An Open Letter to Indiana

An Open Letter to Legislators and Business Owners in Indiana

Dear Sir(s) or Madam(s),

This is an open letter to legislators and business owners in Indiana regarding the religious freedom legislation, which may allow for discrimination against people, especially people from the LGBT community.  Now, it is possible that the recent law passed is NOT meant for this purpose, that it is truly a law protecting religious freedom.  I sincerely hope that is true.  As I was raised in a Mennonite church, I hold religious freedom and separation of church and state very dear to my heart.  When a person is raised on stories of martyrs and fiery deaths, she understands the need for free practice of religious faith.  So, I hope the Freedom of Religion Act is just what its name implies.  But, I doubt it.

This letter is specifically to the business owner who is planning to discriminate against people in the LGBT community on the merits of his Christian faith.  I have never met you.  I don’t even know if you exist, or if perhaps you are a figment of our fevered cultural imagination, born out of right-wing fantasy and left-wing fear.  No one in my wide circle of friends has EVER told me (to my face) that they felt that being gay was a sin, or that they opposed the right for two loving people to be married.  I have a pretty wide variety of friends:  straight friends and gay friends and some in-between, friends whose ages span between 70 years, friends who own guns and friends who protest the NRA, friends who hunt their own food and friends who are vegans, friends who drive pick-up trucks and friends who drive smart cars, friends who are Christian, atheist, Jewish, humanist, and pagan, friends who love Joe Biden and friends who love Sarah Palin.  Out of ALL of those people, NO ONE has ever told me they would not serve a person based on that person’s choice of partner.  So, perhaps you, the discriminating business owner, do not every truly exist.  But, if you do, I cannot be silent anymore.  Here are my two cents.

• If you believe that Christianity calls you to condemn consensual same-sex relationships as a sin, I think your theology is WRONG.  I may be a liberal Christian, but I’m not exactly a “progressive Christian”.   I, too, believe in the conception, incarnation, and bodily resurrection of Christ.  I, too, believe in the trinity.   I, too, hold the Bible to be sacred; I do NOT ignore the scriptures.  However, I do NOT believe that St. Paul, or the authors of the Old Testament, were speaking about two consenting adults engaging in a loving, respectful relationship.  The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah weren’t homosexual acts, they were rape and hateful treatment of a foreigner, someone different from the people in the town.  Did you get that?  Hateful treatment of someone different?  A sin?  Sound familiar, like not serving someone based on who they love? At the end of the day, Jesus called us to LOVE others, not judge others and I believe a loving God created each of us just as we are.
• If you still believe that same-sex relationships are a sin, how on earth do you get to judge?  Do you refuse service to alcoholics, adulterers, liars, cheaters, gossipers?  Christians accept the fact that we are all forgiven sinners, and that we should love rather than judge.  Honestly, most everyday sins (gossip, lying, self-centered actions) are much more hurtful than my friends who happen to love each other and live together in a committed relationship.  Seriously, if same-sex relationships are a sin, they are the ONLY sin I can imagine that hurts absolutely no one.  So, if you do not issue a lie-detector and morality test to all of your customers, refusing to serve someone who may be a “sinner” is surely discriminatory.
• If you say, “I hate the sin, but I love the sinner.”  Or you say, “Not accepting a person’s decisions is not the same as bigotry.  I can love someone and disagree with them.”  I say, “You are wrong.”  Of course, I love people with whom I disagree all the time.  I disagree over political decisions, choice of music, and whether green beans are fit to eat, and yes, I do love those people.  However, I do not insist that they abide by my opinion in our disagreement and seek to pass laws to enforce that.  Maybe I even love someone who is stuck in destructive behavior, like addiction, and I disagree with their actions.  However, I do not tell them that their entire being is an abomination, that their innate sexual desire is wrong, that the person they love with all their heart will lead them to hell.  I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t feel like love to me.

So, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner, perhaps I am overreacting and jumping to conclusions.  I sincerely hope this law was truly passed to protect religious freedom and not to discriminate against anyone.  I sincerely hope that you do not even exist, and that no person would actually refuse service to another person based on their choice of a partner.  I also realize that if you do exist, you probably never read this, or stopped after the first paragraph.  I realize that my impassioned plea may well fall on deaf ears.   However, if you do exist and you are reading this, please, please STOP.  Stop hurting people I love.  Stop turning back the clock of social justice by at least fifty years.  Stop using my government to legislate your discrimination and stop wrapping your bigotry in my Christian faith.

Sincerely,

Linda

The Sacrament of my Big Red Truck

Recently, my “church” friends and I were discussing liturgy, especially how we liked to take our Eucharist.  Did we like our Eucharist high church--with bells and smells, sacred, mysterious, and untouchable, to illustrate the glorious, inexplicable nature of grace?  Did we like our Eucharist low church--accessible and ordinary, to underscore that grace is available to all and that Jesus has no registration process?  Suddenly, I realized how much of an Episcopalian I’ve become in the last three years.  I think we do our Eucharist just right--accessible and open to all who come, with enough sacred ceremony to make it significant, to set it apart from an everyday occurrence.  I find peace and succor in the Eucharist every week, as we take the most mundane bread and wine, the stuff of regular life, and elevate it to a sacrament--the outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace.  For a moment, we suspend our regular life and touch, taste, and feel the love of God in something quite ordinary.

There is a tension about the Eucharist, should it be regular so we can all access it, or should it be special, so we all revere it?   Jesus took ordinary food and created extraordinary vessels for grace, and we recreate that miracle when we celebrate the Eucharist. After centuries of veneration, the bread and wine is truly something special. It reminds me of a sacred item in my life, my big red Dodge pick-up truck.  It’s a 1993 Dodge diesel dually pick-up, the kind of old Dodge truck with the square front end.  It’s well-worn for its years, missing a tailgate from too many careless accidents, a little scratched and beaten.  This truck is made for work; it’s not some fancy-pants vehicle of a surburban housewife.  It’s high to climb into and it doesn’t fit in parking spaces; it’s a stick-shift and the clutch is long and hard, the kind that makes your left leg sore if you’ve got to shift often during a drive.  It runs like a top and can haul just about anything.  It is the last truck my dad ever bought and it was my inheritance when he died.  It’s just about the most ordinary, most mundane, regular-guy truck you can find, as ordinary as the bread and the wine that Jesus ate at that last supper, hearty, solid, and full of grimy life.

Just like the unremarkable food that the ordinary disciples ate, my truck started out normal and accessible and easy to understand.   My family travelled to many horse shows in that truck, hauled mares to breeding and foals to the vet, drove me to college multiple times, and moved my horse from Ohio to Illinois when I moved away from home.  Other than the pride my father took in his rig, there was nothing very special about it.  Nothing very special, except that the more we used it, them more sacred it became.  The life of my family, the joys, triumphs, sorrows, laughter, and tears filled up that truck over the years.  After Dad's death, we couldn't conceive of giving up his truck.  So, it became mine, along with the everyday pieces of Dad’s life, so ordinary, but now so sacred.  I found his tape of Scottish folk music in the tape deck (yes, my truck is old enough to have a tape deck), the folder of horse registration papers in the glove box, and Dad’s well-worn cowboy hat behind the seat.  Those things that never meant much suddenly meant the world to me; there I found his smell, his sound, and his essence.  It all was contained in the sacrament of metal and diesel fuel.

Dad comes to me in the truck, as crazy as it may sound.  Although he’s been gone almost ten years, it still carries his smell.  Once, during a crisis of uncertainty and anxiety, when I didn’t know which way to turn, I dreamt of my dad in the truck.  I was driving, hauling our trailer full of horses and he was in the the passenger seat.  We were heading into some water and the road was obscured.  Afraid, I turned to Dad, “What do I do?  I can’t see the way forward.”  Dad just smiled and said, “Keep going, squirt.  You’ll be fine.”  I woke up the next morning, a little quieter, a little more resolved, a little more peaceful.  The sacrament of my truck granted me peace.

Other people notice it, too, the ones who pay attention.  Last summer, we loaned the truck to our church.  The church needed an extra vehicle to pick up donations for our rummage sale.  Two trucks meant two crews working at once, less wear and tear on vehicles, and more donations gathered.  My friend, Tim, our priest, drove it often, and he seemed to notice the sacredness, too.  He would call me while driving down the road, or send photos of the great red hood looking out on the highway.  He would ask me, “Don’t you think you’re dad would be happy today?  Don’t you think he knows what we’re doing?”  Having never met my father, he felt the love of our family contained in the cab of his truck.  As ordinary as it was, people treat my truck like it is a little bit special, a little bit more than just steel and rubber, like the way we treat the bread and the wine of the Eucharist.  Because of the memories and the love, the trappings of our regular lives are filled with grace.

So, this Holy Week, I long to contemplate the sacred within the ordinary.  I long to see the regular, everyday stuff of my life lit up by grace.  I long to partake of the sacrament of body and blood, accessible yet inexplicable, simple yet mysterious, and sacred to all.

Ben's Journey: a Strange Ending

The people who starved and neglected my horse were found guilty in the court of law and found dead by a violent fire on the same day.  Writing that sentence feels so bizarre, almost as bizarre as the entire situation.  Two years ago, a horse I had bred, birthed, raised, trained, showed, and sold to a loving family was rescued from the brink of death, starved and neglected within inches of his life.  My friend, Jen, called me that fateful day, “Linda, I think I just rescued Ben.  I just wanted you to know that he’s in good hands.  He will be OK.”

The horse I saw when I visited the rescue was almost unrecognizable.  I’ve lived with horses my entire life, seen them born and die, seen them healthy and sick, and I have never seen one in such poor condition.  The width of my hand could disappear between his ribs, his hips were like tent stakes with sagging skin between them, and I could trace the bones in his neck.  His gray fur was matted with a tar-like substance, nearly impossible to remove.  He was polite and reserved when I entered his stall, barely looking up from his hay.  But he had the long whorl of hair between his eyes, a little longer and lower than most horses forehead whorls.  And he had the little white spot on his nose, about the size of a dime, just a little bit off-center to the left.  I had kissed that spot on his nose nearly every day for many, many years.  Now, it was the mark that proved my childhood friend had returned to me.

The twenty-three horses rescued from the farm were all in sad shape, but Ben’s condition was especially dire.  It takes a long, long time to starve a horse to death, and when the animals were rescued, there were several corpses of fallen comrades lying in the stalls.  Ben was twenty-three years old, tough and determined, but the rescuers estimated he wouldn’t have lasted another week without food or water.  Lucky for us, he was lively and eager to regain his strength.  Given care and food, he and the other horses bounced back to life.

As rescue workers and volunteers nursed the horses back to health, the wheels of justice began turning slowly.  The owners of the farm did not immediately give up the animals; they fought the charges for a few months.  Eventually, justice, good sense, or lack of money won out, and the animals became custody of the village of Pleasant Prairie.  On the 4th of July, Ben was mine again.  

It’s funny to say “mine again”, because it felt like he was mine all the time.  If a rider is lucky, one or two horses truly become her partner.  Ben was one of mine.  I was 14 when he was born and 17 when I started him under saddle.  I had started a couple of other horses by this time, but he was truly MY project.  For the first 3 years of his riding life, I was the only person on his back.  Horsemen talk about a thing called “feel”.  Feel is difficult to define, but the best definition is the connection between horse and rider.  It can be physical connection, between the seat, legs and reins.  Sometimes one can have a “feel of” a horse without even touching him.  One cannot achieve harmony, or even communicate without a nice, soft feel.  Feel is not taught, but learned; it grows organically out of time, patience and attention to each other.  Ben was the first horse I trained thoughtfully and got a true “feel of” the horse, and I was the first rider he “got the feel of”.  For better or worse, Ben and I created each other’s feel.

He was my companion, my partner, my frustration, my pride, my “big deal” for my teenage years.  As my ambitions grew greater, I sold Ben to a nice family who loved him.  As he grew older and stiffer and their girls moved on to other things, they told me they’d found him a good home, on a farm where he would give lessons and be well-cared for.  Something went terribly, terribly wrong.  Animals died and people denied it.

Thanks to the care of the Pleasant Prairie police department, Ben is now healthy and happy, living out the rest of his days on the Ohio farm where he was born.  He roams the hills of his birth, with a herd of pasture mates, on the very space where his mother and friends have passed away before him.  Ben and I got our happy, Disney-story ending. http://lindaloumiz.blogspot.com/2013/08/bens-journey-home.html

The wheels of justice turn very slowly indeed.  Almost two years after the animals were found, the owners of the farm were on trial.  Finally, lawyers selected a jury and made their arguments.  Although I couldn’t attend the trial, the detective sent me email updates on the progress. On the morning the guilty verdict came down, the defendants were not in the courtroom.  Their bodies were found in their burned-out farmhouse.  After investigation, detectives ruled the deaths as suicide. http://racineuncovered.org/2015/03/pleasant-prairie-couples-death-ruled-homicidesuicide-dog-was-also-shot/

I wish I could make meaning out of these tragic events.  I wish I could chalk it up to karma or find satisfaction in a violent end.  I wish I could pray for their souls and forgive them.  The only meaning I can find is acceptance.  Terrible things happen to innocent beings.  People are horribly flawed and broken, and wreak havoc on the world.  We all do the best we can and thank God for the small victories.  When I look out on Ben peacefully grazing the Ohio hills, fat, furry and happy, I shake my head and count my blessings.

Decaying Church: The Walking Dead

In his book, The Divine Magician, Peter Rollins calls the church to be an agent of decay, “a putrid agent dedicated to encouraging the decay of that which we already know is dead.  The term decay is important for a couple of reasons. First, because exposure to decay is more visceral than exposure to death.  The decay of those we love can be more traumatic to us than their death… because decay confronts us more fully with the reality of death.”  (Rollins 2015, p. 175)

Personally, my journey towards Christ began in a moment of quiet, sobbing desperation on my bathroom floor, where I lay down my burdens, my anxiety, and my control, and gave it up to grace. As I saw myself in all my flaws and I just couldn’t promise to do any better, I told God, “This is the best I can do.  Do you still love me?”  Grace answered me, “Yes.”  There is something magnificent and terrifying about being loved, just as I was, in one of my darkest moments.  I wanted to dive into this faith I could see, hear, feel, and taste in liturgy, in prayer, in practice.  I wanted to lay my life down at the foot of the cross and let Jesus remake me.  I wept and prayed to be worth of the incredible gift of grace of God in Christ.  I was ready to die to my old life in order to find a new life in Christ.

I may have been ready to let my old attachments die, but the decaying, well, that was a little more difficult.  The things that I held dear, my accomplishments, my pride, my self-satisfaction, all of those old idols didn’t just give up the ghost, they hung around, waiting.  Sometimes it seems like I’m hanging on to all my dead weight--the attachments, the pride, the selfishness--and clothing it in another way. It’s like my attachments and distractions aren’t really dead, they are the Walking Dead--zombies.  The undead attachments are still with me, moving slowly through my psyche, stalking with labored, stilted steps, relentless in the pursuit of living flesh.  My zombie sins thrive in the dark, in denial, and in self-satisfaction.  

My most persistent zombie, the need for approval and accomplishment, is sneaky and clever.  When I started out this journey, in that moment of humble acknowledgment of grace, I laid my pride down and stopped trying.  I was raw and afraid coming to church that first few times, hesitant and suspicious, and the zombie slept.  As the community welcomed me and I grew comfortable; however, I fell back into old patterns.  

Being a peculiar type of non-competitive overachiever, I can even be an overachiever at doing church. If Christianity was a class, I want to earn an A.  I can read every book, write every blog post, volunteer for every committee within my talents, and really, really hope that someone notices.  I can easily drive myself to work hard, hoping to prove I’m good enough.  If Christianity were a cocoon, I wanted to crawl inside it.  I wanted it to wrap me up safely, so I would not have to feel inadequate again.  I wanted to be the best person at admitting my inadequacies, at praying, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner”.  I was going to rock the hell out of confession and win an award for humility.  It was OK to be humble and broken, because I was going to be an A+ Christian.   If I was just a good Christian, then I would be good enough, right?  I would earn my way.  And, the Walking Dead rise again--boy, do my zombie sins love that kind of thinking!

The thing about the church, the grand decaying mechanism, is that I can’t earn an A+.  There is no rubric to score, no extra credit to earn, there is only people, people to love.  The decaying process of the church makes me vulnerable.  The more projects I undertake, the more help I need.  The more I feel accomplishment, the more I share the credit with the people that brought our shared dreams to reality.  My zombie sin of striving for approval is brought out into the light of community, and there it disintegrates. Through love, my sins gives way to the agents of decay, which break them down to make room for new life.  In Christ, I can let go of the Walking Dead, in order to live a new live, for love of the world.

Rollins, P.  (2015)  The divine magician:  The disappearance of religion and the discovery of faith.  New York, NY:  Howard Books.

A Finger Pointing towards the Moon

Why should we bother with church? Why does a Christian or other spiritually-minded person, need to show up to a certain place, at certain times, with other people? In this fragmented, secular, post-post-modern world, what is the point of church? To borrow a metaphor from the Buddhists, the church is a finger pointing to the moon.  The mission of the church is to point us towards God.  The church isn’t God, it is merely the finger pointing towards the mystery.  It’s a crooked, wayward finger, that often strays off course and requires critical redirection.  It’s a flawed, mistaken, human finger, pointing at the inexplicable.  But, it’s all we’ve got to proclaim the scandalous, surprising, saving grace and love of Jesus Christ, the gospel of a God of losers, of outcasts, of sacrifice.  Any other mission:  loving our neighbors, serving the needy, establishing social justice, is a direct result of the mysterious event of Christ’s death and resurrection, the event that happened and is happening in our own hearts, every moment.

The church is where I go to say, “Yes, me too” to the mystery.  It is where I bask in the grief of Good Friday, venerating the rupture of meaning in the world that echoes the rupture of meaning in my own life.  It is where I go to hear the incredible scandal of the resurrection that turned the world upside down.  It is where I go when I feel the embrace of God, or when I am wrestling with God.  It is where others look me in the eyes and shake my hand and say, “Peace be with you.”  It is where I take my hungry hands and desperate spirit to the altar, to be fed with spiritual food in the sacrament of the body and blood.  It is where we are present to and live within the mystery of a God who loved the world so much that he gave himself to it.

Recently, I’ve had a few “god-filled moments”.  Moments where the REALness of reality ruptured my perception and cut me open.  Moments that were indubitably true and inexplicably mysterious.  Moments that seemed either crazy, or made everything besides them seem crazy.  Moments when all my pretensions fell away.  I saw how I pose and posture, how I strive for certain praise, how I preen and practice.  Grace laid me low and naked in the eyes of God.  I couldn’t promise to do it any better, for any attempt to love or serve felt like it was loving and serving my own purposes.  In that moment, I lie there, stricken and paralyzed. Helpless, I knelt and said the confession, “God, I have not loved you with my whole heart.  I have not loved my neighbors as myself.  I am truly sorry and I humbly confess.”  I didn’t hold hope of absolution, for I was in the desert without an oasis.  I had the incredible gift of sight, of seeing myself clearly for a moment, and it was terrifying.  Christ that brought me to that understanding; Christ ripped the scales from my eyes.  In this moment, Christ did not heal me, Christ wounded me.  Christ did not comfort me; he challenged me.  Christ did not prop me up; Christ ripped away the crutch so I fell flat.

When Christ ripped away my crutch, I lay flat and waited on Christ, in the church.  When I shared this overwhelmingly mysterious and emotional experience with my priest, he said, “Yep. God will do that.”  The church is where bring our questions and our despair to contemplate the finger pointing to the moon.  As we live in the church, we shouldn't find the answers, we should find new questions.  Any answers that the flawed, human church could offer would fall woefully short of the reality of God.   The church should be structured not to give us quick comfort, but to challenge us into greater love.  Any quick and easy comfort would only anesthetize ourselves to the pain in the world and isolate us behind the church walls.  The way out of despair is through love, love of the world in the midst of our pain, living through the sadness until the sadness disintegrates.

The world is weird and wonderful.  God is strange and terrifying.  We want to look to the church for answers, but in reality, the church should raise questions and criticism:  about God, about the world, about ourselves, and about the Church.  It should rock us from our foundations, shake us out of our comfort, and attack our presuppositions.  The church of humankind is too flawed, too myopic, and too human to give any real answers.  Let’s not even pretend to give answers.  Let’s just sit together in contemplation, in communion, in broken-down wonder at the mystery, and point our crooked, wayward fingers towards the moon.

Stumbling over the Grammar of God

I really hope to be wise someday; I really want to "know stuff". I like to analyze and to understand things.  Don’t get me wrong--there are many, many subjects of which I know very little.  I don’t know how to bake, how to play basketball, or how to park my car straight between the lines in a parking lot.  I don’t know why my kids’ socks disappear and I don’t understand why people like to watch football.  However, the things that I do know, I want to REALLY know.  I want to understand them deeply, to let that understanding spill over into other aspects of my life, and (yes, although it’s hard to admit) be recognized for the fact that I understand them.  I become indignant when people underestimate my few areas of expertise:  horse training, teaching children with disabilities, Seinfeld references, and the English language.  Oh, and Christianity.  I am a somewhat-newly converted, dedicated learner of Christianity.

The thing with learning Christ, is that it’s not a straight ahead process.  I can’t follow a scope and sequence and assess my understanding.  I can’t progress up the levels and reflect back on the areas in which I need to improve.  No one gives grades in the work of building the Kingdom. I cannot earn extra credit in Christ.  As a matter of fact, Christ confounds our understanding and confuses our wisdom--and then we learn.  

St. Paul tells us (1 Corinthians 1:20-25):  "Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, he world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of god and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength."

The other day, God showed how his foolishness was wiser than my perceived wisdom; Christ made me stumble.  I know a thing or two about stumbling--it happens to me all the time.  I’m wandering around, lost in space, and I trip over something in plain sight or walk into a wall.  I often find random bruises on my shins.  My father used to say, “We should have named you Grace, because you don’t have much of it.”  So, I am an experienced stumbler. I stumble when I am in a hurry and when I'm not noticing things in the way; I stumble, curse, and right my path again. There is always a lesson to learn when I lose my balance: Pay Attention! Look!  Christ made me stumble recently, over an argument about grammar, no less.

My discussion group at church is reading Peter Rollins’s excellent book, How (Not) to Speak of God, which, of course elicits much speaking of God.  My priest and I were hypothesizing whether God was a verb--an action--the love we do, or God was the subject--the ground from which we exist--the place from which we love.  He said, “Maybe God is both the subject and the verb.”  “What!” was my indignant response, “That doesn’t make ANY sense!  The same word CANNOT be a subject AND a verb!”  He was now messing around in my wheelhouse, as an English teacher and lover of grammar.  Never mind that he was a priest and had earned a PhD in theology--don’t start talking loosely about sentence structure.  Don’t make some bald statement just for effect that was so clearly inaccurate.  I was just a little bit hot about it!  I mean, debate theology all you want, but leave diagramming sentences to me!   Luckily for us, our friend, Joy, jumped in to change the subject back to the actual question at hand and the conversation continued on more appropriate topics.

Later that night, I continued to chew it over.  How could the same word be subject and verb?  Was it a true statement that Fr. Tim made?  Or was he just saying something impossible for effect?  I imagined all the diagrams of possible sentences in my mind, over and over again.  Then, Bam! I stumbled over it.  God’s foolishness trumped my perceived wisdom, again, as always.  Love loves!  We often use love as a noun, for example, “Love wins.  Love hurts.  Love heals.”  We often use love as a verb, “I love you.  We love each other.”  So, love can love.  Love, the subject, can act in love, the verb. To take the concept further, love loves the loved. Subject, verb, object--Holy Trinity!   God is love, which loves the loved one. What the hell?  The grammar of God!

Love| loves | loved

I texted my priest the message:  “I see it!  Love loves.  Love loves the beloved.  Trinity!  Duh!”  He responded, “It is the Trinity.  The Trinity makes our grammar illogical.”  Normally, I don’t like illogical things.  They bug me.  I tend to stumble on them and bang my shin.  I like things to fit into the spreadsheet and calendar of my life, into the diagram of my sentence.  I like to understand them. This moment tripped me up and jarred me out of my logical thought, thanks be to God!  Even in the midst of an epiphany, I didn’t really understand it, but I saw it was true. My analytical, grammatically correct mind was pulled into seeing things differently, into allowing the possibility of the impossible.  God made foolish my knowledge, and I, when I let go of it, I saw God.

If God had a mouth, God would've bitten you

I detest looking for things.  My general attitude towards locating lost items is not “seek and ye shall find”, but rather “make do without it and hope it will appear eventually”.  I have lost my Ipod in my car for a week or so.  Two weeks ago, my watch fell off my wrist in my house and I haven't looked for it at all. I just hope it will turn up, washed up to the shores of our clutter by the daily tides of my children and pets.  Once, I lost the remote to our VCR for a year or so, until my brother-in-law located it behind the television in the kitchen.  During my childhood, my mother often told me, “What do you mean, you can’t find it?  Let me look.  See, Linda, if it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten you.”  I just can’t stand looking for things.  I don’t enjoy hide-and-seek or scavenger hunts, and Easter egg hunts drive me up the wall.

Due to my severe lack of skills, discipline, and patience in finding lost items, when I do lost something crucial (like my phone, my car keys, or my coffee cup), I panic.  My blood pressure rises, I lose my train of thought, and I wildly move around the room, throwing around papers and other clutter in a disorganized fit.  I am distraught when I lose the few things I cannot function without in my life.  Imagine what I act like when I lose God.

Now, I know I cannot really lose God.  God is not a possession to be tracked.  God does not have a LoJack, because God is not an object.  God is the subject, the Who or What from which the Action stems, the Action which acts upon Us--the Objects of God’s love.  We can no more lose God than we can lose the air which we breathe, or the ground on which we stand.  I realize the truth of this, but I assure you, there are times in my life when I feel like I’ve lost the air I need to breathe, and the ground underneath my feet. There are times when the blessed balance and grace and gratefulness I find in God seems to have disappeared.  There are times when God, the subject of my life, is noticeably absent to my limited perception.

In those moments of loss, I sway between two extremes--overconfident laziness and outright panic.  I try to pretend I can just make do without feeling the presence of God, like I never really needed God anyway, like I can just hit the buttons on the VCR without the remote, like I can just handle it myself.  That lasts for a while, depending on how individualistic and self-sufficient my ego feels at the moment.  Inevitably, the pendulum swings back again, from complacence to desperation.  I spin in circles of anxiety that spill over into my work and my relationships.  I drive the people in my life crazy; my poor husband says, “You need to settle down!”  So, I pray, I read, I listen to spiritual music, I read theology.  

Recently, a moment of anxious searching brought me to Peter Rollins, one of my theological super-heroes.  In his book, How (Not) to Speak of God, I saw it.  As my mom would say, “If it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten me.”  Rollins writes, “Seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already been found.  Rather than desire being fulfilled in the presence of God, religious desire is born there.  In short, a true spiritual seeking can be understood as the ultimate sign that one already has that which one seeks, or rather, that one is already grasped by that which one seeks to grasp.” (Rollins 2006)  Did you hear that?  That I am already grasped by that which I seek to grasp.”  The mouth of God just BIT me!

As a child, I learned to sing the hymn, “Seek and ye shall find, Knock and the door will be opened, Ask and you shall receive…”  I never forgot the words, but I never understood the meaning.  God is not something to locate, to pin down, to lock up for safekeeping. God is not an object to be found; God is the subject from which I stem, from which I act, and from which I seek to find God.  Seeking and finding are not separate acts to participate in the mystery of God; they are not cause and effect.  Rollins tells us, “Matthew 7.7-8 does not refer to two separate moments but rather to a type of present-continuous tense by which the seeking is the finding, the asking is the receiving and the knocking is the opening.”  (Rollins 2006)  The moments when we think we lose center, our balance, when we think we lose God, and we begin to seek the Object of God again, are the moments when the Subject of God embraces us and we find ourselves.

Rollins, P.  (2006).  How (not) to speak of God. (5th ed.)  Brewster, MA:  Paraclete Press.