blocks my view of the harbor. The tree is inside me: I have no more health to despise it than I do to despise my own breath.

Which brings us back to where we started, as seems to happen when discussing relationships that inter-connect in the dizzying trail of a celtic knot. It’s hard to remember, but my lungs, too, contain breath, hold spirit. I have a hard time remembering this, but I must remember, I must remember: I carry images of the divine.

In ragged breaths,

In tearful sobs,

In shallow panting,

the name of God.

Intentional inhales,

lungs are broad,

Mindful exhales,

the name of God.

This was written for Theology I in Fall 2012. Students were asked to consider the way they understand themselves in relationship to God and others.

brilliant

As part of a recent course, the instructor asked the class to write about a moment in which we felt most alive. “What were you doing?” she prompted. “What was happening? What noises do you associate with this memory? What color is that moment?” The class laughed when she asked about the color, but the answer, for many of us, was immediate. I struggled to write down the specifics of the color flashing in my mind: Light. Clear. Bright and in focus. Well-lit. White? Sun beams reflected off moving water.

As we shared, one participant said her memory was yellow. Those of us who knew her nodded, yes! Of course she’s yellow! One person wondered aloud, in a concise illustration of calling and flourishing: how can we help her be more yellow, or help her be yellow more often?

It wasn’t until much later that I began to apply the concept to myself: what does my color say about me? And of course, I pinpoint the color I was really trying to name, and with it the frustration and anger and elevation and pressure and pleasure and delight when people say to me: “You’re just

so

brilliant.”

There was a day last year where I vented to a friend about how my peers didn’t engage me or interact with my ideas or add to the conversation, they just told me how brilliant I was. I said the word with contempt. Brilliant. I took their complement as a statement about my intellectual capacities, an urging for me to perform so they could consume the words and ideas. My friend listened, nodding, then responded, with overwhelming strength and compassion, “Well, you are brilliant. Literally, you shine.”

And in this moment it all clicks together. It’s never been about intellect, it’s been about personhood and flourishing and identity. My peers have been calling me to be more me, have been calling me into the moments where they see me have the most life, have been calling me to be the person I was created to be more often, have been calling me to flourish—not for consumption or as superficial complements, but for delight and for glory. The intellect is just the self-created shadow I’ve been hiding in, hoping to dull the shine. What would it look like for me to allow myself to be light, clear, bright and in-focus? What would it look like for me to allow myself to be more brilliant, or to be brilliant more often?

I’m scared.

“repent of thinking evil of evil”

Those words were one line in the closing blessing of tonight’s liturgy. In the wake of the Zimmerman trial, of what feels like a massive injustice, a failure of our system, a brokenness of humanity, they rang through my soul. I’ve been thinking of Zimmerman as an evil man with a cold heart and hard intentions, and while that might be true for the moment in which he chose to pursue with suspicion rather than step away and trust in the workings of the universe, decided to kill rather than lose a fight against a teenager, that is not the sum total of who he is as a person.

I recently got into an argument about whether or not it’s acceptable to say “the cross” with reference to the entire life and death of Jesus. I’m convinced that it is not: invoking the cross does not also invoke the resurrection, much less the many years and teachings of the incarnate divinity before that moment. By saying “the cross” to mean “the life,” by invoking the metonym of a part to represent the whole, we are choosing to remember him only for the worst thing that ever happened to him. But he wasn’t simply a victim of the state; he was a helpless infant, and a wise child, and an unconventional rabbi, a man who loved, who had compassion, who wept. How dare we reduce him to a symbol from just one day in a rich life?

And yet that’s exactly what I had wanted to do to George. (It feels more human to be on a first-name basis with a man with whom I have wrestled internally so much.) I had wanted to define him by the worst thing he had ever done, to name him simply ‘murderer’ and not have to deal with the complexity of his life in all its love and pain and joy and fear and shame. Which isn’t to say that justice is irrelevant; it’s not, and I would love to see him repent, to see him confront his prejudices and hatred, to be in community with those he fears, to heal and become more whole. Which might happen, who knows. I do know that his life and actions are beyond my control; I must step away and trust in the workings of the universe. I must repent of thinking evil of evil.