Sometimes I write what I feel

Sometimes –
when I’m sure that no one’s watching –
I write what I feel.

I can’t do it on the bus,
when someone next to me might surreptitiously cast
one eye in my direction,

or at the office,
when someone might sneak a glance at my desk
from across a carpeted, cubicled span of inches.

Really, it’s best not to use paper at all,

in case it slips out of my pocket
while I’m climbing a flight of stairs,

and heavenforbid someone recognizes my handwriting.

So I write it on my heart instead,
traced into the veins and ventricles inside me,

secret.

The Risky Business of Worship

I recently read Richard Foster’s classic The Celebration of Discipline. If you’re not up for diving into all 12 disciplines, can I invite you to read just his chapter on worship?

Brace yourself: it’s convicting.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I’m on staff at a church, so Sunday mornings are one of the most hectic times of my work week. I’m often filling in for missing Sunday School teachers or throwing together puppet shows or craft activities at the last minute.

Truth be told, sometimes I’m hiding in the choir loft by the time worship rolls around. Or at least sneaking coffee hour snacks from the Fellowship Hall.

Foster reminded me that praise is a sacrifice that we offer to God, and the praise we offer together as a community is impacted by the state of our individual hearts when we walk into the church building.

We need to be practicing hearing God’s voice all week so we will be more open and ready to hearing it from the pews on Sunday mornings.  Worship is to “permeate the daily fabric of our lives,” as Foster puts it. If we aren’t accustomed to inviting the divine into our own mundane moments, we won’t be ready for it in corporate worship either.

I’ve been carrying that conviction around inside me for the last few months, and I can tell you: it’s been changing the way I enter into worship on Sunday mornings.

I want to be ready to be changed, not only because I’m entering a sacred space of communal worship, but because I’ve been tending to my spirit throughout the week. I am grateful to those who worship with me that they, too, are bringing their vibrant spiritual selves to the sanctuary.

As Foster writes, worship “is not for the timid or comfortable. It involves an opening of ourselves to the dangerous life of the spirit.”

Thank goodness we’re on the adventure together.

How do you prepare your own heart for communal worship? Do you think Foster is right that worship is a risky business? Have you ever found yourself hiding in the choir loft?

Hums & Whispers: An Ode to Springtime

I had almost forgotten Spring
when she came upon me walking along in sorrow.

It was a moment before recognition reached
these eyes, this heart,
head tilted slightly to the side,
brow furrowed slightly toward the center,
as if to inquire of a stranger who has brushed
too close for coincidence
don’t I know you from somewhere?

But Spring knew me immediately,
perhaps by the slope of my shoulders,
perhaps by the weight of my burden,
perhaps by the shape of my slightly misshapen earlobe.

There was beckoning in her greeting,
dewdrops and softly opened petals,
she was a subtle reaching, a caressing healing.
She was the kind of newness you forget
until it graces your memory with
ahh, it all comes full circle.

She was full circle.

I held her, almost (as one can only almost hold Spring)
until our time came to part ways again.
And I felt somehow different,
ripened, settled,
for having walked with her a while.

Ask me now what she told me,
and all I’ll know are hums and whispers.

Who can say if there was ever more than that?

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(Spring has found me later this year than last but has found me nonetheless.  This in response to an invitation to poetry from Christine Valters Paintner at the Abbey of the Arts. Go visit and read some more spring!)

Why I Told My Truth

I did something really scary (so scary I pretty much stopped talking about it right after I did it):

I told the truth.

Actually, that’s not entirely correct. I wrote the truth. The truth of my story, which is really the only truth I know.

I wrote it down and sent it to someone else to read and then suddenly I was in a crowd of other young women of faith writing the truths of their stories, and now suddenly we’re here.

We’re here sharing our stories with anyone who wants to read them. We’re here sharing our stories with you.

After I did this horribly scary, possibly foolish, completely uncomfortable thing, I wasn’t totally sure why I’d done it.

Why risk telling the truth of my story when it might end up really hurting or embarrassing me?

Why write it down in a way that it can’t be forgotten or edited or hidden under a mountain of rocks somewhere, never to be recovered?

Why talk about what it means to really live my Christian faith — in the gritty, authentic, this-is-not-a-fire-drill kind of way that’s easier to hide than to admit?

I wasn’t sure why I’d written my story until last week when I mentioned this feat of stupidity courage to two of my close friends and co-workers.

I told them I had a secret I wanted to share, and then I told them I’d written an essay that was getting published. They, predictably, squealed and praised before asking why I’d keep something like that a secret.

I wrote about my personal life, I told them, and how it intersects with my faith. I wrote about how the church can be overwhelming and suffocating at the same time as it can be welcome and grace-filled.

All of us, the dozens of truth-telling women in this book, wrote about these things. We wrote about sex and abuse and dating and love and marriage and fear and relationships and desire and purity.

Not in an abstract, clinical way, but in a raw, honest way. We wrote about our own experience with these things. My friends understood immediately why this was something terrifying for me (but they didn’t take back their squeals and praises).

And then? Then we talked.

It was like some secret door had been opened in the space between us and suddenly they both wanted to tell their stories, to speak about their experiences with religion and taboo.

Our stories were different; our lives are different. But each story matters, and we were all relieved and excited to have someone to share with.

People are hungry to have this conversation! They are searching for a safe space to be honest about their lives in a way they often feel they can’t be. We are all longing to be our whole selves, right where we are, and to share those whole selves with each other.

After my conversation with my friends ended, I realized that was why I had risked telling my story. Integrity is not an easy thing, but it is a precious and powerful thing.

Every time I have taken a step into a space of courageous authenticity, I have found that so many shining, sparkling souls are standing right there with me.

We are already standing right here with you. Come share in the story and be part of the conversation.

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Want to learn more? Check out these posts by the editors, Enuma Okoro and Erin Lane or go visit the Indiegogo site for Talking Taboo to watch a video of these fabulous ladies chatting about the project.

Asking for Our Authentic Selves

You delight in truth in my inmost being.
You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
Psalm 51:6

God not only accepts your deepest, truest self — God delights in your deepest, truest self.

Did you know this?

God is interested in what is most authentically you, no matter how messy or confused or selfish or vulnerable or stuck that you might be.

During Lent, I studied some of the questions Jesus asked during his life, and I was struck by how often he sought to move past the veneer and get at the most genuine, real part of the people to whom he was speaking.

I imagine that Jesus asked “What are you looking for?” and “Do you wish to go away?” and “Do you want to be made well?” because he actually wanted to hear the answers.

These are questions for which there is no right or wrong answer, there is only the real answer of what’s true for the listeners at that moment. They are invitations into further reflection and conversation.

If I find that I don’t actually want to be made well, why not? What is holding me back? What am I valuing more than wellness?

The Psalmist declares that God desires truth in our inmost being. I heard that theme echoed over and over in the questions of Jesus — the desire to know us as we truly are, in the most hidden places of our hearts.

God is asking for our most authentic selves — we have only to answer.

Hush

There are few things as mystical
as the slant of morning sunlight,
the way it changes the nature of things,
with its illumination and shadow,
how it casts and recasts the world
in the image of God resplendent.

There is a space inside me that welcomes the light –
recognizes and invites it –
Come, wanderer,
how precious that you have arrived here,
this very place at this very moment.
Come, alight on this fragment.
Stay as long s you like: an hour, a moment.
Come.

Says the light, nothing,
for its being is full already,
and it has no room for sound.

Guest Post: Why I Believe in the Devil

I’m so excited to be posting some writing by my colleague and dear friend, Daniel. We love to talk theology, even if we don’t always agree. This is probably the first time either Karl Barth or the devil has made an appearance on my blog — my thanks to Dan for courageously tackling the tough topic of evil.

source

Renouncing the Devil

I’ve always thought of the Devil or Satan as an interesting character. This person/demon/spirit/snake appears throughout Scripture generally making a mess of things.

Much of Christian tradition associates the snake who slyly convinces the proto-couple to eat forbidden fruit and bring God’s curse upon their own heads with Satan (Gen. 3:1-7). In Job, Satan is described as an “angel” or a “messenger” who appears before God with the proposition to toy with Job’s life to see how much suffering it takes to break a faithful person (Job 6:1-12). Jesus is tempted in the wilderness by the Devil in an attempt to make the Son of God seek honor and power in the stead of suffering and service to humanity (Mat. 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-13).

In my denomination’s (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) baptismal liturgy we have preserved an early church practice of reciting certain vows before receiving this sacrament. The one receiving baptism or someone on the baptized person’s behalf is asked, “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?” to which the respondent says, “I renounce them.”

I myself have made this renouncement and as a pastor-to-be I will be asking others to make this renouncement. I have to ask myself though, do I really believe in the Devil? Is he or she a real force that occupies this world?

Encountering the Other

In much of religion, I believe that we humans are constructing metaphors to describe some teeny, tiny, unfathomable aspect of a reality outside of ourselves- divine and demonic. In the case of God, he/she/it is simply too big for us to grasp. God is too “Other” for us to fully comprehend. Karl Barth wrote that the Gospel (a revelation of the Other God to us)

is not one thing in the midst of other things, to be directly apprehended and comprehended… The Gospel is therefore not an event, nor an experience, nor an emotion— however delicate! Rather, it is the clear and objective perception of what eye hath not seen nor ear heard.
(Taken from The Epistle to the Romans)

I love that paradox. Our experience of God is such a clear, obvious encounter with the invisible, unencounterable Other. When we give words to God we are speaking something cannot be spoken and we are given vision to something that is invisible. Revelation doesn’t stop being inaudible or invisible, but we try to construct something audible or visible to something that is beyond sensory or cognitive apprehension.

I do not know who God is entirely. Saint Augustine, Billy Graham, John Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Abraham Heschel, Martin Luther, and I may say things about God, but that is only what has been revealed to us in our very limited comprehension. God is beyond words or thoughts.

This is why I feel that I can faithfully believe in and pursue interfaith relations. My understanding of God does not grasp anywhere near the entire reality of who God is and what God’s salvific actions entail. I have no right- in fact, I believe it is grave sin to claim an exclusive knowledge of God.

In short, I know God in my faith, but I do not know God in anyone else’s.

God’s incomprehensibility is why I think we can use so many beautiful or disturbing metaphors. God is a warrior (Exo. 15:3), God is a father (Mat. 6:9; Luke 11:2), God is a mother (Hos. 11:3-4), God is a judge (Psa. 7:11), God is a potter (Isa. 64:8), God is a king (Psa. 95:3), God is a chicken (Mat. 23:37), God is a lion (Hos. 11:10), God is a lamb (John 1:29). Anything we say of God can only be spoken in metaphor simply because we do not have the faculties to speak directly about what the incomprehensible All-Mighty.

Incomprehensible Evil

To an only slightly lesser extent, I believe the same can be said for evil. Our world is broken and most people are too aware of that fact. Poverty, hunger, injustice, disease, and death. The church has historically called these shortcomings of goodness “sin.”

In my understanding, “sin” comes in three main varieties. First, sin may be our individual shortcomings. For example, I have sinned when I say a cutting remark to that person who has just been annoying me for far too long. Second, sin may be corporate. Our nation’s racial-economic inequalities are a corporate sin that too many of us contribute to. Third, Sin is outside or Other. Something is broken with our world on an elementary level. We may see it in death that strikes suddenly and with disregard for age or goodness.

The classic question of theodicy haunts suffering humanity, “How can evil exist in the world when a good God created it and continues to sustain it?” or more simply, “Why does God allow suffering in the world.” I firmly believe that anyone who claims to have a convincing answer to the problem of evil’s rule of our world is either delusional or a liar. No answer is satisfying when someone asks, “How could my little girl die of leukemia?” or “What good purpose was achieved in the drought that led to multitudes of starving people?” At times, evil which rebels against goodness so strongly is nearly as incomprehensible as the idea of God itself.

This is why I believe in the Devil. I see the Devil not merely as a red man with a pitchfork and horns, nor as a conniving snake, nor as a rogue angel. The Devil is those forces within humanity individually and corporately that tirelessly seek to upset the good of this world- evil inclination. The Devil is also the aspects of our lived experience that we may know viscerally to be wrong- chaotic evil.

The Devil is embodied Sin.

I do not believe that the Devil is a snake or a fallen angel any more than I believe God is a lion or a chicken. When faced with realities- good or evil- that are more real than we can imagine, we humans can only speak in metaphor. The Devil is real and we just do not have the words to speak directly about that incomprehensible, beyond understanding force of destruction.

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Want to read more of Daniel’s essays and sermons? Go check out his blog at  Eisenblogosphere.