This morning an old friend croaks at me from the imaginal realm: Raven, brushing my hair with blue-black wings. She comes from The Void, and I feel the tendrils of that cold, dark country around her. She gazes at me; her eyes are a windless midnight surrounded by yellow rings. I gaze back, waiting.
She shows me first a dawn sky, a brush-full of light staining the horizon. I watch as individual things take form out of the darkness -- a process as sure and unchangeable as the turning of the globe itself.
She shows me next the carcass of an elk half buried in snow -- a creature who didn't make it through the winter night. It is half frozen, and vacant as an empty room. Raven will eat the meat. Where, I wonder, did the spirit go?
Third she leads me high into the heavens and shows me the line of daylight as it creeps across continents. City lights wink out one by one. It is a glorious, breath-taking sight. Daylight touches all of us impartially, every single day, with the miracle of its return.
Have I made it through the winter night? There are some things, vacant as an empty carcass, that will be left behind. They will be food for Raven. "My sister," I implore, "any hints about what is taking shape inside me? I am a planner; I would like to know."
She croaks a throaty call perfectly pitched to shatter my thinking. In the instant following I realize she has already given me my answer. What grows like daylight needs no help from me. Carcass and new life alike, it will be revealed and become manifest. Nobody stops the sunlight, and it falls on everyone alike.
As sure as darkness is, daylight is the gift of a turning world.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Gender Bending
This morning as I lay half awake, tangled in a knot of blankets, the phrase "gender bending" came into my head. I love that phrase. It sounds like the mutter of thunder.
Gender bending. Picture a hot summer afternoon, still to the point of deadliness. Suddenly you hear thunder and glance reflexively toward the mountains. Tall piles of cloud have appeared. All at once a soft, cool breeze blows through.
I have always been a bit on the edge when it comes to gender identity. I remember a long talk I had with myself when I was in sixth grade. I had taken myself out to the edge of town where I could have some solitude. My inner turmoil was the result of the fact I had come to the realization that something a bit different was being demanded of me in the world of my peers. They were all starting to sort themselves according to sex, responding to the instinctual call of pubescence. This was confusing to me, as I couldn't really make up my mind whether I was essentially a boy or a girl. After much pondering I decided to choose neither.
In my twenties I enjoyed sometimes dressing in a very masculine way. It suited my inner guy. I found, as perhaps many of you have also, that breasts tend to get in the way of this portrayal. And I love my breasts.
The inner guy; the inner woman -- there is something very creative that goes along with fluidity. In Lander, Wyoming, I am ashamed to say, there is an incredibly racist and misogynous event held each year called the One Shot Antelope Hunt. It is awful. No women are allowed to enter, and losers have to dress as "squaws". Well, they may have changed that last bit, but the sentiment remains. My friend Dee wants one day to enter and wear, on the day of the hunt, an evening gown in camouflage orange. The only thing that stops him, he says, is all the men with guns. But his protest might work, where more "serious" efforts to stop the hunt or at least change its more terrible aspects have failed.
I am convinced that God loves gender bending. God loves anything that opens the cracks in stereotypical thinking. God really enjoys a good drag show, loves the sudden surprises, the pushing of portrayals to their most flamboyant extremes. God loves the delight of expression, of self-realization, of making manifest everything one is.
Gender bending. Thunder and the sudden arrival of gentle wind. The spirit moves -- Ruach.
Gender bending. Picture a hot summer afternoon, still to the point of deadliness. Suddenly you hear thunder and glance reflexively toward the mountains. Tall piles of cloud have appeared. All at once a soft, cool breeze blows through.
I have always been a bit on the edge when it comes to gender identity. I remember a long talk I had with myself when I was in sixth grade. I had taken myself out to the edge of town where I could have some solitude. My inner turmoil was the result of the fact I had come to the realization that something a bit different was being demanded of me in the world of my peers. They were all starting to sort themselves according to sex, responding to the instinctual call of pubescence. This was confusing to me, as I couldn't really make up my mind whether I was essentially a boy or a girl. After much pondering I decided to choose neither.
In my twenties I enjoyed sometimes dressing in a very masculine way. It suited my inner guy. I found, as perhaps many of you have also, that breasts tend to get in the way of this portrayal. And I love my breasts.
The inner guy; the inner woman -- there is something very creative that goes along with fluidity. In Lander, Wyoming, I am ashamed to say, there is an incredibly racist and misogynous event held each year called the One Shot Antelope Hunt. It is awful. No women are allowed to enter, and losers have to dress as "squaws". Well, they may have changed that last bit, but the sentiment remains. My friend Dee wants one day to enter and wear, on the day of the hunt, an evening gown in camouflage orange. The only thing that stops him, he says, is all the men with guns. But his protest might work, where more "serious" efforts to stop the hunt or at least change its more terrible aspects have failed.
I am convinced that God loves gender bending. God loves anything that opens the cracks in stereotypical thinking. God really enjoys a good drag show, loves the sudden surprises, the pushing of portrayals to their most flamboyant extremes. God loves the delight of expression, of self-realization, of making manifest everything one is.
Gender bending. Thunder and the sudden arrival of gentle wind. The spirit moves -- Ruach.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Thanks, Harvey!
It's gratifying to see that the movie Milk is so well received. It's a good movie. It reminds me of things I haven't thought about in a long time.
I was going to college in Oakland in the years when Harvey Milk was campaigning to be a city supervisor across the Bay. I remember his admonition to "come out of the closet and fight". It was tough back then to come out. It meant severed ties with family, being fired, ostracized, ridiculed . . . sometimes beat up . . . occasionally killed. It was tougher for the gay men than for us lesbians, but we were still, with good reason, afraid.
We used to have these little business cards -- I think they were pink -- that read, "You have just been talking with a Lesbian." We passed them out after conversations with our wait people at restaurants, with passengers on buses, with shoppers on Telegraph Avenue, with strangers at the park -- where ever and whenever we could. Even though we were usually safely away before the cards were read, we thought it very risky. But the idea was that people didn't really know any lesbians; didn't know what they looked like or sounded like, what they thought about, what they cared for.
In those days a lot of women older than me divided themselves up into the roles of "butch" and "femme". They either dressed as men or they wore frills and makeup. Butches always partnered with femmes, never with other butches, and femmes never partnered with femmes. These women would assume these roles in the evenings, when they went out on the town. During the day they "passed".
We younger women thought we were so progressive with our easy movement between masculine and feminine roles. But we were just as closeted.
I remember when Harvey Milk was elected. I went to the Gay Freedom Day Parade that year and waved and cheered as he rode by. We were all elated. It felt so affirming to have somebody like us in public office. He still had the same message: "come out of the closet and fight."
I remember when he was killed. It was every bit as bad as when MLK was killed and when JFK was killed. We cried our hearts out.
I didn't come all the way out of the closet until 20 years later, when another gay man was killed: Matthew Shepard, age 19. We of the glbt community in Wyoming felt the cold hand of fear squeeze our hearts the day he was beaten and left tied to a fence to die. I finally decided that enough was enough. Terrifying as it was, in the months following that tragedy I kept finding myself witnessing in larger and larger gatherings to being a lesbian.
It is perhaps easier in 2009 to come out of the closet and fight. But it is still no walk in the park. Terrible crimes are perpetrated on the glbt community every day. Young gay men are still the population most at risk for suicide. Women loving women and men loving men still risk losing their families, their jobs, their faith communities and their homes.
I am still afraid every time I have to come out. My heart races; I sweat. I know that, every single time I do it, I risk ridicule, rejection or worse. I have a healthy fear of gay-hating groups, religious people who want to "love the sinner and hate the sin", political organizations who would blame the glbt community for societal ills. But I still have to come out. For the sake of my glbt brothers and sisters, I have to come out. For my own sanity, I have to come out. Scary and lonely as it sometimes is, I have to be out.
Here's to Harvey Milk, trail blazer for gay rights. And here's to each of us who reluctantly or enthusiastically, sooner or later, follow in his footsteps and come out of the closet and fight.
I was going to college in Oakland in the years when Harvey Milk was campaigning to be a city supervisor across the Bay. I remember his admonition to "come out of the closet and fight". It was tough back then to come out. It meant severed ties with family, being fired, ostracized, ridiculed . . . sometimes beat up . . . occasionally killed. It was tougher for the gay men than for us lesbians, but we were still, with good reason, afraid.
We used to have these little business cards -- I think they were pink -- that read, "You have just been talking with a Lesbian." We passed them out after conversations with our wait people at restaurants, with passengers on buses, with shoppers on Telegraph Avenue, with strangers at the park -- where ever and whenever we could. Even though we were usually safely away before the cards were read, we thought it very risky. But the idea was that people didn't really know any lesbians; didn't know what they looked like or sounded like, what they thought about, what they cared for.
In those days a lot of women older than me divided themselves up into the roles of "butch" and "femme". They either dressed as men or they wore frills and makeup. Butches always partnered with femmes, never with other butches, and femmes never partnered with femmes. These women would assume these roles in the evenings, when they went out on the town. During the day they "passed".
We younger women thought we were so progressive with our easy movement between masculine and feminine roles. But we were just as closeted.
I remember when Harvey Milk was elected. I went to the Gay Freedom Day Parade that year and waved and cheered as he rode by. We were all elated. It felt so affirming to have somebody like us in public office. He still had the same message: "come out of the closet and fight."
I remember when he was killed. It was every bit as bad as when MLK was killed and when JFK was killed. We cried our hearts out.
I didn't come all the way out of the closet until 20 years later, when another gay man was killed: Matthew Shepard, age 19. We of the glbt community in Wyoming felt the cold hand of fear squeeze our hearts the day he was beaten and left tied to a fence to die. I finally decided that enough was enough. Terrifying as it was, in the months following that tragedy I kept finding myself witnessing in larger and larger gatherings to being a lesbian.
It is perhaps easier in 2009 to come out of the closet and fight. But it is still no walk in the park. Terrible crimes are perpetrated on the glbt community every day. Young gay men are still the population most at risk for suicide. Women loving women and men loving men still risk losing their families, their jobs, their faith communities and their homes.
I am still afraid every time I have to come out. My heart races; I sweat. I know that, every single time I do it, I risk ridicule, rejection or worse. I have a healthy fear of gay-hating groups, religious people who want to "love the sinner and hate the sin", political organizations who would blame the glbt community for societal ills. But I still have to come out. For the sake of my glbt brothers and sisters, I have to come out. For my own sanity, I have to come out. Scary and lonely as it sometimes is, I have to be out.
Here's to Harvey Milk, trail blazer for gay rights. And here's to each of us who reluctantly or enthusiastically, sooner or later, follow in his footsteps and come out of the closet and fight.
Friday, April 17, 2009
On Community
Once, many many years ago, when I was young and isolated inside my own skull, I sat on a hillside above the ocean and felt miserable and bereft because I was so alone. I couldn't imagine a community in which I would fit -- couldn't fathom how I would ever find anyone who would like me.
That day, in my imagination, a large silver serpent came to me. She was huge, sensuous in her undulations, a cobra and deadly. I was afraid she would bite me. I thought I knew how that fantasy would go: death and eventual rebirth in some new, less anxious form. Instead she indicated that I should follow her.
She led me down the hillside through the tall grass. We sinuated through a stand of oak trees, across a scree slope, down a cliff face, to a beach teaming with people. On the beach she disappeared. I was left among the people, none of whom took any notice of me at all.
A little perplexed, I looked around. It took me a minute to see what I was meant to understand. Standing there on the sand I was suddenly aware that everyone was breathing in and breathing out at exactly the same time. Everyone, including me, was breathing in and breathing out in unison.
It had never occurred to me before that other people probably often felt just like me. We all, I realized, have our places of insecurity and isolation. Amazed, I followed the thought to its natural conclusion: meeting people there was something I could do, something natural to me. If everybody was like me, why, then, I could speak to them. We could have a relationship. People need to be reached in their tender places, I realized. They need to be touched and acknowledged, welcomed.
Coming back to ordinary time there on the hillside, I was relaxed and at peace. I began to enjoy my surroundings. A tiny cool breeze carried the smell of fish and seaweed along with the distant rhythm of surf from the ocean below. Light played through murmuring leaves above me, ran in waves across the pale grasses and danced off the scattering of bright orange poppies among them. A meadowlark shouted his distinctive hail.
After awhile I picked myself up and began the walk back to my car. No one was on the trail with me. I followed it's dusty length in a reverie, beginning to doubt my insight a little. Suddenly something moved almost right under my feet. A huge brown and gold snake had been sunbathing on the path. This was no imaginal beast; she was entirely, solidly in the three dimensional world. Startled by our sudden arrival in one another's world, we both nearly had heart failure. She slid quickly away into the grasses. I scurried off home, totally nonplussed by the synchronicity. I had learned to take such things very seriously.
So, I took my insight more seriously than I might have otherwise. Still it took me a long time to live into it. Now, looking back on the cobra's visit, I see that the wisdom she brought me was very serious indeed. In fact, though it worked slowly and over years, it was every bit as transformative as a venomous bite. Forced to her radical understanding of community by my own anxiety and pain, I am not released from the vision as it expands in ever more broadening ripples. There are places where all of us can meet one another. There are places where we are the same. Across the boundaries of class, the barriers of race, the divides of histories, religions, cultural understandings, sexual awarenesses, bodily abilities, gender orientations, and the fences raised by any other differences between us we belong to one another. Period.
And so I am reminded to pay attention to the ripples cast by the dropping of a stone of wisdom into the pool of spiritual understanding. We Americans tend to stop too soon. We learn the "can do" aspect of a lesson, applying it to the transformation of our personal psychology and our individual lives. We forget to let it play out into the realm of implications for all of us together. The further the ripples go the more scary and dangerous are the insights. At some point they begin to demand the world of us.
That day, in my imagination, a large silver serpent came to me. She was huge, sensuous in her undulations, a cobra and deadly. I was afraid she would bite me. I thought I knew how that fantasy would go: death and eventual rebirth in some new, less anxious form. Instead she indicated that I should follow her.
She led me down the hillside through the tall grass. We sinuated through a stand of oak trees, across a scree slope, down a cliff face, to a beach teaming with people. On the beach she disappeared. I was left among the people, none of whom took any notice of me at all.
A little perplexed, I looked around. It took me a minute to see what I was meant to understand. Standing there on the sand I was suddenly aware that everyone was breathing in and breathing out at exactly the same time. Everyone, including me, was breathing in and breathing out in unison.
It had never occurred to me before that other people probably often felt just like me. We all, I realized, have our places of insecurity and isolation. Amazed, I followed the thought to its natural conclusion: meeting people there was something I could do, something natural to me. If everybody was like me, why, then, I could speak to them. We could have a relationship. People need to be reached in their tender places, I realized. They need to be touched and acknowledged, welcomed.
Coming back to ordinary time there on the hillside, I was relaxed and at peace. I began to enjoy my surroundings. A tiny cool breeze carried the smell of fish and seaweed along with the distant rhythm of surf from the ocean below. Light played through murmuring leaves above me, ran in waves across the pale grasses and danced off the scattering of bright orange poppies among them. A meadowlark shouted his distinctive hail.
After awhile I picked myself up and began the walk back to my car. No one was on the trail with me. I followed it's dusty length in a reverie, beginning to doubt my insight a little. Suddenly something moved almost right under my feet. A huge brown and gold snake had been sunbathing on the path. This was no imaginal beast; she was entirely, solidly in the three dimensional world. Startled by our sudden arrival in one another's world, we both nearly had heart failure. She slid quickly away into the grasses. I scurried off home, totally nonplussed by the synchronicity. I had learned to take such things very seriously.
So, I took my insight more seriously than I might have otherwise. Still it took me a long time to live into it. Now, looking back on the cobra's visit, I see that the wisdom she brought me was very serious indeed. In fact, though it worked slowly and over years, it was every bit as transformative as a venomous bite. Forced to her radical understanding of community by my own anxiety and pain, I am not released from the vision as it expands in ever more broadening ripples. There are places where all of us can meet one another. There are places where we are the same. Across the boundaries of class, the barriers of race, the divides of histories, religions, cultural understandings, sexual awarenesses, bodily abilities, gender orientations, and the fences raised by any other differences between us we belong to one another. Period.
And so I am reminded to pay attention to the ripples cast by the dropping of a stone of wisdom into the pool of spiritual understanding. We Americans tend to stop too soon. We learn the "can do" aspect of a lesson, applying it to the transformation of our personal psychology and our individual lives. We forget to let it play out into the realm of implications for all of us together. The further the ripples go the more scary and dangerous are the insights. At some point they begin to demand the world of us.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The Upstairs Room
Today I am thinking about Jesus' disciples straggling in from wherever the explosion of his death and reported resurrection threw them. Like blind people, they grope their way toward one another, coalescing in community. They find an upstairs room with a door that locks and they just stay there -- together. Maybe they compare notes about Jesus' post-death appearances, seeking to grasp what happened through pinning down the particulars. Perhaps they just look at one another and shake their heads, saying things like, "Amazing. Who would have thought?" Likely they begin sentences they cannot finish, laugh helplessly, cry abruptly, and shrug. They just hang out. Everything is the same as before and yet everything is different. What sense can they make of what has happened? They need a whole new frame of reference: new wineskins for the new wine they've been given. There isn't much to say until that structure evolves.
True revelation seems always to need a time of incubation. Its immediate consequence is a feeling of dislocation. The world goes on as usual. People go to work, advocate for causes, pick their children up from school, play out their loves and competitions; and the receivers of the revelation feel like a curtain has been drawn between them and all these activities. They are suddenly strangers in their own lives. Not knowing what to say about this, they hope that they need say nothing.
And yet the urge to integrate the experience is also strong. They want to name and describe the revelation lest it disappear. They begin to search for people who have the experience to hear them, who can help them with words, who understand that what happened is real. No wonder the disciples sought one another out.
A wise mentor can be an invaluable asset in a situation like this. It's always a good idea, if you're on the receiving end of a revelation, to find somebody who can help you process it. It generally takes time. Contrary to popular belief, instant fully-formed insights are not usually the rule when divinity informs humanity.
The disciples eventually emerge from their room. They become a dynamic community in Jerusalem, a community that understands the revelation so well they can describe it in many different languages and can live it in such a way that everybody takes notice.
For now, let's hang out with them in their upper room, in the state of uncertainty and wordlessness, in incubation. In this way we'll be empty bowls to receive whatever the Holy has to give us. We'll grow it into something before we let it loose on the world.
True revelation seems always to need a time of incubation. Its immediate consequence is a feeling of dislocation. The world goes on as usual. People go to work, advocate for causes, pick their children up from school, play out their loves and competitions; and the receivers of the revelation feel like a curtain has been drawn between them and all these activities. They are suddenly strangers in their own lives. Not knowing what to say about this, they hope that they need say nothing.
And yet the urge to integrate the experience is also strong. They want to name and describe the revelation lest it disappear. They begin to search for people who have the experience to hear them, who can help them with words, who understand that what happened is real. No wonder the disciples sought one another out.
A wise mentor can be an invaluable asset in a situation like this. It's always a good idea, if you're on the receiving end of a revelation, to find somebody who can help you process it. It generally takes time. Contrary to popular belief, instant fully-formed insights are not usually the rule when divinity informs humanity.
The disciples eventually emerge from their room. They become a dynamic community in Jerusalem, a community that understands the revelation so well they can describe it in many different languages and can live it in such a way that everybody takes notice.
For now, let's hang out with them in their upper room, in the state of uncertainty and wordlessness, in incubation. In this way we'll be empty bowls to receive whatever the Holy has to give us. We'll grow it into something before we let it loose on the world.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Good Friday
It's Good Friday. Today I'm wearing my "Leo" socks as a reminder of what is altogether too human and untransformed in me: the inner Roman Empire where Pax is a matter of human will and force.
Here's why I am an Episcopalian: the Eucharist unglues me. Since I first entered an Episcopal church when I was 19, it always has. This ritual works, symbolically, on every psychic level. In the immediate language of dreams it is the act of incorporating that which we would emulate, of "swallowing the leader". Then again, it is the sacrificial breaking open of the Godhead to become food for the people. Or, on the other hand, it is the shattering of divisive human egotism into the larger God-centered awareness. It is unity and abundance, the ever-flowing abundance of the Holy. It is the dance of humanity and divinity meeting and parting and meeting again.
These sentences only approximate the meaning of the Eucharist. At it's heart, like any good symbol, it is mystery. It is something to be lived into, understood, and even then not perfectly, through a lifetime of engaging it.
These days, for me, the Eucharist is about family. It is the blueprint of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the table at which all are welcome, the only table where I eat with people who are different from me in almost every way. Different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, sexual orientations and gender identities, political affiliations, spiritual understandings -- we all eat bread and wine, elbow to elbow, at Christ's table. We divide up a common loaf of bread. We share a single cup of wine. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in it together.
Good Friday, empty Friday: the male followers of Jesus scatter like leaves in a wind in the face of the death-by-torture of their Rabbi. The women, who as people of no account are flying under the radar, witness and mourn. It's all such a very public, so very demeaning tragedy -- for everybody. The Romans show their most brutish un-Pax-filled natures. The spiritual leaders of the Jews flamboyantly display their petty self-centeredness. The common people reveal the tendency of people everywhere to become with little provocation a mindless mob. Everybody is so very, very human. Re-enacting the story today I can find the bits of me that are like all of these characters.
Through all this walks Jesus, embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In everything he does he remains true to his larger vision of Pax, a Shalom with the heart of God. He sees everything with compassion, teaches where he can and submits where he cannot. He gives us a Way to go forward with one another and he remains true to that Way through torture and death.
Pax will never come to the Earth through human effort and force. It only arrives when we become open to the Shalom with the heart of God. By myself I am like all the characters in the Passion narrative: petty, abusive, blaming, judgmental, terrified, vindictive, and stupid. Fortunately I have a family that comes together over bread and wine to approximate a different understanding. Each faith tradition has a place like this, a place where we are family and our hearts become transparent to the heart of divinity. From these places Peace can be made. May God help us to recognize them in one anothers' Way.
Here's why I am an Episcopalian: the Eucharist unglues me. Since I first entered an Episcopal church when I was 19, it always has. This ritual works, symbolically, on every psychic level. In the immediate language of dreams it is the act of incorporating that which we would emulate, of "swallowing the leader". Then again, it is the sacrificial breaking open of the Godhead to become food for the people. Or, on the other hand, it is the shattering of divisive human egotism into the larger God-centered awareness. It is unity and abundance, the ever-flowing abundance of the Holy. It is the dance of humanity and divinity meeting and parting and meeting again.
These sentences only approximate the meaning of the Eucharist. At it's heart, like any good symbol, it is mystery. It is something to be lived into, understood, and even then not perfectly, through a lifetime of engaging it.
These days, for me, the Eucharist is about family. It is the blueprint of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the table at which all are welcome, the only table where I eat with people who are different from me in almost every way. Different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, sexual orientations and gender identities, political affiliations, spiritual understandings -- we all eat bread and wine, elbow to elbow, at Christ's table. We divide up a common loaf of bread. We share a single cup of wine. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in it together.
Good Friday, empty Friday: the male followers of Jesus scatter like leaves in a wind in the face of the death-by-torture of their Rabbi. The women, who as people of no account are flying under the radar, witness and mourn. It's all such a very public, so very demeaning tragedy -- for everybody. The Romans show their most brutish un-Pax-filled natures. The spiritual leaders of the Jews flamboyantly display their petty self-centeredness. The common people reveal the tendency of people everywhere to become with little provocation a mindless mob. Everybody is so very, very human. Re-enacting the story today I can find the bits of me that are like all of these characters.
Through all this walks Jesus, embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In everything he does he remains true to his larger vision of Pax, a Shalom with the heart of God. He sees everything with compassion, teaches where he can and submits where he cannot. He gives us a Way to go forward with one another and he remains true to that Way through torture and death.
Pax will never come to the Earth through human effort and force. It only arrives when we become open to the Shalom with the heart of God. By myself I am like all the characters in the Passion narrative: petty, abusive, blaming, judgmental, terrified, vindictive, and stupid. Fortunately I have a family that comes together over bread and wine to approximate a different understanding. Each faith tradition has a place like this, a place where we are family and our hearts become transparent to the heart of divinity. From these places Peace can be made. May God help us to recognize them in one anothers' Way.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Christian Loyalty
I am a Christian. In this day and age that admission is not without cost. Nevertheless I confess: I have a relationship of discipleship with the enigmatic, powerful, demanding Christ of the New Testament of the Bible. I believe him to be God incarnate, and accept all the challenges to the way I live my life that that belief brings.
When I was younger I used to wonder if I would have become a disciple of Jesus had I been alive and met him in first century Palestine. He was a dirty anti-establishment peace monger, a fringe dweller who demanded everything of the people who followed him. He turned all the dearly-held beliefs of his society upside down. Simply, forcefully, he introduced a whole new understanding of God, one that didn't include special privileges for people of certain tribal affiliations or levels of affluence. He taught radical inclusion, even of the ritually unclean. He demanded his followers learn the way of forgiveness and that they break old ties to kin and state. He asked, in other words, a fundamental realignment of loyalty away from the concerns of "the world" and toward this kooky understanding he called "the kingdom of heaven".
Lately I have come to see that of course I would have followed this weirdo. I follow him now. That might be partially an accident of culture and upbringing, but it is also a much deeper matter. He speaks to me from the center of my heart, from the room in my psyche where I stand in the presence of the divine. Certainly he would have spoken to me from that place had I met him in the outer world.
The real question is how well am I doing in being his disciple now. That is a moment to moment issue between me and the weirdo. As I understand it today, the kingdom of heaven is a bond of mutual accountability and care between me and all else that is. I have learned over the years that the distinctions between "the world" and this other kingdom are always murky. I think I am choosing in one direction and discover later it's really the other. Or my reasons for doing something morph midstream. Often I'm pulled into some course of action or involvement with others against my own will. The realignment of loyalty is tricky. I've learned to go slowly, look for feedback that comes over time, and not to be too flapped about playing the part of the fool.
Being a fool for Christ -- there's something noble about that. But just being a darn fool -- that's another matter. Unfortunately, you have to risk the latter in order to arrive at the former.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday. With millions of people around the world I reenacted the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and then the passion of his crucifixion. I heard the stories of how Christ's disciples reeled away from the outrageous, horrible, affronting realization of what choosing the kingdom of heaven really means. Betrayal, denial, violence, running naked through the streets -- we all have trouble looking through that bright, bright window that is the cross.
Entering into Holy Week, focal point of the Christian year, I will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on all these things. Thank God for the communities of faith with which I make this journey and for Christ himself, speaking from my heart.
When I was younger I used to wonder if I would have become a disciple of Jesus had I been alive and met him in first century Palestine. He was a dirty anti-establishment peace monger, a fringe dweller who demanded everything of the people who followed him. He turned all the dearly-held beliefs of his society upside down. Simply, forcefully, he introduced a whole new understanding of God, one that didn't include special privileges for people of certain tribal affiliations or levels of affluence. He taught radical inclusion, even of the ritually unclean. He demanded his followers learn the way of forgiveness and that they break old ties to kin and state. He asked, in other words, a fundamental realignment of loyalty away from the concerns of "the world" and toward this kooky understanding he called "the kingdom of heaven".
Lately I have come to see that of course I would have followed this weirdo. I follow him now. That might be partially an accident of culture and upbringing, but it is also a much deeper matter. He speaks to me from the center of my heart, from the room in my psyche where I stand in the presence of the divine. Certainly he would have spoken to me from that place had I met him in the outer world.
The real question is how well am I doing in being his disciple now. That is a moment to moment issue between me and the weirdo. As I understand it today, the kingdom of heaven is a bond of mutual accountability and care between me and all else that is. I have learned over the years that the distinctions between "the world" and this other kingdom are always murky. I think I am choosing in one direction and discover later it's really the other. Or my reasons for doing something morph midstream. Often I'm pulled into some course of action or involvement with others against my own will. The realignment of loyalty is tricky. I've learned to go slowly, look for feedback that comes over time, and not to be too flapped about playing the part of the fool.
Being a fool for Christ -- there's something noble about that. But just being a darn fool -- that's another matter. Unfortunately, you have to risk the latter in order to arrive at the former.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday. With millions of people around the world I reenacted the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and then the passion of his crucifixion. I heard the stories of how Christ's disciples reeled away from the outrageous, horrible, affronting realization of what choosing the kingdom of heaven really means. Betrayal, denial, violence, running naked through the streets -- we all have trouble looking through that bright, bright window that is the cross.
Entering into Holy Week, focal point of the Christian year, I will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on all these things. Thank God for the communities of faith with which I make this journey and for Christ himself, speaking from my heart.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
A Hag Wearing Jeans
This morning, sitting with my tea and my journal, I was visited in my imagination by a hag wearing faded jeans and a saggy grey sweat shirt. She was all over wrinkles, like the before pictures on the Weather Channel website.
I hate those images of wrinkle removal: the craggy face, exaggerated; the magic line, like a curtain dropping over reality, that transforms the face to youthful smoothness. The image, in maddening, boring repetition, etches itself on my psyche, one more form of subtle misogyny.
My heterosexual women friends have told me about the descent into invisibility that aging has brought them. No longer important in "the eye of the guy", as one woman put it, makes them feel worthless, like maybe it's their time to go out on the ice and die. I am assured that the most skilled and proficient career woman will feel this irrational tug. For me, a lesbian, "the eye of the guy" has been at best an irritant and at worst downright dangerous. Not being seen has always suited me just fine. And even so, I sometimes feel that aging diminishes me.
The hag, of course, would like to be called Sophia. "Hag" once meant wisdom instead of ugliness and invisibility. That this is a perspective from a long-ago time is attested to by our collective tales. In our stories and myths, what goddess hasn't hidden herself in some toothless old maid, to watch her people from secret vantage? Even Christ has taken the form of the helpless old widow. This could not happen if hags were attractive, held people's attention.
Sophia chuckles at me, daring me to quit projecting. Uncomfortably I remember the times I have smiled indulgently at collective wisdom as embodied in, for instance, the older women in my church. Then even more uncomfortably I think about the ways I am beginning to resemble those women. I'm just a teeny bit hard of hearing sometimes -- often because I think I know what someone is going to say before they actually say it. I ran into a door a couple of days ago -- gently, with a thud -- because I had expected it would be open and so didn't bother looking. I see paradigms I have longed to shed being broken open and discarded matter-of-factly by people a few years younger than me. That makes me unspeakably joyful. It also serves as warning that it is time for my leadership to take a different form.
Sophia nods, satisfied that now she has my attention. She reaches in the pocket of her jeans and removes a small vial. She prizes off the lid and pours a few drops of some liquid into her hand. Tucking the bottle under an arm she rubs her palms together, then comes at me hands outstretched. I close my eyes, expecting she will rub her ointment on my face.
Instead I feel her fingers against my heart. Small and cool, with that unmistakable sensation of another person's healing touch, they massage the oil in. And I remember -- my wisdom. I remember some of the hurts I have transformed through making them conscious, suffering them, allowing them to be healed; some of the projections I have reeled in and used as teachers; a few of the angers and resentments I have engaged and let go; one or two of the bumbling idiosyncrasies I have seen in myself and come to love. I discover in myself a valuable storehouse.
I can't tell you, just at this moment, what more to make of this vision. Sophia has wiped her palms on her jeans and is regarding me with eyes all a-twinkle. I am grateful that Wisdom treats me so gently. I am awed that she loves me with all the quiet certainly of a snowfall. I aspire to love all her children in just the same way. Impossible task for a little biased human -- I know. Yet still -- I can aspire.
I hate those images of wrinkle removal: the craggy face, exaggerated; the magic line, like a curtain dropping over reality, that transforms the face to youthful smoothness. The image, in maddening, boring repetition, etches itself on my psyche, one more form of subtle misogyny.
My heterosexual women friends have told me about the descent into invisibility that aging has brought them. No longer important in "the eye of the guy", as one woman put it, makes them feel worthless, like maybe it's their time to go out on the ice and die. I am assured that the most skilled and proficient career woman will feel this irrational tug. For me, a lesbian, "the eye of the guy" has been at best an irritant and at worst downright dangerous. Not being seen has always suited me just fine. And even so, I sometimes feel that aging diminishes me.
The hag, of course, would like to be called Sophia. "Hag" once meant wisdom instead of ugliness and invisibility. That this is a perspective from a long-ago time is attested to by our collective tales. In our stories and myths, what goddess hasn't hidden herself in some toothless old maid, to watch her people from secret vantage? Even Christ has taken the form of the helpless old widow. This could not happen if hags were attractive, held people's attention.
Sophia chuckles at me, daring me to quit projecting. Uncomfortably I remember the times I have smiled indulgently at collective wisdom as embodied in, for instance, the older women in my church. Then even more uncomfortably I think about the ways I am beginning to resemble those women. I'm just a teeny bit hard of hearing sometimes -- often because I think I know what someone is going to say before they actually say it. I ran into a door a couple of days ago -- gently, with a thud -- because I had expected it would be open and so didn't bother looking. I see paradigms I have longed to shed being broken open and discarded matter-of-factly by people a few years younger than me. That makes me unspeakably joyful. It also serves as warning that it is time for my leadership to take a different form.
Sophia nods, satisfied that now she has my attention. She reaches in the pocket of her jeans and removes a small vial. She prizes off the lid and pours a few drops of some liquid into her hand. Tucking the bottle under an arm she rubs her palms together, then comes at me hands outstretched. I close my eyes, expecting she will rub her ointment on my face.
Instead I feel her fingers against my heart. Small and cool, with that unmistakable sensation of another person's healing touch, they massage the oil in. And I remember -- my wisdom. I remember some of the hurts I have transformed through making them conscious, suffering them, allowing them to be healed; some of the projections I have reeled in and used as teachers; a few of the angers and resentments I have engaged and let go; one or two of the bumbling idiosyncrasies I have seen in myself and come to love. I discover in myself a valuable storehouse.
I can't tell you, just at this moment, what more to make of this vision. Sophia has wiped her palms on her jeans and is regarding me with eyes all a-twinkle. I am grateful that Wisdom treats me so gently. I am awed that she loves me with all the quiet certainly of a snowfall. I aspire to love all her children in just the same way. Impossible task for a little biased human -- I know. Yet still -- I can aspire.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
