PeaceBang

Couldn’t Wait To Get To Church, Or Why I Love the Bible

I went to bed really late last night, as is my wont in the summer time. It was 2:00 AM before I really tucked in, although I knew I’d want to wake up at 8 AM to get to a 10:00 church service in the city.

As I had my breakfast and got ready to leave, I realized that I was filled with a feeling of thrilled anticipation to go to church ! What a wonderful feeling! I wondered if my own congregants ever felt this way: this kind of first-day-of-school excitement. I certainly hope they do on occasion.

I climbed into the car for a fairly long drive and almost popped in a tape of a sermon from the Festival of Homiletics but decided to wait to hear the word from the preacher at the church I’d be visiting.

And then it hit me: I can’t wait to go to church because I’m so psyched to hear what the preacher has to say about the Bible!

How did THAT happen?
Me, a serious Bible lover?

Well, apparently so!

I have been studying Christian and Jewish scripture formally and informally, on and off, for about twelve years now. Suddenly, in the summer of 2007, I look up and realize that the stories and characters in the Bible are real to me, and precious. I care about them. They are people with whom I have a relationship, and whose experience of the living God helps me encounter the living God, too. I honor their interpretation of their experience even as I vehemently disagree with it at times. They were, as I am, products of their time and place. Their vision, as is mine, was limited. “Now we see through a glass, darkly.”

I realized this morning that it makes so much sense that I would come to madly love the Bible. Books in general have had a tremendous influence on my life and are like food and drink to me. If you could gain weight from reading I’d be 500 lbs. by now. So it’s no surprise, duh, that The Good Book would worm its way into my heart, soul and mind and draw me into deeper engagement with not only its stories, but its spiritual power.

Duh, again. The Bible does have tremendous spiritual power. Are you kidding? All those billions of people over all those years diving into that text and looking to it to address the deepest questions of their lives? Yeah, there’s a little bit of powerful mojo there.

I knew that this morning in church we might be hearing lectionary texts about Naman from 2 Kings, or the wonderful story from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a community doesn’t want to receive their ministry. I knew that there was a chance the preacher would talk about that bizarre moment in Luke 10 when Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall down from heaven like a flash of lightening.” What a great moment; a trippy mystical vision following all that eminently practical pastoral advice. I was downright excited.

As it turns out, the preacher preached on Psalm 30, and that was fine, too. I’ve grown to love the psalms over the years, too, although I initially thought them a bizarre, dreary collection of violence and complaint. Now I see them as a record of sacred kvetching, but also as a beautifully crafted, poetic account of one individual’s troubled and transcendent relationship with their inscrutable God. Before we had psychotherapy, people had the psalms. They are deeply healing and integrative. There isn’t one emotion I’ve ever had that the Psalmist didn’t have. There isn’t one spiritual question, doubt or ethical dilemma I’ve had that the Psalmist didn’t address.

The Bible is, for me, an ancient record of my ancestors attempt to explain the ways of God as they experienced it. I think they got a lot wrong, but I believe that they got so much right, too.

As for Jesus in the Bible, well… just when you think you know Jesus, you turn back to the Bible and realize that you don’t know him at all. I read a lot of books about religion and an awful lot of those books are about what Jesus supposedly was and what Jesus supposedly did and wanted us to do. I read a lot of theology and sociological commentary on what the Church is supposedly about and what God wants us to do, and how God may or may not exist, and all that. I read thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff every year. And yet every time I open the actual Bible and read it in whatever translation, it’s like being doused with a bucket of refreshingly cool water. Let me make this analogy: you can read about music, or you can hear it. You can read about falling in love, or you can experience it. You can look at a photograph of food in Gourmet magazine or you can taste it. If you want to get into the living God of Jewish and Christian tradition, you can read theology or you can read the Bible.

Read and taste. Read and hear. Read and experience.

And there I was thinking that that particular revelation was totally sealed. Silly me. But here’s the thing: it took a lot of work and intellectual commitment before the Bible began to reveal its beauty and power to me. I’m so glad I didn’t follow the example of all the “enlightened” people I’ve known over the years who are persuaded that only fools and fanatics bother with it.

Prepare To Pray

I said to my students last week that becoming a minister means becoming one who is willing to pray with people when they ask you to. And they will ask you to. They don’t want to hear about your theology and whether or not you still subscribe to a traditional God, and they don’t care if you’re a Trinitarian or a Unitarian or any of that. If you have a “Rev.” before your name, you should be ready, willing and able to offer up prayers for folk. We all have to find our way to do it with integrity.

Today I was asked to give the invocation at an Eagle Scout induction. I went right from there to a rally for Marriage Equality and prayed there, too (they wanted me to speak but I have a funny way of making even the most general speech into prayer, or what I call “spiritual ranting”).
On Sunday morning I’ll be going over to the Firefighter’s Memorial and praying for the boys over there who didn’t re-invite a local priest to do it, “because we’re not all Catholic, and he was making a big religious thing out of it, and for most of us, our religion is love.” Sounds good to me; I’m happy to do it. Honored, in fact.

I’ve been asked to pray with people on buses, in hospitals, in prisons, on airplanes, in restaurants, at country clubs, over the phone, in conference halls, at Starbucks, on the beach, in backyards, hospitals, homes and classrooms. No one told me when I got ordained that I was being named an official “pray-er,” but given that I’m asked to do it so much, I’ve made it a point to make my peace with what’s happening when we pray together out loud. It’s coming more naturally, getting in my bloodstream some, and even changing the rhythms of how I think about things.

New priests and ministers, especially those doing your CPE residencies right now, I wish you peace and grace in your career as those who pray on behalf of others.

Here’s how it works for me: someone says, “Reverend, would you pray with me?” and I say “Of course” and then I have this terrible, swift knock-down-drag-out fight where my Intellectual Brainy Self pipes up and says, “Oh, excuse me, this is the dumbest irrational thing ev -” but before she can get that out of her mouth, my Spiritual Heart Self wacks her over the head with a baseball bat and stuffs her body in the pantry and locks it, and sweetly says, “I’m sorry, how can I help you?” Then I ask my Spiritual Heart Self to please provide some words and she says, “Darling, I’d be happy to.” And I try real hard to listen to what she’s dictating to me and if my Intellectual Brainy Self isn’t hollering too loud from the pantry, I can get a real fine prayer out of it.

For me, people asking me to pray for them or with them is pretty much equal to them saying, “Would you mind terribly believing in the power of love with me right now, out loud, I mean?” In my experience, it is only Unitarian Universalists in the act of corporate worship who, when they hear the word “prayer,” stiffen up in a communal sense of proactive offense and get out their mental thesauri so they can replace all the words you’re saying with the ones they prefer. Oi! Mi gente!

I love the story of the 90+ year old Unitarian woman who, when the hospital chaplain went in to visit with her and asked if he could pray with her, replied with her special twinkly charm, “No thank you, I’m a Unitarian.”

Saying Thank You As a Spiritual Practice

Like most pastors (I hope!), I spend a goodly portion of my time reaching out to people, making check-in calls, and sending “thinking of you” and thank you notes. As a result of this activity, I also spend a goodly portion of my time making and losing lists of who needs to be thanked, forgetting a few people now and then, and feeling truly lousy about it. It goes with the territory.

:::breast-beating interlude for failing to thank someone who totally deserves it in church this week:::

My parents raised me to write thank you notes for everything, and to basically understand that without people’s help there is no life and you’ve got to thank folks. You bring little gifts. You tell them verbally. You never leave a party without thanking the hostess. When my Dad took us out to dinner, we were expected to thank him, not to take it for granted. All of that emphasis on thanking people really influenced the person that I am today: a person who is attentive to blessings and really, truly grateful. I may be a cranky, nasty wench, but boy, I’m sure not an ingrate. My CAT is an ingrate, but that’s another story, and a species issues.

So it always shocks me how often in my life I have made a pretty monumental effort on someone’s behalf and have been utterly ignored for it. I could never, for instance, spend a weekend at someone’s house and then not write a hand-written thank you note afterwards, or at least send an e-mail. I couldn’t imagine asking the minister of a church I’ve barely attended to come speak for an hour at two college classes I teach and then never thank her. (Hell, I’d PAY her!) I can’t imagine stiffing the minister who officiates at my own wedding — let alone not thanking them — although I absolutely can imagine how one would fail to thank a clergyperson for doing a funeral — trauma has a way of obliterating manners, and I understand that. But mostly, I just don’t get it when people accept generosity and don’t express thanks. It just seems to me that their lives must be kind of impoverished for that, because I know that when I express thanks, it has the pleasant effect of prolonging the goodness of whatever I am thanking someone for.

Again, I’m not perfect in this but I do make a concerted effort.

A young Southern woman has written to me a few times to ask for my help with her spiritual malaise as she struggles to maintain a fairly liberal theology while living in the Bible Belt. She listens to my sermons on the internet and calls herself my “uncommon parishioner.” I think it’s a wonderful connection. But I noticed something strange the other day: she initiated the conversation last fall, and while I have written her at least three heartfelt and caring respones, she has never in any way thanked me for them. When she first asked for my spiritual support, I was instant in my reply of many pages. I never heard from her to even acknowledge that she received my e-mail.

Then she popped up again the other day to share her grief about a friend’s passing. I’ve written her two long letters and she has replied. She includes no salutation, just launches into her statement of need, and says nothing that would acknowledge appreciation for my being there.

I begin to wonder if her sense of spiritual torpor and arid, dwindling faith is connected to her inability to express gratitude where it is appropriate. I say this truly without malice, but with genuine curiosity. If one can reach out to a busy clergywoman one has never met and receive a very compassionate response that obviously took a long time to compose, and absolutely fail to express even a shred of appreciation for it, perhaps one is taking a similar stance toward God? By which I mean, sending out the call for help and support, receiving it in abundance, and then soldiering right on with one’s further sharing of pain without stopping to say, “Hey, I may not perfectly love the response I’m getting here, but I love that I’m getting a response, and thank you.”

As you all know, I have an anxious, irritable and melancholy temperament and spend a lot of time grousing in my head about the state of the world. It hadn’t occurred to me until now — and for that I am grateful to my Southern Correspondent — but I spend at least as much time thanking God for my blessings as I do bitching about the brokenness of the human species. If I did not, I couldn’t bear to stay here. My inner voice of criticism, skepticism, anger and disappointment with myself and other humans would drown out the music of what’s really going on, and although I’d probably survive in body, my soul and spirit would be numb and dead.

Just the other day I was crabbing in my mind about my stupid paper, my stupid aching lower back, the stupid person tailgating me down Route 123, stupid Jerry Falwell and stupid Paul Wolfowitz, and the stupid rain, even getting in some good glowering about the fact that I’ve had two movies out from Netflix since early April that I haven’t watched, and doing an excellent Crank Pile-On. Then I stopped at a stop sign and was practically attacked by a huge, dripping wet lilac bush that is my favoritest flower.

And right away, it was like I was at the swankiest divine cocktail party ever with the most elegant, gracious guests who were welcoming me with gorgeously fragrant hugs and kisses and saying, “It is SO good to see you. We are SO glad you’re here, honey!” I had to stop grousing right away and say, “Well, thank you, because I’m SO GLAD to be here! And I LOVE what you’re wearing!”

I really do feel that God is like a love-sick suitor constantly trying to win our hearts and our loyalty. As a privileged woman living in the wealthiest nation on earth, I feel like God is showing up every morning with a magnum of champagne and a huge bouquet of roses going, “Darling! Shall we dance?” I mean, even in my times of deepest depression when I couldn’t feel connected to that extravagance of love and generosity, I knew that it was there. I knew that there were lilacs, and music, and friends. I knew that it wasn’t God’s job to do some miracle on my behalf, but to just keep being God, which was miracle enough.

As I get older I am less and less interested in fussing over doctrine and more and more interested in finding ways that make being human a less painful experience. I don’t know what beliefs or prayers work, but I do know that gratitude does, and I’m pretty sure it’s pleasing to God, too.

Over Forty

Something I’ve noticed lately is that when I talk to my friends who are over 40, there’s an ever-more frequent catalog of aches and pains, or little ailments.

“How you doing, hon?”

“Pretty good, but I’ve been really gassy lately.”

“You know, me too. Must be all those soy products. And God, I am so depressed this month.”

And so on. It’s very comfortable, a bit like primates sitting around picking nits from each other’s heads. No cause for alarm.

On the other hand, if I mention something to a 20-something friend their response is quite different. They quickly recommend new diets, elixirs, the latest article they read, the medical information they think I don’t have, or Dr. Phil’s opinion of the thing. They rush to help, to fix, to inform.

I find this incredibly endearing and irritating at the same time.
I’m middle-aged now. I’ve read a thousand and one books on nutrition and tried every cleansing regimen and exercise fad and self-help trend you can think of. I don’t care what Dr. Phil thinks. I don’t need a fix. I’m sorry I made the mistake of responding truthfully.
Sometimes an old broad just wants to kvetch a bit, that’s all. And if she wants advice (and sometimes she does), believe me, she’ll ask.

When I started in ministry, I was quite the little advice giver myself. I thought that’s what people expected of me. By now, I’ve realized that most folks just really need someone to be with them in the spirit of care and love while they share their pain and fear. No advice needed, most of the time.

But you learn that with age.

Speaking of which.

I was meditating the other night on the question of knowing God’s love, resting in it, experiencing it. I was doing my usual agitated type praying, banging at God’s door asking, “EXCUSE ME! WHY? WHY THIS, WHAT THAT?” and then waiting in stillness for an answer, then banging again.

As you can imagine, this method of prayer is not usually terribly effective in the pursuit of spiritual wisdom.

But the other night, I got a response so big it was like a billboard across my mind. It read,
“THIS WILL COME WITH AGE.”
And then,
“I PROMISE.”

Then I was flooded with a sense of such blessed assurance that I breathed a big deep breath and fell fast asleep.

What The Body Knows

Still Waters
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I knew something was wrong, or off, yesterday when I sang almost an entire concert from somewhere not quite in my body. Every third or fourth song, I would look into the audience and really connect, but most of the time I was smiling and energetic but on some deep level I just wasn’t home.

Partly it is this time of year. I go into reveries and while I’m technically in 2007, my mind is living 25 years ago. A smell can cause this time travel, or a song, or a quality of the rain. April is the cruelest month, as the poet wrote. For me it is the most nostalgic.

I watched a father and his elementary school-age daughter snuggling at rehearsal on Friday night, she sitting in his lap, he absent-mindedly kissing her forehead, and I felt absent of words, just a little mouse in the hidey hole with the other mices. Very tender, very vulnerable.

Another person at the rehearsal is hugely pregnant and due to give birth any day now. I watched her prepare a little piece of French toast for her firstborn, so grounded in her big, extravagant body, and I felt like I was floating out of mine.

I put 100 miles on the car without having any real sense of where I had been.

I slept 8 hours most nights this week with no real sense of the days being different from the nights. My mojo is looooow. I re-read my Easter sermon and couldn’t remember having written it. When did I write that? Was that me? Did we really dedicate that beautiful baby girl that morning, our living evidence that God loves us enough to keep inviting us to the party even though we’ve been such a bad guest at Her house?

It should have come as no surprise, then, when I was hit with a major panic attack yesterday evening. When my mind, body and soul slip apart like that, my body is usually processing through the accumulated stress and trauma of the past few months and deciding what to do with it. If I have not been consistent with exercise, prayer, quiet time and intentional healing work, I fall prey to anxiety attacks, or just chronic sense of anxiety that sits in my chest, back and neck and holds me in the kind of bear hug granted by an overly-needy participant in a men’s spirituality retreat.

If you’ve never experienced a full-blown anxiety attack, it’s hard to explain. For me, as I’ve described before, there is the textbook sensation of “fight or flee,” a quick spreading heat all over my body, tingling extremities, blurred vision and a sense of “losing it.” I literally can’t see straight. I can’t focus my thoughts. Every bit of energy is occupied with the struggle to remain calm, remain in the body.
My thoughts come in big block letters: “YOU ARE NOT DYING.”
” YOU DO NOT NEED TO CALL 911″
“YOU SHOULD BREATHE DEEPLY AND SLOWLY.”

I talked with my mother as it hit, and she was good, allowing me to put the phone down and stretch and walk as I needed. She did not panic herself. She knows I’m fine.

Sleep came only after much effort and stern admonitions to self (”WE HAVE CHURCH IN THE MORNING. GO. TO. SLEEP.”). When I awoke with slight fluttering and trembling, I shot out the back door into the cold yard and walked firmly around it, telling myself all the while to “CUT IT OUT, NOW.”

It was so good to be with my church. The service went well. The music was beautiful. My congregants were healing to me, with their fine energy and their humor and their warmth.

The struggle continues. I talk about it because I believe that chronic anxiety is an extremely common ailment of our time, and because I believe that creative and spiritually-oriented folks need to know that someone like them — someone whose very life blood is in the work of ministry, pastoring, writing, witnessing and living as deeply as possible — is willing to speak honestly about the ways we can skid off the road and into high weeds if we do not care for ourselves as tenderly and in as much detail as we care for others.

Oh, it’s not worth beating ourselves up over. I’ve done that and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t work. What does seem to work is just accepting what is, getting help that I need from whatever sources seem promising, and talking truth about it. In my experience, having an anxiety disorder is less exotically stressful the more honest and plain I am about it. It is simply an extreme fight-or-flight response that happens out of context, shocking the respondee and causing more fear and alarm.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. And yet, it is a challenging responsibility to be the best stewards we can be of these marvelous instruments within which we experience the miracle of incarnation.

I wish you health, and a peaceful heart.

"How Jesus Claimed Me"

This essay of mine appears in the anthology, Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism. I’m glad to be able to share it with you today as the front page article in this week’s UU World online magazine:

http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/22324.shtml

Taking A Sabbath Day

This morning I decided to take a whole day of Sabbath, where I would actually do no work at all.

It’s 5:40 pm now and I am doing pretty well at it.

I did do some dishes but I have refrained from putting away the laundry or cleaning up my desk or answering any church e-mail.

I have been reading, and lazing, and sleeping. I have been staring out the window and thinking. I have been petting the cat. And reading some more.

I have been breathing deeply and not having any adrenalin rushes, except for seeing one e-mail subject line that referenced “gossip” which made me think that someone was gossiping about me and that I’d have to go into upset/defense mode. But that wasn’t it, so I was able to relax.

I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love and although I enjoyed the section on Italy and really enjoy her very much as a writer, I am not sure that I like her as a person. The book seems to assume that I will, in fact, fall in love with the narrator, but so far I’m not there. This may impede my ability to read the rest of the book.

I am also reading something called How To Write a Book Proposal but it made my heart race with a sense that I should Get Right On It, so I put it away.

I am also reading Praying For Sheetrock, and the latest issue of Food & Wine magazine, which to tell you the truth, is the best sort of thing to read on a sabbath day.

It’s very cold outside so I’m not going out there. I am not washing my hair or putting on make-up or arranging my face into anything but an expression of quiet and repose. I don’t need to have anything to say, or anything to suggest. Just for 15 hours or so.

I am not even going to put a new ink cartridge into the printer. That would be work.

Lenten Hiatus

Hola, amigos,

Given all the attention that Beauty Tips For Ministers is getting these days, I will be taking a little break from this blog.

If anything totally inspiring comes to mind, I’ll be sure to share it.

I’m off to church for a midday service to get smeared on the forehead and reminded that I’m mortal but that I get to spend my eternity with God.
It’s one of my favorite holy days.

Peace.Bang.

Take a Hike

It was a crisp, sunny day today and I thought for the millionth time that if I’m going to make it through to April without resembling and feeling like a mobile piece of fungus, I need to get out in the fresh air and take walks.

Except this: I kind of have a walk phobia.

Seriously, you say. PeaceBang, that is too neurotic even for you.

It’s true, though. I don’t know what it comes from, but it takes a lot of gumption for me to head down the hill from the house to take a walk. I’ve done it pretty frequently in the past year — especially when the weather is perfect — and I feel safe in our little woodland preserve. It’s about 2 miles around the loop, and I like to stop at the edge of the North River where there’s a little cabin on the water and look at the sparkles on the water, and breathe. Sometimes I stretch out on the warm deck. Sometimes other walkers find me there and I smile sheepishly up at them, i-Pod buds in my ears.

Emerson said that he and his daughter Ellen were professors of walkology. In fact, the whole Transcendentalist movement could be fairly said to have been conducted during walks shared by brilliant friends. Think of Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne, or Emerson and Thoreau, or Emerson and Alcott, or Thoreau and Melville and –Moby Dick and Hester Prynne! Wait! No! They’re not real people! –
all strolling through Walden woods expounding on great literary and spiritual themes.

Think about it, then think about how frozen with awkward paralysis PeaceBang feels when she’s ready to head out the door for a walk.

How does one go for a walk?
A time step, I can do. A waltz. A foxtrot, even.
A saunter from point A to point B in Barcelona, I can do.
A stroll into the village to pick up a baguette and some raspeberries, I’m good at.
A purposeful stride from Macy’s all the way over to Nordstrom’s to get to a shoe sale, eat my dust.
But a pointless WALK, the good ole American WALK, I am at a loss. I feel like a total tool. Nothing makes me more self-conscious.

I live on a busy main street, so a walk down my own street is fraught with dangers: busy suburbanites whizzing by in big SUVs, a latte in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I’ve taken walks down my street to get to littler streets, but I always feel endangered. And then it just seems ridiculous to drive somewhere to take a walk.

I prefer city walks. I like to people-watch and window shop, and to get lost in a crowd. I do not like country walks. Again… what do you people do on walks? Maybe Dan Harper will coach me on this. He seems to be a real pro. I am jealous of his ability to take WALKS.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, my senior colleague and his lovely wife arose early every morning and took walks together. I have always thought that this was the most romantic thing of all time. Walking, talking, planning the day, being wholesome and outdoorsy together in their matching LL Bean fleece pullovers. Boy, is that not me.

But I still think it’s important to take walks.

There. Now you feel exceedingly well-adjusted, don’t you? And the next time you take a walk, you’ll wrack your brain trying to figure out why anyone on earth could make such a difficult job of it.

Modesty Sheet

When we first arrived in Antigua, we stayed at Palacio de Dona Beatriz at the outskirts of town. Lovely place with a great concierge named Rudy.

I saw that they offered an hour massage for $35 — who could resist? — so I ordered one up.

Jorge showed up right on time and set up his massage table in the chapel next to our room:

He had no sheet to cover me with. Imagine the flurry of flustered Spanish on my behalf as I hastened to my room to retrieve a pareo I had thought to pack (Gracias a Dios!), and imagine how quickly I got over my self-consciousness as this friendly man pounded me to within an inch of my life (in a good way) as I looked out the window at the volcanoes surrounding the city.

Holy bodywork, Batman!