Sacraments on the refrigerator

Just like every other mom with a minivan, I think I’ve got a story to tell.  They must give out your google blogger password with the title to your Dodge Caravan and your Baby Bjorn.  All of us middle-class mommy bloggers have gotten wise on our own self-reflection.  I make fun of them because I am one of them.  I, too, have a few moments where God, like an AT & T customer in the 80s, reached out and touched me, moments of sacramental grace within the mundane.

    A few years ago, my husband and I were embroiled in a serious fight.  Grieving the loss of my father and navigating a change in career, I wrapped myself up in anxiety and narcissism.  My husband finally stood up to my bratty behavior, and then I fought back.  We said all the usual things, not really true things, but the things you say when you feel rotten and are angry:  “It’s always all about YOU!  You don’t UNDERSTAND me!  You keep trying to change and it never gets better!  You NEVER loved me!”  When I spoke those last words, my husband took a wrinkled, dog-eared scrap of paper out of his wallet and threw it on the table.  “Look at that and say I haven’t love you all these years,” he said.

    I stared at the scrap of paper, yellowed, wrinkled, and tattered, with my name and an old, old phone number.  Nine years ago, I’d given that number to him, on the night we met.  Nine years before this fight, where I questioned his devotion to me.  My husband, who is absolutely unromantic, unsentimental, straightforward, and brutally honest, had kept my phone number on the exact piece of paper in his wallet for all this time.  I had no idea he would do such a thing.  The moment I gave him that number was not one of those angels-singing-softly-lighted romantic moments where you realize you’ve met someone special.  It was a random night of partying at a random club with random people.  That chance meeting resulted in a long, meaningful relationship, but we surely didn’t know it then.  He had kept that scrap of paper through our dating, engagement, and marriage, through family crises, deaths of loved ones, vacations, new homes, fights.  He kept that one piece, which suddenly showed me how much he loved me.  It didn’t mean much, except it symbolized everything.  It symbolized the love that had been there all the time.

    One of our friends says, “Well, that must’ve shut her up.”  Yes, that little scrap of paper is a bit of a trump card in our marriage.  It is displayed on our fridge, now, with all the family snapshots and childrens’ artwork.  It reminds me that, even when I didn’t recognize it or acknowledge it, he loved me.  It is a symbol, a sacrament, of our relationship, something tangible to point to the love between two people.  I am not holding up my marriage as an example of marital bliss; we have our own bag of struggles, I assure you.  That moment, when my husband showed me that scrap of paper, which he held precious for so long, is a moment when God showed through the love of two people.  The best way we can experience the love of God is through each other.  There are moments of relationship with a spouse, parent, child, friend, or even a kind stranger where other people embody the unconditional love of God.  

    God loves us, whether we recognize it, acknowledge it, or return it.  God in Jesus Christ loves us when we act like narcissistic brats, when we question everything, when we treat the gifts we’ve been given in our life like a pile of crap.  Jesus loves us, whether we deserve it or not, and he always has.  When I was fighting and denying him, he was busy loving me.  When I was running away, he was keeping me safe.  Eventually, in my despair, I made the accusation, “You never LOVED me ANYWAY!” Then, I looked up and saw him, hanging on the cross.  It had been there all the time.  Yes, that will definitely shut me up.

Finding a church home is like dating

When it comes to churches, I am a serial monogamist, currently involved in a committed relationship.  Joining the Episcopal church has been a series of paradigm shifts and life changes.   Many articles on finding a church home give advice:  shop around, make checklists, and weigh options.  Those are all good strategies, but I didn’t do any of them.  My gut led me on a slightly different journey.

To me, joining a church isn’t a shopping trip.  It isn’t about finding the best make and model, looking at consumer reports, setting your price and closing the deal.  It’s a relationship; quite literally, a relationship with Jesus and a whole bunch of his pals.  Jesus is hard enough to date, what with all his expectations, like loving your enemies, forgiving your trespassers, and laying down your life to follow him.  It is not easy to be loved, just as you are, the way Jesus does.  It takes some getting used to.  To complicate it further, you can’t just date Jesus by himself; he brings all his friends along.  When you begin a relationship with Jesus, a church comes as part of the bargain, which is sort of like dating four, or twenty, or fifty, or five hundred, of Jesus’s friends.

To begin the relationship, I did my homework.  I found the closest church that appeared to match my theological convictions and I stalked it.  I scoped out the website, drove by the building, asked around the town about it.  I googled the church, the diocese and the denomination.  I read books.  I emailed the church office.

Then, I took the risk of showing up for the first blind date. I walked in the door and looked around.  Nothing scary yet, some friendly faces, some welcoming smiles.  It felt pretty good, a few butterflies, but comforting, too.  Yep, there might be some potential here.  We made plans for a second date, and a third date.  Things got more comfortable.  I began to fit into the rhythm, to learn the lingo, to make a couple of acquaintances.  It took some effort.  I had to keep showing up.  I had to be available and open to new experiences, like serving fish dinners, or working at rummage sales.  I had to listen and be brave enough to share my own thoughts.  The church reciprocated; the people were warm and they listened, too.  As in most relationships, I got back what I put into it.

After several months, it was time to take the next step and get more involved.  I volunteered to organize Vacation Bible School.  Taking on a project in a new church is sort of like the first time you go on vacation with your new boyfriend or girlfriend.  You find out who brings the food, who sings the songs, who shows up, and how they do things.  This turned out to be a great vacation, and we ended up closer than ever.  I made new friends, had a blast, took some great photos, and made plans for next year.

Eventually, in every dating situation, you have to meet the family.  Church is no different.  Most churches describe themselves as a family, which can be wonderful--or quite dysfunctional, depending on the situation.  Many people are related to their church--their parents were married there, or began the church, or built the bell-tower, or directed the choir.  There are families within families and there might be feuds layered on feuds.  Hopefully, when all the history and interrelations come to light, you find a loving, supportive community (even if it’s a little odd, as most families are).  Thankfully, my church family seems pretty healthy.

Things were going along swimmingly.  I was getting to know the family, feeling comfortable enough to be myself, sharing relationships and building trust.  All of a sudden--commitment time!  Do you want to be confirmed?  Would you consider joining the vestry?  Things were getting serious now.  I had a few moments of doubt and fear, but I decided to take the plunge. After all, I wanted a church that would feed my soul, and that takes effort.  My soul is not on a feeding tube, I have to find the nourishment, prepare it, and eat it myself.  It is an active process.  I need to take responsibility for finding, maintaining, and caring for the church that feeds my soul.

As in any relationship, I know the church will disappoint me sometime.  I will get angry, sad, frustrated, and impatient sometime.  I will drop the ball sometimes and fail.  I will try something new and get hurt.  Healthy relationships are not always roses, chocolates, and loving words.  Sometimes they sting with honesty, challenge our abilities, and surpass our expectations.  I hope that my church relationship is strong enough to endure the inevitable challenges.  With Christ’s help, I know it will be.

Tattered and Holy

      My daughter’s favorite princess dress is in tatters, the side seams and the waist seam ripped open from on-and-off-again dress-up games, the hem fallen from years of wearing to every possible occasion.  She wears the Snow White dress to the store, to daycare, to the park and to church.  I joke that my church really does accept all who come to the worship princesses or not.  Heck, there may be several princesses at our communion rail every week; mine just happens to be dressing the part.  I’ve been dreading the day when the dress is beyond repair, when we finally have to retire it, but it clings together, doggedly.  Although the seams are open and the hems falling, the velvet flattened and the satin dull, you can still clearly see the essence.  For every rip and tear, there is a story of loved use and devoted purpose.

    I love objects with dents and tears.  The most precious things to me are the most tattered and torn:  the favorite pair of jeans during college, which became my favorite pair of shorts, and were only “retired” after another 10 years, when they were the merest suggestion of a garment, and certainly not something a respectable mother in her 30s should be wearing; the leather jacket given to me for my 14th birthday, worn smooth and shiny in parts, worn cracked and paper-thin in other parts, of which my husband says, “you’re not really going to WEAR that, are you?, but which I cannot give away, no matter what; my first pair of well-made riding boots, which cost a month’s salary and have been resoled, patched and repaneled by my excellent cobbler so often that there is no actual original part left to them, but which I will wear as long as I can still slip my calves into them.  Those are the objects, the fabrics that bind the pieces of my life.  The more rips and holes, the more I love them.

    When my dad had something new, a new truck, a new pair of boots, a new tool, when it finally got a scratch, dent or ding, he celebrated.  “Good!  Now, it’s really mine and I can relax about it,” he would say.  He defined his possessions by their scars.  The more wear something had, the more it belonged to him, the more its essence showed through.

    Life is rough and we show the wear of it.   If we’re lucky, we start out new and fresh and perfect, and then we start living.  Daily use dulls the sheen of our soul, crushes the velvet of our psyche a little at a time.  And that’s just the regular stuff, not even counting the REAL sad stuff, the grief that rips at our seams, the failures that open our hems, the pain that punctures our fabric.  I don’t know why life is difficult and fraught with suffering.  People smarter than I am have written books on it.

    I do know one thing.  I know that, like my daughter and her precious Snow White dress, God doesn’t throw us out because we are rent and torn.  Sometimes God mends us, carefully, thoughtfully, with stitches that bind us up stronger than before.  Sometimes we keep the tears, the holes and the fraying pieces, but that doesn’t make us ugly, not to God.  She loves us more for all the holes.  

God didn’t put them there, but she can make them hurt a little less.  No way do I believe God wishes us to be hurt, ripped open or scarred.  God does not will bad things to happen, nor allow them to happen to teach us a lesson.  God does not set us up with challenges to test us.  The God of love which I worship is not an eternal examiner.  Still, in life, bad things happen, things that wound and scar.  My soul may be tattered and torn, but the love of God makes my holes holy.

On lock-down drills and faith

Today at school, we had a lock-down drill.  In the middle of a lesson on comparing and contrasting nonfiction texts, we had to practice the procedure in case a threat invades our building.  School shootings are deadly real and these drills are, sadly, common life for modern students.  We have a few practices every year.  Our teachers know what to do, sit in the “deep corner of the room”, the place that is the least likely to be seen from the window, sit quietly, don’t move, don’t make any noise at all, and wait.  We wait, wondering what it would be like if a madman with a gun were running the halls, looking for targets.  We wait, mentally casing the room for objects to bar the door, for objects to throw at an intruder, for weapons.  We wait, breathing, grateful that it is merely a drill, mindful of those who have died at their desks, mindful of those who became targets in a deadly, real-life video game, mindful of the deadly necessity of these drills.

Afterwards, we discuss scenarios.  The kids have been thinking about possibilities, too.  When the drill is over, we field questions,

“What if I was in the bathroom?”

“You get to behind the first door you can find and lock it tight.”

“How long could we be waiting?”

“As long as it takes for the police to ‘neutralize the threat’, check all the rooms and evacuate us safely.”

“How do we know the drill is REALLY over?”

“There is a code word that we all know.”

“Should we close the blinds?  Should we try to escape?  Should we try to fight back?”

The questions, suggestions and discussions keep coming.  The kids are getting used to the idea of planning their survival in the face of a threat, all in their place of learning.

A lesson about reading for information turned into survival training.  I feel so sad that we have to practice this, that I have to walk down the halls of my school, considering safe hiding places and quick escape routes.  How has our society become so broken that we prepare for the possibility that a person with a gun will invade a school to kill innocent people?  A neighborhood school, the free and appropriate place of public education to which all children are entitled, reduced to a target range.  How have we come to this?

All I know is that I don’t know.  Maybe people are desensitized to violence from our culture of violent movies and videogames.  Maybe guns are available to too many people, or available to too few of the right people.  Maybe people are raised with a lack of love and affection.  Maybe people are raised with the mistaken idea that their life will be easy and comfortable, then they can’t deal with the reality that life is tough and sad sometimes.  Maybe people become so angry, wrapped up in fear, depression, and hate, that they lash out at the most innocent victims they can find.  Maybe people in society are so disconnected and so lonely that they forget to treat their fellow man as precious, living beings and instead treat them as targets on which to vent their loneliness.

As teachers, we don’t just teach our students how to hide from threats.  We talk about respect for all, responsibility for our actions, tolerance, kindness, no-name-calling, anti-bullying, positive behavior intervention and supports, etc, etc.  We work hard to build positive learning communities that respect and value diversity.  We build relationships, we show compassion, we model community service.  We make our best effort to educate every student who comes to us, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability.  And then, we practice, in case someone walks in the door and starts shooting children.

In the midst of this dichotomy, I still have faith. I still believe that we can make a difference, in the life of a sad child, in the life of a poor child, in the life of an angry child.  I still believe that love conquers hate, that love shines in the darkness and that the darkness does not overcome it.   I still believe that the good we do in life means something, that the lives we touch with love will grow in love to toward others.  I see it happen daily, in small moments of kindness between people.  I still believe those moments of kindness count for something, that they make a difference in the ugliness of the world.  While hiding on the floor, in the deep corner of my room, silently waiting with my students, I pray that my faith becomes sight some day.

The question that scared me out of church

Sometimes, religious people say stupid things.  They say stupid things out of kindness, when they trying to help someone feel better, or out of fervor, when they are trying to convert, or because they get hung up on jargon and don’t pay attention.  Nadia Bolz-Weber, one of my personal theological superheroes, recently wrote a blog post about it. (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2014/02/828/)  Some other smart people in the blogosphere writing about about phrases that churches say that scare young people away.  Well, I’m not so young, but I certainly can identify with being scared away from church.

No one has yet mentioned the phrase that terrified me, my personal church jargon bogey-man.  It was the well-meaning question, “Have you taken Jesus Christ into your heart?”  As a child, I pictured a tiny Jesus living in a house in my heart.  My seven year-old mind wondered, “Why on earth would he want to be there and why would I want him living inside of me?”  I never got past the weirdness of it.  Then, there is the similar, less imagery-laden query, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”  Both of these questions scared the hell out of me as a child (and as an adult, honestly).

I remember sitting at the campfire at my church choir camp, after we’d had our fill of smores, sang Kum-Ba-Yah, and got bitten by 20 million mosquitoes.  The irresistibly charming  teenage counselors invited those who wanted to “take Jesus into our hearts” to stay after the campfire and “be saved”.  I froze.  I wanted to do it, to belong, to become a part of this special society.  But, I was terrified.  What would happen to me if I did it?  How would I be different?  What about me needed to change?  I went back to my cabin and went to sleep.  I peeked out from my bunk as the girls who stayed at the campfire returned to the cabin, talking in hushed tones, faces lit up with the glow of the holy spirit.  Maybe it was a crush on the cutest counselor--but I figured it must be the Holy Spirit.  Part of me felt like I missed out on a party, but most of me was just plain relieved.

Why couldn’t I do it?  I was fine with God and Jesus Christ.  For heaven’s sake, I had just ridden a bus 8 hours to a camp where we sang hymns for about 4 hours a day, I loved my Sunday School; I went to church every Sunday.  Why couldn’t I “accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior”?  That little question was part of what drove me away from church for more than 20 years.

I think I realized that it’s a loaded question, like a loaded gun.  There is an unspoken second part to it:  “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?  (Because if you have, then you’re in like Flynn and if you haven’t, well, welcome to Hell, my friend.)  It’s kind of like the questions parents ask their children, “Have you cleaned your room (eaten your vegetables, washed your ears)?”  What parents REALLY mean is, “You damn well better have, if you know what’s good for you!”  I suppose my 12 year-old self saw through that loaded question and rebelled against the implied threat.  I ran away from the whole thing.

So what brought me back to church?  It was absolutely not fear of hell, or wanting to be “in the right crowd”, or a calculated effort to hedge my bets for eternity by hanging out with the “good guys”.  It was Grace, saving, catholic Grace, unearned, undeserved, unadulterated Grace. I found grace in the words of one of my other theological superheroes, Robert Farrar Capon.  Capon said, “Jesus is the Light of the World, not the Lighting Company of the world.  Neither he nor his church is an electricity supplier you have to get wired up to in order to have light in your life.  He is the Sun, not a power utility; all you have to do is trust him enough to open your eyes and presto!  You had light all along.”  

Holy Shit!  I had to put the book down to wipe tears from my eyes.  Here was someone telling me that Jesus had been in my heart ALL THE TIME and that he was ALREADY my personal savior.  The loaded question became an invitation; the threat became a blessing that I’d already received.  Fear of hell was traded for an invitation to an eternal party.  My mind was lit on fire with the realization that we all were ALREADY saved.  

Those kind people asking me to “take Jesus into my heart” meant well.  They were trying to help me, with their veiled threats and their loaded invitations.  They just couldn’t find the right words to corral my stubborn heart.  I didn’t realize that what I was afraid of was already my comfort, that I didn’t have to change to receive Christ, but I have surely would change because of Christ.   I don’t have to do anything special to receive him--I just had to quit working so hard to keep him out.  I didn’t have to “let him into my heart”, because he has always been there.