Last night, I had a nightmare. Not one of those vague anxiety dreams about too many papers to write and an endless drive-thru at McDonalds, where I work. No, last night was truly horrible: I am-- in the dream-- pregnant. I am a Truman student as I am in real life, with no husband, without even a boyfriend. I am panicking as I have never panicked before; how could this possibly be happening to me? My friends' reactions range from disappointment to embarrassment to anger. My body aches and my belly feels as though it will burst. I tell my professors I am dropping out of college to raise my baby, and they look back with shock and sorrow. I quit my church out of shame, unable to look anybody in the eye, my dreams of ordained ministry shot. I am on the floor in front of my father, groaning, "Daddy, Daddy, can you believe that I'm a virgin?" My father laughs mirthlessly, shakes his head silently, seemingly unable to speak. I run throughout Truman's campus in desperation, begging God to take this baby away from me...
And then I woke up. For one horrifying moment I felt my stomach, full of Christmas sugar cookies my mother had baked, and thought it was true. Reality set in and I knew I had a lot of plates to spin, but a pregnancy was not one of them. But the dread, the physical terror, remained vivid. I love babies. But being pregnant now, at twenty one, would be devastating. Psychologically, relationally, educationally, physically, vocationally... I would be devastated.
(I don't mean to offend people who became parents young. I know things happen, and I applaud anyone who can shoulder that sort of responsibility at such a young age. I am simply saying for me, and for many of my fellow Truman students, a pregnancy now would be terrible.)
As I lay in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, it hit me: Two thousand years ago, give or take, for a teenager named Mary, my nightmare was reality.
What did Mary's friends say? What about the people at synagogue? The neighbors? How did she tell her grandparents, her parents? How did she tell Joseph? One day, she was daydreaming about their wedding, plotting their new life together. Then, she had to bear a dangerous secret and the scorn of everyone she knew and loved.
But Mary had a choice. God always gives people choices. She could have told Gabriel to go fly away. She could have asked God to pick some well-off, married lady instead who could better provide for this little bundle of joy, whose life would not be marred by scandal.
Instead, Mary said, "Here am I, the maidservant of the Lord."
Being the Lord's servant can lead to a lot of heartache. Mary could have been stoned, as she surely knew when the angel approached her. She nearly lost Joseph. Christmas tell us plainly that sometimes God asks us to risk everything.
We so often sentimentalize Christmas, whitewash a rather harrowing story. God used my nightmare to make me think about the shame and fear and desperation Mary must have gone through. But Christmas doesn't stop there, of course.
Christmas promises that God asks ordinary people to do extraordinary things for his kingdom, even though it might involve extraordinary danger.
Christmas promises that God wants to partner with people to accomplish God's tasks.
Christmas promises that God rewards radical faith like Mary's.
I don't want to have a baby like Mary did now. Or ever, really-- the giving birth video in sixth grade health class achieved its goal of scarring me for life, thank you very much. But I pray for the faith like Mary's to keep saying, Here am I, Lord, even when the going gets tough.
(And P.S., in case anybody reading this takes my dream seriously-- I am in absolutely no danger of getting pregnant now or in the foreseeable future!)
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Thursday, December 19, 2013
A Month of Sundays
I just finished A Month of Sundays, John Updike's at once haunting and hilarious novel composed of journal entries by the wayward Rev. Tom Marshfield. This married Episcopal priest carries on a months-long affair with his organist and soon moves on to sleep with women of all ages in his congregation. The organist is upset he is cheating on her and spills all. Tom's bishop sends him to a rehab program in which he must write a journal entry every day. By the end he has reflected upon the whole story with some soberness, but plenty of snark, and in the final entry he examines his tryst with his therapist at the rehab program!
I'm embarrassed to say I devoured the book. I couldn't stop reading late into Saturday night, knowing I would be tired for church in the morning but Updike had sucked me in! The book is definitely R-rated, but pornography this is not. Instead, it's a fascinating work of art that traces the psychological and spiritual path of a dramatic fall from grace. What does this book mean? More than I can figure out. But I have some ideas.
Tom has some fantastic lines, words I want to wrench from the context of this lurid book and misattribute and use in sermons or something else because they're just so wise. Like this one: "Compassion is not simple. That is where you so heretically condescend. You give your simple compassion to those whom you imagine to be simple." What a great insight into so much flat, paternalistic, "Christian" "charity." Or, "Irony is the style of our cowardice." Or, "Our body looks up at us as from a cloudy pool, but it is us, our reflection." So good!
And I suppose that's partly Updike's point. People can say wise things without being wise themselves. Smooth words are not necessarily indicative of an unstained soul. Jesus says that at the end people will say "Lord, Lord!" and Jesus will reply, "Go away; I never knew you." As soon as we're lying to God we're in huge trouble. That kind of empty, insincere piety can't fool Jesus, but it sure can fool people, like Tom's congregation.
And Tom himself. He seems unaware of the consequences of his own actions. He insists he doesn't want to separate from his wife, yet continues to blatantly sleep with more and more women. In a bizarre scene, while in bed with a deacon's wife Tom practically coerces this stunned woman to recant her belief in God and howls that Christianity is just a fairy tale. Yet he stubbornly clings to his profession and is surprised to face disciplinary action even though his harem has swelled to alarming ranks. Tom is out of touch with reality; he sees himself as untouchable. That blind, relentless pride is a major factor in his moral decay. If normal rules no longer apply to me, I am free in the most dangerous way possible, free to destroy myself and everyone around me.
And I say I because I could do it too. Bed a third of the congregation? No, fornication isn't my style. But I think massive pride, though, and an ego of soul-crushing proportion is an omnipresent danger for most people, myself included. A lot of clergy and leaders in general seem susceptible to that sort of egoism. And it can lead to a whole host of sins, of which Tom's sensational serial adultery is but one.
Another thought: Tom was no longer accountable to anybody. Having ceased believing in God, he was certainly not holding himself to the Spirit's refining fire of examination. And he disengages with his wife, disdains his associate pastor, and never makes mention of colleagues in ministry or any sense of participation in community. His mistress the organist makes some apparently salutary suggestions about improving his preaching and cutting back on music-- all during their trysts! And the final journal entry's description of his sleeping with the therapist highlights that he isn't being challenged by her, either. Without anyone to lovingly question us, inquire how much sleep we're getting, take us out to dinner and refuse to budge until we divulge what's really on our minds... we lose the Spirit's movement in the community. Everybody, especially pastors, is in doubly big trouble when they've isolated themselves. Tom has become an expert in adroitly cutting off this kind of sacred intimacy, barters it away for cheap sex, which resembles but ultimately avoids the kind of intimacy Tom desperately needs. I think Updike wants us to ask ourselves if we're guilty of the same sin, perhaps committed in smaller, less grandiose ways.
I can't quite explicitly recommend this book since it is so explicit in parts-- body parts. Detailed body parts. But it's such a fine literary work and a thought provoking study in the anatomy of sin for anybody over eighteen, I'd say. Updike's choice to make A Month of Sundays a series of journal entries makes us feel awfully close to Rev. Tom. Which is a good thing, because most of us aren't that far from becoming, in one way or another, like him.
I'm embarrassed to say I devoured the book. I couldn't stop reading late into Saturday night, knowing I would be tired for church in the morning but Updike had sucked me in! The book is definitely R-rated, but pornography this is not. Instead, it's a fascinating work of art that traces the psychological and spiritual path of a dramatic fall from grace. What does this book mean? More than I can figure out. But I have some ideas.
Tom has some fantastic lines, words I want to wrench from the context of this lurid book and misattribute and use in sermons or something else because they're just so wise. Like this one: "Compassion is not simple. That is where you so heretically condescend. You give your simple compassion to those whom you imagine to be simple." What a great insight into so much flat, paternalistic, "Christian" "charity." Or, "Irony is the style of our cowardice." Or, "Our body looks up at us as from a cloudy pool, but it is us, our reflection." So good!
And I suppose that's partly Updike's point. People can say wise things without being wise themselves. Smooth words are not necessarily indicative of an unstained soul. Jesus says that at the end people will say "Lord, Lord!" and Jesus will reply, "Go away; I never knew you." As soon as we're lying to God we're in huge trouble. That kind of empty, insincere piety can't fool Jesus, but it sure can fool people, like Tom's congregation.
And Tom himself. He seems unaware of the consequences of his own actions. He insists he doesn't want to separate from his wife, yet continues to blatantly sleep with more and more women. In a bizarre scene, while in bed with a deacon's wife Tom practically coerces this stunned woman to recant her belief in God and howls that Christianity is just a fairy tale. Yet he stubbornly clings to his profession and is surprised to face disciplinary action even though his harem has swelled to alarming ranks. Tom is out of touch with reality; he sees himself as untouchable. That blind, relentless pride is a major factor in his moral decay. If normal rules no longer apply to me, I am free in the most dangerous way possible, free to destroy myself and everyone around me.
And I say I because I could do it too. Bed a third of the congregation? No, fornication isn't my style. But I think massive pride, though, and an ego of soul-crushing proportion is an omnipresent danger for most people, myself included. A lot of clergy and leaders in general seem susceptible to that sort of egoism. And it can lead to a whole host of sins, of which Tom's sensational serial adultery is but one.
Another thought: Tom was no longer accountable to anybody. Having ceased believing in God, he was certainly not holding himself to the Spirit's refining fire of examination. And he disengages with his wife, disdains his associate pastor, and never makes mention of colleagues in ministry or any sense of participation in community. His mistress the organist makes some apparently salutary suggestions about improving his preaching and cutting back on music-- all during their trysts! And the final journal entry's description of his sleeping with the therapist highlights that he isn't being challenged by her, either. Without anyone to lovingly question us, inquire how much sleep we're getting, take us out to dinner and refuse to budge until we divulge what's really on our minds... we lose the Spirit's movement in the community. Everybody, especially pastors, is in doubly big trouble when they've isolated themselves. Tom has become an expert in adroitly cutting off this kind of sacred intimacy, barters it away for cheap sex, which resembles but ultimately avoids the kind of intimacy Tom desperately needs. I think Updike wants us to ask ourselves if we're guilty of the same sin, perhaps committed in smaller, less grandiose ways.
I can't quite explicitly recommend this book since it is so explicit in parts-- body parts. Detailed body parts. But it's such a fine literary work and a thought provoking study in the anatomy of sin for anybody over eighteen, I'd say. Updike's choice to make A Month of Sundays a series of journal entries makes us feel awfully close to Rev. Tom. Which is a good thing, because most of us aren't that far from becoming, in one way or another, like him.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
A Certain Kind of Afterlife
A couple weeks back, in my Death and Dying class, we watched a documentary entitled, "A Certain Kind of Death." It was probably the most frightening movie I have ever seen. It follows coroners, autopsy people, and basically all the government services that process dead people. They were following people who had no living family or friends nearby to make the phone calls, do the cleanup, go to the funeral, right to the crematorium. Unflinchingly honest, this documentary showed even severely decomposed bodies. At multiple points I nearly lost my breakfast and at other times I could only watch through trembling fingers.
Thank God, and knock on wood, I have never seen a dead body up close and personal. Rotting, black flesh, eyes and nose caving in, maggots in their orifices... it was extremely disgusting. And at the end, they showed bodies at the crematorium, with blood and other fluids dripping everywhere. The technicians put the body in the oven like a pizza, then open it and with a rake break up pieces of bone. Then the bone pieces get ground up in a blender. And if the remains go unclaimed for years... they have to make room for new boxes, and dump them all into a hole in the ground. Clouds of ashes, pieces of people floating through the air... this movie was nothing short of horrific. And yet, it is reality.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Everyone I know, their heads will one day be black and maggots will crawl from their shrinking lips and their orifices will ooze body fluid into the earth. My friends. My professors. My brother and sister. My parents. Me.
That day we watched the movie, I had already planned to go to the nursing home to visit some people from church. I already knew I needed to go, but I felt even more sure about the decision after this chilling documentary. But the whole time, in the back of my mind, I thought: one day these gnarled hands gripping mine will go pale and ghostly and then rot away. And the rest of my mind suppressed the thoughts, knowing that my contemplation of death would show on my face, that people in the nursing home need hope and life, not death, spoken to them.
And as Christians, we have the greatest hope in the world. We do not deny our bodies will become ashes and dust. We know that isn't the end. The clouds of ash, the clouds of people will turn to flesh. The rotting corpses will turn to fresh, shiny life. We believe, as the creed says, in the resurrection of the body.
What must that mean to my old people, whom I love, whom I pity, who stand on the precipice of death so far away from me in my naive youth? The ones with wheelchairs and walkers will run again. The ones who can't hear or see anymore will behold the face and voice of God.
A physical, literal resurrection of the body, not a spiritual heaven but a coming new heavens and new earth... after watching that documentary, I think I understand a bit better. Death is horrible, it's disgusting, frankly. I thought of Martha, who told Jesus Lazarus' body would smell. In that culture, death was more frequent and more public without hospitals and coroners and funeral directors. But death is always unsanitary. Belief in a certain kind of afterlife, the biblical one, in which we will live a perfect, embodied, healed existence, means we can have hope even as we look on the grisliness of death.
And after that horrible Friday, Jesus' body turned that awful translucent, pale color, his tongue lay askew, the hands that healed the blind were like rancid meat...
All so that won't be the end for me. Or for you.
If you can stomach it, it was a good documentary. But keep some tissues and a trash can and a Bible handy.