Transitions

So, in another two and a half months, or so I am will be tearing out my roots and attempting to replant myself far away from here. I will be moving, with as few of my things as seems reasonable, from Michigan to Seattle. I will be leaving the working world for the academic life. I will be traveling from a place of relative safety to a place of risk and potential. I am largely terrified, but when I look beyond the terror I am also excited.

I started this blog a year and a half ago (or so?) because I needed a place where I could engage my own thoughts on somewhat academic topics and I thought that writing was a good place to start. I also figured that I would write about books, because I love books and am always looking for an excuse to talk about them. As time progressed, I did write about some books I was reading, some of them academic and I reflected on at least semi-theological topics as I pondered them and found myself moving in unexpected ways. Lately, when I have been able to engage myself in more intellectual pursuits, I have found people with whom to talk and felt less the need to write. I also found that I don’t know how to blog about fiction books I read. If I analyze the story then I will give the plot away. If I try to review the book, I largely fail and also bore myself. Also, I have been lazy.

Moving into an institution of higher education I will have plenty of opportunity to write and talk about academic topics. I suspect this will fill the felt need I had for exploration and expression when I started the blog. At the same time, I will be leaving behind everyone I love deeply and everyone with whom I have lived my everyday life. I will miss them incredibly and I know I will be lonely.

And so I foresee a change coming to this little blog of mine. I suspect I will be using it more as a tool for communication and connection and less for a place just to ramble (though no doubt I’ll still do a measure of that as well!). I will be making an attempt to write at least some life update type posts in order to keep my family and friends in the loop as to what I’m up to and what I’m experiencing.

I suspect, of course, that I’ll still talk about thoughts I’m pondering which will be largely involving faith and things. I suspect that as I open the blog up as a venue for communication with a wider audience that there will be more people who are either less interested in my faith ramblings or who may be a bit disconcerted by the direction I may take certain theological topics. The school I will be attending will not live up to its promises if it does not force me to engage thoughts and ideas outside of the ones I have already come to embrace.

In an effort to be both true to myself and kind to my audience I am going to attempt to utilize different “categories” for different sorts of posts. In the upper right hand corner of the blog you will find a box with the heading “Posts About…” You can click on the title that most interests you and see only posts about this topic. So, if you don’t really want to hear too much about my out-of-the-box theological thinking you can just click “Life in General” and see posts about life. I am planning on a category for “leaving”, because I want to spend some time processing this thing I’m doing–this leaving. Hopefully, as my life coalesces in a new place I’ll add another category or two that will reflect my new life. We’ll have to see how it goes, but that’s the plan for now.

Thanks for joining me on the journey. I’ll need all the companionship I can get!

Where I’ve Been

Hello again, world of the internet. As my lack of consistent posts of late may have indicated, I have been struggling through another season of wordlessness for the last six or seven months. It has been a very strange time in which I have both taken some of my biggest risks yet (applying for and accepting the invitation to school all the way across the country) and been further trapped in a small, dark world inside of me. Perhaps there is even some sort of cyclical connection between the two. Without digressing into too much psychological introspection that may not be particularly suited for the public world, I will say that thanks to the keen observation of a coworker of mine, I was able to recently realize that I’ve been depressed. Not new to me I’m sure, but a companion I had thought I may have left in the past and hadn’t thought to consider as an explanation for who I’ve become lately.

It may be premature to say, but I have the distinct feeling that I am now, with some help, finding my way back to myself.  I have started to enjoy the presence of people again; I am lacking some of the intense hatred that I seemed to be unreasonably pouring into my job; when I sit in silence I am faintly finding myself present again–able to (though feebly and distractedly) reach for the God who  has been patiently waiting for me to materialize again. I am grateful. Maybe these are just glimpses of health or perhaps my feet are truly on the path.  I am happy to say that this weekend I was spontaneous, I initiated social activity, I enjoyed art, I cleaned, and I here I am writing. For the first time in quite some time my television to real life activity ratio has been largely in favor of real life. It feels like a good start.

What I sat down to say is that I am planning a transition of the blog from a place where I can process my intellectual thoughts (which it has only ever been in part) to a place where I can, at least for a time, connect with those I love as I move so far away from all of them. I think I will say more on this soon, but for some reason I felt the need to account for where I’ve been, as if not doing so would be leaving a gap in the story. The internet is a strange place and I feel uncertain as to what I am doing here, but here I am nonetheless. Thanks for being here with me.

Why I’m Going to School

Last week I heard from the admissions team at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology that they had accepted my application for admission. Today the packet came in the mail with the papers on which I can sign my life away to education and to debt.

It was particularly a Monday today including a mean email from a customer and my poor attitude rearing its ugly head. I’ve been struggling and mostly losing the battle to be my best (or even reasonably decent) self at work these days and I come home as discouraged by myself as by the job itself. Because I was already feeling low, all the information about student loans and moving across the country and entering into personal examination and discovery felt particularly overwhelming. And so, it seemed like a good day to pull out my application essay to remind myself that I really believe all the effort is worth it. I am daring to dream that there will someday be a me who comes home from work tired but fulfilled and that I will someday be a self who finds it a bit easier to remember her worth.

Pretty much, this is just my statement of purpose as I sent it to the admissions folks, but I thought it would also be the best way to explain to you, my friends and family, where it is I’m going and what I hope to do. Here goes:

“Listen. Think. Write. Pray.” Not long ago while sitting in a strengths training workshop I was asked to describe my ideal job. At a loss, I opted for what I thought was a flippant response. “I want to listen, think, write and pray for a living,” I wrote, knowing full well that these are not skills required for my retail job or any job I could imagine. I left the meeting more convinced than ever that I was not pursuing the work that I was made to do. Over the next few weeks, however, I began to realize that I had actually spoken a deep truth to myself. This list of disciplines began to burrow itself into my consciousness and I began to realize that this is exactly what I want for my life.  I want to listen, think, write and pray. For the first time in several years, I began to dream. I started to imagine a life centered on these pursuits and shaped by these disciplines. What if who I have been made to be is also what I am made to do? What if I can find a vocation in which I have the opportunity to listen for the voice of God inside the stories of people? What if I am able to create a lifestyle that will give me the mental space to think deeply and the energy to discipline myself to write? What if I find a way to live dedicated to the rhythms of prayer? In applying to The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, I am daring to dream that the answers to these questions may be found and that the search for them is worth the risk.

Pursuing school is a first step I am taking on an unknown road. I have thoughts of running a retreat center, working as a spiritual director, or some similar endeavor. Sometimes I wonder if I hear a call towards chaplaincy or church work. Maybe I will find a niche for myself somewhere that I have not yet dreamt. For many years I have lived believing that if I do not know the destination then I had better stay off the road. I am now convinced that the end will never be known and that all I will ever have is the invitation to start walking. I believe that time spent at The Seattle School will provide me with a place to look more deeply into who I am and to explore more broadly how I can offer myself in service to God and God’s world. I hope to tailor my studies towards spiritual formation and direction. This education will not only equip me with the knowledge and skills to do the tasks that lie before me, but will also call me to be more deeply the person I have been created to be.

I may not know exactly where I am headed, but I have a long list of ideas about who I want to become. I believe that the study of text, soul and culture will be one avenue for transformation into the kind of person I desire to be. I want to become a woman who learns to listen deeply and clearly. I hope to be a person who considers the world with intelligence and nuance and who is able to communicate my convictions with clarity and compassion. I want prayer to shape my life as I step out of the center and allow God to do God’s work in and through me.

I desire to be a person who engages Scripture in a way that is life-giving and full of wonder. As I take time to learn how to study the Bible, I hope to become a person who can wrestle more honestly with the challenges that the text illuminates, both within itself and within me. I want to become attentive to the voice of God as the Spirit speaks through the Scriptures, through lives, and through the world all around us. I want to sit in the text with other individuals and within community. I want to hear the call to be the Church and learn how to follow.

I am most fully myself when I am living deeply attuned to the soul and so I hope to learn how to be a person who listens with greater attention and honesty. I want to open myself up to the examination of my story, being vulnerable enough to see both my strength and weakness. I hope to learn how to be still long enough to truly hear God at work in the lives of others as we acknowledge brokenness and unveil our vulnerabilities together.

I want to live a life that speaks with a quiet boldness to the heart of our culture. I hope to explore ways of living that will call out the good in the world while challenging the presuppositions of a culture bound up in excess, exploitation, consumption, and despair. I have so much to learn about how to engage in public life as a follower of Christ, and I hope to spend time exploring ways of being a radical witness in the world. Whatever my stance may be on any particular issue, I hope to always have the eyes to see the Kingdom sprouting up through the sidewalk cracks and the courage to cultivate truth wherever I may find it.

This will likely turn out to be the most dangerous road I have taken thus far. The Bible is not a safe text. It is full of difficulties and hard choices. It will force me to question my beliefs and presuppositions; it will call out the darkness inside my soul. Sitting in the brokenness of humanity frightens me. I will see my weakness with greater clarity and feel the oppression of sin more deeply than I have before. Speaking truth to the world is an unpopular action. The system ensconces those it favors and the blind prefer not to see. I may find that my vision for a life of listening, thinking, writing, and praying does not pay the bills and requires greater sacrifice than I had known to expect. This is a path that I choose with fear and trembling. I do not know what will come and the unknown is deeply frightening.

But I choose to trust. I choose to trust the God who I believe has called me on this journey. I will trust that the steps that will carry me forward will be no less accidental than the steps that have brought me this far. All of my life I have felt the call to serve people—I have just never known exactly how who I am fits with this calling. When I look back over my life thus far I see a girl who has never been content with easy answers, a girl who has always simultaneously loved and questioned God. I see a young woman falling more in love with this God and God’s Kingdom as each becomes wider and more mysterious. I look back over the past few years and see that each time I took a bigger risk with my heart the struggle became greater but so did the hard won peace.

I believe that The Seattle School is a community where I will be given the tools I need to develop my understanding of my vocation through mindful study and intentional practice.  I have been created to be a woman who serves God’s people in God’s world. I can do this anywhere, in any career, among any group of people, but I know that there is a path to greater life than working a retail job and playing it safe. I may not know where the road will lead, but I do know that it is time to take the risk and to walk the dangerous path.

Just a Girl

Today I got my rudest email to date from a customer. Rudest because he did not simply express his frustration with his product (which, incidentally I did not create, nor did I sell to him), but he chose to attack my character instead. The thrust of his tantrum went like this:

Of course, you have not personally charged me $16.00, so you are innocent of the hypocrisy, right?—after all, you just work here! Let’s face it…you don’t care. You are just the dead weight road block to any practical solution which is so typical of any large corporation.

…anyhow, just go home and eat and forget about it, OK?

Reading these words after the work day is over they don’t seem quite as powerful as they did sitting there at my desk at 9:00 this morning. What astounded me more than anything was how he, as if by some preternatural cognition, was able to tap into one of my biggest fears and wield it against me. To someone who didn’t spend much time worrying about the ways in which she is caught up in the machine his words would have been easier to dismiss. But, this was me he was writing to. Sensitive, over-thinking me. A coworker of mine suggested that before I try to write a real response back, I write what I would like to say just to get it out of my system. As it turns out, I will not be responding at all. But this is what I would have liked to have said. (And, by the way, the irony of the fact that I am throwing this cry out into the internet void has not escaped me.)

*******************************

Dear George,

Actually I do care, and I am sorry that you felt that it was fine to be so rude to me. I am sorry that you ordered a book from a company that is not me, over a product that is designed to pull you further into the monopoly of Amazon and that you decided to take your venom out on me.

I am just a girl. A broken-hearted girl, working for a good company, caught up in a world far beyond her control. You have presumed to know that I don’t care, when in fact I care deeply. I spend part of almost every day in a moral crisis over all of the ways I am complicit in the immoral corporate world. The food and clothes I buy are produced by companies who pay their employees far less than they are worth. The car I drive is part of a system that works towards the destruction of the natural world God has given us for our subsistence and care. I invest in a 401k that buys stock in companies of every kind. Probably some of them are involved purchasing the natural resources that make my cell phone work. These minerals are the wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo and are her demise. These are the resources that are fought over by warlords who use mass rape as just another weapon in their greedy fight. Every part of my life is complicit in the manipulation of society by the government and large corporations who profit from our helplessness.

And yet I am just a girl. I do what I can. I shop at the farmer’s market. I buy thrift. I choose expensive durable goods over the cheap disposable products that feed into the system. I work for a family owned company that is not large and that is full of good-hearted people. A company that may not get it right in every single instance but is scrambling to stay alive in the digital age; a system in which change happens faster than we can breathe. A relatively small company that is run by people whose main motivation is to provide excellent resources to the world and to take care of their employees in the process. Making a profit is a means to these goals, not the goal itself. No one in my company wants to rip you off.

I am sorry that you think that I am a dead weight roadblock. In fact I am a girl. A tired girl whose job stresses her out in ways she cannot quite comprehend. A thoughtful girl who sits behind a computer all day and tries to remember the humanity of the hundreds of customers she serves. A brokenhearted girl who is facing her second Christmas without a mom who died all too young. A loving girl who tries to support her family when it is easy and when it is hard. A burdened girl with friends who have cancer, whose husbands are fighting overseas and whose children struggle with mental illness. A lonely girl who has a knack for loving boys who will never reciprocate. A wholehearted girl who strives with all of her being to love and serve the God who created us all.

I am a person. I am not a cog in the machine. I, like you, am complicit in this world beyond our control, but I do not stand passively by. I do my best day in and day out to serve people I will never see for a pay that will never allow me to see many of my dreams come to fruition. I have done what I can to pass your complaint onto people who may or may not have control over the product which is delivered to you on a device created by a corporation that actually is large.

If you want to take your venom out on someone, take it to Amazon. The corporation that bullies small companies like mine into compliance and will sell you their reader for below cost, in hopes that your purchasing patterns will spiral more and more into their control. But be careful. Every company is just made up of people. Most of them people like me. People without say in how the company is run. People struggling to put food on the table and live an honorable life. It is never fair or right to treat fellow human beings with rudeness and contempt. I’m sure you are a sad and angry person who just needs compassion. So am I.

May God have mercy on us all.

Mary, mother of Jesus

I’ve been thinking and trying to write a reflection on All Saints Sunday for several weeks now, but the farther we get from the day the more untimely it begins to feel. The communion of the saints is nothing if not unbound by time, however, so hopefully I’ll find my way into that reflection sometime, even if it is later rather than sooner.

In the mean time, we’re coming up toward advent and I am looking forward to it. Advent will always bring me back to those dark evenings when the Bailey family gathered around the advent wreath Mom had made out of fragrant pine branches to light the candles and meditate on the characters surrounding the birth of one small child who would save the world.  Perhaps my taste for ritual and sacred space can be traced back to those peaceful, deep moments of telling the Story.

Doing a little catching up on blog reading this afternoon, I read  To my Mary icon, in preparation for Advent  — a meditation from my favorite blogger and found myself deeply moved .  I recommend the whole piece, particularity since she includes the icon in the post, but here is a small taste:

So say it now, friend. Say what it means to wait, what it is to be filled up, what it is to resolve to hold heaven in your womb. Tell me about the kind of earnestness that a girl like you holds when she says yes to this: holy pregnancy, loss, the miracles and the longing for normal, the promise of eternity and the fear of eternity.

In the tradition I grew up in, we tended to only think about Mary during Christmas. For a few brief scenes she was mentioned, but then we tactfully put her aside, afraid lest we fall into the much misunderstood veneration of her we so heartily avoided. More often than not, I still don’t give terribly too much attention to the mother of Christ, but now and again she catches my heart. Reading this blog post by Mama:Monk I was immediately brought back to a moment in Rwanda where I was arrested by an image of Mary cradling her burning heart.

It is hard to recall the specifics, but I believe it had been an emotional morning. It may have been the day we visited the school for the deaf children where a small, financially poor staff did the best they could to work with children whose handicap had isolated them from much of their society. I think we may have also already visited the family of orphans in which the oldest sister, who could not have been much above 14, carried the weight of providing for her three younger siblings in nearly impossible circumstances. It was that point of the trip where I was emotionally spent. Too much time around people with no solitude. Too many difficult things to see all at once. Just enough time for my emotions to start taunting me the way they always seem to do in groups like this.

As we drove up to the compound where the priest lived, I was comforted by the chi rho I saw landscaped into the yard. For all of the trouble he must see every day the priest was a joyful man, excited to show us all the work being done in his parish by Catholics and Baptists alike. He spread before us a feast of plantains, rice and very, very chewy goat meat and while we were circling his table  Mother Mary caught my gaze and would not let go. I was in a place of feast and laughter, but my heart was heavy and broken. Somehow Mary understood. I seemed to see Mary afresh, the woman who surrendered herself fully to God and whose heart was pierced as reward.

I haven’t yet fully comprehended what it was about Mary in that moment that so comforted me, but I still hold her in my heart. When I encounter people taking time to truly contemplate her sacred role in our story, I always stop to listen. I am glad to be reminded of these things and to have my eyes opened anew. As we approach the beginning of advent, I hope to open my heart again to the beauty and pain of this woman who quietly bore the joy and the pain of a life fully surrendered to the will of God.

Pain

Wow. That’s quite a title for the little thought I have to say, but nothing witty is coming to mind. After all, there’s not much witty about pain.

It seems to have been a theme over the past week or so, this idea of how we address the pain that we encounter in our lives. Pain comes in all shapes and sizes. There are the relatively small discomforts of good change (though these discomforts have felt anything but small for me these past few months) and the devastating grief of loss. There is the solitary pain of loneliness and the overwhelming despair of seeing injustice at play all over the world. There is the pain of seeing your own sin illuminated by the bright light of God’s righteousness, and there is the pain of getting caught in the crossfire of someone else’s sinful patterns. Pain can crush us or grow us, and it is the journey of a lifetime to figure out how to handle it.

I find myself wondering how it is that I can approach pain in a way that will make me stronger instead of allowing it to simply send me, paralyzed, deeper into myself. Is there a way that I can reconcile myself to the fact of pain without calling evil good and glossing it over –pretending it is something it is not?

I felt that I had some little clue thrown to me last week when I heard these word’s from Eugene Peterson’s interpretation of 2 Corinthians 7:

^8-9I know I distressed you greatly with my letter. Although I felt awful at the time, I don’t feel at all bad now that I see how it turned out. The letter upset you, but only for a while. Now I’m glad—not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss.¹⁰Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

^11-13And now, isn’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart. And that is what I was hoping for in the first place when I wrote the letter. My primary concern was not for the one who did the wrong or even the one wronged, but for you—that you would realize and act upon the deep, deep ties between us before God. That’s what happened—and we felt just great.

While there are several interesting things that could be said about this passage, what I latched on to was the list of attributes that pain can grow in us, if we allow it to. For each one I can think how pain naturally tends to lead me to its opposite. When I am in pain my tendency is not towards alive-ness, but a deadening of myself. I do not want to be more sensitive, I want to instead close myself off. Pain could turn me into a bitter, angry person, but what if I open myself up to it and choose to become the opposite instead?

Yesterday during Discipleship Formation (which would have been called Sunday School in my former and less precisely named life), we were talking about this very topic. How do we approach the compost of our lives? These things that we go through that are made of waste, that seem terrible and smelly during the moments we are living through them. The question came up of how do we view God’s goodness during pain, and I was quick to say that sometimes hearing things like, “But God is good” or “Good will come out of this” can sometimes seem the least helpful things a person could say.

And yet, as I listened to the older folks in the room proclaim God’s goodness throughout all of life’s circumstances I couldn’t help but believe them. These were not quick words spoken naively, but ones said with confidence of pain survived over a lifetime. When asked the question, “how do you know God is good?” the simple answer was “He always is.” And there wasn’t much more to say. I want pain to shape me into that kind of person. I want to be someone who can see the horrors of life and say without flinching, “God is good.”

Let me heartily admit that this is an idea, not something I’ve figured out how to live. It is a hope, not an easy three-step program. But it is hope that I need most when walking through pain. What I want most is to become a person fully alive. Someone who is concerned with those around me, and sensitive to the needs of others and to God’s quiet voice. I want to live with reverence for a God who loves me fully. I hope to be deeply and vulnerably human with a passion for all that I am called to be and the responsibility to live it out. I want to be pure in heart, singly devoted to the one who will see me through whatever pains life can send my way.

Tree of Life

I saw Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life last week and have been thinking about it ever since.  I’d like to write about it because I’d like to figure out what I thought about it, but it’s the sort of art that leads me more towards silent contemplation rather than verbose pontification. I saw it with a group of folks whose opinions of it varied widely, from the literary girl’s feeling that it is a work of ultimate indulgence and pretension, to the film guy’s belief that it is a work of cinematographic, philosophical and theological genius.  I, of course, can see both sides of the story and spent a fair amount of time thinking about how this text read us just as much as we read it. (A theme I’ve been pondering for some time, you may have noticed.)

I, for example, wanted to love it, and was in fact deeply moved by it. I was drawn to the film guy’s unabashed passion and was easily caught up in his joy and enthusiasm. I accidentally let myself click on the Rotten Tomatoes page for the movie, and was astonished to find that it got an “85% fresh” rating from the critics. I thought critics pretty much hated everything. Also, I was interested to find that despite the majority opinion, I still felt that I was obligated to give more credence to those voices that criticized rather than those that praised. This reaction tells me something about myself, I’m just not quite sure what yet.

My first thoughts on the movie were that it presented a very honest picture of the human search for and experience of the Divine, and that it spoke deeply to what it means to be male in American society. The questions the characters asked of a God who was both intimately present and achingly absent were questions so human and so honest that I could not help but be moved. These, of course, are the questions I so often find brewing within myself.

I have no first hand experience of growing up male in America, but I have brother(s), I observe closely and I read books. I was immediately reminded of John Updike’s short story Pigeon Feather’s, which lives in some vague recess of my English major mind, and of the beginning of a John Irving novel that I gave up on due to it’s graphic adolescent boy-ness. The movie portrayed many experiences which seem to me to be both imminently human and particularly male: deep ambivalence towards one’s father, the constant struggle between gentleness and force, innocence and shame, love and hate.

As a woman I found myself thinking much about the mother–the one woman in the film–focused on how her deep love for both her husband and sons was not only what bound her to them, but also what separated her from them. How does a woman respect a man who attempts to teach her sons the brutality of the world even as she, by her very nature, longs to infuse them with wonder and love? While the mother in this story is in some ways an idealize caricature, she also portrays for me the inherent isolation of a woman who loves.

I have spent a bit of time wondering what this film would look like if the main character was not a man wrestling with the memories that have formed him, but instead a woman. I wonder what pictures of growing into womanhood would capture the essence of being female. I have thought about how I would portray the rejection of self that seems to haunt so many women I know. I picture my middle-school self walking up to the lunch table of my “friends”, realizing it was full, turning away unnoticed and knowing that from then on I was to be on my own and invisible. I think of myself as a young woman hearing the words, “I want to have this conversation, but first I want to hear this song.” knowing that while I had gained some measure of visibility as a person, I was to remain invisible as a woman. It is these small moments, so brief and yet so significant that intrigue me, and in some dream-like way I felt that it was these moments that were so deftly captured by Malick’s film.

I haven’t even written about the themes of loss and surrender which seem most central to the story of the movie, but perhaps it is these themes which strike the deepest chords for me and so remain wordless. And that may be what I loved most about Tree of Life–so much of what was said was told in images, sounds and subtleties. When so much of life is too deep for words, sometimes the fewer words the better.