Name change

I guess I never thought changing my name would be that big of a deal.  It seemed like a normal thing to do when you got married.  My mom had done it, and most (though not all) of the moms I knew had done it.  Besides, when you’re a girl, and you’re young, you pick up things like writing your name with the last name of the boy you like, or maybe Mrs. Boy’s Name, possibly surrounded by a lot of hearts.  I did this.

By the time Jon and I actually started talking about getting married, I didn’t really know anymore.  I chafed at the thought of being called “Mrs.” (Seriously, a title change based solely on relationship status, for women only?)  I got actively grumpy at the thought of being called Mrs. Man’s Name.  And I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my name. 

On the one hand, I was fine with who I was as Allie Rosner, I had accomplished a lot as Allie Rosner, and I kind of wanted to stick it to the patriarchy, also.  On the other hand, I wanted to have the same name as my potential future kids.  Jon said he didn’t care what I did, and I yelled at him that he didn’t understand that this was a real crisis of identity.  Jon also didn’t like the way our names sounded hyphenated together, as much as I insisted he was saying it wrong.  He said to go ahead and call the kids Rosner, but I think he was bluffing, and in the end even I was a little too old-fashioned for that. 

In the end we decided that I’d add Bass on the end and he’d add Rosner in the middle, and I would try my best to go by all three names and keep Rosner in the mix.  It seemed like a fair and adequately progressive compromise, and I was happy with it. 

Since then, legally changing our names hasn’t been a hard process for either one of us, but emotionally it’s actually affected me more than I thought. 

We came home from the DMV the other day with promises of new licenses in the mail, and I was happy about getting that done.  But later I started feeling a little sad.  BASS would be in big bold letters at the top of my license now, and Rosner relegated to the middle, where no one cares.  I also had to drop my own middle name, Gail, because I knew if Rosner was my second middle name there was no way anyone would end up using it.   I couldn’t really put my finger on why I felt sad about all that, except that it’s who I’ve been for 30 years, and it’s hard to give that up. 

I started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with me, that what I’m called is so wrapped up with the core of my identity.  Shouldn’t my identity come from somewhere else—from everywhere else?  From my baptism?  From my relationships?  From my accomplishments?  From my vocation?   I’m a pastor, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a writer, a world traveler, a vegetarian, a runner, a cookie baker and milkshake lover, a child of God.  Those things haven’t changed. 

But then again maybe I shouldn’t have ever thought that changing my name wouldn’t be a big deal.  I should have remembered that I preach on stories where changing your name is a really big deal.  Jacob becomes Israel, the one who wrestles with God.  Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus will build the church.  Saul becomes Paul, a Hebrew name to a Roman one, symbolizing a complete about-face in his life and ministry.  For all these people, their names carry a deep sense of identity. 

Names were powerful back then.  You weren’t even allowed to say the divine name, because that’s how powerful it was.  Changing your name when you get married isn’t that powerful, but it is powerful.  Still. 

And I should have remembered, too, how in fifth grade I decided to go by Allie instead of Alison, and I spent a year fighting for my teacher to agree to call me that.  It was important—if only because it was me deciding on a name for myself.

I should have remembered how when I started college I thought maybe I’d go for a new start and go by Alison again, so at an admitted students weekend I just let people call me Alison and didn’t correct them.  It felt weird in a way that made me sure, inside, that I was still Allie.

It’s not that I regret my decision.  Sometimes I really like introducing myself by my new name, even in scenarios where it sounds overly fancy to go by three names.  I like the reminder that I’m married to Jon.  I like the symbol of a new identity in that way.  I’m gaining something in that, but I’m losing something too, and that is hard. 

One of the hardest parts is in this kind of name-change limbo period.  I didn’t know where to look for my name tag at the district clergy meeting a few weeks ago, under B or R.  When I ordered a sandwich at the Cheese Shop the other day, they asked for my first name and last initial.  It didn’t matter whether I said R or B as long as I retrieved my sandwich when I was called.  But I felt like I really didn’t know.  I have a flight booked for Monday, as Alison Rosner, and I honestly don’t know what my ID is going to say by then, so I can’t even call the airline and change it until I do.   One group I’m part of didn’t get the memo and still listed me in the directory as Rosner, I noticed today; I also played around with some online database for our District Committee on Ministry trying to make it display all three of my names, but when I got an email from the committee chair, there I was on the roster as Bass, Alison.

When I’m called Bass, it’s this strange sensation of being called a name that is very familiar to you, because it belongs to someone you love, but that in any case still isn’t quite yours.  But when I’m called Rosner, that feels wrong too.  In this limbo period, there are times when I’m not sure I know what my name is at all.  Depends who’s asking.  It’s a pretty unsettling feeling to not know what your own name is. 

I know the limbo period will be over soon enough.  I know it’s likely that eventually I’ll stop trying to make sure everyone keeps Rosner in the mix and just go by Allie Bass, because it’s easier.  Right now I do not like that thought.  Because that’s not who I am. 

But maybe I’ll see that I am still all those things I was, that I am still the same person I was, no matter what it says on my driver’s license.  And it won’t seem like such a big deal anymore.  For now it is.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare wrote.  A lot, as it turns out. 

Meeting with Mormons

Back in late November, I met some LDS missionaries on my way home from church one evening.  It was already dark, so I didn’t recognize them immediately.  They handed me a card advertising some event, and I tried to hurry away before they could get me to sign up for something, like sponsoring a child in Africa.  But they introduced themselves too quickly, and as I realized who they were, my face lit up.

This is a reaction that not everyone might understand, but the truth is, I had always wanted to meet some Mormon missionaries!  Or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or really whoever was going door to door.  I wanted to learn more about them and what they were doing and talk some theology, even if we disagreed.  This is actually not uncommon among seminary-educated people, I’ve discovered.  I do know a few Mormons, but we’d never really gotten into the specifics of what we respectively believed, and this seemed like a great opportunity.  We arranged to meet in a nearby park the next day around lunch.  I was excited.

That night my mom told me about her own one experience with LDS missionaries: they had come to church once with another member of the congregation who had been meeting with them.  If he went to their church, they would go to his, and they did.  The way Mom described it, they sent their ringers, the most car-salesman-y guys in the ward, who shook everyone’s hands after worship and tried to convert them over coffee cake.

But that’s not who I met.  Instead I met two young, friendly guys who confessed to being nervous at talking to a pastor.  (Actually, three now, because one got replaced by another along the line.)  They were nice.  They offered to help fix the water fountain at church the day it broke and flooded the hallway.  They clearly believe in their mission, enough to spend whole days outside in 12 degree weather.  And yes, they tried to convert me.

We’ve met four times total since November.  There are four sessions, if you will, and they give you a pamphlet and describe an aspect of their theology in each one.  Last week was “The Plan of Salvation,” for example.  Today was “The Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  These meetings have been an opportunity to learn about the LDS faith, but also to reflect on evangelism—their version of which is almost completely foreign to me.

One thing I admire about Elders G and F is that they know their tradition.  They can tell you what they believe.  How many mainline Christians can do that?  Sometimes people talk about your “elevator pitch.”  If someone asked you about your faith on an elevator, what would you say in that fifteen seconds or so?  I don’t have an elevator pitch.  Even with an M. Div., even as someone whose job it is to talk about this stuff, I’m not really sure how I would lay it all out for someone who needed the info quick.  But they know their content, and I like that.

I also don’t like it at the same time.  Earlier this week I was doing my homework, reading the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet they had given me in advance.  I was doing this a little out of guilt, because at our first meeting they gave me a Book of Mormon, and then at each meeting after that they brightly asked if I had been reading it and praying to receive the truth, and I said no.  But I figured a pamphlet I could handle.  It had a picture of Very White Jesus on the front and referred to God as Heavenly Father a lot, which I take it is standard LDS nomenclature.  But even besides those things, the pamphlet rubbed me the wrong way.

It wasn’t about content, really.  In fact, with some small tweaks, it could have been written by any evangelical Christian tradition.  That was one of my main questions in our discussion today—what, really, is the difference between the Gospel as you understand it and the Gospel as I already understand it?  What does following Jesus mean in your tradition that it doesn’t mean in mine?  (Besides the obvious things, like not drinking coffee.)  As far as I could tell, the answer was not that much.

My objection was more about form.  As I was reading I realized this: I am inherently suspicious of any faith that can be summarized in a pamphlet. 

That goes for other forms of Christianity, too.  Show me a pamphlet with three steps to salvation, the last one of course consisting of some drawing of a cross forming a bridge over hell, and I’m pretty much out.  To me, faith is so much more than that.  It’s wrestling with God and struggling with tradition and trying to make sense of experience in community.  It’s learning and praying and doubting and coming to new understandings.  It’s trying out what it means to love Jesus and finding there’s something you’re drawn to about that and then trying to figure out from there how all the puzzle pieces fall into place, if they even do.

That’s the kind of faith we even see in the Bible, with people who follow and fight and question and lament and fall away and fall back, and with authors who disagree with each other, each trying to figure out who God is and what it means to be God’s people.  The whole thing is a struggle and a conversation.  The day I realized that is the day I fell in love with the Bible.

And here was that faith I vaguely recognized reduced to some bold points across six pages with a vocab section in the back.

I got a little preachy about this at our meeting today.  I testified a little.

I mean, I get it, you know?  You can’t lead with the complicated and messy stuff.  You can’t ring someone’s doorbell and say, “Hey, there are a lot of different ways of understanding the Atonement, and I’m not really sure which one I think is right; here’s where I’m at today.”  You have to give people something to go on.  The conversation can develop from there.

I figured there had to be more than this.  These missionaries had to present their case, they had to give the “right” answers to my questions, even if they sometimes seemed parroted.  That was their job.  But surely underneath it all was a living, dynamic faith that I could recognize and appreciate, even if it was not the same as my own.

So I asked: “Tell me something you struggle with in your faith.”

They looked at me like they did not get that question a lot.  After a minute one of them said, “There isn’t anything, for me.”  To be fair, he grew up in an orphanage in Eastern Europe until being adopted by a Mormon family from Utah just a few years ago.  I got the impression that being adopted into that family was when life stopped being hard, and he was ready to accept it all because it had given him that.  Still, he looked like he didn’t even really appreciate the question.

The other one seemed more sympathetic to the question.  “I’m sure there are people who do doubt sometimes,” he said, “but I can’t think of anything.”

But if it were me, I could think of so many things.  And I’m not ashamed of that.

I walked away kind of disappointed.  I had really wanted there to be more than that.

I’m not trying to make sweeping generalizations about Mormonism here.  They are two guys, young, trained to know the answers.  I’m sure there are Mormons out there with a more nuanced faith (in fact, I’d love to hear from them.)  I’m sure a conversation with many evangelical Christians would have gone similarly.  I’m sure when I was 22 my faith was a little less nuanced too—in fact, my elevator pitch has probably deteriorated steadily since then.  Not that I was brave enough to go around and share it with random strangers, even then.

So I’m not trying to generalize.  I’m just trying to say I’m reminded how important it is to me that faith never be wrapped in too neat a package.

But how do you evangelize that?

 

 

Advent and Nelson Mandela

I was a freshman in college when I was introduced to South Africa, through a Desmond Tutu book we read in my Human Rights class first semester.  You might say there was no excuse for the fact that it took that long, especially since I was in Model UN in high school.   In fact, I'd represented South Africa at a conference once, but it was kind of awkward, because I'd gotten an old book out of the library for my research and basically ended up representing the former apartheid government.  (My partner and I won that conference, my first and only gavel, and I'm not sure what that says about anyone involved.)

But it was the Tutu book freshman year that hooked me on South Africa, its history and contemporary struggles.  And soon I was writing every paper I could about South Africa: the ethics of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Its level of economic development.  The liberation theology that arose from its struggles.  And I went there, too: just for a week at the end of a summer in Lesotho, but I went to the Apartheid Museum and ate lunch in Soweto and stayed in a big house on a shady street on the other side of Joburg that was surrounded by high walls and barbed wire.

I read Long Walk to Freedom between freshman and sophomore year of college.  I already loved Tutu--it was time to get to know Mandela.  It was slow at the start, which I didn't think boded well for the next 600 pages or so.  But the more I read, the faster I turned the pages; I got to accompany Mandela and his contemporaries as they organized peaceful protests, orchestrated sabotage from exile, risked their lives, and found reasons to survive and hope during decades in prison. 

It's been a long time since I've read that book and since I wrote my last research paper, and I don't remember many of the names or dates or details, anymore.  What I remember about Long Walk to Freedom is that it made me want to be part of it all.  It made me wish I had lived in that time and place, risking my life and safety for justice, being part of the struggle with those other people who believed so strongly in the same things.  It's the same way I felt reading Harry Potter, only this was real.

The truth is I'm not sure I would have been part of the anti-apartheid struggle, if I had lived at that time and in that place.  I would have supported it, of course.  Maybe I would have attended a few protests, made my opinion clear to those who would listen, given some volunteer hours.  Planning sabotage from exile?  In real life, I'm not that radical.  Maybe I'm better at studying these things from a place of privilege half a world away.

And yet I wish, sometimes, for something that would make me radical, to be drawn into that struggle between clear right and clear wrong and be willing to risk everything in it.  But Jesus said that whoever is faithful in small things will be faithful in big things, and maybe someday my big thing will make itself clear. 

Here's what I know: reading Mandela's story in his own words made me believe that a new kind of world was possible.  After years of struggle and violence and setbacks, it was possible.  That's why he was so beloved, I think; he made us all believe that.  And he made me (us?) believe that it was worth the risk and sacrifice.

South Africa still needs that hope, and the world still needs that hope, and I still need that hope.  That's why Advent seems like an appropriate time to be thinking about these things, because that's an Advent kind of hope.  God comes and brings redemption to a broken world, and we wait for the day when God's kingdom is fulfilled, and if we do things right, we wait actively by anticipating that future in how we live today.  And I'm thankful today, for those who have struggled for justice much harder than I ever have, and who have helped me believe that this world is being made new, and who have made me want to be a part of that.


 

Obama's Religion, and Why We Go to Church

I’ve seen some comments on Facebook today speculating on the sincerity of President Obama’s faith.  I’ve heard such speculation in the past, though not completely sure where it comes from.  Do they have to do with his personal narrative?  Or do the questions arise from his social policies, which some Christians don’t agree with and some do?

First of all, to state what I hope is the obvious, it’s pretty unhelpful to try to judge the sincerity of someone else’s faith, or to determine whether they get to call themselves the same thing that I call myself.  I’d say the same if it were Mitt Romney being inaugurated today and people were debating whether Mormons are really Christians.  Why is that up to me?  If someone calls him- or herself a Christian, I’ll give them the respect of assuming it’s true.  We might disagree on matters of theology, and we might disagree about what it means to faithfully follow Jesus, but for goodness sake let’s not quibble over the labels.

At the same time, helpful or unhelpful, I admit I have also wondered what really prompted Obama to join a church and to start calling himself a Christian.

I read Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father a long time ago, and though I don’t remember all the specifics now, I believe he wrote about meeting Christians and working with churches through his job as a community organizer, and how at some point, it started to feel like something he needed, too.  I’m paraphrasing a lot there.  Maybe that’s how it happened: a conversion, a turning point, a change wrought by people who witnessed to the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Or Obama’s story is the story of an aspiring politician who realized how useful it would be to have not only a label, but the connections of a faith community.

Or maybe it is a combination of both.

Or maybe it is a combination of both with a lot of other factors added in too.

The truth is, there are a million reasons that anyone who is part of a faith community is part of a faith community.  Maybe it’s because I grew up going to church every Sunday, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what you do.  Maybe it’s because I was lonely in a new town and looked for a way to meet some people.  Maybe it’s because I’m looking to be part of something bigger than myself, even if I’m not entirely sure yet what that is.  Maybe my parents make me.  Maybe my spouse makes me.  Maybe I want attention, and can get it reading Scripture and chairing a committee.  Maybe I’m looking for people who can help me—who will give me money, give me rides, visit me in the hospital, or even who will vote for me.

Good reasons?  Bad reasons?  Should we make a list and divide them up?

I grew up in the church, and my experience in my own home church and in my college campus ministry led me to want to not only participate in a faith community, but to pastor them.  I go to church because I want to follow Jesus and I think we do that best when we figure it all out together.  I go to church because I believe God called me into ministry.

But I also go to church for a lot of other reasons.  I go to church because it’s what I learned to do as a kid.  I go to church because throughout my life, I have met good people there.  I go to church because I like the hymns.  I go to church because it looks pretty at Christmas.  I go to church because sometimes there are tasty potlucks.  Some Sundays, when it is early and dark and raining, I go to church simply because I don’t want to get fired.

I know people, furthermore, who came back to church after a long hiatus because they wanted their kids to have some sort of spiritual grounding, or because it was important to their significant other, who are now leaders in our congregation and, as far as I can tell, people of deep faith.

At any church, people are there for a million different reasons, “good” reasons and “bad” reasons that are inextricable from each other, reasons that change over time.  And as far as I’m concerned, Jesus doesn’t have a tally sheet marking off each person’s reasons for coming that day and determining whether they are valid or invalid.  Jesus says, “Come on over.”  Just like he did to the people who found themselves hanging around him in first century Palestine—people who needed healing, people who needed food, people who needed a refill on the wine, people who wanted to watch a miracle, people who needed affirmation, people looking for adventure, people who were curious, people who were suspicious.

Is Obama a sincere Christian?  Who knows?  Am I?  If I had to guess, I’d guess Obama calls himself a Christian for a mix of reasons that are personal, spiritual, social, and political.  And if that mix of reasons isn’t valid, then whose mix of reasons is?

Mom's Retirement Speech

The speech my mom gave to her office today:

This is a great time for me to retire.  I’m 66 years old and I’ve had a great career.

I have a couple of memories of my employment history that I wanted to share. 

I graduated from college with a degree in Spanish and started looking for a job.  At that time the Employment section of the newspaper had the job adds segregated by sex.  The men’s jobs were on one side, and the women’s jobs were on the other.  I remember my mother saying, “Look on the men’s side;  that’s where all the good jobs are.”     That was the year that the National Organization for Women (NOW) was organized, and the following year NOW began petitioning the EEOC to end sex-segregated ads.

I did find a trainee programming job at Metropolitan Life insurance Co.  They gave a logic test every day to those who walked in off the street, and trained those who passed the test.    Since an Employment agency had sent me, I owed the agency 10% of my first year’s salary (salary $100/week, $5,200/year).

Later, when I was married, and moved to Ohio I had to look for another job. 

I went to National Cash Register (NCR).  On the wall near the employment office were the usual signs about employment rights that have to be posted.  As I was looking at them, a couple of guys came along, and I explained I was looking for a programming job.  One of them said, “We couldn’t hire you, because women aren’t allowed to work overtime, and we need people who can work overtime.”

Then I went to an employment agency in Ohio.  Employers were hesitant to hire a young women who would just turn around and get pregnant, so the employment agency woman who interviewed me asked, “Are you “on The Pill?”.    (It was just two years prior to this that birth control pills were made available by prescription to married women).  I said, “yes,”  and the woman wrote,  P I L L S  all across the top of the application.  [Birth control pills could not be prescribed for unmarried women until 5 years later.]

I did find a job in Ohio from an ad in the paper. (I don’t remember if it was a sex-segregated ad.)   Again I had to take the logic test.   I was the only woman in the programming shop for 2 years. 

My first two weeks on the job at Arlington I was sent to IBM Assembly Language School.  I had to study ahead of time, and pass a test before the class started.  I came in to Arlington the previous week to pick up the books to study.  I always remembered how they had given me the books and sent me to school before I had even one day on the job. 

These incidents seem like a long time ago, but, believe me, it was really just like the blink of an eye.

So, things have changed during my career.   Programming was the perfect job for me.  And I appreciate the opportunity I had to find a niche on the PRISM  team as the mainframe systems were phased out.

Poor People Aren't Lazy.

Given the likely smattering of people who will read this, I realize I am preaching to the choir.

But I found myself frustrated by certain opinions expressed on Facebook this evening that implied that, and I thought I might sleep better if I wrote down my thoughts instead of having an eloquent yet angry conversation in my head.  Here's the gist of that conversation in my head: people think poor people are lazy.  They could get a job, but they don't, because it's easier to just ask people (and the government) for free stuff.  I disagree with this premise.

 Now, I could go into detail about all the poor people I've met or heard of who work two jobs at minimum wage and it's not enough, or the people who have to find a new job every time tourist season ends, or the people who were semi-holding it together until a medical emergency sent them into a tailspin.  But for the sake of argument, I don't want to talk about those people.  For the sake of argument, let's assume we're talking about a stereotypical welfare recipient who could ostensibly work but instead asks people and the government for free stuff.  Even that stereotypical poor person is probably not lazy.

One of the most important things I learned in seminary, in a contextual education class that went along with an internship at a homeless shelter, is that it takes skills to be poor.  I never thought of that before!  I had always kind of assumed that it takes skills to be rich, and you were poor if you didn't have or use those skills.  And it does take skills to be rich.  It also takes skills to be poor, and they are very different skill sets.

Twice a month I have office hours in which I meet with people requesting financial aid.  Some of them certainly fall into this category of people who could ostensibly work but instead prefer to ask me and the government for free money.  To get that free money, this person has probably called every church, charity, and assistance program in the phone book.  They probably met with someone at United Way and were turned down and told to try the Methodists.  They probably had to find a ride, since if they have a car, it's been out of gas for a while.  They probably showed up at my church at 8 to make sure they get on the list for when I start seeing people at 10.  If I help them, it will probably be for a week of rent at the cheap motel they're currently staying at, or a quarter of the monthly rent for their apartment.  So from my church they will probably continue on this extended scavenger hunt that is their daily life, trying to piece together the next $200 donation toward whatever it is that they need.  Oh, and let's work a few job interviews in there too.  Not that they are actually planning to go to work (because, remember, for the sake of argument, that's not the kind of person I'm talking about) but just to meet the qualifications to keep receiving aid.

Being poor is hard work.  I would suck at being poor.  I don't have the skills for it.  Being poor, even the stereotypical kind of poor that gets branded "lazy," takes hoop-jumping, and networking, and perseverance, and no small amount of chutzpah.

Would those skills better serve society if they were channeled into an honest-to-goodness, wage-paying, W2-filing job?  Sure.  Are they the same skills needed in most low-level honest-to-goodness, wage-paying, W2-filing jobs?  Maybe some, not all.  There are many reasons why people don't get or don't keep jobs, and most of them have to do with the skills they've learned and how they've learned to apply them.  Mom never taught you how to be on time for a job?  Well, maybe she taught you how to go on a scavenger hunt to get this month's electric bill paid.

Do I know how to change any of this?  Heck no.  But even if you don't consider something "honest" work, that doesn't mean it's not hard work.  Whatever else you may call the poor life, don't call it lazy.

But There is No Unity!

In fourth grade social studies, we had to memorize the last part of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech.  The words come back to me sometimes in that weird way you remember things from a long time ago.  “Gentlemen may cry ‘Peace, peace’,” it began, “but there is no peace.”  It was years later that I realized he was quoting Jeremiah. 

I’ve been thinking about that line again since last week, when General Conference voted to change nothing about the church’s stance on homosexuality, not even to officially admit we disagree.  The arguments and politics behind such votes are complex.  But one rule of discourse is simple: no matter your stance, it would behoove you to claim a basic commitment to church unity.

Here’s how Adam Hamilton and Mike Slaughter put it, in their defeated “agree to disagree” amendment: “It is likely that this issue will continue to be a source of conflict within the church.  We have a choice: We can divide, or we can commit to disagree with compassion, grace, and love, while continuing to understand the concerns of the other.  Given these options, schism or respectful co-existence, we choose the latter.”

If I had been a General Conference delegate, I would have voted in favor of the amendment.  It would have been, at least, a small step in the right direction.

But I wouldn’t have been completely happy about it.  The way they put it, the choice seems so obvious: schism or respect?  Division or grace? 

And that makes me sound pretty bad when I say that I’m not sure “respectful co-existence” is my choice.  But what I mean is that I don’t find our current “co-existence” so respectful at all—certainly not to our LGBT brothers and sisters. 

I’m not saying division is necessarily the best answer.  But maybe it does deserve a real place in our conversation.  Maybe we do need to give up this idea we’ve held onto so tightly, that our task as a denomination is to preserve our sense of unity at all costs.

Yes, I know—it is Jesus’ prayer that his followers might be one (John  17:21).  That’s why I don’t say the above lightly.  Believe me, I love the United Methodist Church.  It has been, since my early childhood, the place that taught me about God, Jesus, discipleship, love, compassion, justice, forgiveness, and faith.  If we divided, I would grieve. 

And to further complicate things, I do actually believe that we can only truly be the body of Christ together.  All of us, from D.C. to Yamoussoukro, from incense-wielding Catholics to slain in the Spirit Pentecostals.  The United Methodist Church only represents part of this diversity of the body of Christ, but it does represent a lot of diversity, nationally and globally.  And that’s good.  I value that.  I value being in community with people who are different from me, and even with people with whom I disagree.  I know I have things to learn from them.  So yes—I value unity.

It’s just that when I look at the church, even now, unity isn’t what I see.

That’s why I’ve had this edited version of Patrick Henry and Jeremiah running through my head this week: “Gentlemen [and women] may cry ‘Unity, unity’,” I hear them say, “but there is no unity!”

The way I see it, there is no unity when loyal, lifetime United Methodists are already being told (directly or indirectly) that their families are unwelcome in church, because their families are “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

There is no unity when homosexual young adults are already being told they have to choose between answering a call to ministry and being in a fulfilling, committed relationship.

There is no unity when pastors are already required to draw a line between couples they can marry, and couples they can’t.

And most importantly, there is no unity when people have already left the church because they can’t support injustice and inhospitality, or when people have never bothered to enter a church because they associate Christianity with bigotry and homophobia.

There is no unity because, if “committing to disagree with compassion, grace, and love” means maintaining the status quo, we have already tacitly chosen schism.  No, it’s not the dramatic, knock-down-drag-out schism we fear.  It’s not the kind of schism where you have to sue each other for church property.  Instead, it’s a quiet, invisible schism between those who are fully welcome inside the walls of the church, and those who are not.

The choice Hamilton and Slaughter give us between schism and “respectful co-existence” may sound like a clear choice, but it is a false one.  We’re not choosing between schism and unity here.  We’re choosing between schism and schism.

So, then, the question becomes: schism along what lines?  Do we choose the schism that comes from standing up for justice, or the schism that comes from crying “Unity, unity!”?

After the vote last week, I heard and read several different responses from LGBT friends.  “I refuse to leave,” said one, “because I believe that love will win.”  I admire that, because it’s a response that refuses to be run off, that refuses to believe that the way things are is the way that have to be, that refuses to stop fighting for justice from the inside.

“I will always be Methodist,” said another, “but it’s finally time for me to look for a non-UMC church.”  I admire that too, because it’s a response that refuses to stay in a church that tells him God didn’t make him for the same kind of love as everyone else.

Stay and fight, or divide with grace?  I don’t know the answer, but I am interested in a real conversation.  There’s a part of me that thinks we’d be better off to go our separate ways, those of us who are in favor of full inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the church, and those who are not.  We don’t have to hate each other.  We don’t have to stop talking to each other.  We don’t have to stop praying for each other.  Maybe, idealistically, we could still handle the whole thing with “compassion, grace, and love,” still “understand the concerns of the other.”  But why not do it with separate polities, each group aligning its common life with the Gospel according to its best understanding?

But even if separate polities aren’t the best answer, let’s at least stop paying so much lip service to unity.  No matter how many times we say the word, the truth is that there is no unity.  Stay and fight or divide with grace, let’s tell it like it is: we’re guilty of schism either way.

Food Stamp Challenge, Day 19 (sort of)

I say "sort of" because I was in Atlanta for a week on a Wesley mission trip, and since I didn't have much control over where we ate* I decided to give myself an early Lenten reprieve. Know what's depressing? Eating delicious creamy dreamy grits and Blue Bell ice cream and knowing you're coming home to four more weeks of beans and rice.

*By "I didn't have much control over where we ate" I mean that our group went to all my favorite Atlanta restaurants, by my suggestion. Oh well.

But we were gone for exactly a week, which meant I had three days on one side of the trip and four days on the other to make a whole budget week. And I did a little better this time than last. Not only did I have a few things left over that made room for some more varied purchases, but I also had a coupon for $2 off a $20 purchase at Martin's. I actually forgot the coupon the first time I planned to go shopping, which is my usual modus operandi with coupons. Normally I'd say whatever, it's two dollars. But this time I went home to get it. (If gas factored into the budget, that might be a different story.) The thing is, it might have only been $2, but that meant another item or two I could buy. It actually made a big difference.

I spent about $22 for those three days before the mission trip, which means I still have $8 to work with between now and Wednesday, and that makes me feel rich.

This time, I was able to get chili and garlic powder. I can't tell you how much better it makes everything to have garlic back in my life. And the chili powder will go a long way on those beans and rice, I'm sure. I got some veggies and some more beans and made vegetarian chili. I also bought yogurt (non-Greek, and in the big container, instead of in the little ones) and grapefruit juice (on sale.)

I'm starting to feel like as meager as everything seemed during week one, this is going to get easier as I gradually build up my pantry. (That, or everything will run out at once...) I'm already not as hungry and not as worried about rationing.

Of course, I've been aided by a couple meals in the meantime. Two Wednesdays ago was the free office lunch I won from Moe's, from which I took some leftovers, too. That Thursday I met Jenny and Jessie for dinner at Panera. (A $5 meal of soup means I owe the Lenten offering $10--that plus $3 for the coffee I got at Wawa this morning after deciding I wasn't preaching on 3 hours of sleep without a caffeinated beverage.) Just like the $2 coupon, it's amazing what a difference one meal out/free can make in stretching the rest of your groceries and providing a little variety. I've decided free food isn't cheating. Instead I'm thinking of it as grace.

I've been more aware of food and food stamp issues recently, too. I ran past 7-11 yesterday and noticed the sign outside advertising that they accepted SNAP (the official program name for food stamps.) I was a little disgusted by that. I guess I had thought from the outset that food stamps would be more like WIC, where you have designated items you can buy that will presumably actually supplement your health. I remembered that Sarah had said once when she was going to Wawa a woman gave her her food stamp card and asked Sarah to buy her Funyons and a Coke. Sarah hadn't realized you could buy Funyons with food stamps, and neither had I. I mentioned that to Jon later and he said it made sense, because of course it's in the interest of whatever big company mass produces Funyons to make sure the government lets people buy them with food stamps. But if I did my shopping at 7-11 for $30 a week, I'm pretty sure I'd be broke by day 4, and possibly also develop scurvy. Then again, I wonder if in some food-desert areas where the majority of the population probably receives food stamps, 7-11 is one of the only convenient places to shop.

I'm planning on spending my remaining $8 for the week this afternoon. I'm going to get more bread and peanut butter and bananas and if I have anything left over maybe look ahead to what I want for next week. I'm pretty excited about it.

Food Stamp Challenge, Day 7

Well, I've been Food Stamp Challenged for a week now. I lived on $30 worth of groceries for the past seven days, and I only cheated a little bit. The first way I cheated was by going to the Cub Scouts' Blue and Gold Banquet at church on Friday and eating there--but hey, I don't schedule these things. The second way was that Sarah came over on Sunday and we made dinner and I opened a jar of the good spaghetti sauce. By "good" I mean the $2 store brand kind already in the cupboard, or in other words, anything but pasta sauce in a can. The most important lesson I learned this week: pasta sauce in a can may cost 75 cents, but it also tastes like crap. I'd like to think I would have suffered through it on my own, but I wasn't going to start subjecting my guests to it.

Some other thoughts, reflections, and lessons in no particular order:

1. I enjoy oatmeal for breakfast. I might keep that up. One serving, unlike with any cereal I've encountered, fills the whole bowl. And it's natural, and has fiber, and all that.

2. I got used to not having coffee surprisingly quickly. I miss it, but more as a morning comfort, rather than as a headache and general fogginess alleviater. That's good, because I doubt it's fitting in the budget anytime soon. If I could buy it at all, I couldn't buy fair trade--and I stand by my coffee ethics!

3. I have been extremely hungry every day between lunch and dinner. This is one reason I ordinarily spend so much money eating lunch out: I have almost never managed to be full on a lunch I pack for myself. At the beginning of the week lunch was a peanut butter sandwich, applesauce, carrot sticks, and a banana. Then I ran out of bananas. Either way it wasn't enough.

4. But dinner's been OK, too. Beans and rice taste OK with just a little salt and pepper. It's annoying to have to soak and cook dry beans for so long before I can eat them, but it's not so bad if I plan ahead, and they're tons cheaper than canned. Another thing I might keep up. And on pasta days I missed the cheese on top, but once we opened up that jar of real sauce it was just like normal.

5. It is possible to eat healthy on a food stamp budget--in fact, this is healthiest I've eaten in a long time. I've had to pay attention to serving sizes and variety in a way I never do. I've eaten an egg each day as a cheap, protein-filled snack, and I looked up nutritional info to make sure I wasn't getting too much cholesterol that way. Then I checked the rest of my groceries--that was the only source of cholesterol in my diet. It is true that my meals have been carb-centered (but all whole grain) and I had to ration my fruit and vegetables more than I would have liked. Oh, and the one thing I probably didn't get enough of: calcium. I had some milk each day, but I am used to getting a significant portion of my dietary calcium from cheese in all forms and expensive Greek yogurt, neither of which I could afford.

6. I have a few things left over: some oatmeal, and beans and rice, and frozen peppers. Hopefully this means I can go shopping tomorrow and increase my stock. I'm especially excited for some yogurt and more fresh veggies.

7. Being social is awkward (I mean, more than usual) on a food stamp budget. I went to a movie with Kim on Saturday but couldn't buy anything to eat before or after--where do you talk to someone when you can't buy food? And Sarah almost didn't know what to do with me when I said did she want to hang out but I couldn't do anything food related--though we did end up having a lovely day walking around Waller Mill Park. Still, I'm glad for that reason that this is the end of my "strict" week--that now I can go out to eat with friends, and just donate double the amount I spend to our Lenten Offering at church.

8. My pants fit better. This makes me not want to start going out to eat again at all.

Saturday I'm going to Atlanta on Wesley's spring break mission trip, so I'm not sure I'll be able to control much of my diet there. Still, I'm looking forward to learning more in the next few days and weeks--how much I can save with coupons, how much I can save just by shopping at Walmart, what difference it makes to spread $60 over two weeks instead of $30 over one. We'll see

Food Stamp Challenge, Day T-1

Tomorrow begins this year's Lenten discipline: I'm taking on the Food Stamp Challenge.

From now till Easter, I'm attempting to live on the average amount given to food stamp recipients in Virginia in 2011. It works out to just over $30 a week for one person. I hope doing this will help me to understand a little better how some of my neighbors in this community live. Lots of the people I see for financial assistance are on food stamps. In fact, one article I found said that about 1500 people in Williamsburg receive food stamps--a number that is growing.

I wasn't sure how I felt about not being able to go out to eat with friends for all of Lent, though, so I'm doing things this way: for Week 1, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be strict about it. After that, I'll give myself a little leeway. I'll still keep careful track of what I spend on food, but if I go over the $30 (or eat out) I'll donate twice the difference to my church's Lenten offering.

I've been spending the last week using up food that's already around so I can't fall back on raiding the fridge. Yesterday I took stock of what I still had that I didn't want to use up or get rid of: half a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I subtracted $4 from the $30 to account for those.

Then today I went shopping during my break between bells and staff meeting. It was a different experience than usual to be sure. I'm used to looking at prices and buying the cheaper versions of things, but I'm not used to having to add everything up as I go. I'm not used to having to weigh whether it's worth more to spend 30 extra cents on something with no high-fructose corn syrup, or to rationing my vegetables.

I left Martin's with rice, two kinds of beans, a box of pasta and a can of sauce, peanut butter, oatmeal, bananas, applesauce, a big can of mandarin oranges, a bag of whole carrots, a potato, a bag of frozen broccoli and a bag of frozen peppers. Oh, and some salt and pepper.

It came to $23.68. I left satisfied that I still had a little over $2 to ration throughout the week--maybe to supplement the banana supply. Except that when I pulled back into the church parking lot I realized I hadn't bought any bread to go with my peanut butter. No problem, I thought--I'll stop at Walmart on my way back from the hospital this afternoon. I don't usually shop at Walmart, but desperate times, after all, call for desperate measures.

I found the bakery section of Walmart before I found the cheap bread hidden away in the back. As I wandered around looking at loaves that cost $4 each, I started to feel genuinely worried. I don't often buy bread--had I misjudged the price? My lunch plans for the whole week revolved around peanut butter sandwiches, and now I literally might not be able to afford the bread at all.

I did eventually find the cheap bread, and bought a loaf for $2. (I could have gone cheaper if I'd gone for the high-fructose corn syrup variety.) That left just about 50 cents for the week, and I'm taking that to justify the use of some existing brown sugar in my pantry on my morning oatmeal.

So there you have it--I'm out. I have all the food I get to eat for the week. I'm pretty sure it will be enough, but I'm also pretty sure it's going to get old. And that it's going to require a few lifestyle adjustments. For example, I bought the kind of beans you have to soak. I'm pretty sure I haven't soaked beans since I lived in Lesotho. And the carrots, which I'll cut up into sticks tonight--another thing I haven't made the effort to do in a while. And the lack of cheese on the menu is going to be a definite challenge. Maybe at the end of this week I'll have some food left over and be able to invest in some cheese or yogurt for next.

So we'll see how it goes. Right now I'm looking forward to starting on this. It's going to require some heightened intentionality, but after all, that's the point. In the end, I know I'm lucky: this is something I get to choose to do, rather than something I have to. Hopefully it will help me be mindful of those who don't have that choice.

Christmas Eve: thoughts from the colonial side

This morning my plan was to finish tomorrow's sermon at Aromas and then take a walk down Duke of Gloucester Street. This, as it turned out, was also the plan of everyone else in Williamsburg and their dog. It was crowded, and that annoyed me a little. I had wanted to be alone with my thoughts to ponder lofty and holy things like Incarnation and the True Meaning of Christmas.

Luckily (inspired by this article I shared recently on Facebook), it didn't take me long to realize how silly it was to want to be alone to ponder the incarnation. So instead, I noticed the people around me, and that became my prayer. I noticed the woman walking her two sweater-clad, antlered greyhounds; the toddler jumping on a wooden stage saying, "Jump! Jump! Jump!"; the Russian tourists figuring out where they were; the boy pretending to shoot passersby with his fake rifle; the fifers, and the drummers; the young woman hugging Santa in Merchant's Square; the group of maybe eight Occupy Williamsburg protesters huddled around a Christmas tree with a sign at the top that proclaimed, "A better world is possible."

This is the life God enters. All of it.

Colonial Williamsburg has always been a place where the past meshes with the present so that it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Kids with light-up shoes wait in line to stick their heads in the stocks; a man in 18th century garb is in line ahead of you at Wawa. And today that seemed especially true as I remembered that the God who entered this world in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago walks with us still--us, in all our latte-drinking, dog-walking, tourist-shooting, Santa-hugging, corporate-personhood-protesting glory...or lack thereof.

What I saw was ordinary people caught in ordinary moments, just like me. And that's the life the incarnate God makes holy. That's the un-lofty life God infuses with eternity.

Hope on a treadmill

It's been a rough couple of days. Without going into detail (professional boundaries, and all that sort of thing) it's been the kind of weekend that requires the support of good friends (thanks, guys), and Ben & Jerry's. Luckily, I've had both.

But while the Ben & Jerry's is necessary, it's also a very short term solution to life's problems. It's easy to sit there with your face firmly planted in a pint of Half Baked, consequences be damned, I don't care if I'm downing 1500 calories in one sitting or whether I'll feel sick later.

So the ice cream was only part of my approach. I also went running. That's not a new thing, of course, but that's kind of the point. In the midst of being sad, and physically and emotionally tired, I managed to stick to the marathon training schedule I started in July. This is a low week, schedule-wise, so it was only 3 miles. But still, I found some hope in that half hour on the treadmill.

(OK, it was a little more than half an hour. And it might have been the only time I've ever found hope on a treadmill. There was Great Dismal Swamp smoke outside, you see...)

Running, for me, felt a little bit like Jeremiah buying his field at Anathoth (Jer 32:1-15). The land was under siege, and property values had plummeted. It just wasn't a place you bought land anymore. But Jeremiah did. Buying that field was a way of showing he had faith in what the future would bring: that, as God told him, "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."

Things may be a little rough now, but I'm trying to have faith in what the future will bring. And running is a way of doing that. Even a 3 mile run is an investment. It says that in November, no matter what else, I'm going to run a race and I'm going to be proud of myself for it. Fields will be bought again in this land. There's good stuff to come. Let's get started now.

Nothing Like Me

When you work in a church--or, let's face it, when you are part of a church--there are inevitably a lot of times that you wish that everyone else in the church was just a little more like you. Thought a little more like you, had priorities a little more like yours. But then there are also times when you have to praise God that there are people in the church who are nothing like you, too.

Today and tomorrow our church is hosting Helping Hands, a mission mini-camp for 4th-6th graders. And today the group of kids from our church went to sing some hymns with the folks down in Respite. I thought this was great, because I love Respite and wanted the kids to love it too, but I was also a little nervous. I was worried that the kids would go, stare at the old people, sing a little, stare a little more at the old people, and leave. And that didn't seem like the point of a mission experience.

I was worried that it would be that way because that's what I would have done as a kid. I remember a Girl Scout trip or two to sing at a nursing home, and I was happy to sing, but I did not want to talk to anybody. For one thing, there is to this day nothing in the world I despise more than being told to "mingle." For another, I was scared of old people.

Having since gotten over my fear of the elderly (though not my fear of being made to mingle), I tried to pump the kids up. I told them why Respite was a special place for me and encouraged them to talk to the clients after we sang. So after our last hymn I said, "All right, go introduce yourself to someone!" and waited for the shy hesitation and embarrassed stares. I waited for them to respond like I would have.

But instead, the kids went right on up and introduced themselves. And they chatted with the old folks. And the old folks smiled and loved them.

And then we went back upstairs to the fellowship hall. We were the first group back from our mission projects. There were cards still on the tables--cards the kids had written and decorated as they had arrived at the church earlier, meant to be sent later to people at nursing homes.

But one girl said, "Hey, we should take these cards down to Respite."

So the kids picked out the best cards they could find and we turned around and went back to Respite, back to the old people, back to the world I never would have wanted to enter in the first place at their age. And they each found a client to give their card to, and some of them chatted a little more, and the old folks smiled and loved them.

Now that's what I call mission--not just singing a few nice songs, but reaching out in love and friendship to someone you wouldn't normally encounter or pay attention to. Those kids today didn't just follow my own hopeful/skeptical instructions to meet people. They went back. They took their call to mission to heart. I'm so glad they are part of the church--and that they are nothing like me.

Grace in the hard times

Tonight we had a small group for my Altar in the World study. This at first seemed like a slight disappointment, but I think it was actually a blessing. We had some of the best conversation we've had up to this point. The chapters we talked about tonight had to do with pain and how it can lead to spiritual growth, and the how and why of prayer. The people there had some really powerful stories to share relating to these chapters, things that might not have been shared in a larger group.

Their stories had to do with personal struggles and sickness and fear and the loss of loved ones. They are not my stories to tell, so that's all I will say. But I was humbled as I sat surrounded by these people who have been through so much more than I have and come through these struggles with grace, at least in retrospect. None, I am sure, are struggles that anyone would choose to go through again, but these people have become stronger, more faithful, and more grateful people through them. And when I shared some of my own experience wrestling with how to pray and what to expect from prayer, they had advice for me. Not know-it-all, obnoxiously certain advice, but helpful thoughts born and cultivated in the important experiences of their own lives.

So tonight I am thankful for people in my life who have gained wisdom through pain, and I am thankful for their willingness to share those stories so that we all might gain a little bit of that wisdom. I'm reminded of how much I have to learn spiritually from those who call me their pastor. And I hope that when I inevitably face struggles in my life harder than those I have encountered thus far, that I will be able to see--at least eventually--grace and growth in those times, too.

The compassion game

On the first Wednesday of every month, people from around Williamsburg come to see me, and I give them money. Sometimes it is money to help with rent, sometimes a few nights in a motel, sometimes making a dent in a power or water bill. Sometimes it is money for prescriptions or gas. I'm the one at church whose job it is to hear these needs and decide whether and how much help is appropriate.

I've written and talked a lot at church about how hard this part of my job is. I never know whether I'm being stingy or gullible and mostly end up feeling both at the same time. I see a lot of the same people from month to month and am acutely aware of how little difference this money actually makes, at least most of the time, and how powerless the church and I are to actually make that difference. Sometimes I think--though most of the people I see would probably disagree--that the most important part of this job is the fact that it makes and allows me to listen to people. I hear stories from parts of the community that I don't hear on Sunday mornings or evening Bible studies. And I get to put a face to the fact that the church cares about helping its neighbors, whether or not we can do much.

Every once in a while I meet someone who thinks that, too. They will thank me not only for the check I hand them but also for listening to them. "I've been everywhere," they've said, "and no one else has listened to me." I feel good when people tell me this. It makes me feel like what I am doing is ministry. It makes me feel like I have succeeded in treating my neighbor with dignity, as a child of God. Sometimes it also makes me selfishly feel like we're doing better at that here than whatever other church they were at last.

But I know also that it probably works the other way around. When the budget has run out for the month, when someone's come back for the third month in a row and I have to tell them no, when I have to tell them no for any reason, I'm sure they must find another church, and another pastor to sit down with, and they must sometimes say, "Thank you for listening to me. I've been everywhere, and no one else has listened to me." And by no one else, they will mean me. Maybe what they mean is I didn't give them what they wanted. But maybe they really mean that I somehow failed to see them in the process, too. From the point of view of someone in need, those two things must blend together.

Ministry is so imperfect. I remind myself of Bonhoeffer's view of ethics, how not to do anything for fear of sinning is really the worst sin of all. I hope in the end, I've listened to more people than I haven't. And I hope that when I haven't, someone else will have--money or no money--at the church down the street or somewhere else in this community.

Time, why you punish me?

Two or so weeks ago, I wrote my monthly article for our church newsletter, about revisiting our chosen Lenten disciplines mid-Lent. Our newsletter deadlines are the 15th of each month, and they don't come out until the beginning of the next month. So I wrote this mid-Lent article at the beginning of Lent, you see. By the time this article actually appeared in the newsletter, I had already let my discipline slide for almost a week. So I thought in the name of integrity, I'd better revisit it.

I've let my Lenten blogging slide in past years, too, because I found that I had a hard time thinking of new, fresh theological thoughts to write each day. That's not really my problem this year. Spending my days at church lends itself to having lots of theological thoughts. I might not always want to write publicly about things that happen at church, but at least I am thinking theologically. The problem this year is more one of time.

I know I work less than many of my friends who are bankers and lawyers and even some who are pastors. But I don't know how. Even if I get home from work at a "normal" time, say a little after 5, there is running to do, dishes to be washed, dinner to be cooked, laundry to be laundered, and Spanish to be practiced. Sometimes there are also TV shows to catch up on on Hulu--but cultural literacy is important too, right? Something's gotta give, whether it's laundry or dishes or blogging or sometimes a mixture of all of those things.

One of the chapters we read in my Barbara Brown Taylor group this week was on saying no, and I think I felt like that gave me a little freedom to loosen the reins of discipline and make a grasp at regaining some sanity. It also made me think a little more about the value of actually giving things up for Lent.

Giving something up for Lent is traditional, of course, but I've heard lots and lots of people express a preference for adding something meaningful instead. Giving up chocolate doesn't seem to do much spiritually, so we'll commit to a half hour of meditation a day instead. It sounds so reasonable. And we encourage things like this at church--I'm doing this Lenten study for people to add to their busy schedules, after all.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that if it works for you, but I wonder if for some of us it's missing the point a little. Those of us who are busy know how to add things to our schedules. We're good at it (to varying degrees.) Taking something away is harder. It's counterintuitive. Why subtract from life when we can add instead?

BBT talks about sabbath as "taking a break from earning our own salvation for a day." I think giving up something meaningful for Lent--maybe not just chocolate--could be a powerful reminder of that. The real self-denial might be in believing we don't need to add more things, do more things, be more things. A friend posted a link to Facebook recently to an article about how sleep tends to be the first thing we sacrifice when we're busy, and what a bad idea that was. Could a Lenten practice be getting a full amount of sleep, even when things don't get done? I don't know if that's the most meaningful spiritual practice, either, but it's an interesting thought. When did the self-denial of Lent become about more instead of less? Can we really go for less and trust God to be our More?

I think these thoughts will remain theoretical for this season, which is already winding down. I don't want to stop blogging altogether, but maybe post-Easter it's time to transition to an occasional practice of writing down theological thoughts year-round, and leave Lent for giving up. Of course, there's always the hope that by next year I will have mastered the art of adulthood and manage my time brilliantly. There's always that hope.

I miss Mayberry

I love Target. I really do. The one here in Williamsburg is remodeling and reorganizing a little these days, so at times I love it a little less because I can't find what I am looking for, but still. I walk in and see colorful scarves and pretty shoes and nicely arranged kitchen equipment...and it's all so reasonably priced!! And today I wandered around their new and improved grocery section with real live fresh fruit and stuff. It's not as big as a regular supermarket, of course, but it wasn't bad. As I realized when I first found out they were putting one of these in: now I really have no reason to go anywhere else.

I don't know what this says from a social justice perspective, this getting everything in one place. Not because Target has a bad record on social justice--now that they've promised to stop donating to the PACs of anti-gay candidates, I think they're on the up and up. But because ideally, I suppose I'd shop at a lot of different local, family-owned stores. One for produce, one for bread, one for linens, one for pots and pans, one or more for clothes. This way, instead of a lot of different people owning businesses, a few people own one business, and the rest get to work for them as cashiers. (Although never enough cashiers for the number of people in line, I might add...)

There are some small local businesses in Williamsburg, of course, but not enough I know of to get all the different things I need. But even if there were: who has time for social justice these days? When I went to Target tonight, it was 8:30, and I hadn't been home since 8:45 am, and I had to get Oreos and a springform pan and some cat litter and some moisturizing cream and some coffee filters, and then I had to go home and make the chocolate mousse pie I had promised for staff meeting tomorrow. No way I would have gone to a bunch of different places. We'd make do with a smelly litter box and dry skin and no pie.

I promise I don't generally fantasize about a return to the 1950s or anything. I will continue to shop at Target, and I will like it. I will do the best I can and buy things there that have names with "eco" or "green" in them, however much that means. I will pay more for the Newman's Own fair trade coffee, even though I really want the cinnamon flavor in the Dunkin Donuts package. Sometimes all we can do is the best with what we have to work with, or work within. But I guess it's still good to remind ourselves of the consequences of the systems we buy into even as we load our one-stop baskets with exercise videos and cheap jewelry and toothpaste and, now, bananas. And even as we fully enjoy it.

Perdida

One of my group's Barbara Brown Taylor spiritual practices for this week was the Practice of Getting Lost. It may be hard to do that intentionally, in the literal sense, but in the chapter talks not just about getting geographically lost but about intentionally putting yourself in places where you are a stranger.

The other practice for the week was the Practice of Walking on the Earth, but it was cold today, and I did not feel like doing extra walking.

Anyway, today I got myself intentionally lost by going to a Spanish language church service after my own church got out for the day. I have been to a Spanish church service before, but not here, and never by myself. I've also been saying for years I need to start going to a Spanish service, but I have never gotten up the courage to do so.

I was nervous for two reasons. First, I am not good at Spanish. My reading is decent, but I can barely understand a natively-spoken word. That was all the more reason to go, of course--I need practice. But it was also all the more reason to fear that they would ask visitors to identify themselves and I wouldn't even know what they were asking, and everyone would be looking at me, and I wouldn't know what to say.

The second reason I was nervous is that I read a description of the church on its website, the bigger English-speaking church of which this Spanish service is a part. It said they worship like the Bible commands, with lifting hands and dancing and stuff like that. My own church is predominantly comprised of 75-year-old white people, and I fit right in. We do not lift our hands. We do not dance. Furthermore, the "What We Believe" section was full of things that would make any progressive mainline Protestant think twice, like the infallibility of scripture, even in scientific matters.

But the point was to get lost. So I went, half hoping it would be big enough that I could sit in the corner and no one would notice me. It was not that big.

We started with praise songs, and there was some clapping, and some lifting of hands, but I was relieved to find that it seemed to be like any contemporary worship service. The guest speaker spoke in tongues a little when he prayed, but not too much. During what I suppose was the passing of the peace, I talked to people. Just a few sentences, but it was a start.

The guest speaker actually spoke in English (natively, and appeared not to know Spanish.) It was translated by a native English speaker who did speak Spanish. In a way, that meant I was a little less lost than I had anticipated, about which I was both glad and not glad.

The speaker was loud. That's basically what I can say about him. Everything he said was loud and punctuated, like each sentence was the most important thing you were going to hear all day. At one point he told people to take notes. This is not a preaching style that tends to resonate with me. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's a lot different from my own preferred style of "OK, now, let's see if we might be able to look at this text a little differently..." In a way, I felt more out of my comfort zone listening to him than I did singing praise songs in Spanish. I also think if I'd been listening to that preaching style in Spanish, it would have been OK. When something's in another language, you expect it to be different from what you're used to, and there's a openness to that. When it switches back to your own language, when you're on the border between lost and not lost, you shut down. You want to not be lost. At least I do.

But that was a good reminder that you don't have to go far to find another culture. Because even if we both call ourselves Christian, that man and I come from very different cultures. I am lost in his, and I'm sure he would be lost in mine. I'm learning Spanish because I want to be able to connect with some of God's children whose stories might be very different from my own. It's scary to walk into someone else's story. But that's why it's spiritual, too--it demands something of us, it demands our vulnerability. And that's true whether that story is told in another language or in your own, whether it takes place across the world or just around the corner. I think I'll be back.

Broken for birds and squirrels

Today I did a little communion service for the Respite Care folks in the chapel. I love doing this. The only tricky part is that it's a pretty small group, and it's hard to buy bread the right size. When we do this I usually end up with a hefty chunk of leftover Body of Christ.

Properly disposing of communion elements can be a bit of a pain. You can't just shove them in the trash or dump them down any old drain. You have to either eat them, or return them to nature. The juice isn't too bad, although there was that one time I spilled grape juice all down my front by trying to drink the excess without actually putting my mouth on the chalice. Since then I've discovered the special drain in the sacristy (OK, I hope that's what it is), and besides, you can always just pour it outside. But there is something that feels a little irreverent about just throwing a (whole) half a loaf of bread into the woods. I don't know if any theological school of thought says yea or nay on that, but usually I try to break it up into little pieces, and that is what I did today.

I think about feeding the birds when I do this, like when I was little and at my grandmother's house in Philadelphia, and we would stand on her little balcony and tear up slices of Wonder Bread and throw them to the pigeons. But today it wasn't Wonder Bread, it was consecrated bread, the Body of Christ. And it felt like there was something holy in doing this, in tearing off pieces of bread just like I had served to people in the chapel, and throwing them in the grass for the birds or squirrels or whoever else would find them.

I don't think the birds and squirrels care that this bread is holy bread. And I don't think they need the sustaining, renewing grace that is in that bread in the same way we do. Birds and squirrels live by God's grace every day, eating what God provides, praising God just by being birds and squirrels. But I care that this is holy bread that I am feeding them. It reminds me that God's grace is for all creation, and that this Body of Christ is broken for the salvation of the whole world. And on my way home, I heard the birds singing a little clearer, because I was reminded of this.

Dream on

I've been reading Revelation these days. Not for any specific purpose, but just because I've been working my way through the New Testament in my own devotional reading each morning, and I finally got there. I've read Revelation before, and despite what the Left Behind series has made of it, I don't hate it. In fact, I really like some parts of it. Dr. Newsom's Apocalyptic Imagination class at Candler gave me a solid appreciation for the social justice implications of the book, and especially how it has been meaningful through history for oppressed and/or minority communities--for whom, of course, it was first written. Reading it as a work of spiritually grounded political resistance starts to look a lot different than reading it as if it were written especially for upper middle class white Americans.

This is the first time I've come back to the book as a whole since I took that class, and it's different to come back and read it outside of that academic context, too. The appreciation is still there, but the details of that appreciation are fuzzy. I feel much more like I'm encountering the book as an "average," not-in-seminary person this time. Which brings me back, somewhat, to the mindset that seminary shook up a little: this book is weird.

There's just so much imagery shoved together. That's my problem. If John of Patmos could just pick one or two symbols and do a kind of extended metaphor thing, I think I could be on board. But that's not what he does. Instead...there's a throne! Now there are some creatures around it! Now there are horsemen! Now there are some angels with bowls of plagues! Now there is a beast! Also a whore is riding it!

It makes it all very hard to follow.

But here's a thought that helps me read Revelation. It's not a very academic thought that explains why all these symbols are there thrown together. It's just a thought. And that is that this book is the retelling of a dream. Or a vision, a revelation, an apokalypsis, whatever you want to call it.

Have you ever tried telling someone about a dream you had last night and ended up sounding like a complete crazy person? I've had those dreams. There's someone whose face I never see, but I know who it is. Or there is someone who looks like one person I know, but in the dream I know they're really supposed to be someone else I know. There are non sequiturs where you move from one scene to another with no good explanation, but somehow it all makes sense. All the parts seem so disconnected that it's almost embarrassing to try to relate them to anyone. And maybe it's not just random synapse firing, either--there are subconscious reasons why all these things play a part in your dream--but when you put them all together, it's just weird.

I'm not saying that's a completely accurate representation of a sacred text, here, which I am sure has very carefully chosen imagery and symbology throughout. But really, if John did have some divinely-given revelation of this struggle between heaven and earth, it would be no wonder if he couldn't quite relate in terms that made complete logical sense to the person he was telling it to. In fact, it would have had to have been a pretty boring vision if he could. The overall dream has an important and poignant meaning, and each part of it is there for a reason, but when you put it all together in chronological order it comes out sounding like, "And then there was a beast! And then there was a whore!"

Scholars who know more than me are free to debate me, but it helps me to read this text without thinking I have make complete sense of it all, that trying to make logical sense of it even does it a disservice--because how could a powerful divine revelation like that make perfect sense?

I like to think this. It helps me appreciate what's there.