I am bored!

Boredom is dangerous, especially in ministry. It can just sneak up on you, and when boredom takes over, temptation takes hold. Boredom is probably the greatest enemy of faith and love. Both faith and love are active. They require that we use them like muscles. Boredom causes atrophy. Boredom makes us ignore the miraculous and look instead for drama.

There is a lot that one can do to combat boredom. You could work on your sermon, re-reading some of those books from seminary. That sermon probably is not as good as you think it is anyway. We all could read more. You might actually prepare for worship by going over the service. Look up why we do what we do.

How about developing a new class for new members? You could visit a few parishioners and shut-ins or call a few visitors. You could write encouraging notes to people. Be the first person to visit the hospital when someone calls. Go down and volunteer somewhere each week. Maybe you could even develop a new opportunity for outreach in the parish. There actually is a lot that you could be doing. It may not be sexy or exciting, but frankly, it is what you should be doing anyway. Heck, if you were doing all this, you would not be bored.

Of course, you might want to explore why you are bored. Maybe it is time to look for a new position, but maybe it is something deeper. From where might that dissatisfaction come? Is it a matter of changing your perception? Or is the Spirit telling you it is time to leave?

In the meantime, during your discernment (in your boredom), you might want to avoid doing these:

• Whatever you do, leave the bulletin boards alone! Sure, they look terrible because the lady who does them has no eye for design, but do not touch them unless you would like to have pins and notes sticking to you. That is not the ditch you want to die in.
• Do not start calling your boss by affectionate names in staff meeting, even if the meeting is about 40 minutes too long. For some reason, no one likes the nickname “Long winded baboon.” Sure, monkeys are kind of cute, but do not say it. I guarantee that if you shout that out in the meeting, you will not be bored, but you will be unemployed or worse, in charge of the bulletin boards.
• Now is not the time to point out the deficiencies of the cleaning crew at church. Dust bunnies may be breeding under your desk, planning to revolt, and take control of your office, but if you start whining, you can bet that dust bunnies will not be the only things under your desk.
• Stay out of the Cathedral bell tower. No one cares that the bell is two notes or two minutes off. Let’s not figure out just how they work. Remember the movie “Vertigo”?
• Let’s be honest, the boss does not want to hear your suggestions for improving efficiency or sermon critique, but I am sure he will not mind talking to you about Budget efficiency.
• Trust me; there are no positions in England available for hot lady priests right now. Don’t bother because I have checked.
• It is never going to work out with the handsome interior decorator that comes every Sunday with his friend Antonio. Leave it alone. Stop thinking about it. He may have washboard abs. You might wonder if he has tan lines (he doesn’t). He is not interested, at all. Ain’t nothing but heartbreak and ecclesiastical court down that road.
• Do not suggest that maybe we should change the Sunday School curriculum, unless you would like your body discovered disemboweled in the nursery. You might be right, and you might end up standing in front of a classroom filled with monsters demonstrating Jesus walking on the water with a felt board.

The list goes on and on. Like I said, boredom is dangerous.

Running Away

Who knew a Jewish physical therapist could re-root my prayer life after conversations with a spiritual director, two bishops, and several priests fell flat? Granted, my discussions with them were about prayer as a narrative act, involving neatly strung-together thoughts and sentences demanding focused time and great deliberation about intercession, thanksgiving, repentance, glorification, and discernment.

My physical therapist just gave me several intense exercises that, done regularly over several weeks, healed my hip muscle so I could run again.

And when I run, I pray.

I’ve tried the whole pray the Daily Office with regularity bit, and it works for a while, until I miss four or five or twenty days, then decide I’m just not cut out for reading lovely canticles aloud for a regular prayer life. Every day. On the hour. For the frigging rest of my life.

Or I try to sound all holy and righteous as I kneel in prayer at my prie dieu (oh yes, I’m just a priest-dork enough that I have my very own at home) , plopping down before God a laundry list of all the concerns in my life, the community of my parish, the city, the state, the nation, and the world, as if God needs a reminder memo from me on all that’s not right with the world. All legitimate concerns, but not exactly the stuff of great prayer.

Great prayer is honest prayer from the person. I could also be completely full of shit, but I suspect God appreciates our honesty and truthfulness in every aspect of our lives, right down to our prayerful moments. And I’m never more honest that when I’m running a few miles.

My running prayers are deliberate and focused, because, well, I’m running. Lest you think I’m one of these runners who gets a runner’s high after a few minutes of physical torture, think again. I’m one of those runners who looks at my watch after I’m surely twenty minutes into the daily sweatfest to discover I’m actually only three minutes. Jesus Christ, why do I do this? Prayer beginning.

I have an antagonistic relationship with running. I struggle for breath; I drip sweat; and I give myself little goals. “Just run until you reach the street light. Just until the end of the block. Just one more minute. Then you can quit.” But I don’t quit, most of the time. I look for excuses not to run, like the day of the week ending in “y.” I think running develops my leg and butt muscles at the cost of spider veins and calluses on my feet. Running is not always fun, and neither is prayer.

Still, I run. One foot in front of the other, with abs and butt muscles tight. Run. Jog. Sweat. Feel. Breath. Pray.

Granted, my prayers aren’t nice, composed narrative acts. I leave that to the real professionals like Thomas Cramner and the Blessed Mother. My running prayers are feelings and emotions, raw and unedited. I began running prayers while serving as a hospital chaplain. Daily, I offered comfort and help to people suffering physically and emotionally. Drug addicts in withdrawal, heart patients with tubes and scars and monitors, young women with breasts filled with cancer, people whose only source of healing was holy death, and those who love all of these. Comfort, spiritual and otherwise, comes at a cost to those who offer such care. I absorbed some of their fear, their sadness, and their despair, taking it home as extra bags of luggage acquired on the journey of loving one another.

I had a few options, as exhibited by other ordained folk I knew. I could repress my emotional response, and let it gain energy and force until it appeared as some form of a Dark Lord in my life, twenty or so years down the road, wielding destruction and personal annihilation as I had an affair, numbed it with alcohol, acquired crushing debt, or some other nifty way to spiral out of control. I could eat my emotions to profound unhealth, always a handy tool, and a girl does love her chocolate, but not the diabetes, expanding girth, or skyrocketing cholesterol that accompanies such action.

I could process the extra baggage, giving what I couldn’t carry back to God in an offering of brutal honesty. That, however, required work and vulnerability and more work. Not the most attractive option, but the option that boded well for my emotional health long-term and my waist line. At the suggestion of Buddhist monk (don’t ever think God speaks only through Christians), I began running on a treadmill in my apartment gym, a dark hole of a place. A perfect place, actually. While I ran, I could rail at God for all the whys and hows I couldn’t answer. I could weep for those who had died or who would die. I could just be and feel and pray. When I finished my run, the angst, sadness, hopelessness, and even fury fell away as my pace and heart rate slowed and I uttered a breathless, “Amen.”

My running prayers are more often than not feelings, those things that we can’t really edit or verbally express very well. They are the immense sadness when we cry so hard we can’t even breathe or the enormous joy that explodes from us as a glorious smile or deep laugh. As I run, I feel the impact of the road and the impact of my day and the people and issues I’ve encountered.

I run among the minutia of our earth, the first courageous blades of spring grass or the first smell of autumn in the air and give thanks for the movement of time and seasons and change and pray for the courage to accept the movement and change with a minimum of whine time.

I run past and with others on their journeys. We wave or nod. Sometimes if we are ending our time, we may speak a few words. Brad tells me of his new cat, while Mary Ann is redecorating her bedroom. Perhaps we are not solving the crises of the world, but we smile at each other and wave. The world would be a better place if we smiled and waved more at others we pass on our journeys.

When the day and the run have been particularly hard, I cry. Snot dribbles from my nose, and I'm all sweaty and red-faced, so cover-girl attractive, I’m not. But neither is life for many, including me. Somewhere between gasps of breath and one more push, I give thanks, even when I’m not wholly thankful. I can run.

And I can pray.

Putting the Hoochie back in Hoochie-Mama

Sunday afternoon was an adventure. A friend and I decided to go to the French Quarter Festival. When I arrived at her house to pick her up, she took one look at me and said: “You can’t go like that. You need to wear a dress.”

I insisted no. I was comfortable in my shorts, tennis shoes and t-shirt. The French Quarter Festival is a casual event, not a man hunting activity. My friend felt differently about this. Quickly she tossed me two dresses to try on.

God bless her, one of the dresses was a size two. I could not get the dress much past my boobs. I just laughed. The other dress was like putting on a sausage casing. She thought it looked great. Okay she actually said: “You look hot.” I guess that is a good thing so we went to the festival.

I thought I would have been more self conscious, but I was not. I was putting the hoochie back in hoochie-mama. My friend laughed at my jokes. She thought we looked hot. I am not sure if we did or not. We had fun.

It got me wondering. Should I be showing off more of the real estate (if you know what I mean)? Am I comfortable in my own skin, with who I am? Am I a shorts and t-shirt kind of woman disguising a super hottie or am I just a shorts and t-shirt kind of woman in a sausage casing?

I would say that I am pretty confident in myself. I feel pretty comfortable in my skin. I like the way I look and the way I dress. But maybe this is a question of how I see myself versus how the world sees me. Do they line up? Maybe I see myself as okay, but how does the world perceive me? One could worry oneself into an acne breakout thinking about this.

Or is this a question of how God sees me? Perhaps, like my friend, God sees me as a size two. In God’s eyes, I am hot. No that dress does not look like a shirt, it looks good. I think that I am fine just wearing a t-shirt, but God knows that I am not just a t-shirt kind of woman. In God’s eyes, I am extraordinary. I do not need to cover it up. I need to share who I am authentically. We need to share who we are authentically.

Okay, I cannot really see myself wearing that shirt/dress again, but maybe I could show off a little more, a little something something. Maybe I can see what God sees. I may not totally agree, but I can give it a try.

The F-Word

"Let me tell you again why I'm so mad, why I am justified in my anger," I said, straightening my back in that pose that I've perfected over the years of righteous indignation. Then I show Her my scar, the place where my heart fell out of my soul from someone's actions. The space between how I would have done something and how the other person DID do something, and that something almost always leads to hurt, disappointment, anger, even rage if all the pieces fit just right. So I proceed, again, to recount the event, even events, that led to this place. When I pause, She nods, even adds in a, "Yes, that was hurtful." And I continue, until I finish.

And God sits, as She does, silently for a while, letting the steam vaporize off my burning soul. And She says one word.

The F-word.

Not the one that can be oh-so-useful as almost any part of speech. Not that one. Not the one that may have meant, "Wow, doesn't this suck." Nope. She says THE F-word. The one we wish Jesus wouldn't have uttered at all: Forgiveness. The F-word, that which God reminds us is not simply a lofty ideal of Christendom, but a hard reality of love. Which will make the best of us say, "Fuck."

"Forgive, my ass," I say, adjusting my beautiful new silk shirt I bought in a perfect pink shade on sale that falls just so the scars aren't visible to anyone else.

But they are visible to Her. Our scars, the places where we've been cut and left to bleed by other children of God. We all have them. And we've all inflicted them. When we compare scars, we often find that they are very, very similar. Trust betrayed, abandonment, disappointment, loss, exclusion, violence to our body, mind, and soul. Sins, we call them, and sins leave a mark.

God, in Her infinite wisdom, let us in on the healing process of those soul marks. Forgiveness and reconciliation. We like forgiveness as a concept, like fusion Asian-Canadian cuisine or those three-inch red strappy heels or giving up chocolate for Lent. In theory, in our intellectualizing, forgiveness sounds so lovely and warm.

"I'm sorry I hurt you. Forgive me?"

"Sure."

And the strings swell as the movie ends and all is right with the world.

But here in the real world, where to relate is to react, we all muff up the relating part regularly and the reaction to said muff-up is usually not so pretty. We might offer some platitude for apology without digging into the details, and we may forget to ask for forgiveness all together because we're just not sure what the other person will do in his or her pain. Animals in pain lash out, even at those hands trying to help. We humans do, too.

Forgiveness isn't about the right words or the perfect apology (although, let me insert that those things go a LONG way to help). It is about taking off the glasses of hurt and anger and disappointment and all the other scars that tint our viewpoint, our entire relationship with the one who has cut us, and our relationship with ourselves and God.

You know the glasses, the lenses that allow us to see every movement, every word from the other as justifying our anger and continuing permission to nurture our wound. The lenses that often make our scar seem much worse than it is, actually, because we want the other to see the betrayal and brokenness live and in living color. The lenses that cast a shadow over reconciliation, even block it completely. The lenses that stop us from seeing how we may have a role in this mess, too. Maybe. Because most sin is complicit. It takes more than one human to, shall I say, fuck things up.

After some time, after I sit in silence, God takes my hands and speaks. "Girlfriend, those glasses are just ugly. They worked for Buddy Holly, but not for you. Take them off."

"No," I say. "I've worn these glasses for a while. Their weight feels familiar."

Then God holds up the mirror, and I can see what God sees. They are not-so-cute. Angelina Jolie couldn't make these look good. So I take them off.

I do. And for a while, my vision is a bit fuzzy. Reconciliation is a new focus, and it doesn't happen in an instant.

"Can I still hold them, just for a while?" I ask.

"If you want," She says, "But they will get heavier and you might miss holding something fabulous. But it's your choice."

And I decide to hand them to Her. She'll know what to do with them.

New Fire

Tonight the new fire is lighted. We wander in the dark, listening to the salvation story. The wait is over, the tomb is empty, and we have dazzling light. Open your eyes, look around and witness the return of love. Not just love’s return, but love’s triumph over death. All it took was three very long days, the longest days of your life, really.

Have you ever sat at a funeral, looking at the casket, wondering how you would get to the next day? How did you end up sitting on that pew and someone else ended up lying in a casket? Now what? You hold your breath, but you do not know that you are holding it. What if he or she came back?

At first, I imagine all sorts of zombie foolishness. I am holed up in my basement, the doors barricaded, and dad’s corpse on the outside, banging on the house, and shouting: “Brains! Brains!” Of course, that would never happen because we do not have basements in New Orleans. The image is ridiculous, but as a precaution, I make it a personal policy not to support any university that studies Corpse Re-animation, 101 or the follow-up course Aiming for the Brain, 102.

But seriously, how strange would it be to have that dear one return healthy and alive? What a reversal? Finally you could breathe again. I think we would be terrified and exhilarated because of what that resurrection shows us.

That resurrection shows us that this end is not an ending at all. All those things that frightened us are just smoke and darkness. The darkness cannot overcome the light. Not even death can diminish the power of love. We do not have to be frightened to love and lose because love will continue. We can go to the very length of love and find out that it continues beyond the horizon into forever, a world without end.

Shout out from PeaceBang!

Wow, this is like finding a kickin' pair of heels on sale that are comfortable and that go with your clericals.

Nothing like positive reviews. Kiss of peace to you, too, Vicki.