Other People's Words

There is a sermon series at my church that is hitting me hard. Every night, before I go to sleep, I lie awake in my lofted dorm bed, somehow closer to God up there, and I think about it. The sermon series is about not being an "accidental Pharisee," about not being too proud, "accidentally" noxious to God and others. And see, I'm being pharisaical by pointing out how deeply I've been affected by this series, how very thoughtful, how contemplative I am... when really, a damn good pastor is preaching some damn good sermons that damn me to hell (apart from the fact Jesus will save me through grace by faith, of course) over and over again. 
So, I'm beginning to process this by writing some quotes somebody else wrote, especially wise, savory quotes from Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts On Faith, because it's good for my soul to display other people's wise words instead of thinking my words are so wise. 

"Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.'
"I remembered the old line that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. But I also heard these words in my head: seek wise counsel."
"She said that when she prays for direction, one spot of illumination always appears just beyond her feet, a circle of light into which she can step. She moved away from the pulpit to demonstrate, stepping forward shyly-- this big-boned African-American woman tramping like Charlie Chaplin into an imagined spotlight, and then, after standing there looking puzzled, she moved another step forward to where the light had gone, two feet ahead of where she had been standing, and then again. 'We in our faith work,' she said, 'stumble along toward where we think we're supposed to go, bumbling along, and here is what's so amazing-- we end up getting exactly where we're supposed to be." (God, I hope that's true!)
"But I couldn't discern even what direction to face. And I didn't understand why as usual God couldn't give me a loud or obvious answer, through a megaphone or thunder, skywriting or stigmata. Why does God always use dreams, intuition, memory, phone calls, vague stirrings in my heart? I would say that this really doesn't work for me at all. Except that it does." 
(Anne Lamott quotes this in her book)
"And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."-- Raymond Carver
"Our funky little church is filled with people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and they are home writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food."
"The church became my home in the old meaning of home-- that it's where, when you show up, they have to let you in. They let me in. They even said, 'You come back now.'"
"This is in fact what I think God may smell like, a young child's slightly dirty neck."
"Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life's nature: that lives and hearts get broken-- those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers."
There will be more later, when I have more time to read more of this fascinating book. 

Untitled Poem II

If I were picking out a man
The way one picks out a toothbrush
He would be tall and lanky
Reach all the right corners
Nooks and crannies
Of my heart

He would not flinch
At bad breath
Stubborn plaque
Or the smell of chocolate
Mixed with garlic

I could put him away neatly
When I am finished
Part of every day
Any day
But not quite 
A part
Of my heart 

Ash Wednesday

From T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." This is incredible, breath-takingly sad. It belongs in a sermon, if only that sermon can be half as good as this poem. 
"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice"

This Land Is Your Land

Most people don't know that I really love sixties music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Byrds, Pete Seeger... all of them are geniuses. Raw, deeply spiritual, unafraid to boldly demand change. Today I was listening to my sixties Pandora station and along came, "This Land is Your Land," this version by Peter, Paul, and Mary. 
I thought about the lyrics' reverence for God's holy creation: "And all around me, a voice was singing: 'This land was made for you and me.'" Do we hear that unearthly song today? 
I've talked before about the contemporary church's unbiblical eschatology that fails to acknowledge the promise of the coming, physical resurrection, the future "new heavens and a new earth" that are physical, bodily, real. Unconsciously we have sold the Bible's nourishing promises for a mess of pottage: fragments of orthodoxy mixed with gnosticism, Platonic and enlightenment period dualisms, and evangelical rapture theology. 
The effects of this run deeper than I know. One big problem is that it makes "heaven" is boring, flat, one-dimensional. Without physicality, without bodies, what do you do in heaven? This theology sadly marginalizes many people who do not, as I do to my own detriment, live in their heads. I think of my grandfather, who has an almost unnerving connection to animals. Without bodies, I guess that's gone. Or my mother and her mother, who are great at cooking. In "heaven," as "spirits," you can't cook. (Yet the Bible says upon Jesus' return the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and we will all feast at the great banquet!) This "spiritual," bodiless eschatology, that sees matter as a great prison, privileges the mind above the rest of humanness, and sadly excludes those who have connected with God in many other ways, as I have enumerated above. Why do we wonder why so many boys and men-- athletes, mechanics, soldiers and Marines, rough-and-tumble, testosterone-filled guys, do not go to church? Our unbiblical theology excludes them. 
The contemporary church does not know or love the Bible. We are so disconnected from its world. The world "land," the Hebrew eretz Yisroel (the land of Israel, still a holy phrase to modern Jews who have not forgotten Scripture), no longer stirs in us profound joy and aching. It no longer represents God's covenant with Abraham and his children to give them, to give us, the promised land. Land no longer means to us livelihood, prosperity, hard but satisfying work, the beautiful handiwork of our creator God, shared life with our brothers and sisters and the rest of God's creatures, that voice all around us singing, "This land was made for you and me!" 
That is a taste of what the word "land" (or "Canaan" or "Zion" or "Jerusalem") mean in the Bible. We do not understand it, and so we do not understand when God promises to give us the land, finally, and make it new when Jesus returns in final glory. 
Our misunderstanding, to be sure, is not only a result of our biblical illiteracy, and the half-baked theologies held by our pastors and academics. It is also because modern Western life knows almost nothing of the power of the land. We, myself included, live inside. We trash nature. I need to go outside into nature more, to taste the holiness of the land, to hear the world gasp in the pangs of labor, awaiting the birth of the new creation. I feel an inkling of it on my bicycle, at the train bridge with a million galaxies dancing in splendor above my head because we have fled the light pollution, at Thousand Hills, dipping my toes in the cool lake beside people I love, on the drive from Kansas City to Kirksville, the sun setting, huge, away from ugly suburbs... 
"They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall build vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another enjoy. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be; and my chosen shall long enjoy the works of their hands. The wolf and the lamb shall eat together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent-- its food shall be dust! They shall not destroy on my holy mountain, says the Lord"-- Isaiah 65:21-25. What glorious promises! 
And I believe, on that holy mountain, Peter, Paul, and Mary will sing, and we will cry out for joy: "This land was made for you and me!" 

No, You Can't Change The World

I helped out at Youth Strike for Christ this weekend, a Methodist conference for teenagers in Iowa. I'm not trying to brag by saying that. Honestly, a big part of why I wanted to go was to relax and get out of Kirksville. In the interest of working on being overly critical, I'm going to start by saying what I liked about it. The theme was "Thrive"-- about how we can thrive as Christians because of God's grace and life in community despite challenges. Learning to define success by God's standards and as mediated through community is profoundly important in our individualistic culture. There was a chapel with lots of interesting prayer activities. And the concerts were pretty cool. Plus I liked that they managed to do a service project even in the hotel! So it was a great conference, and I bet a lot of kids walked away renewed and transformed by God's grace.
But. There is a but, in my opinion. Multiple speakers, to include the bishop, talked about how these kids can go "change the world" through their faith in Christ, create a world with no more poverty or bullies or whatever. They were careful to emphasize they can only change the world together in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. But that simply isn't biblical. It fits with the vast theological confusion, even among learned Christians, about eschatology (the end times). Now, I believe sincere Christians can walk away from the Bible with different opinions on heaven, hell, and the parousia (Jesus' triumphant return at the end of history). But if we're reading the Bible seriously, there's some non-negotiables about the end times in there.
1. Jesus is physically returning to earth at a time known only to God the Father.
2. After Jesus' return, there will be a physical, bodily resurrection of the dead.
3. There will also be a new, physical earth created by God at that time where there is no pain and suffering
4. People who permit God no place in their lives will have no place in the new creation
5. Good deeds will be rewarded in this new world
6. We will know God far better than we do now and we will spend time with others in this new creation, including others we knew and loved on earth.
7. Christians have nothing to fear from death but will await Jesus' final return in victory
I'm too lazy to include the Bible citations. Revelation, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians, and Matthew 24 talk about this stuff. There's a lot of metaphorical, confusing language I'm not learned enough to sort out yet. But I think these ideas emerge clearly from the Bible if we cast aside false cultural assumptions. (The book Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright writes lucidly about this stuff, way better than I ever could. Probably one of the most important books I have ever read, and where I learned that stuff.)
My point? No, you can't change the world! The world is doomed! That's the dark side of the good news. This side of history, there will still be wars and rumors of wars. Our spears have not yet been beat into plough-shares. We are still sinners awaiting our redemption. (Sorry, J-Dub, not buying 100% into your Christian perfection stuff. But that's another post.) Until Jesus returns and makes our world and our sinful natures new, the world is heading off a cliff. 
Yes, we can and should work to serve the poor, to improve ourselves and one another, to fight for peace. But we should harbor no illusions that our efforts will totally succeed before Jesus comes to set it all right. To believe that lie is to settle for far, far less than God's best. 
Jurgen Moltmann wrote a deeply unsettling book that speaks to this problem called A Theology of Hope. As a Methodist and a former Lutheran I felt very uncomfortable reading it. Moltmann says a lot of fascinating things I couldn't possibly convey in that book, but a main point is that the Bible is all about God's promises, coming in the future, and awaiting these promises is the essence of faith. John Wesley wanted to talk about the need to live out the good news now. Did he shift the locus of faith too much into the present? I don't know. It is a both/and thing, but I almost hesitate to say that because it's too simple. Hmmm. I need to think more about this. Maybe another post on this issue soon.
Anyway, I just feel the contemporary church is broken in so many ways, and our faulty eschatology impoverishes us spiritually. Kids who are told Jesus will help them get rid of poverty and bullying on earth and change their schools might be devastated when it doesn't come true. As it won't, because Jesus' way is narrow and steep, and there will be no more tears, but not yet. Is this why existentialism, the idea that life is absurd and meaningless and all you can do is try to eek out your own meaning before you die and fade into oblivion, came about? Because Christians naively thought they could make all things new without Jesus' final defeat of evil? If redemption depends on us, redemption will never come. We are called to far more radical faith.
I pray a lot of things, when I am prayerful, for the contemporary church. Among those things is that we will wait seriously for Jesus' return and dare to believe this world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through, a-passin through. Perhaps our affluence, our iPhones and junk food and TVs, have made us forget the depth of brokenness only God can repair in the end. 
He will come again to judge the quick and the dead... We believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. 
The new world is coming when Jesus returns in final victory to vanquish evil. No, you can't change the world. Get over it! 

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.