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.

Celebration is a Matter of Perspective

We have lost our way when it comes to celebrating. As a culture we know how to celebrate grand things like winning a super bowl or an academy award or presidential election. We celebrate hallmark events like New Year's Eve or Christmas or Valentine's Day, as though sending cards will somehow make it into the true event we want it to be. We even celebrate good fortune, a new job, a baby, a marriage, but how do we celebrate in the midst of the everyday life of headaches and tedium and broken toys and hurt feelings?

I think about this because I ran across a blog for the spiritual community Aldea, which seeks to live together intentionally, live fully, and be present to life, and as only one of its efforts, to gather on Sunday mornings. I am humbled by how the idea cuts through so much of the b.s. that we call church. This month, the community's blogging topic is "Celebration" and especially on celebrating in the midst of Lent and giving up suffering as a Lenten discipline.

As I pondered invading their blog as a relative stranger (sounds like an oxymoron to me), my first thought of a celebration I enjoyed was as a kid during a blizzard in Colorado Springs. The power was down for a few days, and so the whole neighborhood, 11 townhouses lined up out in the middle of a prairie northwest of the city, had a big cookout one evening. Looking back, it seems almost apocalyptic as thought we were huddled together for survival. Perhaps it was not that severe. But we had to eat some of the meat in people's freezers that was beginning to thaw, so everyone pooled their resources and offered it up to the community.

Did the adults think of it as a celebration? I wonder. Or were they so caught up in the worry of when the power would come back on and when the roads would be cleared so they could get back to their routines and the OTHER worries they had? Did they see the mystery of a community stopped cold in its tracks and taking the opportunity to be a slice of the kingdom of heaven as I see so clearly looking back through 10-year-old eyes?

I am struck once again by how much a role our minds, our perceptions play a role in what we see. This Lent, may I shed some of the adult worry seasoned by responsibility and fear and being caught off guard too times in favor of the simple joy and ability to be spontaneous of a 10-year-old.