PeaceBang

Banjo Breakthrough

Before I hunker down to work, I must share a BANJO break-through.

I began lessons in May, and quickly determined that I am NOT a natural talent on the BANJO, although the very idea that I might play it even half-decent is very EXCITING to me because the BANJO is a very happy instrument no matter what.

So today I had my lesson and my teacher played me this very cute song by the group Asleep At the Wheel and we just sat and strummed along as he called out chords and he had to stop and teach me a few new ones, and then we just kept going and I realized that I was actually playing a song with no music in front of me, just by ear.

I was pretty ecstatic and I think my teacher knew it, although I was very cool about it.

Also this morning I made up a new recipe that’s really good.

PeaceBang’s Cheesey Potato Leek Cabbage Mess

Cook some little potatoes until done. Rinse them with cold water in the colander for slicing later.
Sautee some garlic, leeks and some cabbage in olive oil.
(It’s better to do them separately.)
Throw a big hunk of gruyere cheese in the food processor (cut it into several smaller hunks first). Process to crumbles.
Slice up the taters and layer in a buttered casserole dish.
Add a layer of the sauteed cabbage and the leeks (I processed the leeks, too, because they can get stringy if left in chunks). Sprinkle with gruyere cheese.
Add another layer of the cabbage and leeks mix. Sprinkle with more of the gruyere cheese.
Make some fresh breadcrumbs real quick in the food processor, add some parmesan. Use this to top everything.
Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Take it out, dot with butter, and bake for another 5-10 minutes until bubbly and fragrant.

(You should add whatever amount of salt and pepper to your casserole that you like while cooking, but remember that the gruyere cheese is salty. Fresh ground pepper on the cabbage is heavenly.)

Now if I can get my church service done I will go to bed a very satisfied girl.

I also managed to get to the gym. Miraculous.

PeaceBang Is a Puppy Auntie!

THE LIVELY TRADITION GOT A PUPPY AND DIDN’T TELL ME!!!
http://thelivelytradition.blogspot.com/

More On GA Planning

Rev. Sean over at Ministrare has some thoughtful things to say about the GA Planning Committee’s boneheaded decision* to eliminate our Sunday morning worship service and move it to 4 pm:
http://revsean.com/

Sean’s first post on the matter says, “the last thing I would sacrifice would be Sunday morning worship.” Amen, Sean.
But in his subsequent post, he says, in effect, “but maybe I need to be less resistant to change.”

I’m sorry that Sean back-pedaled here.
I think this is one of those times when wrong is wrong, and it’s not about being resistant to change. A religious body should worship together on a Sunday BEFORE doing their work, not after, as a kind of parting shot before taking off.
The way the committee has planned it, worship seems tacked on, like an afterthought or an irritating obligation to be dispensed with when most people will be on the road home already.

I maintain that it’s a shame and a disgrace.

It’s just another illustration of the way that the GA planners think they’re “moving the Association forward into the future” when actually they’re just overloading us with information and recommendations, “thou-shalts” and calls to arms and other forms of activism that fail to recognize, honor and respect much of what the local congregation exists to do and to be.

* Note that PeaceBang is a little less circumspect than Rev. Sean in this matter

On the Same Note

I remember in Divinity School, people would walk around asking each other about their prayer practice. They said it in this very breathy, kind of holier-than-thou way. “What are you doing for your prayer practice?” they’d say. “Oh, I’m doing this amazing prayer practice.”

It made me very cranky. One day this intimidatingly beautiful, wispy woman with huge eyes and the clearest skin in the world said to me, “Do you have a prayer practice?” and I was just so fed up I said, “NO. I HATE PRAYER.”

To this day, if I ever see her, she gives me the gentlest, most understanding smile in the world like the kind you would give to a dangerously insane person after determining that they were safely shackled to the wall.

Spiritual Discipline Is A Form of Stewardship

Yesterday’s schedule:

Awoke at 6:30 a.m. to prepare for 7:30 drive to school.
1.5 hours on the road, enjoyed listening to podcasts of The Splendid Table, NPR Food, and best of all, Krista Tippett’s “Speaking of Faith” interview with Rachel Naomi Remen. Great company.

Class from 9:00 - 12:00. Intense 20 minute consult with professor afterwards, lunch with enthusiastic new colleague (we’ll be small-group partners in the class) who likes to talk as much as I do. Talked animatedly until 2:30. Visited seminary bookstore, went to the library, copied readings for next week.

Got in car, put my seat back, and napped.

Drove back to my approximate neighborhood in rush hour traffic, listened to messages, made some return calls. Picked up some veggies at a nearby farmer’s market.

6:30-9:30 visited with church couple who are experiencing serious marital stress. Ate with them. Talked a LOT.
9:30- 12:00 Returned e-mails, did some housework, ranted and raved to myself about something that’s upsetting me, rehearsed a few grudges, did not pray before bed.

12:00 Tried to fall asleep in a tizzy of stress and the high of wasteful, draining anger. What I am guessing are leaf mold allergies cause irritating cough. The cat does not want to be around me.

2:30 a.m, very minor anxiety attack awakens me. Fall back asleep immediately.

Morning: wake to find cat pressed to my side in “nurse mode.”
***

My point? When I used to hear the term “spiritual discipline,” I immediately generated a mental image of someone who had a serenity gene I did not possess that made it possible for them to meditate or pray for a sustained period. This was just not my nature.
Similarly, it was just not my nature to exercise, because I wasn’t a “sporty” type.

What I understand now is that physical exercise and prayer are not a matter of my nature. They are a matter of stewardship of a good gift that I am called to use as wisely and well as possible, both for myself and for others.

When I refuse, or fail, to exercise and to pray, there is no visible consequence to anyone else. But I notice the difference in glaring ways that do, in fact, reverberate into the community. At the end of the day, I have good cause for gratitude, and I always have a decent list of reasons to pray to be forgiven my trespasses. The best days are the ones that I can say, “I did okay. I really did okay today.”

“Spiritual” is such a gooey word. It evokes for me whimpy angelic sentimentalism and vague suspicion. “Discipline” I like better, especially for its similarity to the word “disciple.” Together, they don’t resonate for me. What I am doing in my daily prayer and struggle to change my heart and mind in accordance with the teachings and example of Christ is more verbish than noun-ish. Words like pulling, grasping, reaching, straining, groaning, striving, digging, howling, begging, yearning, leaping, flailing
come to mind. “Spiritual discipline” is such a tepid phrase to express what is really happening and what I am working so hard to attempt.

It makes me admire people with a serious spiritual discipline so much more than I did before.

Your Faith Has Healed You

Nocturnal anxiety attacks are back. They hit, I wake up, I calm myself down with assurances that I am neither insane nor am I dying of a heart attack, I decide to believe my own assurances, I go back to sleep. Upsetting, but not too terrible.

I pray before bed every night, using either the Universalist Prayer Book or the King’s Chapel Prayer Book. I read some of the gospels or the psalms. It’s weird how much this practice has begun to affect me in all that I do. Meanness and self-hating is so much less. Fear of death much less. Compassion and curiosity, up. Noticing that my body is stressed, way up. I just figured out that I crunch my shoulders up around my neck as I type (and as I do most things, actually).

You wouldn’t think that teacher Jesus would have anything to teach me about my tense shoulders, but it’s a holistic thing. Jesus is very physical. I get this in a new way now.

Last night I was reading out of Luke and got to the wonderful stories (one embedded in the other) of the Woman With the Flow of Blood and Jairus’ Daughter. I read the encounter between the woman and Jesus about half a dozen times (in the NIV, which I just like so much) before I got something: she reaches out for healing, and that’s why she is healed. I know this is going to strike Christians as the biggest DUH moment of all time, but I always focused before on the total embarrassment of the woman having to be like, “Um, sorry dude, it was me touching your robe.” I always pictured Peter looking at her with totally impatient irritation and Jesus kind of surprised, and then giving her the kind word, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

Last night, what really became vivid for me was the image of this suffering woman reaching out to the hem of Jesus’ robe. He was whisking through the crowd so fast, and she was a nobody, an untouchable. Still, she reached out. She knew who he was, and she wanted healing so badly she got herself into close enough proximity to him to partake of his mojo. Man, I admire that.
That woman became my hero last night; me, who if a healing guru was coming to town would probably be in the back of the room thinking, “How nice that all those suffering people are going up to be healed. Isn’t that touching. Well, this has been an interesting little sociological study, but I really should get home and get back to work.”
Then I would drive home with my shoulders hunched up around my ears listening to some educational podcast on the stereo, get home and do some writing, go to bed, and wake up with an anxiety attack, go back to sleep, and wake up and get back to work.

But it’s so nice that all those people went up for healing. Isn’t that touching.
I certainly would never need to do that.

Here’s a totally hilarious church production photo of the raising of Jairus’ daughter: http://www.radiant-life-church.com/adults/productions/ThePromise/photos2004/At%20Jairus%20house.jpg

You can tell that the guy playing Jesus is so appalled by the eye shadow of the girl playing the daughter that he forgot his next line.

(For some non-Christian spiritual healing resources, this is neat: http://www.ringingrocks.org/www/index.php?order_ropes)

What Is God Doing In Your Life?

I have been helping a local woman who is two days away from becoming homeless. She said to me today, “I just feel like God is coming through for me. I just feel like He’s blessing me and isn’t going to let me go. I just thank Him so much today.”

I’ve gotten to the point where this kind of remark doesn’t irk me in the least anymore. It used to. I’d think, “So what happens when the housing assistance grant doesn’t come through or the nice minister doesn’t pay the phone bill and the food pantry is closed when you get there? Where’s your blessing from God then?”

I have changed. Now, when I hear such expressions of gratitude to God, I just chime in with something simple like “God is good.”
I have come to believe that God does care about this woman, personally. No matter what the day brings, there is a life force coursing through her veins that is the same as the life force that runs through all of creation, and it fills her with the desire to connect, to survive, to cling tenaciously to whatever beauty and grace can be found, and to give thanks for the small things that go right.

Is what I am calling a “life force” a euphemism for divine love? Can we call it God?
I do.

Why should it offend our intellectual sensibilities — we who tend to be so radically uncomfortable with such a personal concept of God — to affirm this woman’s faith? What good does it do us, or her, to be snarkily dismissive of her belief system? Do we really think that this woman is going to use her belief in God to oppress others, or as a smokescreen for abuses of power? If not, why do we treat her with the kind of contempt we reserve for the religious hypocrites who do believe that their power comes from a God who personally rewards and anoints them? Because in my experience, we do just that.

Are we not covenanted within a religious movement that affirms the right of conscience and the centrality of freedom in discernment of the spiritual path? We are. But notice that we only make room in our worship, our fellowship and literally ALL our outreach materials for those whose God concepts are sufficiently abstract. Don’t believe me? Do an audit. You will see that I am right.

Some Unitarian Universalists do have a very personal sense of the Deity. Some of us are developing one (and I count myself among them). If we feel we truly belong within Unitarian Universalism, you can bet it isn’t by virtue of our theology, but by virtue of birth or an M.Div. from Harvard or by some other standard of acceptability (we’re liberal enough, we’re gay enough, we’re beloved eccentrics among our congregations or we just plain keep our mouths shut about how God is present in our lives).

Maybe when UUs can question — or eradicate — their own assumption that those who believe in a God who works directly in their lives are weak-minded bliss ninnies, we will move more decisively out of the adolescent period we’ve been mired in for decades.

I’m a pretty educated gal by ordinary standards. And I can tell you that nothing I’ve studied in the area of literature, pedagogy, history, psychology, sociology or organizational development has required anything like the depth of concentration and intellectual rigor that my recent, private study of my own belief in God has required of me.

God ain’t for dummies.

Hey, When’s Talk Like a Janjaweed Militiaman Day?

Okay, here’s where you get to say, “Oh, PeaceBang’s lost her sense of humor!”

But I have to ask it:
How come it’s so funny to talk like a pirate, and why is America so into pirates, and why do we laugh about “Talk Like a Pirate Day?”

Aside from the fact that we love Johnny Depp as Captain Jack, and he’s totally hot, I mean?

Here are some of the things that pirates routinely did: raped women and men, girls and boys (and probably the occasional octupus, for all I know), tortured their captives, starved and enslaved each other, slit throats with impunity, destroyed property, terrorized entire seaside communities and the high seas in general, thieved and looted, murdered, mutinied and did I say “tortured” yet? I probably did, but let me be more explicit: pirates were known to flay men alive, to slash at their bound victims with swords and then pour salt into their wounds, hack off body parts, gouge out eyes — oh, they were real charmers. Interestingly, one thing pirates did not generally do in real life is require their victims to walk the plank.

So as much as I love the Johnny Deep thing myself, I’m just puzzled by all the general merriment around pirates. They were savage terrorists who specialized in slavery and torture, and it’s not like they’re so distant from our time chronologically that we can romanticize their bloodthirstiness like we do with, say, the Aztecs. Do you want your great-grandchildren cracking jokes on “Talk Like a Janjaweed Militiaman Day?” Or wearing Nazi costumes on Halloween? Because those guys are colorful, too, and probably have some great costume options. And I bet the Janjaweeds party just as hearty as any pirate as they’re pillaging their way through Sudan. I’m just guessing, here.

When I think of pirates, I tend to get a visual image of a filthy, siphylitic sociopath whipping some strung-up captive to bloody shreds. And I just really can’t so much get into the “Argh, matey” thing. Even though I love “The Pirates of Penzance” dearly, the actual pirate thing is just about as charming to me as the Spanish Inquisition or Al Qaeda.

I know — I’m no fun.

Happy New Year

this is a shofar, people
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

PeaceBang would like to wish all her Jewish friends and family Shana Tovah, Happy New Year.

To all the people who have assumed she was Jewish because she has a Jewish last name and a Jew”ish” (nominally Jewish) father, and who had no idea that she was raised Unitarian and has hardly ever stepped foot in a synagogue except for Erik Mallon’s bar mitzvah in 1977 and who are totally confused to find out that she is now a Christian…

PeaceBang would like to thank you for the compliment.

Jewish identity is a complicated thing. Plenty of the world, if they wanted to round up all the Jews and do away with us once and for all (god forbid), would certainly include me in that number. I know anti-Semitism firsthand and have not forgotten it. Many Jews, however, would exclude me from claiming the identity for the sake of my shiksa mother and my baptism in 1999. Who can blame them? Especially in the latter case!! (Someone once asked me if I was a Jew for Jesus. I had to honestly reply, “Well… yes, but not one of those Jews for Jesus!”)

Am I a Jew? As my friend Rabbi Klein once said, “If you’re a Jew, that’s between you and G-d.”

And so I will leave it in God’s hands.

My Sensitive Toothpaste

I bought some Tom’s of Maine Natural Sensitive toothpaste today.
The label says,
“Natural
sensitive.”

I imagine that every time I unscrew the cap, I’ll hear this voice going, “How are your teeth feeling today, hon? How’s hot and cold going for you? Any pain?”