A Return from the Wilderness

It is now 2 years after my experience in unemployment wilderness, and I finally surface to give an update. My time and energy has been spent on moving to a new city (Racine, WI), starting as rector of a parish (St. Luke's, Racine), settling into a cute bungalow and exploring the city, until two months in, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

My usual routine when I move into a new city was altered as I focused on all the medical details, which I blogged about in CarePages for the last year. I am now overjoyed to report that I am "dancing with NED (No Evidence of Disease)", as my oncologist put it. Yes, God saw fit to put me in the care of an oncologist who is also a mystic and very spiritual: Dr. Michael Mullane.

Now, on the other side of chemotherapy and radiation and baldness, my hair has grown back curly, and I quickly revert to routines. I am still not ready to proclaim what I learned from the experience of cancer. In some ways, the experience of being on the prairie, in the wilderness of not knowing if I was going to run out of money or ever find another job, was much more difficult than cancer.

But I don't want to minimize anyone else's experience of cancer. I just found that having cancer was one of those struggles that I could easily share publicly. People expressed a lot of compassion and yes, some pity, but it was so much more acceptable than being unemployed, or struggling with depression, or having financial problems. The problem with going through more shameful (according to society) life experiences is that it isolates you. I found the same thing with the death of my husband Ernie, after about six months. People feel awkward and don't know what to say, so the tendency is to quit talking about what's happening. They don't ask, so you don't tell.

It's interesting that I did not feel isolated during my time on the prairie, any more than I felt isolated going through cancer. There are some high-powered pray-ers out there, and I have learned to cultivate the ones whose prayers I can feel. I'm not sure I'm one of them. I confess that I forget to keep praying for people. I make a point, when someone asks me to keep them in my prayers (a natural thing to ask your priest!) to say to God, "Take care of them and bless them, and help me to remember to pray again."

And so, there were high-powered pray-ers who were thinking of me, and there were people who checked in on Facebook, and there were others who met me for lunch halfway between Loveland and Boulder, and that meant so much. Because isolation, or estrangement, or alienation of whatever way you experience disconnection from others' care is ultimately a victory for the Dark Side.

I have been encouraged to take up this blog again, and I do so a bit timidly. When I was interviewing for the position of rector of St. Luke's, one of the parishioners Googled my name, and found my blog post about "Unemployment Wilderness." My blogging style is to be pretty candid and revealing about my own struggles of faith and confidence and God's work in my life.

This parishioner was alarmed that the person they were looking at to be their next rector didn't have the confidence to lead a parish, and so he contacted the Bishop's office. Fortunately, the Canon to the Ordinary who read my blog liked what he read, and I was hired anyway, but I wondered if I should risk putting my thoughts and struggles in such a public place.

It is something to consider for every one of us who decides to be honest in a public way. How much is appropriate, and how much is necessary to be authentic? What thoughts are helpful to others and what needs to be kept private, between a close friend or therapist?

The ultimate purpose of any writing is to bring us as human beings closer to each other through shared experience, thought, and culture, or to provide insight through different experiences, thoughts and culture from our own.

In addition, my hope is that through my being honest, it will bring you, the reader, closer to yourself.

Temptations in Unemployment Wilderness

Almost three weeks into the gift and blessing of my "hermitage", being in the wilderness does not seem so hard. I wonder if Jesus felt this way at some point during his time in the wilderness just after he was "driven out" by the Holy Spirit. (I sometimes wonder what the Holy Spirit drives: a Honda Accord, so people could say they were all together in one accord?). Of course Jesus did not have the option of driving into town to go to AA meetings, or coffee shops for internet access, or lunch with good friends when the isolation was too great.

But if I can put myself in the same company as Jesus, I do believe I have been tempted in this wilderness of unemployment that I've been in. And as all spiritual lessons seem to come in threes, I, too, feel I have had three different temptations.

The first temptation I experienced was the temptation to be a victim. After that first breathtakingly bewildering experience of realizing, oh my god, I won't have an income soon. I don't know what I'm going to do to "make a living", there is the overwhelming urge to run around screaming from the rooftops, and get others to say oh my god with you. Since it was the church that I was talking about, I knew it wouldn't be hard to find people (who later found me) who would say, "I wouldn't think the church would lay off anyone," as though the church was somehow exempt from the rules of economy, and that when the church's expenses were greater than its income, a God-flow of money would just fill its accounts again. This type of thinking was what got me in this position in the first place: people who considered the church a place for solace and comfort, but didn't feel responsible to help keep it afloat financially.

One woman in AA actually said in a meeting, "wow, it's bad when you get fired by God," which made me laugh, but touched a really deep fear deep inside me that God was trying to tell me I should leave the church and the priesthood, and that if I didn't, it was like someone in an abusive marriage who stayed in the marriage out of fear of the unknown and the fear that the real world was a lot scarier than anything the relationship could dish out. I still don't know for sure that this is NOT God at work, but friends who seem to see things deeply keep steering me away from this thought, and keep telling me I AM a good priest, and the church needs me.

But this reassurance did not keep the second temptation at bay: the temptation to believe that I am not of value if I d not have a job. Now, this is probably a very common belief in our culture. What we DO, how much we MAKE, how many people we INFLUENCE, how much power we have is the way the world measures a person's worth. But I'm a spiritual person who believes in God's love, and tells people all the time that they are ALREADY loved by God before they ever get out of bed and make a dent on the problems of the world. We can't earn that love, and we are priceless by our very being alive. I tell other people that, but when the rubber meets the road, or when the fears come and roost, the temptation is to feel a lot more like a failure than a beloved child of God.

This particular temptation has taken an interesting spiritual twist, though. I know, even at the heart level, that I am worth more than just what I do. Where I feel as though I don't measure up is that right now I am not contributing any work with the poor or comforting someone who is feeling downtrodden, or giving BACK to the world. I fear that I will become a self-absorbed narcissist who does not care about the needs of the world, which by any standards are worse than anything I am experiencing. We liberals do believe, more than we might like to admit, in a works righteousness world. And it comes back to bite us.

The third temptation hasn't hit full force right now, but every once in a while I can see it peeking up over the mountains surrounding my hermitage. That is the temptation to despair. You could say that so far, I keep telling myself not to go there, not to allow myself to entertain the thought that maybe I'm supposed to experience going completely broke, or the humility of having to work at Walmart, or even having to declare bankruptcy and give up my dogs and go to live in a shelter. Why shouldn't I? There are certainly plenty of people who have had to do this, and God doesn't love me any better than them, so why not me?

There. It's out there. I named it, and it makes a lot of sense, rationally. So do the worst of temptations in our various spiritual wildernesses. They are cold, hard and rational, and don't leave any room for grace or miracles or people who swoop in generously like the friends who are letting me stay in their home right now. I'm also doing my part, and applying to every position for which I might remotely qualify in the church, on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and even Boulder County unemployment, which I don't qualify for, by the way, because the church doesn't pay in to unemployment insurance, because the church almost never lays anyone off, I guess. Don't get me started; it might set me off into being a victim, which I was hoping I had left behind me securely.

A hummingbird hovers just outside the window, vainly searching for nectar in my ceramic pepper plants, a souvenir from Arizona where I lived 12 years. She darts off as I turn to look at her, just inches away. The wind rustles the leaves of the birch tree planted just off the deck. It will be a warm day, in the upper 80s, and I laugh to myself, realizing that I now think that is hot.

In this second week of life in my hermitage, I am feeling very creative. I had gotten settled quickly into the 2000 square foot home, occupying only the family room and a bedroom, and bringing only the basics for the kitchen. Already I had had to buy an iced tea pitcher, a basting brush so I could marinade meat as I cooked it on the gas grill I had decided to bring. It was like a summer bungalow in some ways, and I liked the free feeling not having so much stuff gave me.

The rest of my possessions were crammed into a Packrat container, one of those portable steel storage containers that can be loaded onto a truck and put into a warehouse until I know where I’m going next. Unless it’s Hawaii, I remind myself. If I end up at Christ Church in Kealakekua, they will have to unload and re-pack my things into wooden crates and ship it across the Pacific. I try not to project too far, even as I feel a slight tinge of excitement. I imagine the older congregation on the “Big Island” as being a little less driven, more appreciative of the things I am experiencing during my hermitage and its slowed down pace. Maybe that’s why God sent me here, I think to myself. To get me ready for Hawaii.

Or there is Rochester, NY, also Christ Church. I have a phone interview with them tomorrow evening, and will have to go into Loveland to make sure I have phone reception. I had decided to use only a cell phone and not get a land line, but found it impossible to get a connection many times each day. My ability to communicate was dependent on having enough “bars” on my phone – at least two, and even then that didn’t guarantee that a conversation wouldn’t be cut off in mid-sentence because the satellite or something shifted slightly.

But this morning I am appreciating the chance to pray, meditate, read, write. I had never had so much time alone, despite the fact that I had lived alone for most of the last nine years since my husband’s death. This was different though, being 15 miles from the nearest wifi connection, 18 miles from All Saints Episcopal Church in Loveland that I had attended Sunday. Sitting here in my recliner in the family room of 14151 N. County Rd. 27, I could see two houses, but mostly just green foothills, and the hummingbird and birch tree.

In the quiet spaciousness, the only sound is the breeze rustling the leaves of the birch. In such openness, it was not hard to imagine a universe with vast possibility. Who knew what my future would bring me? For now it seemed God wanted me to be receptive to the possibilities outside my door.

Summer Breezes and Winds of the Spirit

Theo, my Westie, trots ahead on the dirt road, happily sniffing the various thistles and plants along the way. I do not know their names yet. It is my first full day in my “hermitage” as I am calling it, and I am exploring the 70 acres on which the house sits that my priest friend and his wife are letting live in.

It has been almost three months since I was let go from my position as assistant rector at St. John’s because the budget needed to be balanced. The severance they offered me would run out the end of this month. The parish had been generous and had taken up a collection for a “purse” as well, and I have figured that it would last me another couple of months since I did not have to pay rent. I have this deep abiding sense that I will be okay, that something will materialize from the applications I had sent out on line, applications I had filled out for various parishes, Hospice chaplain positions, a couple of addictions treatment chaplain positions.

Like the sparsely planted plains and hills spread out before me as I walk down the road, the responses to my appeals had been few. Of 20 packets of information I sent out to parishes listed in the Church Deployment Office Positions Open Bulletin, I had never heard anything from several; I had been told by more than half of the parishes that they would be in touch once they collected all of the applications; and of those, five had eventually sent polite form letters saying that I was no longer being considered for the position. I was still waiting, though not very optimistically, to hear from a few more. I would send out another batch of applications this week

Perhaps it was the summer, when most church employees take vacation, that had slowed down the process for so many people. Almost as a reminder of that fact, I feel perspiration trickling behind my ears, as my head begins to sweat characteristically. Or perhaps it was General Convention, our national convention held every three years, and which was attended by every bishop and deployment officer for every diocese. Diocesan business would have ground to a halt around the country during the legislative gathering. It was over now. Maybe I would hear something from one of the remaining parishes.

I did not expect them to realize the urgency of my need for a job. This was not really “their” problem. But being the church… I caught myself in the midst of what was beginning to seem like a very naïve way of looking at life in the church. If anything, it seemed, being the church meant that we operated less efficiently AND less empathetically than organizations in the secular world. I would no longer continue to insist that maybe this time the church might be pastoral in its response to my being unemployed.

Passing the manure pile where my friends had dumped their wheelbarrows when cleaning out the barn, I catch a whiff of the sweet/acrid waste. Jesus had a preference for those cast out and in the margins, those considered unclean and rejected by the world.

Watch it, I tell myself as I enter into the territory of self-pity. I cannot not afford to go there, for my spirit, nor for my motivation to discern where God was calling me next. But I feel embraced by something hidden, even as a luscious summer breeze plays itself around me. God is there. And for now, that is enough.

New Life and a Presidential Election

In his poem "The Cure at Troy," Seamus Heaney writes "Call the miracle self-healing; the utter self-revealing double take of feeling... someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime that justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme."

"...New life at its term..." It feels as if many around me are caught up in the hope, "the outcry," "the birth-cry" of hope for change, a word which unfortunately has gotten tired in itself from sheer repetition. But add to the hope of presidential change, and financial change, even change in the way we sell cars (hopefully? is it too much to ask?) it is Advent for some Christians, a time when birth-pangs and cries in the wilderness resonate and promise to bring about revolutionary change. Because if we don't believe that each coming of Christ brings about revolution, why are we wasting time reading the Gospel and celebrating the Eucharist, where every sacramental act is an earth-shaking offering of God's power visited on our earthly selves?

This last several months leading up to this presidential election saw young people pounding on doors for voters to come out and be counted, and retirees who had once been active in the peace marches and picket lines of the 60s, but had grown jaded and discouraged suddenly bursting again with new hope for the future of our country. If nothing other than that sheer hope I joined in. Me, one of the products of the "Me Generation" who had sold out the legacy of the 60s for our MBAs and economic pragmatism and guzzling gas in our SUVs and Ford F-250s. And while I was never wealthy enough to completely sell out, I got caught up in the self-analysis and psychological entitlement that comes from worrying more about my inner child than about the starving child in Africa, focusing more on self-empowerment than empoweringthose in Second and Third World countries.

If nothing else comes out of the election of Barack Obama than making history, at least it can be said that the generations of the 60s and 70s got caught up in the idealism of Gen-Xers, and many people, the majority of people in this country came to believe that they could make a difference and their voices were heard.

But I believe even more than that will happen, if we also unite our political voices with prayers that we be given the strength to sacrifice ourselves when that is called for, that we put the needs of the rest of the world on the FRONT burner when we act as a country. This new president has the vision of a larger world that comes from living in other countries, a world view that does not assume that everyone shares the values of affluent white Americans.

Can you feel the synchronicity of faith and justice colliding? Out of this confluence of values a new world is being birthed.

I Confess to Christian Skepticism

The email from the training I had inquired about ended with "Remember that God loves you and so do I!"

I didn't even know this guy, and my first reaction, on a visceral level, was to cancel my registration to the workshop. I hate it when people tell me they love me when they don't even know me. I don't even want a stranger to tell me that GOD loves me.

What was this reaction about, I wondered? There was a hint of saccharine, of over-simplistic theology. And my experience of faith and the spiritual journey is that it is NOT always rosy, sweet, puppies and cream (to mix my metaphors a LOT). SO right away, I am suspicious of anyone who wants to brush over the fact that sometimes faith can be hard, sometimes we feel far away from God and question whether anyone can love us, sometimes we need validation that the wilderness is just as legitimately part of the journey as the wonder. Our God died a tragic death at the hands of human beings. And we are called to die (usually painfully) to our agendas all the time.

So what’s wrong with reminding people of the resurrection, too? I usually believe that the reminder is the most important thing about Christian community. I am reminded on a weekly basis that God does love me, and others are willing to share an altar rail with me, despite what the world may tell me to the contrary.

But there’s something more subtle about how that message of resurrection comes to me through community, and it is tempered with many other complex messages about God. God is transcendent as Creator, higher even than the church ceiling in a cathedral. God is as close as the peace that is exchanged after we are forgiven by God. God is in the fidgety kids and the old couple sitting quietly holding hands, and even in the overly precious verger whose job it is to create some sense of order in the large church. Especially for me, God is in the faces that look up longingly at the altar rail, hoping to see images of God for themselves as they receive the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

There is nothing simple about the messiness of church, or even in the glimpse of the kingdom of heaven that such messiness might give us. Which is why I resist trying too hard to do liturgy perfectly.

But I realized also that while my skepticism may be a way of protecting myself from overly simple descriptions of God, it may also get in the way of my seeing or hearing God in others.

I went to the church website of my new acquaintance, and saw some great programs being offered that help bring healing and recovery to people’s lives. I saw an attempt to be inclusive and welcoming, which for me is the ultimate test of whether we are living out Jesus’ Gospel. I decided I did not want to be guilty of “contempt prior to investigation,” and to go ahead and attend the workshop.

But I will probably not give up my skepticism entirely.

Nervewracking: A Tale of Sugar Withdrawal

Jackhammers thudded into the cement outside my office window with a bone-jarring intensity. My head had started to hurt even before getting to work, but this was almost laughable in its assault on my sugar-withdrawing body. In the last five days, it had felt as though my nerve endings were just too close to the surface. Everything seemed to be a colossal effort to accomplish, and my patience with everyone was also pushed to the Nth degree. That morning I had considered getting rid of my two dogs, who insisted on barking and jumping up on me with wet paws from the freshly rained-upon yard.
Not everyone has such extreme withdrawals from sugar, but I have always been super-sensitive to the stuff. When I eat sugar, it is far more soothing to me than the average person. And the next day, I have sick headaches and my energy level suffers unless I have a little “hair of the dog” and eat more sugar, or ride it out for three days of withdrawal.
But this was worse. It was a more complete withdrawal since I was also avoiding white flour and other refined carbs, so my body was reacting at a cellular, emotional and spiritual level. It was not happy. Physically it had become dependent on getting endorphine bursts from the carbs, and had gotten lazy about producing its own sense of well-being without an artificial source.
Emotionally, I was struggling with feelings of unfairness and grief over losing my closest friends, ones who had been there for me when others seemed too busy with their own lives. My friend food had turned on me though, and was now threatening my health. This was what I needed to focus on, I told myself. Not on the cultural obsession with thinness. Not on the distorted value we force on women to be a certain size or shape. It really was a health issue for me. If I did not lose some weight, the stress on my knees was certain to put me in a wheelchair within the next 10 years, I was sure.
But fear is not a good foundation for any project, behavior change, or new perspective on life, so my acceptance of this much-needed change hinged on moving to a spiritual level. I needed God’s grace to stick with my plan. I needed an awareness of God’s love for me that transcended what I looked like, forgave me for treating my body so recklessly over the years, and reassured me when I felt completely alone without my former best friend. And most importantly, I needed a transformative change in my personality that I knew was possible from getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous – a change that had completely eliminated my desire or need to drink.
Had I simply switched addictions, and therefore not really experienced transformative change? It was not so simple. Seeking the high that alcohol produced seemed to come from a very different place in my psyche. It was more social, more motivated in feeling competent and successful. It was not the survival-based sense I got from food that the word was safe, and I was going to make it another day.
This probably sounds pretty melodramatic, but think about it. Food is about as basic as you can get. The instinct to eat comes to us almost immediately after we are born. Disrupt that instinct in a baby, and you get a pretty distressed baby, perhaps even one who is afraid for her life.
And so my addiction to food probably goes so much more deeply than that to alcohol that I am dealing with more deeply-embedded spiritual needs. After 23 years of being without alcohol, and the spiritual and emotional work I have done, perhaps now I can begin to tackle this more insidious and pervasive addiction to food.
If the jackhammers weren’t pounding, literally, outside my window. If crazy people would quit speaking their craziness as though it were truth. If dogs would quit being so jumpy and barky, and if computers at work would quit being so finicky. If life would just be easy and effortless and unfold miraculously. Okay, maybe there’s hope for that last one, but waiting until everything is perfect is one of the procrastination methods my disease has always used to put off doing the healthy thing I need to do. That disease would prefer it if I was dead, or at least immobilized by the intake or behavior of one of my addictions.
So I need to get into the spiritual response to the nerve-jarring, impatient, grief-stricken frame of mind I am in. “Holy Jesus, I take delight in you love,” I pray, using the words of one of my favorite prayers, even though I cannot feel their truth through the edginess. “Increase my faith in that love that I may let go of all depression and worry,” I continue from the prayer, which is a paraphrase of something Julian of Norwich wrote. What if I so completely believed in that love, so fully allowed myself to be embraced in that love that I could let go of the need for food to give me the assurance that God offers? I cannot imagine such a faith at this point; I can only act as if I do.
And so I show up one more day, today with jackhammers and malfunctioning internet, and offer myself hopefully to life: nerves on edge, lonely and in grief. A food addict in recovery. Just for today.