Reflections on standing up for mothers.

I have always had a problem with the platitude spouted by everyone from Oprah to the president to principals and pastors, that motherhood is the toughest job in the world. I mean, don't get me wrong, motherhood is hard. It demands a near-constant turning from what the self wants to a much louder, needier, and more demanding self. And it's relentless--even if you try to get a break from it, something can come up--the school nurse calls, or worse, the police, and you have to leave your cup of coffee, or your massage therapist, or your life's work, to deal with one of the jobs of motherhood. But it's not the hardest job in the world. You know how I can tell? Here is a list of jobs I would never want to take on because of the hard work and living sacrifice they would require: President of the United States, firefighter, brain surgeon, prostitute. I would rather be a mother than any of those things. It is not a complete list.

In a lot of places, the church takes this sentiment, and puts a painful twist on it, telling women that God's highest calling for their lives is motherhood. Fortunately, I don't have a ton of direct experience with this evil load of facile crap. The idea is just so extremely wrong that I think I would laugh out loud if I ever heard it from the pulpit. I mean, being a mother definitely enriches my life, and hopefully, if I do it right, the world, but I'd like to think that the work I've done before and during my time as a mother has made an impact beyond that of my family. I'm amused by the idea that the work done by Madeline L'Engle, Dorothy Day, Sojourer Truth, Cady Stanton, Julain of Norwich, Hilary Clinton and Gloria Steinham could be somehow secondary to their roles (or lack of roles) as mothers.

So I was sympathetic when a friend shared a blog post on Mother's Day and church. It's an open letter to pastors by Amy Young. You can read it here.  In the article, Young points out that Mother's Day can be hard for some people in the church. When women are asked to stand, there are some who can't stand, even though they want to. And, while I sympathize with women who are struggling with trying to have children, whose children are dead or dying, and everyone else for whom the issue of motherhood is painful for some reason, I think this letter tries to do the worst thing possible to deal with the problem.

This letter is a version of a new genre of essay born of our blog-all-about-it environment: It's the blog post that effectively says, "There's something about me that makes me special and sad. And I'm not alone. Here's how I think you should change your behavior in order to make me feel better." The great thing about these pieces is that they give people a window into pain, hurt, and struggles that are inaccessible to us. They give us an idea of what others dealing with issue X have gone through so that when our friends tell us they are dealing with issue X, we have a bit of a head start on knowing what they need.

Of course, the big problem with these essays is a societal one. It can seem like everyone who is encountering a difficulty now feels they have a right to delineate all the ways that insensitive people have inadvertently rubbed salt into their wounds, and to demand that we start considering that the person in line with us at the grocery store might deserve special kid-glove treatment because she Has It Rough. If I read enough of these articles, I start fantasizing about staging virtual cage matches, where I pit New Family in Town against Mother of a Kid with Acne. A series of elimination rounds  would give us all a definitive order of deference to show the acquaintances in our lives (eg., peanut allergy trumps concussion victim, but aspergers beats them both).

The bigger problem with these articles is the same as their strength: they make us feel like we have a head start on knowing what people need. Most of the time, our friends need to have the chance to tell us themselves about how they feel about their particular pain. They need it because telling our stories is a big part of how we heal. We all need people who will sit and listen for as long as it takes, people who will hear our hurt and tell us that we're right, it's not fair, to cry and mourn with us, and then ask us what we're going to do about it.

Another reason that our friends need to be the ones to tell us what it's like to be them is that they aren't just feeling hurt. Friends who have lost children, struggled with infertility, given children up for adoption, are feeling a lot more than hurt when they keep their butts in the pews on Mother's Day. Some are feeling guilty, some are feeling grief, some are feeling jealous or angry or bitter or resentful, and they need to be able to tell someone about all of that. Confession is a sacrament for a reason.

Young says that in her thirties, there was a Mother's Day when it got personal for her.

I don’t know how others saw me, but I felt dehumanized, gutted as a woman. Real women stood, empty shells sat. I do not normally feel this way. I do not like feeling this way. I want no woman to ever feel this way in church again.

I certainly don't want people to feel dehumanized at church, but I don't agree with this sentiment at all. Church is exactly the place where people should feel like gutted, empty shells. Because ultimately, that is what we all are--every single one of us feels broken and empty and useless. So where but church should we to go to confront by all the ways that God has let us down in our lives? Isn't church exactly the place we should be when we're naming our pain and stuggling to make sense of it?
 I'm not saying that we should go out of our ways to make people feel worthless. I'm just saying that if asking a group of people to stand up can bring that out in a person, the feelings were already there to begin with. The situation just brought them to light. And just because that's a painful thing does not mean it's a bad thing. Pain is very useful for showing people the places that need healing. In my experience, church is excellent for excavating the painful places that need healing, on pretty much every Sunday.

I don't think removing the annual "can all mothers stand" for the sake of those who have pain around the issue of motherhood is any more appropriate than not honoring veterans on Veterans Day for the sake of war widows in the congregation.
 
You know who can't stand on Mother's Day? My mother. She had polio when she was a girl, and now she's in a wheelchair. (If my brother-in-law ever found himself at a gathering asking the fathers to stand, he wouldn't be able to either. He's a quadriplegic.) I haven't asked them, so I don't know, but I suspect that every time people are asked to stand, they are reminded of their otherness. Should we all stop standing for the pledge or kneeling in prayer during church because it reminds the wheelchair-bound that they're not like everyone else?

In the second part of the article, Young suggests that we honor all the ways women interact with the issue of motherhood. Even if pastors do manage to get through her exhaustive list there are still people who will end up marginalized: women who have had abortions, transgendered women who don't even have the option to get pregnant, and single fathers, who have had to do much of their families' mothering are still left sitting in the pews with their own particular pains and sorrows. I had serious issues with post-partum depression and an emergency C-section in which I'm told I was in danger of dying. She didn't even mention those issues. And even if they were added now that I've brought them to light, the list still couldn't be exhaustive. As much as we try to break the world down into affinity groups and awareness days, the world insists on being populated by individuals with individual stories to tell. No matter how hard we try, someone is always going to be reminded of her brokenness, poked in the sore spot of her heart.

This is a good thing.

It is part of the burden we bear from being alive. We all have these burdens, some of us more intensely than others. It's not a reason to stop celebrating people for the wonderful things they do--if anything, it's a reason to continue. If all we did was pussyfoot around, trying to avoid everyone's psychic burns and bruises, nobody could ever get anywhere.

The solution to the church's problem of the women who secretly grieve on Mother's Day is to know who those women are. Not the types of women who suffer, but the individuals.

If we are living our mission in the world, we will have relationships with the people we sit next to at church. We will know them and their stories well enough that we squeeze their arms while the mothers are standing. We will take a moment during the peace to say we have been thinking about them, hoping that this time of year isn't too difficult. We will reach out to them during the week and make them feel cared for and loved. We will take the time to help them feel like God is completing his good work in them, as they are, right now--and we can do that no matter who is standing up and who is sitting down.

What Makes Good Friday Good?

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

Just a quick post for Good Friday, because we've been on the road all day, and I'm going to fall asleep shortly.

I have never really liked Good Friday. It's a downer, and I spent too many nights listening to lay preachers go into the gruesome details of the crucifixion in order to impress upon me how much Jesus had to suffer for my sins. But today, I realized that I'm really very grateful for Good Friday, because so many of my own days are Good Fridays.

I don't mean that I've been crucified with Christ, or that I suffer much in any physical way. But if you look at the disciples on Good Friday, they have lost all hope. Their leader is dead and they can't make sense of the world. They are in despair.

I have frequently felt like God was completely absent from my life. In a way, it was as if He had died and I couldn't bring him back. In Good Friday, we have an affirmation that all of us lose hope sometimes. It is part of the Christian story--even Peter, who Jesus praised for his faith--couldn't even stand by his friend enough to admit knowing him. We all have moments when we despair, and Good Friday gives us a chance to see what is possible for people living in a hopeless world.

People of the Peter Persuasion

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Psalm 116:1, 10-17 

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." 

Disney World is not the worst place to contemplate the washing of feet. After all, metaphorically, that's what every "cast member" at Disney World does every day--they serve the visitors, answering annoying questions, fastening safety belts, cleaning up the garbage and keeping the bathrooms spotless, while never once show annoyance, or sarcasm or any negative emotion. They call little girls princess and wish you a "magical day." It can be difficult to take, especially if, like me, you're a person who's had a lot of experience working in service industries. I find myself wanting to make sure every costumed employee knows that I understand what a challenging job it is, and how badly some of Those Other Tourists can treat them. I really want every employee of Walt Disney Wold to know that I'm not like all of the other people who just mindlessly walk by, never considering that they have lives. Of course, I can't do that, because the employees aren't really allowed to have visible personal lives. They give them up in service to creating a land of pure fantasy where crime, clutter, and hard work don't exist--or at the very least, are never seen. As far as fantasy worlds go, it's a pretty good one.

In a way, Jesus is doing something similar when he washes the feet of the disciples--through an act of service, he's helping them to begin to imagine a new world in which the most powerful have no power over others. The most powerful, in fact, are the ones who serve. Because we live in a post-Jesus world, we maybe don't contemplate as much as we should how much of a unreachable fantasy world that must have seemed like at the time. Love one another? That's it? What about the law, what about the whole Chosen People thing--people who are separated from the rest through our specialness?


I really identify with Peter in the footwashing story. I think he's a little baffled, and very uncomfortable with this new order of things. Often, we see his refusal to let Jesus wash his feet as evidence of his love and devotion to Jesus. It's worth pointing out, though, that the old system is kind of working for him. Sure, Jesus is the Messiah, and Peter needs to serve him and always be below him, but he's positioned pretty high up in the whole social group that they've got going. One of the three who was able to see Moses and Elijah, and the only other person, that we know of, who was able to walk on water (for a second or two), Peter must be pretty invested in the way things are. If Jesus is suddenly humbling himself and doing all this serving, what does that mean about Peter's future in the organization?

Today, two thousand years after Jesus took on the role of servant, there is a new set of rules about how to excel at being God's people, and many of us act like Peter all over again. We can all think of people in the church who keep it running. They organize the coffee hour AND run a Bible study AND serve on a couple of committees AND are always among the first people to greet newcomers. All of these things are wonderful, or would be, if you didn't get the sense that these people are keeping track in their heads, figuring out how very last they are making themselves, so they can be first later.

Part of washing people's feet--the part that can be the most challenging for those of us who excel at rule following--is giving up the privilege of being the ones who are the washers.

On Easter Sunday, those of us who are church people will arrive for services much earlier than usual, and we will still find people sitting in our chosen pews. We will mentally sigh, and grumble, and try to find a familiar face to sit near, because we want to celebrate Easter with other people who have put in the time during the rest of the year. It will be especially difficult for me, because I've grown up in church, but we aren't really well known in our current church, and I will want to spend most of the service explaining to our neighbors that we aren't among the Christmas and Easters, that we actually belong. But of course, we all belong.

If we look around at the dressed up families in their three-piece-suits and bonnets and ruffles, and wish that they wouldn't keep invading our spiritual home twice a year without putting in the time during Epiphany and Pentecost, we might do well to remember the gift that we receive on Maundy Thursday. Maybe instead of offering a prayer book and pointing out the right page, or putting extra emphasis on Lord, when we say, "The peace of the Lord," or any of the other dozens of subtle ways that church people have found to seem like they're helping when they're really marking territory, maybe we can just sit and worship together, enjoy each other's company, and allow anyone who offers to wash our feet.

Staying Awake

The Liturgy of the Palms

Matthew 21:1-11
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

The Liturgy of the Word

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66 or
Matthew 27-11-54
Psalm 31:9-16 

I was laying in bed this morning, wondering how I was going to get this written, what with a plane to catch, and a bit of an insight hangover from three days of listening to brilliance. I had tried to write something very different last night, the thing I'd been planning on all week, when brain fog took over and I gave up. So I was not in an opitmistic state of mind as I woke up in my hotel room bed, thinking about how weak they make coffee in Michigan--even at Starbucks--when I had a revelation.

If you read the Gospels as a writer, you notice a change in that happens on Palm Sunday. Suddenly everything appears under a microscope. Up to this point, we've been hearing the words of Jesus--his parable, the sermon on the mount--and isolated incidents: the woman at the well, the conversation with Nicodemus, the raising of Lazarus. Everything has been very distilled and told at a bit of a remove.

Take "Jesus wept." As I said last week, we have no idea what amount of time is encompassed by that verse. Could have been five minutes. Could have been five hours. We don't know. In writing, they call that compression. Yet suddenly, today, we hear every detail. Where the donkey came from. What everyone had for dinner, and why. Washing the feet. Sweating blood. The soldier's ear. The zeal. The terror. The despair. Why? Why are John (and Matthew) suddenly so obsessed with all of the little details?

Well, a writer might say, this is the most important part of the story. The details make it feel real and fresh, as though we're there. And that's true, but an editor would say that the gospel writers really ought to have been going for that all along. The saying "Show, Don't Tell" is to writers what "One Day at a Time" is to AA.

But I think there's more going on. I think what we have in today's readings are the conglomorated stories of people so crushed and broken that they need to get it all out. Every last bit. They need to say everything that struck them about that night in the days and weeks and months and years that followed. Because when we experience something so shattering that if feels as though the very sky has torn apart, we need people to hear us.

Jim has family in Joplin, Missouri, and we had the great pleasure of visiting them two summers ago, a little more than a year after a catastrophic tornado ravaged their community. As we were getting ready to visit, I said to Jim, "I want to hear about the tornado, but I'm not going to ask about it. I don't want to make them relive the trauma, and they're probably tired of talking to people who can't really know what it's like."

Boy, was I wrong.

We weren't there a half an hour before someone mentioned the tornado. The tornado's damage was still everywhere, of course. There were entire neighborhoods where all the trees were gone. Whole streets were stripped of livable buildings. But if you didn't know where to look, it seemed like things were back to normal. People laughed, danced, had babies, gave hugs, and went about their days. The people of Joplin are very proud--and rightly--of the way they came together and started putting things back together on their own, without waiting for FEMA or other government assistance.

But in fact, nothing was back to normal, because the people of Joplin knew that they could never get back to what used to be normal. They were too changed. The tornado is everywhere in Joplin, including the conversation. Life is divided into before and after, the way life in New York and Washington, DC pivots on September 11. People were constantly telling us about how things had been before the tornado, and what had happened during the tornado. They needed to show and tell us what had been lost.

I think this is true of all of us. I think it's what's going on with the gospel writers. When the world is torn in half, when we're so broken and damaged that restoration and repair are inconceivable, we need to be heard.

Jesus was in the garden at Gethsemane, and he did something he rarely did. He asked the disciples for help: "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me." We know that he walked off, but we know he was still within earshot, because the disciples tell us what he said. And we know that the disciples missed out on a lot of what he said, because he kept coming back to them and finding them asleep. Is it possible that even Jesus, in his full humanity, needed a witness to his devastation and grief?

When my father was in the last weeks of his life, I went to the hospital. When I arrived, we started talking about how to split up our schedules so that his wife could go home and get some sleep, and patch together the responsibilities she had that wouldn't wait for her world to stop turning upside down. They had known Dad didn't have a very long time, but a nurse had used the word "terminal" for the first time that week, and it had shaken us all. In the midst of this conversation of calendars and errands, my father, who was not a man for admitting any sort of weakness if he could avoid it, said, "Well, I would really appreciate it if someone would stay the night. I don't like waking up here alone." I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.

It can be so hard to stay awake for people--even when we are up and walking around. We are innundated with a cornucopia of distractions. People talk proudly of multitasking, and I know mothers who spend their days driving their children from one activity to another, patching together a life of activity in which nobody ever has a chance just to sit and be. It is quite possible to get through a day of errands without looking anyone in the eye. I know this must be true, because when I remember to look at the cashier in the McDonald's or Starbuck's drive through, they always seem so surprised. And when we do begin to pay attention, it is easy to get overwhelmed by how much pain and horror the world contains.
 
But most of the time, we don't have the excuse of the flesh that the disciples had. The disciples were pretty grieved themselves, after all. Their slumber in the garden reminds me of the knack babies have for putting themselves to sleep. It's as if they have a light switch on their consciousness. When things get to be too much, something inside them just flips it to off. It seems like something similar is going on with the disciples--they're just so overwhelmed, they are incapable of processing even one more  of Jesus' anguished pleas to God. Maybe what Jesus should have said was, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is frustratingly protective of itself."

But mostly, what we're lacking is the willing spirit. It is hard to stay awake. It is scary, and sad, and inconvenient and uncomfortable. But it is so necessary.

A person can say a thousand times, "Our town was devastated by a tornado," or, "My father died two years ago," or, "Jesus was crucified," but telling does not rebuild her soul. Showing does. Showing is the way we get a witness to our grief. We need the world to know every last detail. We need to show our pain and our loss, and we need to tell, no, show, our stories. And we need to show them, maybe  more than once, maybe a lot more than once, to people who are really listening.

Because it is not the showing that begins to heal us. It's the being heard by those who are fully awake. When enough people witness, really witness, our pain and our loss, that is when we, like the disciples, can begin to build a new and powerful and miraculous way to be alive again.

And so, my dear friends, let us make this week, and every week that follows, a truly holy week. Let us, like the disciples, help each other clear away the rubble of our sorrows and losses and disappointments. Let us, like the disciples, build new and powerful and miraculous lives on the foundations of our grief.

Let us remain awake for one another.

Notes from Day Two of the Festival of Faith and Writing

It occurs to me that what we're all really doing here is telling stories and listening to stories. I went to six different sessions today and listened to eight different writers talk about faith and writing and art and life, but really what we all were doing was telling and listening to stories. Then, in between sessions, I chatted with fellow conference-goers, and we told and listened to each others' stories.

Yesterday, one of the writers said that it's sometimes annoying that Jesus spoke in stories, because it would be nice if he would have just made his meaning a little more clear. In some way, that's a tantalizing thought, but I find myself becoming re-convinced and re-energized about the power and utility of stories.

For one thing, I love the way stories can have different meaning for different people, all of which can be true simultaneously.

Here's an example I heard today: Deborah Heiligman (The Boy Who Loved Math, Charles and Emma) read this story from a book by Martin Buber. She concluded by saying that we can do all sorts of things, travel everywhere, without ever realizing that all along, our treasure has been right below our feet. And yet, for me, the story was about being willing to follow wherever it seems like God is leading to find out the truth about where your treasure is. After all, it's not like the Rabbi in the story would ever have just randomly dug up the area under his stove, unless he'd taken the journey.

Stories have always been the way we all get at our truth--and I'm not just saying that because I've been hanging out with readers and writers all day. You hear a friend's story about a difficulty she's having, and you tell a story about a time you felt that way. Maybe you mention what you learned, or maybe you just sit together, knowing the feeling together. Then later, if a friend asks you what's new, or how you're doing, you might tell the story of that story-telling.

It's funny then, that as writers, we so completely resist actually telling the story. We want to tell about it, say what it means, when really we should just be getting out of the way, and letting the story do its thing. The best writing happens when we allow the story to just exist on its own, told as well as we can tell it. This involves a lot of faith--regardless of religious persuasion--because we can't control the story once it's out there. We must have faith in the story to convey truth, and we have to have faith in readers to pay close enough attention to discover that truth. Then we have to have faith that even if the truth that a reader discovers is not the truth that we intended them to find, the story is big enough to hold them both.

Reflections on Day One of the Festival of Faith and Writing

So Gene Luen Yang sort of negated the last eight years of my life this morning during his plenary session, "Is Art Selfish." He talked about a friend who stopped painting when his kids were born, because he had mouths to feed and people depending on him for their survival. The friend said something to the effect of, "Making art just seems selfish now." After some discussion about how making art forces us to be selfish in a lot of ways--we need uninterrupted time to create, and time spent making art comes with an opportunity cost--he said this: "Having kids is not a reason to stop making art. It's a reason to start. Because they need stories to help them navigate the world." I'm sure that's not an exact quote, but it's close.

I heard that, and thought to myself, "Hmm... Maybe I've been making excuses for myself. Maybe I should have been working on my art all along." Of course, this probably amuses anyone who knows me, since I never stopped writing or making art. In some ways I did more. But I feel like I always let writing and art take a back seat to the needs of the kids. I found myself wondering whether a woman would have stated the same sentiment as unequivocably as Yang. Because the thing is, it doesn't matter how good and right it is to make art, somebody really does have to make sure the kids don't kill each other. Yang closes his office door, and even locks it. When his kids come and knock, he doesn't always answer. Then they reach their hands under his door.

You know that at some point, they go off and find the other adult capable of making them a peanut butter sandwich, or reading a story, or whatever other thing those needy needy small humans want at that moment.

At the same time, though, he alluded to a point that just blew me away. Yang teaches at a high school--I don't trust my memory, so I'm not going to name the topic, but it was sciencey--he had an opportunity to use one summer to chaperone his students in a tutoring program for children in need. The high-schoolers would spend the days teaching younger kids. It was a good program that would have benefited his students and the needy children they would teach. He chose not to do it because he wanted to use the summer to make his art. At the time, he wondered whether he was being selfish. Then he pointed out that the kids still got tutored.

And that was a flash of insight. Because I was listening to him, thinking, well, of course you should do that. It's more important to help needy children than to make art. I probably would have made that choice--here's a worthy cause, asking me for help. I can do it, and I can do a good job. A bunch of needy kids is more important than whatever art I could make, right? Well, maybe. But there's a subtle problem with the question.

So often, an opportunity or a need will come up, and we think (or I think, anyway) that I have to chose between making the world better or making art. But really the choice is between me being the one to make the world better in that way, or letting someone else make the world better in that way, while I focus on trying to make the world better with my art. When I think of it that way, art doesn't seem quite so selfish after all.

Of course, there are times, especially at home, when I'm the only one who can do the thing that needs to be done. Then it really is more like the first version of the choice, and of course, sometimes art has to get in line behind a scraped knee or a bad dream. But sometimes being "selfish" by doing what we feel we've been called to do involves a lot less ego than deciding to do something out in the world at the expense of our art, just because we forget that we aren't the only qualified do-gooders in the universe.

Other gleanings from Day One:


Because Gene Luen Yang writes graphic novels (he prefers comic books), he often attends cons. One day a group of cosplayers went by, and his friend said to him, "Don't you feel like there's something religious going on here?"

Ron Koertge spoke to a class at Calvin before speaking at the festival. Apparently a student gave him a hard time about his book Coaltown Jesus because he made Jesus a "sinner," in her opinion. His response--maybe he just looked like he was being a sinner, because the kid he was helping so badly needed to be reached, and this was the way to reach him. It amuses me to think about how even fictional Jesus gets accused of being a sinner while doing good. I also like that this happened right before Palm Sunday, when we traditionally remember how much people wanted Jesus to be someone he wasn't.

James McBride (The Color of Water, The Good Lord Bird): (again, this is a paraphrase) "Most of the things I did, I failed. The difference between me and the other guy is when I fail, I just forget about it and move on."

Over and over, I've heard authors today say that when deciding what goes into a book and what doesn't, they bring themselves back to "What is the mission of the book?" So, from almost the beginning, they are thinking, not exactly in terms of a tagline, but in terms of what, specifically, they want the central issue of the book to be.

That's it for Day One. Wish you were here.

Yeah, right, Jesus loves me. The Bible's full of crap.

The Lessons for the Fifth Week in Lent
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130 

Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

`Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' 

When I was reading the passages this week, there were so many different things to notice. You could write a sermon about any one of them:

• Why does Jesus weep outside of Lazarus's home? I wonder if this is a crucial experience to Jesus' life as a human. Aren't we all transformed by our first experience of the death of someone very close to us? Is this Jesus' first resurrection, as well? Does he come away from his experience of mourning a different man?
• What is life like for Lazarus when he comes back from the dead? There's a great article in Salon.com this week about Near Death Experiences. One of the things it mentions is that people who have them, re-enter their lives radically transformed in very similar ways.
• In both stories, God uses a human make the dead come alive. That has so much to say about how God can use us--maybe even, needs us?--to revive the dead. 

But the thing I kept coming back to all week was a wedding.

I'm sure I grew up hearing the story of the Valley of Dry Bones, but the first time I remember hearing it, I was in my early twenties, attending the wedding of the man that I knew God wanted me to marry.

I'd met Samuel (name changed) in college my junior year, and by the time I graduated, I'd fallen, slowly and completely, in love with him. Samuel was everything I hoped for in a husband--smart, funny, breathtakingly attractive, and most important, deeply engaged with God and living out his faith in the real world. I needed him. He was the only person I knew who could let me question anything at all--anything--without feeling like God would break if I kept pushing. I knew that we were supposed to be together. Samuel did not seem to agree.

I would often bring our relationship up with God--one day, when I was lying in my dorm room, alternating between crying and praying, I had one of those moments preachers talk about right before they ask you for money. I felt more than heard a message from God in my head. God said, "Wait. You will be together, but now is not the time."

So I waited. I stopped fantasizing about marrying Samuel, and faithfully left it in God's hands tried to remind myself, when I was questioning my future with this man, that now was not the time. I considered, but ultimately decided against, joining the organization that he worked for. The summer after I graduated, during the training session I was to have attended, he met the woman he ended up standing beside at the altar while someone read the story of the Valley of Dry Bones.

I remember thinking that the reading was appropriate for any child of divorce. My own parents' marriage was in the throes of a painful and protracted death. It made me question everything I thought I knew about love. Their impending divorce made me feel defective, incapable of love, and destined to a life of singleness. A happy marriage seemed as impossible as getting bones to knit together, enflesh themselves, and walk, just because God tells a prophet to give the command. Being at the wedding of the man God had promised to me didn't exactly mitigate those feelings.

But I was putting on a cheerful face. I didn't think anyone knew I was at a funeral. Sure, I was wearing a mostly black dress, but it had lots of floral patterns on the skirt, and anyway, I was from the East Coast where people wore black all the time. I was happy for him. For them. Yes, I was wandering in the wilderness, watching the promise that God had made to me fall from my hands and dry up my future, but I think I was doing a good job of faking it.

I was watching, smiling, while the couple had their first dance, when my best friend came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked how I was doing. It was like the touch of his hand pressed a button that released all of my emotion at once. The tears just sprang to my eyes. I may have even allowed a sob to escape, before he guided me from the reception hall. I don't remember anything else, except shame, embarrassment, and a burning need to keep this from the couple. I didn't want my feelings to be part of the story of their wedding. I think we went outside. I think I eventually went back to the reception and visited with friends. But somewhere in between leaving and going back in, I wept.

It's tempting to fast-forward to the present. Here I am now, in a marriage that is, at its core, exactly what I was asking God for during those confused and desperate prayers in college. I see that God fulfilled the promise so much more fully than I, in my funereal dress and plastered on smile, was capable of imagining. So God's promise was eventually fulfilled. For me. In this case. In a very different way from what I had imagined.

But it wasn't true for some ten or fifteen years, while I struggled, trying to understand if that promise was real, trying to understand if God was real, and if so, what was I getting right and what was I getting wrong? I spent at least a couple of years worrying that I'd been the one to blow it on the promise--if I had been part of the organization, maybe I would have been the one he fell in love with during summer training, maybe it would have been me up there at the altar, dancing to Etta James. (Well, OK, there's no way the Etta James part would ever have happened. I had a different song in mind.) But the reasons didn't matter. As far as I was concerned, the promise was dead. Dry bones. Rotting and stinking in the tomb.

This contributed to and coincided with a major crisis of faith, in which I spent a great deal of time wondering whether God listened to our prayers, or cared about us, or even existed at all. (You could make a case that I'm still in that crisis, but that's a discussion for another day.)

When you are stuck in the Valley of Dry Bones, it's very difficult to see any way that anything could be alive again. We've all been there. Whether it's the death of a marriage, a career, a friendship, or a dream we've given our lives for, we've all walked through the Valley of Dry Bones, with nothing alive for as far as the eye can see. It's easy to get stuck there, and very difficult to pick up the pieces. Only the most valorous of us are able to say to the broken, dead, dross of our lives, "God is going to make this good. You will live again."

Most of the time, most of us can't find the breath to say the words. We just can't believe anything will be alive again. So we bury our hope for the future and our belief in a God that cares. We hide away our dead relationships and our murdered dreams back behind a stone, where we imagine them rotting and stinking things up so bad that we don't ever want to look at them again.

Sometimes, the most we can do is to get up from where we are mourning our losses, and say to Jesus, "Where were you? How could you let this happen?"  And Jesus says, "show me." So we take him, never daring to believe that even Jesus can make things right. And when we show him, Jesus weeps.

He sits there at the tombs of our greatest failures, our murdered dreams and shattered hopes, and before he gets about the business of transformation, he sits there with us, deeply moved, and weeps. We don't know how long Jesus wept. John 11:35 has enjoyed notoriety as the shortest verse in the Bible, but as any writer will tell you, you can cover an eon with two words. I think we can assume the crying went on for as long as necessary.

It's not until he has mourned with us what we have lost, that finally, we are able to hear his voice above our own sobs: "Take away the stone," he says. Like that's going to make any difference. Some time much later, after we have exhausted our own protests against getting what we say we want, Jesus calls to what was dead in us, and we watch it, dressed for the grave, lurching out into the light. The whole scene is so completely unthinkable, we just sit there, frozen, until finally, Jesus comes up behind us, puts a hand on our shoulder, and says, "Unbind him, and let him go."
 

Some program notes

Hello, friends. Here we are at the fifth Sunday in Lent, so it's time for a few program notes:

Next week, everything gets very intense. And not just in the lectionary, but also for me. This time next week, I will be blogging to you from the Festival for Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There are going to be all sorts of amazing luminaries from the world of writing about faith (Rachel Held Evans and Annie Lamott, among others). Several of you have told me that you'd really like to go, so I'm going to post completely non-Lenten updates throughout the week.

From there, we're taking the kids to Disney World. That's right, on Maundy Thursday, we might be watching a parade and fireworks, and on Good Friday, we could be eating with princesses and not even skipping dessert. I'm planning to blog the Holy Week readings, at night. Who knows what kind of parallels there are to be drawn between the Last Supper and Cinderella's Royal Table?

I've added a "Subscribe by email button" to the right of this page, for those of you who don't want to miss a single post. (I won't be linking to the posts via Facebook, except for Sundays, so be sure to check back if you're interested, but don't want email alerts.)

Also, I'm planning to continue this blog after Easter, so I hope if I've been part of your Lenten discipline this year that you'll consider checking in a few times throughout the year. I'm not sure how the blog will change. I guess we'll find out together.

Holy Spit and the Holy We

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
Psalm 23


"...for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

"If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, `We see,' your sin remains."


What kind of a person sees a man, blind from birth, have his sight restored, and claims it's the work of the devil, because of the day of the week it happened on? The kind of person who sends $35 a month to a charity in order to assure that a hungry child can eat, but then decides she can't support that charity because some of the people who work to feed the child are having gay sex? I'm thinking yes.

What kind of a person sees a man, blind from birth, and decides that the kid's parents must have done something so heinous that God decided to punish them with their child's blindness. The same kind of person who would claim that Hurricaine Katrina was a punishment from God, and protest at funerals to "prove" it? I'm thinking yes again.

At the beginning of the week, when I first started reading the lessons, I thought to myself, "Well, it's good that we've progressed beyond thinking that God would punish parents for their sinfulness by sacrificing a child's sight." But then I started thinking about how every time we have a storm or some other tragedy, some fame-hungry religious blowhard is happy to pin the misfortune on the perceived sins of some group of people that he thinks is completely unlike him.

About then is when I started thinking that when Jesus said, "The poor, you shall always have with you," he might as easily have said, "The blind self-righteous douchebags, you will always have with you." It would have been just as true. And I haven't really come down yet from feeling like religion attracts the opinioinated, self-righteous, condemning and insincere powertrippers who are more about being in an exclusive group of The Elect than about helping to grow the Kingdom of God.

But, of course, Jesus famously said, "Suffer all the assholes to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is kingdom of heaven." Or something close to that, anyway, right? Because when I look at people who decide, based on their own limited knowledge of God's Word, who gets to be in the group and who gets stuck outside, it brings me right back to fifth grade.

You know how a lot of the time in the later years of elementary school, there's one kid who gets singled out as the weirdo? Through some strange pre-preadolescent, group ESP, it's agreed that it's always okay treat this one kid like garbage, because that kid is so different she isn't even really a person, as we understand people at that age. Maybe she's got a little mild autism--not enough to really be different, because making fun of that would be cruel--but enough to be not quite the same as the rest of us. Maybe she's just a new kid, with skin that's slightly browner, or not brown enough, who pronounces her R's in a weird way. Who was that kid at your school?

Maybe you're thinking I'm going to tell you that I was that girl in fifth grade. If so, you've got another think coming. That role belonged to a girl, lets call her Jane, who usually came to school with her greasy bangs sticking to her forehead, looking kind of rumpled. I still remember the time she came to school on picture day, hair washed, in two pigtails with ribbons, in a lovely, clean, pressed dress. I had the nerve to say to my friend, "I thought Jane looked really nice today," and my friend said something like, "Well, I didn't. She looked like she was trying too hard. And now she's shown that she knows how to look good, so it just proves what a scrub she is for not trying the rest of the time." (Scrub was a big word back then.) That quote sums up the catch-22 that the Janes of the world are in: If she showed up being herself, greasy hair and all, she was a scrub. If she tried to conform, wearing dresses and doing her hair, she was a loser for trying too hard.

Back then, teachers still let you get away with taunts in the schoolyard, so when we would line up to go in from recess we'd play a "game" called "Blackout." It was basically an excuse to slap and insult each other. If a kid touched another kid, the second kid would slap his neighbor and say, "So-and-so's germs, blackout!" And that shout would travel up the line as each child loudly emoted the horror of getting stuck with so-and-so's germs. If you cared about a person, you could save her from mortal humiliation, keep her germs, and the game would be over. Mostly, people called Jane's name. Jane's name was one of the only ones that would travel all the way down the line.

It was one of the names that went the whole way down the line, but not the only one. There was a boy, who was basically the male counterpart to Jane. He was necessary for expressing something about the heinousness of boys, and also so that we could make fun of Jane without insulting a "real" boy, when we wanted to have her sitting in a tree with someone. And then there was me. I was the alternate Jane. I was very aware that I was, not the least popular girl in my school, but second-least. The other girls, especially the tight little knot of opinion-makers that, even in fifth grade, wielded enormous social power, would call out my name for a little variety.

I was new to the school, which had a very different culture from the school I had come from, and I was used to being in the knot. So when The Knot made fun of me for not shaving my legs, I told Mom I needed to start shaving my legs. She said no. When I told The Knot that Mom wouldn't let me shave, they made fun of me for not wearing pantyhose. I told Mom I needed pantyhose. Mom was flabbergasted: "In fifth grade?!! No. If you really want to, you can wear nylon kneehighs." So I tried the kneehighs. The Knot pointed and laughed. The Knot mostly wore Levis cords anyway. I told Mom I needed Levis cords from the expensive store downtown. Out of the question. "Well, I need something. Nobody wears dresses at this school." My mother, who didn't really get it, because she couldn't see that there was anything wrong with me in the first place, went to Zayers and bought me two pairs of polyester stretch pants. And of course, then the Knot left me alone after that, because they had nothing more to make fun of. Not.

But I kept wearing the stretch pants anyway, partly because if I didn't, I would have gotten in trouble for wasting money, but mostly because I gave up trying to get along with the Knot. I got used to hearing my name called with horror as it moved up and down the recess line. I got used to being picked second-to-last for kickball. And anyway, it wasn't so bad. At least I wasn't Jane.

Comparison is an insidious thing. I have seen it keep strong women in soul-crushingly damaging relationships, as they think, "He can be cruel, but at least he doesn't hit me, like the last guy did," or "Well, yeah, he gets drunk a lot, but at least he's holding down a job. He isn't a raging alcoholic like my dad." I have seen it rob women of their accomplishments: "Sure, I published my novel, but only with a small house. It's not like I'm at a good publishing house, like So Andso." And I have known it to trap people in a system that nobody deserves: "I may be a loser, but at least I'm not as much of a loser as Jane."

Because, I don't know whether you noticed, but when I was describing the way Blackout is played, I didn't use the word they. I used we. Because, make no mistake: I played. I didn't really like the game, but I certainly played. In a way, I loved it when people would play Blackout with Jane's name, because for those few second, when I could slap someone's hand and cry, "Jane's germs, blackout," I could pretend that I was just like everyone else. I could believe that maybe this time, finally, they were going to let me in.

So imagine what it must be like for a man, blind from birth, to hear a bunch of religious people talking about his condition as theological puzzle. Here's a guy who is known by everyone in the community as the blind guy. At first, it might seem like a regular day. Probably he's used to people talking about him as if his broken eyes had broken his ears as well. So they're just completing the job by breaking his heart: "Whose sin caused this man to be blind?" Whose fucking sin caused this man to be blind? Seriously? Because you need so badly to cling to your belief that God only creates things that you deem perfect and good, that you'd rather believe in a God who punishes people by disfiguring their children? What the kind of a hellish religion is that?

And what does our beloved Jesus do? He says this: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." At first, this seems like an equally dickish move. God makes a man live his whole life until Jesus stumbles across him (hopefully not literally) so that His glory can be revealed? A lot of sources go with this interpretation, but it has problems. For one thing, it's ignoring all the other people who are born blind, and yet not healed by Jesus' spit.

I think that interpretation might be limited by our tendency to apply causality to things that happen right before and after each other: Jesus says the guy was born blind so that God's works could be revealed in him. Then he heals him and that's miraculous, so that must be the work of God that he's talking about. Except that Jesus says "we all,"--so, everyone present, including the blind man--need to do the work of "him who sent me" for as long Jesus gives us light to see by.

What was that like for the blind man? First, Jesus says, "Nobody sinned to make this happen." Imagine that. It could very well be the first time the man ever heard from anyone that being blind wasn't his fault. Oh, the kinder ones might have come along and said something like, "It's not your fault that your parents sinned, but just try to remember that you are living out their pennance for them." But it's possible that nobody had ever said to him, "You were born this way, just because it is who you are. God will use who you are to reveal his glory in the world." Most important, Jesus makes him part of the "We."

Then he spits in the dirt and covers the guy's eyes with Jesus mud, and the guy doesn't go, "Jesus' germs, blackout!" Even though it's kind of gross to have someone else's spit in your eyes, people have been spitting in this guy's eyes for a long time. In fact, I don't think it's so completely outside the realm of possibility that the mud is there because the guy is so moved by finally being included in the Holy We that his own tears are already leaking out of those maybe-not-so-useless-after-all eyes of his. So Jesus covers up the tears and sends him off for a little alone time until he can get himself together.

The rest of the story is Jane on picture day. People are so resistant to letting this guy in that they do all sorts of mental gymnastics: It's not really him. He wasn't really blind from birth. They harass the guy with questions, then they harass his parents, and then they bring him back again, and this is where the blind man truly gains his sight. Because finally, after a lifetime of just wanting to be part of the group, of wanting, just once, to be called sinless and clean, he sees what Jesus states at the end of the story. These people who have spent their lives calling him a sinner and ignoring him as something less than fully human? They still can't let him in. They can't see how blind they've been. So he has the joyous luxury of rejecting them, and going back to the guy who never thought there was anything wrong with him in the first place.

Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelp died recently, having personally condemned numerous soldiers and gay people to his own personal hell. This week, international charity World Vision announced that they would let married gays and lesbians work there. That lasted twenty-four hours, until a ton of Evangelicals accused World Vision of siding with the devil. It's easy to think we know who the blind ones are. But we need to remember: all of us think that we're the ones who can see.

Sometimes when we think someone needs healing, it's our eyes that need opening. Sometimes, we think Jesus is making someone whole, when he's trying to tell us they've been whole all along. We have all been guilty of standing in the recess line of the Kingdom of God, calling, "Fred Phelps' germs, blackout!" "Blind guy's germs, blackout!" "Gay guy's germs, blackout!"  We call people names like "fame-hungry religious blowhard," and we blind ourselves from seeing the whole of Christendom--no, not Christendom, the whole of humanity--and the whole humanity of Christendom, for that matter.

But one thing is certain. As we stand on line, calling out names with horror and revulsion, unable to face what it would say about ourselves if we included our own personal Janes in our own personal Knots, there is one place in the line where the shouting grows silent. Fred Phelp's germs? Bring them on. Gay guy's germs? He'll take them too. Fame-Hungry Religious Blowhard? Blind, Self-Righteous Douchebag? Got you covered. He's not saying that many of us can see more than a few inches in front of our faces, and, frankly, he'd like us to work on that, but make no mistake, we're in. We're all in.

Well, well, well! If it isn't Slutty McHalf-Breed!

Readings for the Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Psalm 95

I have always loved the story of the woman at the well, and not just because it's the only place in the Bible where Jesus passive-aggressively calls a woman a whore to her face. I love it because it's one of the big passages people use to point out that Jesus was a feminist. It's hard to see that from today's perspective, though. I mean, from a modern point of view, this whole exchange has a little too much of a "Yo, Bitch, make me a sandwich" vibe. And there's plenty of racist subtext as well--I mean, "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation comes from the Jews?" You can almost see him blowing on his nails and buffing them against his tunic.

Of course, we don't talk about this aspect of Jesus. We tend to focus on the ways that this exchange is counter-cultural for the time. The disciples are astonished that he's with a woman when they come back--so that gives an inkling of how radical it was for him even to talk to her. And I get that and appreciate it, but it certainly seems that he wasn't thinking of her as his equal.

So far, this Lent has me wondering a lot about whether and how God grows and changes over time, and I find myself wondering how differently the exchange would go if it were happening today. I hope Jesus still wouldn't be pulling this "we're superior to you half-breeds" thing, let alone the whole, "You've been with five men. Who do you think you are, Liz Taylor?"

But I wonder whether Jesus is fronting a little bit. Is it possible that he doesn't really care about whether she's a woman, or a slut, or a Samaratin? After all, she's the one who seems to have a chip on her shoulder about it all--"What are you asking me for a drink for? You, a Jew, and me a Samaratin?" And she's coming at high noon, a time of day when she can be pretty certain that the well will be empty. Like, maybe she's avoiding all the more respectable first-thing-in-the-morning women who fix her with those mean girl glares. The ones who abruptly end conversations as she walks by and then giggle to each other as soon as her back is turned.

Is it possible that she, like many people who are the victims of racist, sexist, bigoted thinking, has internalized the message enough that she's the one who doesn't believe he should be talking to her? Does she believe that Jews and men and most women really are superior to her?

I think she does--or at the very least, she's so used to hearing about her own inferiority that she can't imagine someone else not thinking of her that way. And I think most of us are like the Samaratin woman. We've internalized all the things that our culture has said to us about how we don't measure up.

I know that, for myself, I can never be beautiful enough, thin enough, fit enough, talented enough or successful enough to deserve the space I occupy on this earth. I sometimes feel like until I can fit into a size ten dress again, I don't have any right to expect to be treated as an equal. Everyone around me seems to have it more together than me, and I sometimes feel like if the people who love me really knew how weak and unworthy I am, they would all turn away from me and never look back. I am a priviledged white woman living what most of our parents would have called the American Dream: handsome, successful husband, three glorious children with brains, looks and talent, decent house in one of the richest counties in the country. If I can feel unworthy of the air I breathe, should I doubt that the Samaratin woman felt the same?

And Jesus would have known it. I bet he would have seen it while she was still half a mile away from the well, walking with her head down, back hunched over, willing people not to notice her. Maybe he thought, "How can I ever reach her? She doesn't think she's worth reaching." The Samaratin woman and I, and most of us, I think, are filled with reasons that we aren't worthy--I'm not a real Jew, I'm not a man, I'm weak--and I'm weak in the ways that everyone around me says are the worst ways to be weak. What, Jesus, could you possibly want with me?

So what does Jesus do? Well, he doesn't lead with the living water stuff--and I think I know why. I think if he said, "Hey, give me a drink from the well, and I'll give you such water that you'll never be thirsty again," she would have just blown him off. She would have thought, like so many people think so often, "If he really knew who he was talking to, he wouldn't ever make that kind of offer to the likes of me." Or worse, "I can't take that offer--what if I get it, and then he finds out who I really am, and he makes me give it back? I couldn't bear the pain of that loss--better not to ever have it in the first place. You can't miss what you never had."

So Jesus, wonderful sexist, racist Jesus, does what he is so good at. He goes beyond the superficial politics of what "you Jews" say about "us Samaritans," and he names what's really bothering her. He lays her deepest secrets bare, and he does it right away, so that when he offers the Samaritan woman his living water, she knows that he's making the offer--oh, miracle--to her true self. Not the chip-on-the-shoulder, tough-as-nails shell that she wears as facade and armour, but her warty, slutty, weak, and undeserving half-breed self, who he somehow--really? Really.--thinks is worthy of this gift.

After that, who wouldn't go running through town, saying to  anyone who would listen, "He told me everything I've ever done! He knew the real me, and he still talked to me! He can't be the Messiah, right? Would the Messiah talk to me like that? But who other than the Messiah would ever talk to me like that?"

So many of us feel like a Samaritan woman. We struggle and toil, fighting uphill battles to whatever wells we have available, just to get a little refreshment. Our wells can be anything--accomplishment, exercise, alcohol, junk food, or the good opinion of people who don't know our truest selves. We visit our wells daily, and draw just enough to make it til tomorrow. We think we don't deserve to expect more. And every time we go back to the well for another draw, Jesus is sitting there, waiting. He already knows what we don't want him to know. He's fully aware of whatever it is that we think disqualifies us from a refreshment that will sustain us indefinitely--one that will allow us never to have to sneak to the well again--and he's waiting to give it to us, as soon as he can make us believe we deserve it.

Not Above Being Born

Readings for the second Sunday in Lent:

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121 

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations") -- in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. --Romans 4: 16,17

Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." John 3:3

I wonder whether God has been born again.

It sometimes seems like God changes between the Old and New Testaments, like there's been a kind of transformation, in which God gives up on a lot of the smiting and just settles in to being all about love. I wonder whether God could make a dead God alive again, or whether God could create Godself from nothing. I was really struck this week by the phrase in the Romans passage that says that God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist."

Nice work if you can get it. But it's kind of a weird thing to think about. For one thing, I, personally, have never seen a dead thing come to life. I can imagine some ways to interpret this that would make it feel true, but I wonder whether Paul was speaking in metaphorical terms. Like maybe about how Abram was old enough to be on his way out (or maybe in his delicacy, Paul is referencing fertility), but God brought him back to life. I suppose, if you want to be very direct, you could say that the "things that do not exist" could be referring to Abram's offspring.

But what I like thinking about more, was whether God could call Godself into existence.  I wonder whether, in Jesus, God was born again.

I've read the John passage many times, but the translation on The Lectionary Page is the New Revised Standard Version, in which Jesus says, "no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." It makes me wonder whether God has had an eye-opening experience in becoming incarnate. I wonder whether Jesus is referring to himself, effectively saying, "I thought I understood my creation before, but until I became one of you, I just didn't get the kingdom of God."

For a long time I've been uncomfortable with the idea that it was Jesus' suffering that redeemed us. It's so often framed in punitive terms that seem designed to keep people in line and feeling guilty. Plenty of Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders have told kids that every time they lie, they're pounding the nails into Jesus' hands. I'm just not that sure that such gruesome imagery is the best way to raise Kingdom people who are shining their lights for the world to see by.

Also, I'm very uncomfortable with a theology that romanticizes suffering. Plenty of women have been told to endure abusive marriages, because they should embrace their suffering as Jesus embraced his. It's the kind of thing that has me conceding a lot of points to my atheist friends who call the God of Christianity a sadist.

But what if we've gotten it a little bit wrong? What if Jesus needed to suffer, not to even out some cosmic teeter-totter onto which Sin and Eternal Life had plopped themselves down? What if there is a different reason that suffering is redemptive?

I think God could not enter the Kingdom of God without being born again as Jesus.  There are many stories in the Old Testament that make God seem like a very moral psychopath--someone who will be merciful and just, but more from a place of principal than from a place of empathy. God speaks to people, overpowers them with insight, but mostly comes off as remote and somewhat detached.

I wonder whether Jesus needed to come to earth in order to know what it's like to feel powerless and vulnerable. What if suffering is important, not for the sake of suffering, but for the empathy it brings along with it? What if Jesus needed to be born from above, not to teach us what it's like to be human, but to learn what it's like to be human?

We have all had the experience of seeing tragedy happen to a friend. A child dies, or someone gets cancer, and you try to put yourself in your friend's place, but, for the most part, you just can't. For a lot of what happens in life, you can't know what it's like until you've been through it yourself. This is why we have ritualized things that we do for people--take them meals or write cards--because we want to do something, but we can't always use empathy to figure out what's best.

It's times like this when we find ourselves saying, "I just can't imagine..." And it's true, we can't imagine it. When the unthinkable happens, it's hard to put yourself in the position of the person it happened to. So people seek out others like them. A mother who has lost a child to cancer meets with another mother who has lost her child to cancer. A wife whose husband never comes home from deployment seeks solace with other military widows. No matter how much I love someone, I can't put myself in her situation until I've been someplace similar myself.

Maybe that's why Jesus existed--to help God to understand why we have so much trouble behaving ourselves. Maybe Jesus' life and death was necessary and redemptive not because it was a freely given sacrifice that fulfilled some kind of cosmic debt. Maybe Jesus' suffering is redemptive because, to get all Buddhist for a second, human existence is suffering. There was no way for Jesus to understand being human without experiencing suffering. Maybe God needed to be born again as a human in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

I like keeping that perspective in my head--Jesus chose suffering because it was necessary for empathy--because it helps me to understand suffering as holy in a new way. I'm still going to try to avoid the bad stuff as much as possible. But I'm also going to try to look at suffering differently, as holy. Not because suffering is holy in and of itself, but because it's a natural consequence of being engaged in the world.

After all, those who care the most are also those who suffer the most. And when we lose what we care the most about, we suffer so much more than when we lose something we were never that attached to in the first place.

When you avoid loving people, you don't suffer when you lose them.  If you don't engage in the world, don't develop affection for people, don't hope for a better future for everyone, it's easier to avoid suffering. But when we, like Jesus, throw ourselves into our lives, getting involved with the world, rather than staying aloof and above it all, we will suffer a thousand small deaths. But from each of those deaths, God brings forth a new life in us. A life that connects us to the rest of humanity and helps us to see the kingdom of God.

"Eve, You're the Reason We Can't Have Nice Things."

Readings for the First Sunday in Lent

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11 Psalm 32

I'm going to copy the Genesis passage below, because I'll be referring to it. It's the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, which we're all familiar with. But, as with most things we think we're familiar with, we often "remember" parts of the story that aren't actually there. 

Here's the passage:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.


Before I mention what struck me most about this passage when I read it this week, I have a confession to make. I broke Lent on Friday. When I got up Saturday morning, I realized two things: first, I totally didn't need to break my commitment--it wouldn't even have been hard to maintain. I just wanted the comfort of doing things the way I always did them. Second, I realized that it's a lot harder to do the thing you think God is calling you to do when you aren't all that sure that God is real.

Back when I was in high school, I knew what God expected of me, and I knew I was going to Heavan (at least I knew that most days), and I knew that God was my friend whom I could be with whenever I wanted, just by talking to Him in my head. There was a lot that I "knew." In some ways life was harder--I had high expectations to live up to, and I was always letting God down.  But in some ways, life was easier, too, because when things are black and white, there's a lot of time to be saved by not mucking around in uncertainty and having to decide for oneself what's right and wrong. In some ways, I miss that.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for a God, no matter how abstracted and nebulous, that is big enough to encompass uncertainty and paradox, a God about whom any question can be asked without fearing that the whole construct of God will collapse around your feet. There's something to be said for a God that doesn't force you to deny reality as you are experiencing it.

I wonder which of those Gods is in the garden of Eden, though. Because when I was reading the passage this week, I noticed something: God never tells Eve not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. God tells Adam, and Adam tells Eve. So, if we understand living faithfully to be doing what we think God wants from us, Eve is living her faith based on heresay. (Small aside here: you can't spell heresay without heresy.)

In the passage anyway, God never takes Eve for a walk in the garden. Actually, he wouldn't have been able to--she wasn't even Eve yet. She was just a nameless form of Adam. I wonder whether either God or Adam considered her to have personhood.

So God didn't bother to give Future-Eve a little welcome to Eden tour, pointing out all the danger spots. He delegated. And in doing so, God is demanding a much more difficult thing of Eve than he is of Adam. God is asking for obedience without experience. And God is asking for obedience from a creature he doesn't seem to have a relationship with.

The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get, frankly. Eve is expected to keep a promise that Adam made to God. She wasn't there for the decision, and she doesn't even know for sure that Adam has his facts straight. The serpent is the only one who deals with her as an equal worthy of relationship. Everything the serpent tells her is true. The fruit won't kill her. It will show her the difference between good and evil. And you know what? For all the bromance that Adam and God have going, they haven't really been so great at showing Eve what's good (You exist for Adam's pleasure?!) or what's evil (Don't do the thing I'm afraid to do). What woman wouldn't want to buck that system?

And it's not like this only happens in the Bible. It's a common trope in stories throughout time. Whether it's Pandora's box, Blackbeard's locked door, or a tree in the garden, they're all the same. They're all symbols of things we're supposed to be afraid of, that men/gods drop in front of us and tell us to ignore. Always, the tension is the same: ignore what's right there or accept and ingest the truth. So, big surprise, at some point in each story, the woman picks truth. The women expose the hidden to the light. Then the authorities, that is, those invested in the status quo, get all shirty with the women and blame all of the world's evils on the skirts. Christ, Eve, everything was great until you came along.

Except everything wasn't great. Adam was lonely. And I suspect he was probably getting lonely again, because he still didn't have a true companion. I think it wasn't until Eve acted on her own and ate the fruit that she became a fully human person in her own right. And I think she surprised everyone--maybe even God--when she did. But just because she went off-script, that doesn't mean that what she did was wrong.

I mean, is Eden really where we want to be? Everything is taken care of for us in Eden. It's beautiful and peaceful. It's the place of the eternal now. No regret, no conflict. Any mother can understand why God would want to try to keep us in the garden, innocent and lovely, for as long as possible.

But there's a saying among writers that you have to be cruel to your characters. I recently heard one writer (quoting another) put it this way:  "You have to stick you character up in a tree and then start throwing rocks at him." That's really hard to do with someone you've created and grown to love.
You have to, though, because if nothing bad ever happens to your characters, you're writing a really boring novel.

Without mistakes and conflict and loss, there are no stories, just names. Nobody dies in Eden, but does anybody grow? If the people aren't growing or changing, is it really that much of a paradise?

Eve needs a faith based on her experience, not on some law that she's heard about second hand. And I, for one, prefer Eve's way. I don't want to sit around eating the horticultural equivalent of bonbons all day, petting animals and being sexually available.  I much prefer the life we've got, in which we have the opportunity to contribute to the good in the world, and fight the evil. Because the apple didn't just show evil to the innocents in Eden, it made them able to know what was good. Zeus gives Pandora the box because Prometheus already gave humans fire. You can't have one without the other.

Maybe Eden was always meant to be an estuary-- a protected place where Adam could practice being alive, until he was ready to go out and really do it. If God really didn't want Adam to eat from the tree, he could have stationed a guard there from the beginning. The tree is there, just like Pandora's box, and the key to Bluebeard's room. It's there, waiting until some woman has the courage to man up and confront the whole truth of life, the good and the bad. But when she does, she engages in it as an actor, not just as a child running naked through a garden, peeing on snakes and pulling the tails off of geckos because she doesn't know any better.

Eventually, we all need to set off into the wilderness. The wilderness is where the growth happens. Jesus knew that--he didn't run off to a garden of delights in order to prepare for his ministry. He went out to the wilderness, where God's providence is harder to find, but the lessons are there to be learned.

It's that time of year again, so I'll be back Sunday with reflections on the Lectionary. In the meantime, here's a lovely lenten video for your contemplative pleasure.