Quote of the Day

“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”

Flannery O'Connor

I can relate to this. I've been having a hard time lately with believing. I don't know what I was expecting when I joined a church. That it would light a fire in me? Or that the fire would burn brighter? Instead it feels like it has fizzled.

Part of my problem is that I still don't really understand what it means to believe. I haven't internalized this message. I don't feel it from within. When I'm in church, I sit there and think: "Okay, now I'm here. Why?"

Peace Is the Only Path

Catholic members of Congress have asked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to take a more active role in ending the war in Iraq. Read more here. Here's a brief excerpt:

In our own education in the faith, we find the testimony of the Scriptures compelling, and although we have no illusions about the complexities of our current situation in Iraq , we have come to believe that peace cannot simply exist as an ideal – our efforts must be accompanied by actions as we embrace the teachings of peace and justice.

Books I'm Reading

I'm reading Tony Campolo's Letters to a Young Evangelical. Favorite quote so far:

I once heard a story from a young English evangelist. He told me about the day Charlie Peace, a well-known criminal in London, was hanged -- February 25, 1879. The Anglican Church, which had a ceremony for nearly everything, even had a ceremony for hangings. So, when Charlie Peace was marched to the gallows, a priest walked behind him and read these words from a prayer book: 'Those who die without Christ experience Hell, which is the pain of forever dying without the release which death itself can bring."

When these chilling words were read, Charlie Peace stopped in his tracks, turned to the priest, and shouted in his face, "Do you believe that? Do you believe that?"

The priest, taken aback by this sudden verbal assault, stammered for amoment and then said, "Well... I ... suppose I do."

"Well, I don't," said Charlie. "But if I did, I'd get down on my hands and knees and crawl all over Great Britain, even if it were paved with pieces of broken glass, if I could just rescue one person from what you just told me."

I like that quote. It's a necessary corrective to the glibness with which many Christians speak of eternal damnation. Campolo goes on to say:

If we Evangelicals really believe what we say about the eternal damnation of unsaved souls, how can we sleep at night?... But imagine the consequences of giving up our belief that those who die without Christ are eternally lost.

He doesn't answer the question. At least he hasn't yet. I'll be interested to see if he comes back to it later in the book. Seems pretty crucial. No pun intended.

Update - New Job!

Well, I got the job at Johnson County Public Library. I'm the only "Community Engagement Librarian" that I know of. I'll be working with local government and civic organizations to help citizens become more involved in the decision-making process at the county level. I'll be trained as a facilitator, and I'll also be creating web content to help people become more informed about local issues.

I can't begin to say how thrilled I am about this job. It's so exciting. It's an amazing opportunity to do something really new and meaningful. It feels like another piece of my life just clicked into place.

Hunger Awareness Day

Click for more

We Cannot Merely Pray to You - Rabbi Jack Riemer

We cannot pray to You, O God, to banish war, for You have filled the world with paths to peace, if only we would take them.

We cannot pray to You to end starvation, for there is food enough for all, if only we would share it.

We cannot merely pray for prejudice to cease; for we might see the good in all that lies before our eyes, if only we would use them.

We cannot merely pray, 'Root out despair;' for the spark of hope already waits within the human heart, for us to fan it into flame.

We must not ask of You, O God, to take the task that You have given us. We cannot shirk, we cannot flee away, avoiding obligation for ever.

Therefore, we pray, O God, for wisdom and will, for courage to do and to become, not only to look on with helpless yearning as though we had no strength.

William Cavanaugh: Moral Reasoning or Just Trust the President?

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
From Jim Wallis' "God's Politics" blog

To keep struggling against hate and to practice forgiveness need not mean abdicating one's rights or renouncing justice. This should be emphasized over and over again. It is part of loving one's enemy that Christians must remind the "enemy" of justice and right. It is part of loving to speak the truth.

- Naim Ateek

from "Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation"

23 Earths

So, I did the Ecological Footprint quiz. And I failed. Really badly. It would take 23 Earths to support my lifestyle, if everyone on the planet lived like I do. Gack.

23 Earths! That boggles my mind. It's just so staggering. Impossible to contemplate. Impossible to imagine that I am squandering so many resources. And almost impossible to contemplate changing. I'm such a wuss.

My big problem is my commuting and my gas mileage. 40 miles a day in a van that only gets 22 mpg doesn't cut it. But how do I fix that? This is where I weenie out. I could find another job. Actually I'm working on that one, but we all know that jobs for librarians don't grow on trees.

Or I could .... dun dun dun! Take the bus.

Now, this alternative would be a lot less daunting if I didn't have this issue, that my boss insists I stay at work until 5:30. That one stricture brings my bus choices down to a very narrow few. Like, one. And that one would have me spending an hour on the bus, getting to work a half-hour early, rushing to the bus at 5:30 for an hour-plus commute home. Leaving the house at 7:45 instead of 8:30. Getting home at 7:00 instead of 6:15. 11+ hours a day spent getting to and from work and being at work.

And here's where I have the tantrum because I JUST DON'T WANT TO DO IT!!!! WAAAH!

I don't want to surrender so much of my day to my commute. I'm used to that convenience factor of being able to hop in the car and go, and maybe I have to fight a little traffic, but door to door is 45 minutes on the outside, usually less.

SIGH.

I think gas prices may make the decision for me, though. Already it burns my soul to pay so much at the pump every week. What I could do with that 40 bucks...

So, we'll see. Maybe I'll get this job at Johnson County Public Library and cut my commute in half. Or maybe I'll join the ranks of the Bus Riders. Something's gotta give.

New American Dream

New American Dream

An interesting website with lots of ideas for changing our lifestyles to be more earth-friendly.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler: Christianity Today Challenges Dobson's Hard Line

From the God's Politics blog. It's good to see the editors of an important publication such as Christianity Today coming out on the side of those who believe that it's important to protect the health of the Earth, and of those who don't believe that evangelicals should restrict their social activism to the issues of abortion and the sanctity of marriage.

Christian Aid

Christian Aid

"We believe in life before death."

All are welcome! Well, almost all ...?

Sex Offenders Test Churches’ Core Beliefs - New York Times (requires registration)

This is a really interesting story about a UCC church in California that is divided over the whether or not to admit a man to the congregation who is a convicted sex offender. Some people feel it is their duty to let him in. Others feel he endangers their children. Others, adult survivors of child abuse, feel that his presence is an affront.

I found this quote from the article really interesting and challenging.

“They are conflicting ministries,” the Rev. Patricia Tummino said about reaching out to sex offenders, to children and to adult survivors of abuse....“You can’t be all things to all people,” she said.

Really? Are we going to pick and choose who we serve? I understand that churches have limited resources and can only offer so much in the way of specialized support, but the sex offender in the story is just talking about being allowed to join the church. Not asking for a counseling program.

I don't see that the church has a choice. If you say all are welcome, then all are welcome. Jesus welcomed the unclean and the guilty to follow him. At the same time, everyone understands the desire of parents to protect their kids. At a previous church, he made a deal with the congregation that he would never attend the church without another adult to chaperone him. That seems to me a good compromise.

For now, though, Pilgrim UCC won't allow him to attend services. And because he was open about his background as a sex offender, which led to media attention, he lost his job and was evicted. Now he's homeless and unemployed. He has suffered a lot of setbacks in return for being honest about his background.

I'll be interested to see how this turns out. I'm sure the church will be changed, no matter what happens. As the article points out some people have left because he might be joining, others have joined because they are impressed by the openness of the church. I pray that Mr. Pliska finds a place of peace and the faith of those struggling with this situation will be deepened and strengthened by the experience.

Lent is over

So, Lent has been over for awhile now. I'm asking myself how I did with my Lenten project, and I think I did pretty well. If you measure by results, the fact that J and I joined St Andrew tells you something. If you measure by output, although I didn't manage to post every day, I posted quite a bit. And I think I told the story pretty well.

A lot of the credit for my "success" has to go to other people though, like J, and Holly and St. Andrew, and people like Jim Wallis and Diana Bass. I've been looking for God for a long time and never finding him because there was this language barrier. I was like a tourist in a foreign country and the locals were nice but I couldn't understand the directions they were giving me. I'd end up going the wrong way, ending up in the wrong place and thinking to myself "This is not where I belong." And then having a hell of a time finding the way back to my hotel.

But these people I listed above, they make sense. They are speaking of Jesus and the gospel in a way that I can understand, that resonates with me in the deepest recesses. Yes, the world as we have been given it is beautiful, and we are destroying it. Yes, there is terrible poverty and injustice and the powers of the world turn a blind eye to this suffering. Yes, there is prejudice and racism and hatred, and the powers of the world thrive on these things because they fuel the building of walls, the military machine, and territorial and economic conquest.

And it's been like this for a long time. Jesus fought against these things during his brief lifetime on earth, and he urges us to fight against them today. Not to wallow in our own sins. Not to preoccupy ourselves with securing our personal salvation in heaven. But to bring heaven back down to earth, to renew paradise, to fight for the salvation of all humanity from poverty and oppression in the face of terrible opposition. "On earth as it is in heaven."

I was watching a video last night about Christian Aid, and their motto is "We believe in life before death." Yes!! Yes, that's it. That's what's always been missing for me before. And I finally found it on my lenten journey, thanks to all the loving people I met along the way who have worked hard themselves to find the truth in the gospel, to redefine the problems and to seek real solutions.

In one of my earlier posts I think I mentioned that I didn't understand the concept of Jesus being my personal savior, or what I needed saving for. Now I think I know.

Thank you, Jesus, for saving me from a life defined only by my needs, my desires and my problems by your beautiful example and powerful witness against poverty and injustice. Grant me strength to walk in your way and to live beyond myself, to work for the uplift of others who are suffering and neglected, to make this world a better place, even as you saw it could be. Amen.

Hope

On Sunday, the folks who do adult education class at church decided to have some members get up and share stories of hope from their personal experience. This got me to thinking about what story I would tell, if someone asked me to speak about the manifestation of hope in my life.

The big story would have to be finding my way from the isolation I thought I was going to be in forever to the life I have today, with a loving husband and a new church family. But that's a highly personal story that I imagine most people could not relate to.

But then I thought of this story.

My mother is a very difficult person. She is angry and argumentative. She is anxious most of the time. She is obsessive. She remembers little slights forever. She herself can't say she's sorry.

On the other hand, she can be delightful. She's funny and musical and uninhibited. She feels things deeply. Hence the anger and resentment that linger for years, but also she can feel great joy. She loves with all her heart, so much that she can't really express it.

She and my aunt Carole had not spoken for quite awhile when mom got the news from her other sister that Carole has breast cancer. She told me (because I always hear family news from my mother, it's the way my family works) and I could tell how upset she was, how worried, and how angry and hurt that she had not heard about it from Carole herself.

Well, I decided to break the rules and call Carole to talk to her. And this set off a tirade against my mother that I won't soon forget. I couldn't get a word in edgewise. My husband could hear Carole haranguing me on the phone from the other side of the room. When I tried to tell Carole that my mom loved her and was worried about her, she rejected that notion out of hand. The part that really stuck in my mind was her saying: "Your mother's never gonna change. We've been making excuses for her all these years and I'm sick of it!"

She's never gonna change. There's no hope.

I've been where Carole is now in relationship to my mom. There was a time when I was so angry with her I couldn't stand it. When I felt like having her in my life was toxic to me. And it's true that some things will never change. Like the fact that she brought me into the world. She is and will always be my mother. There came a point where I had to ask myself: "do I really want to give up on one of the most important relationships I will ever have in my life?"

The answer was no. So, rather than wait for her to change, I changed.

I let go of some of the expectations I had for her. How I thought she should behave. How I thought a mom was supposed to be. In some ways, I think of her less as a mom today than as a very good, old friend. Someone I can laugh with, and complain about the government with, and enjoy good music with. And the other stuff, well, I try to let that slide. My husband will tell you I'm not always successful. But I try.

Funny thing is, when I changed, she changed. It was like there was a new atmosphere between us that allowed her the freedom to try a new way. She's not nearly so demanding or angry with me. She seems to enjoy our relationship more, and to feel less disappointment with me. There's a level of comfort between us that has not been there since I was a child.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that there is hope for a relationship that is bruised or broken. Fixing things with my mom seemed impossible to me only as long as I insisted that she be the one to change. When I acknowledged the value of our relationship and my own role in the brokenness, and took it on myself to do things differently, things did indeed change - for both of us.

YouTube - Beyond Vietnam: 40 Years Later

YouTube - Beyond Vietnam: 40 Years Later

Dr. Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam speech, given on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in NY, with video from Iraq.

The End Times

My boss believes we are living in the End Times.

I found this out yesterday when we were having a conversation about the situation in the Middle East. She said: "I believe the hand of the Lord guides the heart of the King." God led George Bush to get us involved in this stupid war to precipitate a conflict that would result in Iran's use of nuclear weapons and the eventual end of the world because it was time for the Apocalypse.

...

Her God is one twisted bastard.

Stations of the Cross

Found a link to this interpretation of the Stations of the Cross on the God's Politics site. So much good stuff in it.

"The God of peace is never glorified by human violence." - Thomas Merton.

Dazed and confused

Ok, so something's confusing me. Lately I've been trying to wrap my head around the idea that Jesus is "the son of God." What exactly does that mean? If you gave God a paternity test, would it come back positive? They have the same DNA? He wasn't even raised by God, he was raised by Mary and Joseph. And I'll bet he was quite a handful.

So in what sense, exactly, was Jesus God's son? Maybe the logic goes like this: I'm omnipotent, and I say he's my son, so that makes him my son. QED.

What's even more confusing to me is the idea of the Trinity. That God and Jesus are "of one being", along with the Holy Ghost. We usually refer to this sort of thing as split personality, and it's usually considered a problem.

Ok so I'm reading Verse and Voice from Sojourners today, and there's this quote from the bible.

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." - Mark 10:17-21

Wait. I thought Jesus and God were one being. But here's Jesus saying that no one is good but God. So Jesus apparently doesn't think of himself as being the same as God. Maybe when he was at least partially human he wasn't perfectly good precisely because he had taken on human form. Now that he's died and shed that body, he's just as good as God again?

This sort of thing makes my head hurt.

Wrong message!

A message:

My wise friend Foo sent me the link to this video:

Hold hands

Foo says:
I believe that video should be sent into all warzones
Foo says:
The otters know!
Foo says:
Hold hands so you don't drift apart!

Favorite TV commercial

Liberty Mutual

I love this ad. First time I saw it, I was mesmerized. Such a beautiful message. Makes you want to run out and do something nice!

Reading the comments about this commercial is almost as good as watching it... except for the ones posted by people who've had bad experiences with insurance companies :D

Comments like: "Awesome message this world needs some lovin."

Welcome to Restoring Eden — Restoring Eden

Welcome to Restoring Eden — Restoring Eden

Inconvenient Christians, indeed. I LOVE it!

Church, Artists and Sex Workers plan an Experiential Easter Service

Monday, March 26, 2007

Becky Garrison: Easter for the Outcasts

Beloved

At St. Andrew they like to use the word "beloved." As in, "beloved child of God." And I like it. It's a beautiful word. Sort of plummy and comfortable in the mouth.

So this word was making me smile the other day and I had this sudden memory of the role the word "beloved" had in my life. This is so ironic and wonderful.

When I used to sing at the Central Christian Church in Dallas, we used to sing an "altar call" style hymn at the end of each service. It was supposed to inspire people to come join the church.

One of the minister's favorite hymns was "Softly and Tenderly". It's an oldie but goodie:

Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me.
See, on the portals he's waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home.
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling.
Calling, "Oh sinner, come home."

You've probably already spotted the part I had a problem with. Well, being ornery, I rewrote it.

Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling.
Calling, "Beloved, come home."

Here's another irony: St. Andrew's has a banner outside that reads: "Home Sweet Home".

*wink*

San Francisco to ban plastic grocery bags - CNN.com

San Francisco to ban plastic grocery bags - CNN.com: "San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling."

Yeah!!!

Preamble

As members of the Christian Church,
We confess that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of the living God,
and proclaim him Lord and Savior of the world.

In Christ's name and by his grace
we accept our mission of witness
and service to all people.

We rejoice in God,
maker of heaven and earth,
and in the covenant of love,
which binds us to God and one another.

Through baptism into Christ
we enter into newness of life
and are made one with the whole people of God.

In the communion of the Holy Spirit
we are joined together in discipleship
and in obedience to Christ.

At the table of the Lord
we celebrate with thanksgiving
the saving acts and presence of Christ.

Within the universal church
we receive the gift of ministry
and the light of scripture.

In the bonds of Christian faith
we yield ourselves to God
that we may serve the One
whose kingdom has no end.

Blessing, glory and honor
be to God forever. Amen.

Singing meat

I love this story. Thanks to J for sending me the link!

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat."

God's Politics

John Young: Not another dime.

Iraq Veterans Memorial

Iraq Veterans Memorial- Robert Greenwald on Tavis Smiley - Google Video

LeRoy

I dreamed about my ex Leroy last night. He was taking one of my dogs and moving away. I spent a lot of the dream crying.

Well, LeRoy did just move, from NC to Wyoming, I'm told. I haven't heard from him, so I have no way to contact him. I think I'm having anxiety about that. We were together for 9 years and we've been friends for over 15 now, and it bothers me that I can't reach him.

Thinking about LeRoy reminds me of something the preacher at St. Andrew said to me on "Pie with the Pastor" night. She said that most people who aren't raised in a church never find their way to faith, so it was important to raise children in a faith community. But LeRoy is a great example of someone who was raised in a family with strong religious beliefs but who wants absolutely nothing to do with religion.

He hated going to church. He vehemently rejects the idea that there is any God. He fully believes that religion is the opiate of the masses. Honestly, these days television is more like the opiate of the masses but whatever.

I know a lot of people like LeRoy. John, my high school friend. Both of my parents. Sarah. People who are intelligent, independent types who feel like religion either failed them or abused them in some way.

Raising a kid in a church is no guarantee that the child will grow up to be a person of faith. On the contrary, he or she could, as an adult, be so scarred by their experience that belief becomes, barring a miracle, almost impossible.

Money Looms in Episcopalian Rift With Anglicans - New York Times

Money Looms in Episcopalian Rift With Anglicans - New York Times: "As leaders of the Anglican Communion hold meeting after meeting to debate severing ties with the Episcopal Church in the United States for consecrating an openly gay bishop, one of the unspoken complications is just who has been paying the bills.

The truth is, the Episcopal Church bankrolls much of the Communion’s operations. And a cutoff of that money, while unlikely at this time, could deal the Communion a devastating blow."

hahahahahahahahaha
*deep breath*
hahahahahahahahaha

Church is not just a social event

I don't want to give the impression that I just want to go to church so I can have friends.

The other part of the puzzle is the desire I have to do something about the suffering in the world. This is an impulse I share with my father, who had a heart full of compassion and no way to express it.

Pretty much everyone in my family lives to achieve comfort for themselves. They do not have causes, they don't support charities. My father would put a few dollars extra in his electricity payment during the winter to help poor families pay their bills, and my mom would get angry.

Most of my family (other than my mom) are all Republican Rush-Limbaugh-listeners, and they have that callous disregard for suffering that is too common among the FOX News commentator types. The poor are poor because they are lazy and weak-willed. "We don't have to feed the hungry. Our wealth will eventually trickle down."

Well, I just can't agree with that. In fact it pisses me off when I think about it. There are huge needs in the world, and the right thing to do is to try to address them. I have come to believe that Jesus saw the same needs and felt them deeply, and that's the main reason I feel attracted to Christianity.

I guess in looking for faith, I'm looking for a family whose values are more like mine, and come from a source of spiritual energy, not from the marketplace or tv or magazines. A family that encourages one another to rise above our own comforts to a higher purpose. A family in which there are many many more people at the table, and not just people "like us" but people of all nationalities, races, creeds.

We live in a country with the abundance to feed the world, and the technology to help improve education, health care and the use of the environment on a global scale. And we aren't doing it. I hope to find a community of faith that wants to take on these issues from a spiritual perspective. We'll see.

So, God = Death?

I was reading over what I've written on this blog and I'm struck by how closely my search for God has paralleled the losses I've had in my life. I think that might have been true early on, when my basic concerns about religion were metaphysical.

Since those early days I've come to realize also that part of the draw of church for me has been the pull of community.

My parents had almost no friends. We never had people over. We never went to people's houses. We didn't have a social life outside the home that involved a church or clubs or sports. We were almost completely isolated.

So I spent most of my years when I wasn't in school in my room, reading, drawing, talking on the phone with the few friends I had made. I grew up into an emotionally and socially stunted, painfully shy young woman. I developed social anxieties that I still struggle with today. For example, I had 3 weeks off from work once, during which time I never left my house. My neighbors called the police to make sure I hadn't been attacked and eaten by my dogs or something.

And yet, through the process of living day to day I eventually discovered that I was not a complete introvert, even though I behaved like one. I love to perform. I turned out to be a natural teacher (something you'd never have convinced me of when I was younger). If you had told me I would spend a good portion of my work day every day getting up in front of people and talking, I'd have laughed in your face. But that's what happened.

I discovered from my explorations of virtual worlds that I am a born organizer and entertainer. I organized online weddings and parties. I led a virtual rock band. I ran a virtual bar. I wrote songs and performed them online.

Who is this person???

Well, I had to finally admit to myself that this disconnect between my real life and my online life, and between my work life and my off-work life, was something to pay attention to. There had to be a reason why I was so outgoing at work and online, and completely introverted otherwise. That realization led to therapy, diagnosis, and medications which helped me make some sense of the conflicting feelings I'd been having about the fear of being around other people on the one hand, and the desire for contact and community on the other.

Thomas Merton on peace.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

- Thomas Merton

from "Thomas Merton on Peace"

Emergent Village

Found something else cool: Emergent Village. I discovered it on the webpage of Diana Butler Bass who turns up now and then on the Sojourners site. Her book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, is now on my to-read list.

So there's a local Emergent group here, at St. Paul School of Theology. There's also one called KC Emergent Cohort. Kinda wonder why there are two.

The folks at Emergent Village espouse 4 main values:

• Commitment to God in the way of Jesus
• Commitment to the church in all its forms
• Commitment to God's world
  
• Commitment to one another

I like the fact that they do not focus on a specific laundry list of beliefs:

We believe in God, beauty, future, and hope – but you won’t find a traditional statement of faith here. We don’t have a problem with faith, but with statements. Whereas statements of faith and doctrine have a tendency to stifle friendships, we hope to further conversation and action around the things of God.

Brilliantly said.

There's also a community of Emerging Women.

Synergies

Remember back when I talked about why I named my blog "Bright Sadness" and quoted Schmemann? Well, Mr. Schmemann is today's Voice of the Day on Sojo.net, the same quote that struck me so deeply:

Bright Sadness is the true message and gift of Lent: ... the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God's presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home. Such is the climate of Lenten worship; such is its first and general impact on my soul.
- Alexander Schmemann
from "Great Lent"

I think it bears repeating.

"The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening."

- zbigniew brzezinski

Naughty, naughty priest!

The Catholic Church turns a blind eye to pedophiles, but brings the boom down on the real sinners: liberation theologians. From the Los Angeles Times:

Vatican to punish priest, sources say

The inquiry into Sobrino has apparently been pushed along by the Archbishop of San Salvador, Fernando Saenz Lacalle, who was formerly the apostolic minister to the Salvadoran military, the folks who murdered Oscar Romero in 1980 and six of Sobrino's fellow Jesuit priests in 1989. The article also mentions that Saenz is a member of the conservative religious organization Opus Dei, which anyone familiar with the Da Vinci Code should recognize.

Seems the new pope has a personal interest in this as well:

The order against Sobrino will be issued by the Vatican's watchdog arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and will carry the approval of Pope Benedict XVI who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led efforts to stamp out liberation theology.

The inquiry was initiated while Ratzinger was still the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Supposedly, the problem is Sobrino's conception of the divinity of Jesus. According to Saenz: "The divinity of Jesus Christ, that he is truly the son of God made into man, is a fundamental point of our faith.... [Sobrino] is aware of [Jesus'] humanity but not his divinity, so he is not Catholic." This sort of thing is just repugnant to me. To my nondoctrinal mind, it seems supremely stupid. People are starving, being oppressed and murdered. Here is a priest who selflessly and courageously fought this oppression. Who gives a rats ass about his "awareness" of the divinity / humanity of Jesus? What does that even mean, "is aware of"? Sounds like doublespeak to me.

Militant agnostic

Bumper Sticker of the Day:

She Who Is

Ok, a few posts back I said I'd explain why I referred to God as She.

I started thinking of God as a woman, probably about thirteen years ago, when I heard this for the first time:
The 23rd Psalm - Bobby McFerrin
from his album "Medicine Man"

The Lord is my shepherd, I have all I need.
She makes me lie down in green meadows,
Beside the still waters she will lead.
She restores my soul, she rights my wrongs,
She leads me in a path of good things and fills my heart with songs.
Even though I walk through a dark and dreary land
There is nothing that can shake me.
She has said she won't forsake me. I'm in her hand.
She sets a table before me in the presence of my foes.
She anoints my head with oil and my cup overflows.
Surely, goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in her house forever and ever.
Glory be to our Mother and Daughter and to the Holy of Holies.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Amen.

The first time I heard this, it took my breath away. I had this vision of the House of the Lord as a place full of sunshine, with the smell of cookies baking in the oven. I think it was the first time I really felt like "God of Love" made sense.

Thinking of God as a man never worked for me. God the Father didn't make me feel secure in God's love, because I was never secure in my own father's love. My dad was a troubled guy who judged himself and everyone else so harshly that expressing love was almost impossible for him. He was angry all the time and I rarely felt like I measured up to what he expected or matched up to what he wanted in a child. So I found that praying to God the Father was difficult. No, pointless.

This isn't to say that my relationship with my mother was rosy and wonderful, but at least I never doubted that she loved me. Maybe too much, but she loved me and nurtured me when she was able.

So anyway, ever since then I have felt that my understanding of God was more complete and less dissonant when I imagined God as female. I wouldn't feel comfortable in a faith setting where God was thought of solely as a man.

For many of us it is not our politics that constrains us to say and do what we do and say in opposition to apartheid and in working for a new South Africa. It is precisely our relationship with God, it is our worship, our meditation, our attendance at the Eucharist, it is these spiritual things which compel us to speak up for God, "Thus saith the Lord ...," to be the voice of the voiceless. For many the spiritual is utterly central to all we are and do and say.
- Desmond Tutu
from "Cry Justice!"

Theme Song

This week's theme song seems to be:

Let Your Light Shine by Keb' Mo'

You say you wanna get over,
What are you gonna do?
Watch the world go by in a corner
All alone?

I know it's none of my business
But there's something I need to say.
If you could see you
The way I see you
You'd start flyin' on your own.

Step aside, and
Let your light shine.
Let your love show.
It's a short ride
Down a long road.
When the rains come
And the winds blow,
Let your light shine
Wherever you go.

This world is ready and waitin',
For you to break on through.
It's time to recognize
Time to realize
You're the only one like you.

Step on up -
Step into your greatness.
Don't be afraid.
There's a place that you
Will rise up to.
No one else can do what you do.

Get out the way and
Let your light shine.
Let your love show.
It's a short ride
Down a long road.
When the rains come,
And the winds blow,
Let your light shine
Wherever you go.

(I was going to link to a sample, but Sony's website works so badly I can't :( )

The Micah Challenge

I came across this today, while reading a post on the God's Politics site. I'm still just looking into it, but I'm intrigued.

http://www.micahchallenge.org/

The Micah Call

This is a moment in history of unique potential, when the stated intentions of world leaders echo something of the mind of the Biblical prophets and the teachings of Jesus concerning the poor, and when we have the means to dramatically reduce poverty.

We commit ourselves, as followers of Jesus, to work together for the holistic transformation of our communities, to pursue justice, be passionate about kindness and to walk humbly with God.

We call on international and national decision-makers of both rich and poor nations, to fulfil their public promise to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and so halve absolute global poverty by 2015.

We call on Christians everywhere to be agents of hope for and with the poor, and to work with others to hold our national and global leaders accountable in securing a more just and merciful world.

Of course being the ornery person I am, on studying their website I'm immediately brought up against something that makes me question:

Latest prayer reflection
Friday March 2: What the heck is social justice? (a link that won't work after the next prayer reflection is put up, thanks guys!)

Now, I'm all about social justice. It's one of the reasons I've found myself interested in joining a faith community. But the first thing this prayer reflection tells me to pray for is:

Please pray: For ourselves and our church that we will fear God in all aspects of our lives.

And I'm, like, no. I'm not going to pray for fear. As someone who has suffered crippling anxiety in my life, anxiety which prevented me for many years from living to my potential, the last thing I'm going to pray for is fear.

I mean... well, just no.

Once again, Jerry Falwell says something stupid.

Falwell Says Global Warming Tool of Satan

Bob Allen
03-01-07

Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, who has worked for decades to involve conservative Christians in politics, said Sunday the debate over global warming is a tool of Satan being used to distract churches from their primary focus of preaching the gospel."

It is not we who do Christ the favor of worshiping him; it is Christ who empowers us by strengthening us, and enabling us to fight for the things that are worth fighting for, the things that endure; and that is a promise worth fighting for, worth dying for, and worth living for.

- Peter Gomes

excerpt from "Strength for the Journey."

The dreaded words:

"Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

I'm interrupting my seemingly interminable story "Slacking Toward Bethlehem" to deal with this nasty question because it's come up again and I still don't know what to make of it.

We went to a gathering at our maybe-church last night to meet with the pastor and other new people and learn more about the church. The subject of creeds came up, and one of the folks present observed that at the service today the new members weren't asked to recite a creed or otherwise prove that they belonged in the church. He found that interesting.

And the pastor responded that the Disciples of Christ considered themselves a non-creedal church, but that they did at some point ask if the person coming to join or be baptized had "accepted Jesus as their personal savior." And I felt like someone had just popped my happy little balloon.

Why does that question bother me? Because I don't understand it. I have no idea what it means. I don't quite grasp why I need a savior to begin with, or what it means to have a personal relationship with someone who's been incorporeal at least for over 2000 years.

It has always been the hardest thing for me to get past. I guess not having been brought up with faith in Jesus and belief in sin and redemption makes it hard for me now to see the relevance. But I will not, under any circumstances, say I believe something that I do not to make me acceptable to a church. I have too much respect for true belief, and for myself, to do that.

Piece by piece

I'm looking at Pam's quilt now, and I realize that her piece of the Quilt reminds me of the interconnectedness of things. People who never knew each other in life are intertwined on the Quilt by the commonality of their death. And disparate things, creatures, souls, are all intertwined in the harmony of creation that I have to call God. And great beauty, like that of the Quilt, can emerge from great sadness, because at the root they are in fact one.

The image of piecing a quilt together also reminds me of what I'm trying to do with this blog: trying to find some meaning in the patchwork of ideas, thoughts and memories, find the harmony that must underlie the dissonance of my search for god, maybe find the theme that runs throughout.

Nothing now can come to any good.

Not long before Kris' memorial service, my cousin, Pamela Jane Pitt Arth, was diagnosed with AIDS. This was devastating to our family more so because we've never been all that great at dealing with pain and grief, or with being there for each other. There's a stiff upper lip thing that kicks in whenever something bad happens. How were we going to deal with this: not just the grave illness of a young, beautiful woman, but the fact that it was AIDS, that "disease gay people get."

Being gay is NOT okay in my family. My uncle used to call my best friend from high school (who died of AIDS in 1984) "just a fag." So Pam having AIDS (she got it from a guy she worked with who was bi-sexual and didn't tell her that he had had homosexual encounters) caused a huge increase in the homophobia and anger toward gay people in my family. Because it was all "their" fault, you know.

Pam died in 1994. This is her square of the AIDS quilt. Her part is the one with the butterfly.


If you know someone who has died of AIDS you can search to see if they have been added to the AIDS quilt.

Pam's death brought me, once again, face-to-face with religion. Pam was the only religious person left in our family. But her approach to religion was very much the "I have a personal relationship with Jesus as my Saviour" kind of thing, which was something I (and I guess the rest of my family) did not share. During her illness, her faith was a solace to her, I suppose, but I just couldn't relate.

I remember sitting at her memorial service and feeling completely disengaged. The preacher had that televangelist personality, the Hair of Steel and a great voice, and he and some woman sang "How Great Thou Art" as a duet. Pam's husband read that dreadfully bleak poem by W.H. Auden "Stop all the clocks". I doubt that he knew Auden was gay. I doubt that he knew who Auden was. He read it because someone remembered it from the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral." My uncle Bert requested "When the Saints Go Marching In" as the recessional, but it did not have the intended effect. These were, after all, Texan Baptists and they really didn't have the New Orleans second-line spirit to carry it off.

But this was one of the times when I thought that religion would have done my family a lot of good. Not the "I felt the flames-uh hail a'burnin' up mah back" kind of religion that my mom grew up with, and not the Jesus-as-personal-savior thing either because if you DON'T believe Jesus is your personal saviour whatever that means, you just can't go there, it's like having a door slammed in your face...

But a more loving, sustaining, inspiring sort of belief that's not dependent on Creed A or Creed B. The kind of belief that helps give meaning to the tragedies that come along in life, like Pam's death. Faith in something more, in something greater than ourselves, our experiences, our petty little lives. Faith that inspires people to reach out beyond what they personally want or need, to ask what other people need. Faith that moves people to strive for justice in the face of evil, disregard and apathy. Faith that allows you to say "there is a reason I was put on this earth beyond enduring all this shit being thrown at me until I die, and it's not just a reward in the afterlife (which has got to be the most masochistic existence I can imagine)."

When we no longer touch

The choir director at Central Christian Church was Kris Anthony. He was a member of the Turtle Creek Chorale, their composer-in-residence at the time. In addition to writing and arranging music, he was a talented pianist/singer. Among other works, he wrote a song cycle for chorus called "When We No Longer Touch" based on poetry by Peter McWilliams combined with parts of the Latin text for the Requiem mass. It's a song cycle about confronting the five stages of grief, and finding a way to survive, when a loved one dies of AIDS.

I came across this beautiful piece written by Eric Watts, who was deeply moved by Kris' music. Reminded me of myself, singing at Kris' memorial service and crying so hard I missed my cue.

The local PBS station produced a movie about the Turtle Creek Chorale, the many singers lost to AIDS, including Kris, and the struggles of the survivors to continue living after losing their loved ones. I found this quote from the video that is really magical to me:

"When you come to the edge of all that you have known, there will be two possibilities awaiting you: There will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught how to fly."

The video is hard to watch but it's so moving. Here's what the National Catholic Reporter has to say about it:

Inspirational is far too pallid and inadequate a word to describe the next video, which I very much wish to bring forward, not only in relation to grief recovery, but in the war against homophobia. It is "After Goodbye," originally an hourlong broadcast on PBS in mid-1994. Since then, our parish and our campus ministry have used it time and a again, to gut-wrenching effect, as one viewer put it. Quite simply, it is the most powerfully moving video I have ever seen.

The focus is on the Turtle Creek Chorus in Texas, which had lost, at the time of production, 60 of its 200 members to AIDS. The film chronicles the men's efforts to grapple with death, loss and grief in their own ranks and, indeed, in their own persons.

Timothy Seelig, the director, recounts with humility and courage how he has been obliged to function only 10 percent as conductor and 90 percent as spiritual guide, father and "love symbol." There is also a support group for parents whose sons have died of AIDS, whose sharing we are privileged to hear. Friends and lovers nobly tell of their own intimate struggles and feelings, as do some who are themselves battling AIDS. Indeed, one of the most emotionally devastating features of this video is that several of those we meet were dead by the time production was completed.

Among these is Kristopher Jon Anthony, whose friend, caregiver and musical partner, Carolyn, tells her story, but who never speaks to his himself except through the eloquence of his music. During the year before he died, he composed a choral setting for a series of poems by Peter McWilliams, which follows the non-classic five stages of grief outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

McWilliams himself sets an excellent tone in his own interview, affirming that the numbness and denial we experience in the face of grief is a healthy reaction, a "transformer" that "steps down the pain" so that we can gradually absorb it. Still, it is Anthony's music that is the soul of this video, surrounding it and suffusing it lovingly, connecting its tissues and acting as interlude between spoken segments.

Kubler-Ross participates fully, interviewed at her farm in Virginia, and she is superb. An exquisitely wizened Swiss-German woman psychiatrist, she has both earthy tenderness and raw strength. Almost an archetype herself, like some ancient sibyl or sculpted tree on an alpine summit, from her furrowed visage come statements that emanate from the depths of wisdom and pierce the heart. She compares the souls of homosexual people with AIDS to the Grand Canyon, carved by the elements and "open for all to see."

"They have been fabulous," she says. "They have taught us much about love."

This is an incomparable video, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in dealing not only with grief, but with prejudice and with death itself.

Sing unto the Lord a new song

So, around this time I began singing seriously, and I started getting gigs singing as a soloist / section leader in churches. This was an interesting way to go to church regularly without having to actually sit out there in the pews with everyone else. Over the years I sang at Disciples of Christ, Episcopalian, Methodist, UCC, and Presbyterian churches in Dallas and Asheville, NC.

I was singing at the Central Christian Church - Disciples of Christ in Dallas when I first felt the presence of God in a physical way. This was not long after my father had died. I had to sing a solo and I was nervous, and I literally felt God reach down and wrap her arms around me. Yes, Her arms. I'll talk about that sometime soon. I felt a huge sense of peace, and saw a golden glow around everything. It was a really profound moment for me.

Quid pro quo

My father's death led to an interesting revelation for me. While I was finding myself drawn closer to God by grief, my grandmother (the one I used to annoy by claiming there was no God) felt deeply betrayed.

My dad was her oldest son and, frankly, her favorite. When he died, she was angry with God. She would say "Why did He take Carroll?" "Why didn't He take me?" "Why would He do this to me?" She seemed to feel like years of Sunday School teaching, missionary work (bringing Christ to the heathen Lutheran in Minnesota...) and right living were supposed to count for something. Build a bulwark against anything bad happening in her life. She told me she had lost her faith.

The irony of it still fascinates me. Here I, the agnostic, was finding faith in God through grief, while my grandmother, the life-long Christian, was losing hers.

I think it has to do with expectations. I have never expected anything from God. I don't blame God for the bad things that happen to me, nor do I consider God responsible for the good things that happen to me, not in a direct way. When I think of God, I imagine something that is so vast and powerful that it completely overwhelms our ability to understand. And thinking of a relationship with God as some kind of quid pro quo seems to reduce it to human terms which are way too limiting to really describe what's going on with God.

When I think of good things coming from God, I think of the harmony of the universe, the variety and beauty of creation, and those good things that come to me personally when I am in tune with that harmony, that beauty.

I do not believe that God reached down and personally took my father's life, nor do I believe that God turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions during the Holocaust, for example. That's thinking of God as if God were a human ruler, with power over people but the limited perspective that we all have that only allows us to see our own sliver of reality.

I was just asking myself: "Don't you believe God can do anything?" And the answer I came up with was "I believe God can be anything." The key to the way I see it is the difference between action and being.

So anyway, the point is: as I saw it then, God did not take my Dad. Dad died. And God grieved with me. I did not feel abandoned. I felt loved.

Gack!

Missed almost a whole week of posts. SIGH. This has been a week of distractions. It's so easy to get sidetracked from things.

Life after Death

So, yesterday, we got up to the point of adolescent atheistic rebellion. Today let's grow out of that stage.

I began to realize in my 20s that there were no easy answers. That's when I decided that it was incredibly arrogant of me to claim to know whether there was or was not a god, and so I became an agnostic.

Then my dad died, suddenly, at the age of 61, and my belief in unbelief was seriously shaken. My dad and I had argued the night before he died, and he was still angry with me when I left the house that morning. I remember lying in bed the night after he died, praying for the first time in my life. I prayed that I might get to see my dad again someday, that this wasn't the end. I couldn't stand the thought that I'd never get a chance to try to make things right between us.

As time passed, I thought about this a lot. I was tempted to beat myself up about it. How selfish was it for me to suddenly decide to believe in god because I wanted something! But I moved past that thinking to a new place. It was not wish-fulfillment. Instead it was more like being forced to look at the reality of death. Was my dad really gone forever? Was that possible? Was that all life was about... living as long as the body machine keeps running and then dying and that's it?

Suddenly that just didn't make sense anymore, for no reason I can put my finger on, and I had this conviction that there was something out there that I could call divine.

What about the hole, Brother?

In my adolescence, which was rather troubled, I went through an obnoxious atheist phase. This is fairly common among intelligent, rebellious teens, I suppose. I got a real kick out of telling my grandmother that there was no God. I was such a little shit.

I remember going to a funeral during that time, probably my great-aunt Bertha's. She was a cool old lady who lived to be 99 and was in pretty good shape mentally and physically until the end. Anyway, I was in the front row of the graveside seats (the plastic folding chairs, you know) enduring the preacher's remarks and probably rolling my eyes. The casket was sitting on a contraption that would lower it into the grave but all of that was covered up by drapery and astroturf.

The preacher was droning on and on about heaven and pearly gates and meeting Jesus and all the usual stuff, and as I sat there staring at the casket the wind blew from behind me and parted the draperies covering the grave. There was the hole. That was where Bertha was going. In a hole. And she was leaving a hole in our lives. And I couldn't see how all the talk about heaven was even relevant to that.

I told this story to my friend John who was a gifted, mostly out-of-control artist/singer/actor who shared my disdain for religion. He turned it into a song. What about the hooooooooooooooooooole, brother? What about the hooooooooooole? I can still picture him holding forth like a revivalist, singing about the grave. He died at the age of 21, of AIDS. That was in 1984.

Yeah, so... what about the hole?

Hmm... Unitarian? Ok!

If you know me, you know that I don't profess to be a Christian. I don't really profess to be anything but a seeker. People who have asked me what I believe usually come away confused. For awhile my husband thought I was Jewish.

I was raised outside church. I have never been baptized. My parents never talked about God, never professed any belief in God, condemned the religion they had been brought up in as coercive and narrow-minded, but they did not condemn the religious impulse. They told me that they wanted me to find my own way to religion if that was my desire when I was old enough to understand what I was getting into.

What am I getting into?!

Of course I came into contact with religion when I was a kid, via the older generation in my family, a short stint in Catholic girls' school (my parents put "unitarian" on my application to avoid uncomfortable questions), and my friends (Jewish and Methodist).

Going to Catholic school was a real cognitive dissonance and complicated my relationship with religion in a big way. I remember distinctly sitting in my first Mass, terrified, because I didn't know whether to take communion as an unbaptized heathen and thus commit a sin, or sit there while all the other kids and the teachers took communion and admit I was different from everyone else (as if that was the only way I was different!). Of course, being different is far more appalling to a kid than sin. I mean, you'll have to pay for being different immediately afterward, when the other kids can get to you. The repayment for sin, by comparison, would be somewhat delayed. It was a no-win situation. So I took communion.

I think that may have been the first time I encountered the cruelty that sometimes manifests itself in religion. I felt humiliated and rejected, and angry for having to make that choice. I'm still angry about it.

Wow.

Bright Sadness

So, instead of calling my blog, 40 Days (see below), I called it Bright Sadness. What the heck is Bright Sadness?

It's an expression from the Orthodox Church. I found this sermon which expresses it beautifully:

The beautiful expression, “bright sadness,” came back to me with special poignancy during Holy Week this year. In Greek the compound noun is charmolypê, variously translated “bitter joy,” “joyful mourning,” or “affliction that leads to joy.” It expresses what the Fathers of the Church call an “antinomy,” a truth that defies normal logic. The word is an oxymoron of sorts, which describes a paradoxical spiritual state characterized by a profound mingling of joy and grief. St. John of Sinai formulates the idea in the seventh step of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, where he speaks of it as “the blessed joy-grief of holy compunction.”

In his classic work, Great Lent, Fr Alexander Schmemann describes “Sad brightness” as “the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God’s presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home.”

Partly I like that quote because it's got all those fancy words in it that we don't get to use every day: antimony, oxymoron, compunction. And I love the Greek word for bright sadness: charmolype. Which incidentally would be pronounced "karmoloopay". Sounds like the name for an alternative-rock music festival.

I also feel like Schmemann could have been describing my life with these words: "the sadness of my exile, the waste I have made of my life, ... the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home."

40 Days

Originally I was going to call this blog 40 Days. But all the possible versions of 40 Days that didn't involve strange punctuation or l33tsp3ak were taken.

Why 40 Days? Because I intend this blog to be a record of a lenten journey. Well, my lenten journey. And in the Christian calendar, Lent lasts for 40 days, the days between Ash Wednesday and Easter (minus the Sundays!), the days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the desert before his return to Jerusalem.

As the preacher said in church last Sunday, Lent is a journey toward the resurrection. I feel like I've been on that journey for a long time. I've been meaning to write about it, clarify my thinking, try to focus on what that means. What journey exactly am I on? Why is it important? What is driving me? But I haven't until now. It seemed too hard, too painful.

Well, my husband and I went to Ash Wednesday service last night, and he asked me what I was going to give up for Lent. And I thought about it. I understand the value and symbolism of sacrificing for Lent, but somehow the idea didn't resonate with me at that moment. And then I thought... do the blog you've been talking about for Lent. Make yourself sit down, confront this desire in your heart to find a way to approach God. Every day. For forty days.

When I told my husband, I (as usual) downplayed the idea. "It's not really giving anything up." And he said, wisely: "It's giving up your time." It's also giving up my comfort zone. We'll see how it goes. I don't think I've ever done anything 40 days straight, except the things I have no control over like waking up and falling asleep.

Maybe I should just think of this as forty days of waking up.