2012.09.12 Back To Basics

 I met Joan Chittister, OSB, up close and personal over a bathroom sink at Regis college where she was about to deliver an address to hundreds of fans—hers and Godde’s. She was frantically searching the sink bowl for her contact lens. I told her to stop up the drain and secretly thanked heaven this wasn’t a toilet bowl.  We peered in, groped about, seeking a tiny transparent flap of plastic, essential to Sister Joan’s full vision. We saw nothing.

THERE IT IS! she suddenly shrieked with the joy of a child, scooped it up gingerly, indelicately slapped it into her eye, gave me a hug, and whisk! she was gone—at a near gallop, still a filly at 75.  

Her talk was swoonable: classic religio-spiritual themes of love, justice, peace for all, the Godde-given power of women to transform the world and church, disloyalty as obedience, feminist theology, and a God who delivers the goods with the help of good men AND good women.

Here is Joan Chittister as a newly minted nun with the Benedictine sisters of Erie PA. The photo is old, her face and body young, and her soul eternal. Her proclamations and vision are the same yesterday today and tomorrow, even though the traditional nuns' habit has been replaced by civvies and her eyes need contacts to see—but not to have vision.

Text:  I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. I fact, I think in many cases your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed.       And why would I think that you don't?       Because you don't want any tax money to go there.   That's not pro-life.  That's pro-birth.  We need a much broader conversation on the morality of pro-life"                  -We the People

INDEED WE DO.  SAY IT SISTER.   

(Myself, I'm pro-life—all life . . . AND pro-choice.)











 

2012.09.09 Back To Church

“It is a mistake to believe that God is primarily concerned with religion.” 

I read this quote recently in May Sarton’s book A House by the Sea. She attributed it to an archbishop of Canterbury but omitted his name. Even Google didn’t know. Hence, the wisdom stands on its own: “It is a mistake to believe that God is primarily concerned with religion.”

“It is also a mistake to believe that God is negligently concerned with religion.”  (This author I know because it’s moi, more properly, I.)

Defending religion? What hubris!  What I really want to do is jump in the currently popular spirituality pool with the cultural gang.  But I need religion and the church, for better or worse.  

I got religion in church, an extracurricular activity I’d flirted with for years and found boring so I fell in love with cute priests and flirted with the trappings. Still, I couldn’t stop wondering—and wondering what really is the point? 

When the time came for my authentic midlife crisis I’d sunk into moral turpitude— Ok I exaggerate here. Still, only something divine was persuasive enough to drop-kick me back into life-in-God. Call me lost, depressed, stuck in a role, “called” a term the church overuses, whatever,  it really doesn’t matter. I just had to find my first “lover” God, the one I’d met as a young child.

There was no FaceBook then and it didn’t make sense to go God-hunting in a library, City Hall, a bar, or on a bed, though I tried all these options: reading the Bible compulsively from cover to cover, changing my political party, alcohol, sex. At last I rediscovered the Episcopal church, the one that had the most sensory appeal, the one that had colors, smells, bells and human bodies that weren’t screwed to the pews—and, I noticed,  hope for women to be ordained.

Religion in a church community gave me something to DO, a VOCABULARY, and a way to THINK. These structures enhanced what I already FELT about God. I didn’t agree with everything but at least I had something to argue with. I met Jesus on directed religious retreats. As I prayed in silence and into the depth only solitude can allow, Jesus coached me into the radical idea that God’s Love lived inside me, so close I ate, slept and breathed it.

The Episcopal religion gave me a lot of grief and patriarchal baloney about women’s roles. It also gave me guidance without guilt, gravitas with flexibility, sin and  grace, elegant prayers to say in a community, a Big Book Bible, rich in stories that read better than any racy spellbinding novel and were, mercifully, lame on self-help, sacraments, and backbone theology—the bend but not break kind. 

Finally, my church gave me ordination to the priesthood.

God IS concerned with religion. Maybe not primarily, and maybe out of frustration over human meanderings. But it mistaken to believe God is not concerned with religion. In fact, Godde may just be leading the charge for change in the churches of all religions.

2012.09.03 Back to School

Can you guess which of these four beautiful children is headed off to school tomorrow? 

Not too hard to know, but what is wonderful is that the other two will be eagerly awaiting the return of the schoolers every afternoon and there will be a reunion of glee before the inevitably normal sibling squabbles begin. This is a loving family.  Maggie the dog sits quietly ready to be a lap of love or a lick of promise whenever it's needed. 

If your kids don’t fight, worry. The art of a good spat is essential to the maturation and lastingness of a good relationship and to helping a kid establish his or her identity but not her superiority.  Spiritually, it teaches the art of forgiveness and the joy of reconciliation and the appreciation of differences and  individuality. 

I remember the anticipation of the first day of a new school year. In my all girls’ school in New York city we had uniforms, gunny sack navy blue serge pleated jumpers—sturdy but ugly.  They had tie belts that always slid up or down and didn’t at all enhance what I aspired to have and didn’t—a budding wasp waist. So there was no fun in laying out new clothes for the first day, unless I had new saddle shoes that sparkled.

For me the joy of the first school day of a new school year was the summer reading list. I’d usually read almost all the books on it and checked them off twice with buoyant pride, as any developing professional book nerd would do.

School in fact was a little holy for me. It made me feel like the God of my early childhood had made me feel, good about being myself. It made me feel successful and proud to be a smart girl, even if sometimes I was a smartypants girl, trying to know it all and have the last word on everything. I had plenty of playground battles over whose way was the right way. Mine of course. But I stayed friends with my friends, and I don’t know why, or how, exactly, except that I wanted to have friends more than be right. 

It’s the same in a family.  Trying to boss my younger sister didn’t work at all. For one thing she was soon bigger and stronger than me,  and for another I secretly admired her un-schoolish non-nerdy ways. I thought she had more fun. She did, but she also got into more trouble.  School wasn’t her bailiwick the way it was mine.  She found different ways to feel good about herself—like by trying to be a “son” to Dad and pissing Mom off.  We broke up and got back together more times than I can count.

You don’t learn all of life in school. You learn it by fighting and making up—all your life.  And you learn by being alone. It helps to have a dog, or a doll, or a favorite stuffed animal, or a book, a thumb to suck, a diary with a lock and key, or an invisible God who listens.

2012.09.02 What a Hoooot!!

Now that I’ve figured out how to get a photo on my blog I am feeling like fun. Also, I’m sick of the heaviness of politics and religion right now!!  So I got this photo of the Holy Trinity. 

Just look at these three wunderkind.  They peer out at me. I see a metaphor for Christianity’s oft-thought idiotic idea of supreme Oneness with a multiple personality disorder.  Can you think of a better way of making sure you get through to a bunch of devoted, hopeful but blundering, earthlings than giving them multiple choice, all options divine?  (OK I know owls are raptors but it's a metaphor!—and my cuddly stuffed owls guide me waking and guard me sleeping; they just don't smile much:)

Three lookalikes with three divine ways of being Being-in-being.
     Check the enormous inquisitive eyes, far-seeing, able to spot, know, and love, even the tiniest critter.
     And the gigundra wing-span—enough to swoop above and into the universe with angel-power.  
    All this and the wisdom to be nocturnal, enough humility to be quiet, only an occasional hoot to let us know She is still there while the weary world sleeps in peace.

 Who said three was a difficult arrangement? 

2012.08.29 To Organize or Not To Organize?

My son John quipped the other day,  “Where is John the Baptist when we need him?”

(Today happens to be on the  liturgical calendar to remembering the beheading of John the Baptist, the biblical prophet who organized the people around sin, repentance and a new way of life. Good idea, not good for the powers of his day who preferred the status quo: despair and poverty for the 99%, power, money and isolation for the 1% with the egos.) 

Let’s get organized! hollered John the Baptist.  I think I shouted that to my young family, or if I didn’t I thought it loudly.  It seemed to me that in our family of six we needed to find a way to go in the same direction at the same time at least once a day—other than to bed. 

I wonder if Godde conjured that divine thought in Her mind just the instant before the firmament split-seconded out of control and Creation burst through—disorganized as hell.

Well, my family never did get organized much—except in heart.  We managed to stay in love despite internecine wars, divorce, suffering, geography, illness, alcoholism, sex, and even religion. We kept the vision of each other’s faces in heart and mind and memory. We occupied each other.

Occupiers recently occupied their vision of economic justice with their bodies. They sat down and stood for the shear voicing of truth.  AND I want them to get organized so that voice won’t fade out and whoosh off like so much sage brush in the desert.  I want them to keep screaming   like John Baptist. I want them to influence voters who have privacy in voting booths to vote, not according to external ideologies but according to their highest values and their spirituality— especially women who may be afraid to stray from the “herd” or think that they are better off kept in a patriarchal world.

To be blunt I want them to vote for the vision they occupied.  Republicans right now are organizing around a vision that compartmentalizes and categorizes human beings, envisioning an either/or nation, and excluding those who don’t fit their criteria.  Some Christians agree. I shudder.

President Obama envisions a both/and, bipartisan nation, organized and occupied by all for all. 
He could use a little more John the Baptist chutzpah but his vision bears my spirituality and will get my vote.
                 * * * * * * *

What about ORGANIZED RELIGION? — which is currently thought heinous.

The early seekers and followers of divinity realized there was more to this messy life than human effort. So they organized themselves and drew a community together to worship a Mystery they couldn’t know except by faith. Awestruck and wonderstruck they uttered prayers. It all began in astonishments and a vision.
And then they organized, the inevitable next step to preserve what they held most dear. This is true for families, nations and religions. 

Of course organization can kill if it gets encrusted in mere habit and when it isn’t occupied by flesh and blood and soul. Let’s face it: Love, by its nature, is impossibly disorganized.  But not abandoned if the people keep hold of the vision: love, peace, justice and equity for all earth. 

So I want our church and our nation to re-organize, to re-occupy a vision of common good, love divine and human, sacred and secular.

 So where IS  John the Baptist when we need him?

2012.08.25 Fathers Matter Lots

Today would be my dad’s 101st birthday. Happy Birthday Dad.
   
Dad was a perfectly imperfect father for a “Mad Man” (TV show, not insane asylum.)  I loved him and longed for more of him all the time, and all our life together.  He died at 71 way too early for the length of my love.
   
Sometimes as a child I’d stand at Dad’s side and silently yearn, hard enough I imagined that he would turn from his preoccupations and take me onto his lap. Sometimes he did.
   
Today is also the day when I entered Hartford Hospital 45 years ago to have labor induced for the birth of my third child, already overdue by two weeks. It was August—too hot to be so huge.  I persuaded my OBGYN that this child should be born on Dad’s birthday.  That was my idea but son Rob refused to come out. He waited till August 31, then came with a rush and a hemorrhage and a loud wail, mercifully strong and full of presence. Happy Birthday Rob.

Cheryl Strayed the author of an exquisite (Oprah aside) memoir Wild, hallows the value of good fathering.  She once strayed into a therapist’s office and announced flippantly, “I’m like a guy sexually.”  Detached.  The therapist listened then asked, “Who detached from you?” 
   
Was this where she was supposed to tell him about her father? As she dove into the dangerous father topic of severe violence and equally severe absence sprinkled with endearments,  she stared at the familiar poster of a whirl of white in a black rectangle. It was meant to be the Milky Way in the middle of which was an arrowed sign that read, You are here.
   
After her tale of pain Strayed stared at the poster and reflected how much worse it would have been to be left alone with this father who didn’t know how to love me as a father should.  The bright therapist countered “What if you had a father who loved you as a father should?”
   
The question threw Strayed into confusion: “I couldn’t land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like a whirl of white on the You are here poster behind Vince’s [the therapist] head. He was a giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I’d feared I’d never find myself inside that great white swirl.” 

Dad held me as the apple of his eye, enough that I knew I am here. And Rob’s children know We are here because he loves them the way a good father should.

2012.08.22 Death Days

The death of summer sizzle and shine makes me sad enough but when a tragedy like suicidal death strikes and death intervenes on life leaving ragged edges, I say, “Oh my God!” thrice and count it as prayer— a cry from the depths of helplessness to the only Love that feels as if it might just be trustworthy enough to bear up and to last.

A good friend—not long-term and not very close but good—is dead, and I never said good bye. I didn’t know he was going to die.

I remembered an event of some years ago when a friend’s teenage son committed suicide.  The memory of her grief gave me a little distance from my own.

After the shock and the inner explosion of every feeling imaginable, my friend settled into a numbness almost worse than raw pain.  She just couldn’t figure out why her son took his own life and why God LET it happen. She kept praying and praying and praying, asking and asking and asking her almighty loving God to be accountable. God and her friends listened and listened and listened.

I had the mental image of God being throttled by prayers of anguish and unknowing and deep faith.  And I’d thought God was supposed to be the hound of heaven!

Months passed before God, who had exercised superb divine patience, finally was able to penetrate this mother’s beseechings, in a moment I suppose of sheer exhaustion—hers not God’s.  What makes you think I wasn’t there? God said from the depths of her soul. A question not an answer but a question that liberated.

The friend I now grieve committed suicide and left a mystery.  Rational explanations about depression and despair and etc. etc. are helpful, but not healing.  Another friend who knew this man wrote, “Mental illness be damned!”  Sin and guilt be damned as well. Advice, judgments and reason at a time like this feel hollow. 

Still, I’ve had my share of grief and have walked with others through theirs.  I know that suicide grieving is the hardest, in part because it will inevitably involve plenty of ideas about preventability.  I wonder if… What if… If only he’d….. If only I’d……..   And on and on it will go till it exhausts itself and you say goodbye to your fantasies and sob.

My good friend is gone. I already miss his joviality, humor, deep belly laughs, and bear hugs. Most of all I will miss his deep religious faith.  He spoke eloquently about God and praised Christ in song and word—despite the darkness that too often threatened to possess him. I’m grateful for positive memories that outlast cruel twists. 

Suicidal death is a spiritual lemon, one you want to turn into lemonade but can’t and shouldn’t, one that many people curse, but God, who knows a whole lot more than we do, blesses.  So what is the spirituality of suicide?

I dare to wonder if my good friend, and others who find themselves wholly lost, reach out, finally and devotedly, consciously or not, for the one hand they know belongs in theirs, forever and eternally. 

And the grasp holds.