Untitled Poem

First, you have to have faith. 
Faith in the things that should come first
[With longing, joy, hunger, thirst
Faith first
First faith
How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord
Faith is the best thing, the only
First, when you mark it all down
[To hear that old unearthly sound
First faith
Faith first
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
one one one one one one 
not two, not two 
one 
one?

Mother, Daughter, Holy Ghost

A college campus, wonderful though it is, can be constricting. I feel cooped up if I don't leave it at least once a day. One of my favorite places to escape the hustle and bustle is my church on a quiet afternoon, inside the small chapel with the light off, to just be with God. I know God is with me wherever I go, and I can and do pray elsewhere. But inside the dark little chapel, I just sense God's presence differently, strongly. I guess I'm a traditional worship gal, and dusty hymnals and stained glass connect me deeply with God and God's church throughout time.

I realized, lying on the soft blue carpet, that the tiny room is like a womb. Having taken a class in Psychology and Religion and read my Freud and Jung, I'm getting better at spotting important symbols and neuroses. This dark, soft, warm spot, where I am safe, where I am connected to God closely, where there is peace...

To be a Christian, a female, college-educated (halfway, by now), and an American makes any simple conception of gender impossible. So do my career interests and upbringing as a military brat with a wonderful stay-at-home mother and an equally hardworking, highly successful father. I do think women can and should be pastors. I also think women can work and have a career outside the home, although I'm choosing not to. I'm not planning on having any children because I don't think I personally can balance family and career, and I don't want to be any less of a mother to my hypothetical children than my own mom is to me and my siblings. My heart, frankly, is too small to love the church and kids. I must choose, and I know how I'm supposed to choose. 

I think I have thought of God as male for most of my life. In Jungian terms, the anima seeks the animus. Females seek maleness to be psychologically whole. If God is male, and I am female, we are balanced. And for years I was trying to teach myself what it was to be a Christian (God was, thankfully, with me in ways I didn't see at that confusing time), so I believed firmly that scripture is inerrant and to be interpreted literally. The Bible was my main guide, my lifeline, so in my preteen mind it had to mean exactly what the words said or it all would crumble. Say a sinner's prayer and you'll go to heaven. Adam and Eve ate a fruit and got banished. And God is a he. (As you can imagine, my childish, stubborn mind had a real field day with the "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" verse. But that's a story for another time.) But God slowly taught me much more nuanced ways of thinking, to learn to be comfortable with doubt, ambiguity, and questions, or at least accept that those things are part of an authentic Christian life. For years, though, I still thought, and often now think, of God as male. Gender is so complicated. Still. 

But yesterday, in that holy womb, lying facedown and almost asleep, I saw God scoop me up like a mother and hold me to her chest. She didn't say anything. She just held me. And I knew, no matter what happens, my Mother God is with me. Taking good care of me. Protecting me. 

The theologically proper answer is that God is male and female and yet beyond gender. Our gender is a reflection of our being made in God's image, as the creation images point out. There is something about male and female that are part of who God is. And yesterday, I connected with the female essence of God's nature. Which should be extremely liberating, the essence of Christian feminism. Women are important because women reflect God's own image. To reject femaleness is to reject our female God. 

But patriarchy is still, sadly, alive and well in the church today. Why did Jesus come as a male? Must mean that preaching or leading or guiding require testicles. And being 5'2, because that's about how tall Jesus would have been, and being Jewish, and oh yes, having dirty feet and never wearing pants. 

Today is Snarkday, I guess. You'll have to excuse me.  

But God goes beyond gender, too. God does not have genitalia. Any language we use about God falls far short of his glory. Words and metaphors are too flat, like a stick figure trying to depict a living, breathing person. Are there any words to explain Christ crucified, the sacraments of baptism and communion, or even the birth of a child or the death of a friend? Yes. But they don't work very well. Gender is one of many metaphors we use to talk about God, and we have to continually remind ourselves that God eludes all our feeble words. 

So it was just an image, which is a little better than words, and I was in my Mother God's arms. 

Forgive my self-indulgent post today. I think it's important to think about God and gender. And to share encounters with God. Our experiences of God are not our private possessions. God gives us Herself so we can share Her with one another. 

Praise Mother, Daughter, and Holy Ghost. 

Amen. 

Oorah!

So I fell of the wagon with my reading of Raymond Brown's commentary on the Christmas story. But I'm not too upset with myself. I have a lot of things going on in my life outside of books; I'm reading "the great book of the world," as Descartes said. (The only reason I know Descartes said that was I was paying about 75% of my attention to the lecture in early modern philosophy the other day. They have some nifty catchphrases, but in general those philosophers seem to be best at curing insomnia. But I digress.)
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Marine Corps. There are watershed moments in our lives, experiences after which we are not the same person. The night of February 17th, 2011 was one of them. It was my senior year of high school. God spoke to me-- not audibly, but unmistakably, inside my heart-- and scared the crap out of me. Please pardon my French. That's the best way to describe it. Otto's description of the sacred as the mysterium tramendum et fascinas (a fascinating and terrifying mystery) is definitely true, but it feels cold and clinical apart from actually encountering this holy, other God. Anyway, God doesn't speak clearly to me very often, probably because I'm too loud to listen clearly. Among the things God said to me that night was that I needed to be like a Marine, like my father.
2 Timothy 2:3 says we must be good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Or "good Marines of Jesus Christ. OORAH!" according to the New Jessica Translation. 
The years we roamed the country at the command of the Marine Corps... Camp Pendleton, Twenty-Nine Palms, Norfolk, Quantico, the Naval War College... I know I'm missing some. I have lost track of how many schools I've been to. No idea how many houses.
When we talk about family history, it's always prefaced with, "That's when we lived in x-state/base."
Still boxes in the basement with misspelled scrawls of movers... my Bitty Baby box reads "Billy Baby."
The best friends I left, the boys never kissed, all the high school proms and graduations I was supposed to attend, new school songs and colors and playground games and lunch tables that couldn't fit a new girl...
A couple churches, visited but never loved, Grandma letting me play with her purse on Christmas Eve, me yawning, why are we doing this, and then later my kid's Bible under my bed, God the only friend who never quit writing back...
There's a picture on my bookshelf, still, me aged four standing with Daddy outside our house in the desert, a real desert called Twenty-Nine Palms and Josh with the blond hair in my first grade class in Tennessee didn't believe me about the desert and called me a liar to my face, right before Daddy went to Okinawa so I wouldn't forget about him for six months. Mommy crying, Daddy wiping tears away and kissing my head, me saying, "Don't worry Mommy. He'll come home tonight" and she's shaking her head no, no
9/11/01, in Rhode Island this time, too close to New York, Daddy's standing in front of the TV: "The world changed today. The world will never be the same." "What do you mean, Daddy?" But he doesn't answer, just watches, and my mom watches him, silently afraid.
Iraq the first time, 2004, he told me in the mall so I would think it's no big deal, except rivers of tears are flowing down my face... what if, what if... God I can't bear it. Standing in the airport, my little brother this time is the one assuring us he'll be home soon, and I yell at him to be quiet, and before he leaves Daddy buys me a bagel but I can't eat it, can't stop shaking...
Iraq the second time, 2006, I email him every day and he writes me back every day, about the mean girls in my class, the one who took a picture of me dressing in PE because I was so ugly, so awkward, a child in a woman's body, the one who said my new blue eye shadow looked like a black eye... Dad listened to it all. Sometimes I can't say anything to anyone else, just sit and try not to think about the news, God if you do this to me, I will never speak to you again, the nightmares with Taps and a coffin, the quiet dreams in which he was downstairs making coffee all along, the rare times he can talk on the phone and I can't talk, can't bear it, and Christmas is an intrusion, I cry more and we buy a little tree, a Charlie Brown tree, for the kitchen table. We aren't going to Illinois this year, just us in California, we'll open gifts but the real celebration is still a month away, when he comes home-- he WILL come home-- safe and sound. 
And he comes home and then retires, and I cry even more, and we come to Missouri. And I still have stuff backstage. We made sacrifices in ways we don't understand. Don't begrudge us our government health care benefits, our commissary savings, if you lived in the same town your whole life and have had friends and a church that loved you your whole life long. 
So God called me to live that kind of life, again. I want a safe life, to have my first and last Christmas tree in one house, to hear my walls whisper decades of love they have seen. And God said, No. No safety, but a life of total obedience to him, complete surrender, to be among the few, the proud, to hear God say "Semper Fi" over me when I face him in glory. This is the theology in my veins, this is my calling.
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country's battles in the land, on air and sea. First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean, we are proud to claim the title of United States Marine. Our flags unfurled to every breeze, from dawn to setting sun, we have fought in every clime and place where we could take a gun. In the snow of far-off northern lands, and in sunny tropic scenes, you will find us always on the job, the United States Marines. 
And the best part, for a religion junkie like me: If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scenes, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines!
God called me using the language of my past. May we hall heed God's voice echoing through our years and Scripture to obey him absolutely, to cry out OORAH to our Commander and King.