6 years ago

The city smells like it is burning. It acts like an unwanted reminder to this date in New Orleans. There is haze and fog today, not unlike the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina. There was this sort of (for lack of a better term) stank in the air for almost two years after Katrina in New Orleans. Everyone had a cough from it.

It was strange coming back to the city after the storm. I had actually moved just a few weeks before the storm. My husband stayed behind to sell the house. I remember not paying much attention to the storm growing in the Gulf.

I asked my congregation to pray for New Orleans, but I thought it would be fine. I really did not know or understand the scale of the impending hurricane blowing toward New Orleans. The news I heard after made it seem okay. Sure, things were a mess, but often after a big storm in New Orleans, things were a mess and you started to clean up until the lights came back on. Then I heard the former Mayor speak about the levees breaking and that the city was filling with water.

Now, frankly, I thought that was just crazy talk. I looked on the internet at pictures from my former neighborhood, but I still did not want to accept what I saw. I thought that my little house off Claiborne Avenue was fine. Sure, the picture I was looking at was from my front lawn looking out, and there was water filling the whole picture, but it surely was not in my house.

It would not be until I watched Harry Connick, Jr. riding in a boat around my old neighborhood, checking on his parents’ house, that the truth started to sink in. My house was flooded. Financially, my husband and I could be ruined. Still, I would not believe until I looked at a video shot by some friends who sneaked into the city. Indeed our house had had four feet of water in it (the house was about three feet off the ground).

I felt so powerless. What would we do? In November, I flew back to New Orleans to see for myself. My mother drove me to my old house. By this time, my husband and I were able to sell it, but I could still walk in to see for myself. The floorboard had buckled, mold covered the walls, and the items that we left behind were covered in filth. The one piece of unbroken back fence was covered with graffiti that stated “Dog Food back here” with an arrow to our backyard (to the idiot who wrote that, we did not have a dog, and thanks for damaging the one unbroken piece of back fence). When I saw that, I broke down in tears.

“I want to show you something else,” my mother said. She drove me to Christ Church Cathedral on St. Charles Avenue. The church’s front lawn looked like a garage sale. People milled about, picking the items they needed or leaving items for others. All was free. I cried again.

Looking back on the storm, I am amazed at how far the city has come, and how far I have come. I often wonder “what if,” but I realize that you cannot live in the hypothetical. I think about the lessons of Hurricane Katrina, lessons, not for the city or the nation or the world, but for me.

Certainly there were lessons. I can tell you what type of insurance to buy and which to avoid. I can tell you what type of bleach to use to remediate mold (outside bleach- there is a difference). I can also tell you that someone else is going through something much worse than you. And I can also tell you that in the very midst of a disaster, hope still shines through.

Hope does shine through. Help is on its way. Bit by bit, the wreckage is cleared, and you start rebuilding. Slowly, painfully, something new emerges- not what it was, not better, not worse. Eventually, healing happens. You find yourself looking back, remembering what was, and you look forward to what is new.

Bad Haircuts and Better

A bad haircut can ruin a day and a week and, depending upon how fast your hair grows, a couple of months.  In our souls, we know that hair grows, but not instantaneously.  So, we (mostly women) work with barrettes and ponytails and even a few hairbands and hats to survive the growing out period.  We probably vow never to cut our hair again and bewail our manifold sins of bad haircuts with friends over chocolate and wine.  We wait.  We even cry.

Life goes on, and little by little, hair grows and we aren't so horrified by the prospect of the morning hairstyle routine.  We start to work with the change of hair.  Maybe we even like it.

Okay, so maybe you men out there can't really relate, but I suspect that most women can.  We've all had the questionable hairstyle.  Maybe we thought we'd really like the short pixie cut.  Maybe we listened to the ill-given advice from the stylist or a friend.  Maybe we thought we were ready for a change and be a redhead, and we really weren't.

Or maybe we were ready and we just needed time to get used to the cut.

Change, transition, upheaval - call it what you will, but they all feel like cuts.  And they are.  They are cuts to our comfort, our routine, our souls as we've come to know them.  They are cuts that often remove what we don't need anymore, that open our selves up to something more, or loose us from some bondage.  Those cuts, painful though they are, often provide the spaces for the light of God to shine through.

I've got several close friends in transition and change.  A few in the search process for a new call, one dealing with the impact when a husband takes a new call and all that will and will not involve for her and the family and herself, one with a soon-to-be-former spouse, one with a potential new spouse.

Oh, I remember that space.  I'm mildly fallow right now and savoring it, as I know fallow doesn't last for long, especially when one's bishop follows God's call to somewhere else.  Fallow is the holy rest stop for a few moments where we can breath deeply and see where we were and how far we've come and smile.  Fallow lets us look at the places where we were cut and see the scar that has healed, test the movement and ability of the wounded soul, and maybe even leap in joy.  I was in the thick of the search process, among other things, this time last year.  A close friend told me, "Your present is not your future," a mantra that seems to be rooted in the words of those who were enslaved by owners in the deep south and yearning for liberation.  It became my prayer, my reassurance that God was working and wanting good things for me, even when the mountain I was climbing was too steep and rocky for me to see anything but the terrain around me, but I could pray.

Climb rocks, bleed, pray:  My present is not my future.  Stumble, slide down, pray:  My present is not my future.  Stand up again, breathe, pray.

In the midst of anxiety, worry, change, even devastation and loss of hope, our present is not our future.

Last night I gathered with other clergy and laity at the Celebration of New Ministry of a new friend and saw many of the new people who were not in my life last year - my current parishioners, parishioners in other churches whom I've met and worked with in the diocese, new clergy colleagues and friends.  And I simply marveled for a few moments, overwhelmed by the love of where I am now.  Overwhelmed, really, by my experience that God walked with me through the growing-out and cutting, and did indeed want good things for me.

The temptation is for me, or any of us who have gone through the cutting and growing, to blithely tell those currently in that place, "Oh, it will get better."  That, in general, is not for me or any of us to say to anyone else.  "Better" always feels like a relative word.  What is better for some is not better for others.  How we would fix something or someone's life is often not on God's to-do list.  As I get older and acquire more scars, I find that grasping for the sunny side in dark times usually meets our need rather than the need of the person in the great deep with God. I don't even know how helpful reminding people that God is in the change, transition, cutting, and upheaval with us is for many people.

Maybe, when it all feels out of control and we are bleeding from the cuts and changes of life, we just need someone who can look through the bad haircut or messy life and smile at the good soul underneath it all.  Maybe we just need a friend who can let us borrow the fabulous hat she acquired from her latest bad haircut until we feel safe enough on our own.  Maybe we just need to hold each other's hands in silent solidarity until the hurting soul finally takes a deep breath and says, "You know, I feel better."

In the interest of full self-disclosure

  Any good relationship is based on honesty, but it takes a little bit to get there. We often must be enticed into relationship. There can be an expectation to be coy. We should not reveal too much, or we should gloss over our flaws until we can build trust. Of course, building trust means being honest. Oh dear!  Well, in the interest of full self-disclosure, here are a few hints about that lovely lady sitting across from you.

You see my hair? Looks great, right? No, I did not wake up with my hair like this. Usually, I am lucky to get a brush through it once a day. A totally awesome woman, at a salon, washed and put super gunk in my hair and blew it dry with a big curl brush, and then she sprayed it with something totally neat (I do not know what it was). It was not cheap, but I think the effect is pretty cool. It should be this way all of 12 hours. Tomorrow morning, my hair will be plastered to the side of my head, as usual. Sure, I will try to blow dry, curl brush, hot iron my hair like this and it will be a disaster. I am convinced the woman who did my hair might be a voodoo queen with magical powers.

Yes I do look lovely tonight. This top I am wearing was found on a large load of laundry still sitting in my bedroom awaiting folding and putting away. Same goes for the bottom. I yanked this skirt from the bottom of the basket without causing an avalanche of cotton and polyblends. I am a little impressed with myself the pile did not fall, but I will not celebrate yet because I think I lost a bracelet somewhere in that pile. Oh yes, by the way, I did iron my clothing. You are lucky to see this because I never iron anything, ever.

Music, sure, I like music! I do like music, but I have bad news for you. Sure, I know the music you are talking about because I was a dj in college. Before you think that is cool, I should mention that I sometimes picked music so I would have enough time to run down the hallway to the bathroom. Currently I am listening to Dolly Parton on cd in my car. It is her album Straight Talk from the movie Straight Talk. I totally love it, but if you should ever ride in the car with me, I will hide that cd and put in U2.

Favorite movies and television, oh dear! Yes I really do love foreign films. Okay, okay, I like movies filmed in foreign places. I love James Bond movies. That being said, I think that Roger Moore is my favorite James Bond. I know, I know, but I will not force you to watch “A View to a Kill” with me. I watch these alone for the sake of others. Also, what I said about not really watching television is not true. I will watch the Simpsons, South Park, Law and Order and Modern Family, but if I get desperate, I secretly like that show Hoarders because it makes my house look clean. I can also tell you a lot about Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Books, okay, here is the truth. Yes, I read poetry in college. I read Iris Johansen and Janet Evanovich. I want to know if Eve Duncan will ever find the body of her daughter Bonnie. I want to know if Stephanie Plum will settle down with Joe. All right, all right, I admit it. I also have a few (huge stack) of Harlequin Romances that I am picking through.

You think my eyes look beautiful? You are too kind because I am indeed wearing make-up. I had a college buddy who called make-up war paint. I used to laugh, but she might have been right. It is war out there to get your attention.  Hopefully, I will conquer you, and I can wipe this stuff off. The truth is that I might moisturize my face or wear gloss, if I am being fancy. I should mention that I am not really fancy. So, if I am being even more truthful, I sometimes do not even look at myself in the mirror some mornings. I just splash water on my face, run the brush through this rats’ nest and go.

Nope, I am not fancy. For that matter, I am not really put together, despite my current appearance, but I am a good and kind person. You might not realize that, if not for my outward appearance. You might not have ever looked otherwise. I am funny, and I would love to listen to you. I guess I just need a chance.

So, you see all this? If this relationship moves forward, this might be the last time you see me this elegantly put together, but you will know that beneath the façade beats the heart of a woman of passion, love, and faith, and that woman feels that for you! So, tell me about yourself?

Baptized in Dirty Water

Dirty Sexy Ministry accepted the invite to be part of the Sanctuary Collective Empowerment Project's Queer Theology Synchroblog, writing about our solidarity with gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, and queer children of God.

Baptismal water should be dirty.  Drawn right out of the local river water and poured into the font and over our heads.  Maybe that will help the holier than thou complex so many Christians have.  That and a good persecution.

One of my professors in seminary said the church needs a good persecution every few hundred years to force it to find its center again.  I think the church needs to quit being complicit in persecutions and recognize the persecutions its currently involved in.  For about the first 300 years of Christianity, being a Christian was risky business.  Sure, you had fellowship and Eucharist, but on any given day or night, Roman soldiers could grab you and force you to be part of the weekend show at the Coliseum. Which usually ended up as you also being the weekend dinner for the carnivores in the Coliseum.   

Then Constantine usurped Christianity for his own political gain (no, I don't believe he really had a conversion moment where Jesus said, "Slaughter the enemy in my name."  Kind of out of character for Mr. Turn The Other Cheek, don't you think?") and Christianity began its own persecutions.  In fact, many historians note that more Christians killed each other in the 300 years after Constantine than Rome killed Christians in the first 300 years post-Resurrection.

Dandy little figure, isn't it?

If the Church just needs a good persecution to find its center again, then simply listen to the stories.  Listen to the stories of those Christians of Color who were and are marginalized, brutalized, and murdered by their brothers and sisters of a different race or ethnicity.  Listen to the stories of women who were and are marginalized, brutalized, and murdered by men.  Listen to the stories of children who were and are marginalized, brutalized, and abused by clergy.  Listen to the stories of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, and queer who have been and continue to be marginalized, brutalized, abused, and murdered by those who fly the banner of Christianity as moral gestapo.

That is indeed our job.  To stop talking and listen.   To let those who are not in the center of power help us discover our center that is and always will be merciful, accepting love.

Jesus does that in the gospels.  In Sunday's lesson, Jesus and his male cadre of presumably straight disciples are doing whatever men do when a Canaanite woman starts shouting at them.  And they get annoyed and urge Jesus to tell her to go away.  Or they are embarrassed.  That's what people in power generally do when someone "beneath" them makes a commotion.

But she keeps shouting.  When marginalized people shout, they shout because those in power aren't listening.  The holy thing is to shut up and let them shout.

And she does.  She gets into conversation with Jesus.  He refers to her, some say, as a dog.  She comes right back.  

"But even the dogs get the crumbs."  She refuses to be marginalized.  Her daughter is sick, and she knows this man Jesus can heal her.  

God bless those who refuse to be marginalized, those who won't give up their seat on the bus, those who marched in Stonewall, those who knelt for ordination in the midst of shouts and jeers.  God bless those who seek and serve Christ in the person or group and say to the Christ who calls them, "dogs," 

"MAYBE, BUT I AM A CHILD OF GOD, TOO.  TREAT ME LIKE ONE."

That is great faith, to believe enough in one's own dignity when no other person around you is affirming that dignity.  That is great faith, to look at one who has dismissed you and say, "You will not dismiss me."  That is great faith, to remember that the wounds, illnesses, and demons we implant in each other because of years and centuries of hate and abuse, can and are healed when those of us who are oppressors are stared down by the oppressed when they say, "I am loved by God, too.  Just like you."

Holy scripture may not say anything implicit about our treatment of GLBTQ brothers and sisters.  Our tradition has certainly given us plenty of examples of how not to love our neighbor.  But the dirty water of baptism reminds us that we all rush through the waters of creation at our births, both physical and spiritual.  We are all called by God to seek and serve the loving Christ in all people.  The water is generally the same.  Because we are the same to God.  We are God's beloved.  All of us.

To those in power, those of us who are rich, straight, male, or whatever power and authority may look like in your circle, stop talking.  Stop persecuting because the shouting is disturbing your conversation, night out, church convention, or worship.  Start realizing that you are persecuting, even if you aren't doing anything active, you are persecuting.  Doing nothing in the face of persecution is still persecution of the outcast.  Start facing your own prejudices.  Start listening.  And listen more. 

To those who have been and are marginalized, keep talking.  Keep shouting.  Keep disrupting the comfortable and afflict them with the promises they made to love their neighbors as themselves.

And thank you for staying in the Church, despite the persecution.  Thank you for believing that we are called to love and, even more, that we are capable still of that love.

Thank you for muddying the waters of our delusional perfection.

For more synchroblog posts, click here.

Ghosts in a Church

Kathryn Tucker Windham died a while back (Southern for sometime in the last year, but I don't remember the exact date).  First, she was an Alabamian, one of the many voices from that state (my home state) that took the common Southern past-time of story telling (or tale tellin') and lifted it to a true art form.  Her best-known stories involved ghosts.  Jeffery was her own personal ghost.  She also kept the coffin in which she was buried in a shed in her back yard.  What seems eccentric in other parts of the country are simply charming quirks in the deep South.  An impact of the heat and humidity and fried chicken, perhaps.

Or perhaps what seems quirky to some is simply unabashed honesty.  After all, ghost stories aren't original to the South.  Or to the North or any direction in the United States.  They appear in all countries in folklore and campfire tales and even the Bible.  Ghosts, their stories or even the idea that they might exist, scare us, especially when it's after midnight and the dog suddenly stands up from a dead sleep and growls at nothing.  My grandmother spoke of ghosts as annoying family members with a penchant for flipping lights on and off. Sure, the thought that I could suddenly see a shimmery figure of a person who is there one second and gone the next is disconcerting (okay, terrifying).

But maybe something else that unnerves us about ghosts is the idea that the spaces we live in or work in had a life before us.  Within the walls where we live and work, life went forward in its mundane elegance.  There are names on memorials of stained glass of stories of loss in wars that we did not experience first-hand.  There are carvings on the backs of pews from a young boy who used his grandfather's pen knife during boring sermons that just look like nicks and scratches to our eyes.  There are stories, many stories, that we don't know when we arrive about a space, its windows and floors and furniture and its very life, that we can hear.  Or fearfully ignore.

I speak mainly here of churches, because clergy have a particularly bad habit of thinking that between Jesus and themselves, nothing memorable happened in the history of the church.  That wherever we are wasn't really as wonderful or as amazing as it is with the advent of our presence.  What a downer to realize it's not.  That whatever ideas we bring, whatever sermons we preach or decorating ideas we have, we are simply another part of the story.

One of the key gifts the Bible gives us is that of story - that long before King Solomon, Deborah the judge had good sense in Israel.  Long before Mary sang the Magnificat, Hannah sang her song magnifying the Lord.  Long before we had the newest idea about church growth, God stood over us, hands on hips, and uttered the line from Job:  "Where were YOU when I created the heavens and the earth?"

Yes, we in the church can let the ghosts of our parishes haunt us.  We can let the ghosts of the past be the thing we talk about ("remember when...") or the whispy veil that limits our vision of the future and what part of the story we can write.  We can let the walls and furniture stand as the only story of our faith community, letting the stories of our past be the only thing that matters.  Not much of a life-giving experience to go to church in a museum.

But not very life-giving, either, to go to church in a place without ghosts, where the stories and spirits of the life before has been eradicated by ignoring their voices.  Ghosts, as Ms. Windham might opine, give land and buildings and homes a life beyond just the wood and windows and doors.  Whether they are factual or not doesn't matter; their stories matter.  Southern ghost stories are often meandering tales of men, women, and children looking out from their present and reaching into our world to remind us that the world existed before we arrived.  People dreamed and loved and cried in spaces that had life.  Our presence doesn't do anything but simply add another chapter to an unending story.

And what a wonderful, rich gift that is - to be important enough to add our chapters to the story.

Forgiving Ourselves for Not Being Perfect

For Jacob

The ancient church mothers and fathers name pride as the root sin; the sin, the feeling, the response, the emotion from which all other sins get their energy.  The sin of pride, that hubris that likes to feel superior to others, often at the expense of others' sense of self.  I'm not referring to self-esteem, that sense of self that doesn't need external measures, that sense that rests in God.  I'm referring to hubris, the pride that often reaches for externals to value self.  That pride tears other people, organizations, even countries down to build itself up.  That pride cannot sit with self-examination.  That pride can certainly keep us in a stilted relationship with ourselves and the Holy One.

That pride can also significantly inhibit our journey of forgiveness.  Several of our Dirty Sexy Ministry community have written about our posts on forgiveness, asking particularly about the work of forgiving ourselves.  After a time of reflecting and talking about our own journeys of forgiveness, some still ongoing, we keep coming back to pride.

Pride, we think, stops us from forgiving ourselves because pride refuses to allow us to recognize our own imperfection and our own complicity in the damage that led to the need for forgiveness.

Forgiveness exists, at least most commonly, because we have been hurt, disappointed, betrayed, or wounded by someone with whom we had some expectation of honorable relationship.  And our first reaction is usually anger:  I can't believe s/he said that about me; he seemed so nice when we talked on the phone, but what a complete dud he turned out to be; why did s/he act that way?  So we get angry, which is a fairly reasonable response to pain.  Anger (not of the seven deadly sin kind) will often get us out of bad situations or tell us we are in danger, so pay attention.

Then we blame and process, we wonder why, we hypothesize, we talk about the other person, dissecting her or his actions.  She must have father issues.  He's just a jerk and not good enough for you.  They aren't particularly helpful reasons, because we are essentially probing around in someone's soul instead of focusing on our own selves.  Sadly, this is where many people get stuck.  The blame-pride arena.  In this place, the entire hurtful episode is the fault completely of the the other.  We were innocent victims.  Caveat here:  sometimes, this may very well be true, but a quick test is to see if the injury in question has happened before.  If you've been betrayed, abandoned, or hurt in similar circumstances, God may be inviting you to more spiritual exploration about your place in the cycle.  

And pride begins to root its ugly tentacles.  Because pride refuses to engage in self-reflection.  Pride tells us we could never have had any part in this wrongdoing.  Pride invites us to gather external support as we share our story of hurt with as many people who will listen.  We may call it processing.  Others call it gossip.  Pride justifies our injury and invites us to bring it out again and again, while we exonerate ourselves.  Pride lets us feel self-assured in whatever overtures of forgiveness we have made that look pretty and tidy on the surface, but never really allow for the deep work of reconciliation.  Quite simply, pride is not interested in hearing about our personal responsibility; pride likes to blame our failures on the other.  

Yet forgiveness is about responsibility.  It is about responsibility of being hurt, of hurting another, and of seeing what impact the hurt may have on the future. The deep work of forgiveness is hard, and if we're courageous, we begin to explore how we contributed to the situation.  We begin to take responsibility for our actions.  Why did I go out with a guy when my gut screamed "no" from the get-go and who created a relationship Eminen could have sung about?  Why did I trust a person who spent most of the time together talking about others in a derogatory way?  Why did I think that my experience with that person/place/job/school/organization, would be different than others who told me of their hurtful time?

I don't advise doing this work alone.  God created us in community, so a trusted friend, spiritual director, or therapist will often be able to hold the mirror up in a gentle way, keeping us on the path of exploring our responsibility and off the path of hurtful blame.

Then, after some work, we get to the point of, "If I'd known then what I know now."  Of course!  But to learn what we know now about our own tendencies to fall into hurtful relationships, to "save" a troubled soul, to miss the signs of certain damaging people in our lives, or whatever the lesson in loving ourselves may be, we had to learn from experience.  We had to go through the experience, hurtful though it is.  We have to get the wounds, to let the scars heal, and to learn.

We all make mistakes.  I've couched them (in my most aware moments) that for whatever reason, I needed to make that hurtful mistake, engage in that hurtful relationship, or act in that hurtful way at that time.  I hope I don't do it again.

When I've done this work, when I've found that wisdom that - unfortunately - only scars seem to bring, and when I've sent pride packing on the forgiveness journey, I realize that I'm not above mistakes or bad calls with people or situations.  Pride will tell us we are above errors in judgment, that we would never engage in hurtful relationships unless we'd be duped, that we are just that perfect.  Love reminds us that we make mistakes, that we often find ourselves wandering in the desert because we need to learn something about our very selves and souls, and that we are gloriously flawed.  And loved anyway.

Somewhere in this journey, we realize that the people we usually need to forgive the most are ourselves, if for no other reason than to forgive ourselves for not being perfect, for making mistakes, and for messing things up.

An we remember, for whatever reason, that is where we needed to be at that time.  We hope we're wiser, and we go forward with our newly found wisdom of self.  We hope we don't repeat that error.  Maybe we won't.  Maybe we will.

And the journey of forgiveness continues.