Sit and Eat

On Babies and God's Love

Allie is two and a half years old, and he's my buddy.  His Mom and Dad are good friends of mine, and I'm lucky enough to get to see him quite a bit.  

There's this funny thing about Allie, which is that he loves me.  He loves me in this strange and mysterious way that I don't think I'll ever fully understand.  He gets really excited when I come to visit and makes special paintings for me in preparation.   When I arrive we play together A LOT.  There is much giggling and galloping and wearing of capes.  On a recent visit, he looked into my eyes and said plainly, "Emmy, I like you." Which made my heart sort of expand and explode at the same time.   

I'm going to school right now and in class we're talking a lot about Luther's notion of grace.  This idea that God's love is freely given, simply bestowed upon you.  My whole life, I've been hearing people talk about God, who loves me no matter how broken I may be.  I've heard it over and over again, but I don't think I really understood it until Allie decided that he loved me.  There's nothing in the world I've done to deserve his love.  He just loves me.  And there's nothing I need to do to earn it.  He doesn't need me to try harder to be perfect.  He doesn't need me to try and make up for all the ways I've gone wrong.  He just loves me.

Somehow it's always so much simpler than you want to make it.  The idea that love could be free...that there is enough of it to flood all the places in your heart you've been so carefully guarding...it's a dizzying notion.  An impossible notion.  You've tried to believe it your whole life.  And then in a moment you understand it with your whole body: this is love, this is all. 

Everybody Worships Something

Rachel's been reading David Foster Wallace.  Last week we sat in the office at Trinity and she told me I needed to hear something.  She hit play on her laptop and we listened together in silence.  

If someone asked me to define beauty, I would say that it's that moment of pause when something in you breaks just a little bit and you remember what it actually is to be human. 

Here's the excerpt of his speech we listened to, delivered at Kenyon's commencement in 2005.  And if you like, the full transcript. 

...Here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

-David Foster Wallace 

On Seasons

I think the seasons are changing.  As a little girl I got a new pair of shoes with each new school year.  We went to the shoe store in my town where the man would put my foot in a silver measure.  He would do both feet just to be sure they were the same size.  I remember a feeling of being attended to as he remarked on how much I had grown.

 

The first Sunday in September St. Lydia’s will mark our one year anniversary.  The year has been one of incredible growth for St. Lydia’s and for me, personally, professionally and emotionally.  I’ve felt a bit like a neatly tended garden, suddenly left to grow wild and rampant for a season.  Vines climbing walls with abandon, flowers blooming recklessly, trees dropping fruit, grasses tangled and overgrown.  It was a year to ignore the voice of fear and the threat of pain, to be undone and exposed.

 

But I think the seasons are changing.  The light is shorter, the shadows longer.  There’s a smell of change in the air.  Wherever the gardener went, he’s on his way back now, and ready to restore order to this garden, clipping and pruning, cutting away what’s unneeded.  With him, safely has returned, but there’s a sense of loss as well.  A sense of exchanging raw, unadulterated growth for a quieter place of imperceptible change.

 

The garden remembers, though.  Even in the dead of winter it remembers a season that came and will come again, of burdened branches releasing the ripe fruit they carry to fall, and roll, and lay untouched amid the grasses.

On Choices or the Lack Thereof

One of the most frustrating things about God is that, there's this strange way in which you don't get to choose.  This makes me angry.  And over the last six months or so, I've been pretty annoyed about it.  Mad at God in a "you can't make me" sort of a way.

I've spent a good deal of my life preparing, unknowingly, for a role I claimed I would never step into.  I was so completely sure all through Divinity School that I would never be ordained, all the while unwittingly and quite specifically preparing myself for the work I'm doing at St. Lydia's.  It's been a bit like that moment at the end of a murder mystery, when suddenly a the pieces come together and the truth is revealed.  There is a sense of incredible joy at finally discovering what I'm being asked to do, and actually doing it.  There is also a sense of unnerving finality.  This is where I've been heading all along, without even knowing it, and now it's time to really set to work.  I can fight it as much as I want: this is what God has set out for me, and I don't really get to choose.

I've been speaking with a friend who's also in the process to be ordained about the particular difficulty of the life that's been set before us.  It's a life that's all about being at the hub of a community.  But as the person in the center, you are also set apart in a very particular way, separate.  I'm discovering that it can be enormously isolating, and there are moments when I'm so frustrated with God for putting me here.  I didn't ask for it, and it's not easy.  At the same time, I'm realizing that finally plunging in means a life that is challenging and fulfilling in a way that is more rich than I could have ever imagined. 

I suppose I share all of this because I believe so wholeheartedly in its universality.  I think we all have a compass located somewhere in our gut pointing us toward something God's got in mind for us.  Following it means giving up control over where we end up, and even how we end up there.  The whole venture can be pretty daunting, I think because it means acknowledging the incredible potential that exists in each of us.  Recognizing the bigness of what God's asking of us is overwhelming, seems too much.  But the thing about a compass is, if you follow it, you'll end up in the right place.

On Heaven

We've all been friends for a while, but in that way that feels longer and deeper than just the years we've known one other.  Tonight the 14 of us threw some crab legs and corn on the cob and sausage and peppers in a pot and boiled it up, and dumped it out on tables covered in brown paper.  We sat out in the garden of the church and if you sat back and listened, you could hear everyone telling stories, wonderful stories, all at once.  And you could hear everyone laughing, and everyone listening.  We ate with our fingers and made a big mess.  The sun was setting out over the hills and it lit everything from the inside so the trees and the fields and the clouds were dusty and golden.

When I said goodbye it was with reluctance and with gratitude.  When we drove away I turned to catch a glimpse of everyone still sitting out.  The clouds moved across the sky and I thought that when I get to heaven it will be just a little like this.  Everyone will be there.  It will be like I've known them forever.  But also as if I'm knowing them for the first time.

On Feasting and Fressing

Thank you to my friend Dale for sending along these quotes from this week's New Yorker (May 24) from an article called "What Did Jesus Do?: Reading and Unreading the Gospels," by Adam Gopnik.  The article is a critical review of several recent works by various authors regarding the "historic" Jesus.  The links to what we're up to at St. Lydia's are wonderful!

"The sharpest opposition in the Gospels...is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.

"The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan...makes a persuasive case that Jesus' fressing* was perhaps the most radical element in his life--that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on "commensality," would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal alliances, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is 'What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean." Jesus isn't a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn't an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He's interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves." pp. 74-75

*from the Yiddish, to eat a lot, and without restraint

On Tradition and Oceans

The word “tradition” gets thrown around a lot, especially among folks like me who hang out at church.  Sometimes people like to talk about “traditional” versus “contemporary” worship, or “traditional” versus “emergent” or “creative” worship. 

 

The words can function as helpful shorthand, but they also create dichotomies.  "Traditional” is a tricky word.  Sometimes when we say “traditional,” what we really mean is “it looks like what I’m used to.”  Every once in a while, someone will talk about what we do at St. Lydia’s as “non traditional” worship, and I’ll note that our rituals are rooted in the earliest traditions of the church.  What we’re doing may not look like Sunday morning in most of the United States, but it’s a practice that dates back to the second century.  It’s really traditional. 

 

On top of our traditions around worship, there are also traditions around church culture: how we make decisions, how we organize ourselves, how we’re structured.  There are vestries and councils and conferences and pastors and rectors and elders and deacons and all the different ways we’ve come up with to be church, to function as a body.  This too is part of “The Tradition,” and sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s weighty.

 

A new-ish congregant and I were discussing all of this over a beer in an outdoor café near Grand Central last night, and came up with a bit of imagery that I found helpful.  I’m invested in St. Lydia’s doing something new while being in a deep and sustaining relationship with the larger church, and I think these images can help us think about that.

 

Tradition is not a ball and chain that we’re trying to loose ourselves of.

It is not a trap that we’re stuck in

or garbage that we’re trying to throw away.

 

Tradition is not a net that’s pinning us down,

or a weight that’s holding us back.

It’s also not necessarily a foundation that we’ve decided to build on.

 

It’s not an object that we’re here to replicate.

We’re not building a factory where tradition will be produced or fabricated.

It’s not an heirloom we’d like to pass down to a future generation.  

 

Rather, tradition is an ocean we are floating in.

We are held up by it, and informed by it,

effected by its nature and character,

drawn into its tides and currents.

Our job is to be buoyant,

to allow ourselves to float weightlessly in a vast sea of heritage.

On appearing in the Time Out Singles Issue. No, really!

Yesterday I went into the Time Out New York offices to get my picture taken…for the May Singles Issue.  You know, when they fill the magazine’s pages with lots of pictures of single people and you can write in to contact them?  I think it hits the stands the last week in May.

 

A friend works at Time Out and asked a few months ago if I might like to be in the Valentine’s Day Singles Issue.  It seemed like one of those things you should just say yes to without necessarily weighing the consequences, so that is exactly what I did.  Low and behold, I was waitlisted until May because there were too many straight single women who applied, and they had to go out and hunt up men in the streets.  This piece of information is almost too alarming for me to contemplate, so let’s just keep moving, shall we?

The last two days have been a flurry of writing up the short profile that will appear online next to my picture, and it was a truly fascinating process.  Rachel actually had the honor of coming up with draft one, which was then revised and batted around via e-mail among a sprinkling of friends: men, women, gay, straight, in between, everybody was part of the fun. 

 

The women almost universally approved of what I/Rachel had written.  One lesbian, “fell in love” with me.  That seemed like a good sign…sort of.  A few of the men thought it was “too aggressive” or, as one friend wrote, “too deep.”  He followed this by writing, “but I am so, so shallow.”

 

I could comment on this, but I won’t.

 

The biggest question by far was how to negotiate my Christian-ness, and what’s more, my minister-ness while, as I put it, “scaring away the scary Christians while not scaring away the non-Christians.”  There were a variety of perspectives on this matter ranging from “fly your freak flag,” offered helpfully by Rachel, to “be honest about what you do, but just mention it and move on,” to a set of blunt and practically-minded, bullet-pointed suggestions from my buddy Jeff:

 

 - You sound REALLY serious, more serious than you are; don't forget that you like silly cat videos on youtube (don't tell people that). 

- Remember that every dude out there who is not Christian assumes that if he dates a Christian girl, she is going to try to convert him.  EVERY one of them.  Including me.  You have to be very careful to let folks know that you are not trying to convert them.  [side note: this had literally NEVER occurred to me.  I can’t even imagine that anyone would ever think that I would want to convert them!  Even more to worry about!]

-You need to tip us dudes off that you like shagging.  Find a creative way.  You don't have to come across as a whore, we just want to know that when we finally get you naked…[we’ll just cut things off right there, I think.]

 

Well said, Jeff.  We never said we loved you for your subtlety. 

 

 

The point is…well…what is the point?

 

There’s a number of reflections I might offer from a variety of perspectives on all of this, the first stage of this terrifying process (and the magazine isn’t even out yet!) but I think the most salient point is this:

 

Jeff’s comments make it abundantly clear just how firmly engrained in our culture it is that religion (especially Christianity) and sex apparently do not go together.  Of course, the church has done plenty throughout the ages to plant and uphold this conception, and continues to do so straight into the present.  The thing about it is, it’s a complete and total fallacy.  The ties between sexuality and the experience of the divine are strong and clear, and show up everywhere from Madonna:

 

When you call my name

it’s like a little prayer

I’m down on my knees

I want to take you there

 

to Leonard Cohen:

 

And remember when I moved in you

The holy dove was moving too

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

 

to Good Ole’ Baptist Hymns:

 

Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me

 

To the Old Testament:

 

As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,

   so is my beloved among young men.

With great delight I sat in his shadow,

   and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house,

   and his intention towards me was love.

 

to the Gospels:

 

Abide in me, and I shall abide in you.

 

 

Sex is intimate and dangerous.  It can offer us an opportunity to look straight into the face of God.  So no wonder it scares us.  No wonder we do anything we can to fence it off, to control it, to monitor or neuter it.  It’s untamable and gorgeous.  It is dynamic and essential.  It is the source of life and the expression of love, or too often of violence.  It is both the raw, unprocessed ore of our humanity and the umbilical thread that links us to the divine. 

 

So yes, to make it very clear for those of you viewing my profile in Time Out New York this month, I do like shagging.  I like it quite a bit.

Advice

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from a pastor or pastor-in-training or a church-goer who's excited about St. Lydia's and wants to think about starting something new, or doing something different.  This is always slightly alarming to me because we're really right at the beginning of this thing and most of the time I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I'm doing.  But then I realize that, of course, neither will anyone else.

Here's what I wrote to one person who asked me for advice:

I'm glad to hear that you're thinking of starting something.  It is difficult and rewarding work!  Here's my advice:

-Pray.  A lot.  God will give you everything you need.  You don't even realize the ways in which God gives you what you need.  It's incredible!

-Fear is good.  If you're afraid, you're probably on the right track. 

-A church is made of people.  Listen to the people, and innovate and create based on what you hear.  See if what you're hearing resonates with them.  What you need to do your work will come from the people.  That all goes back to the God giving you what you need piece.

-Just start!  At a certain point you'll probably just have to do it.  It feels weird, but go for it.  No need to ask permission. 

This is my big picture advice.  Oh, and if you have any friends who live in New York, please do tell them what we're up to!  We're growing by word of mouth.

-Emily

On Death and Bodies

Two nights ago I set an alarm to go off every three hours and dragged myself out of bed to try and force feed my tiny pet rabbit.  His name was Peter, and he had pneumonia, and not much of a chance of making it through the night.

At two I held his skinny body close to mine and knew he was worse and not better and that he was dying.  At three I heard a strange sound as I slept, like a little exhale followed by a kick against the side of the cage.  At five the alarm went off and I found him dead. 

It was still dark outside, and I knelt on my floor over his body and wondered what to do.  My response to the death of this small creature lived entirely in my body, and in his.  I was struck with two opposing impulses.  I was repelled by the rigid corpse (for that is what it was), afraid to touch it.  At the same time, I was drawn to it, wanted to attend to it, wanted to stroke his head despite my fear.  

What is it that happens, when life leaves a body?  A frail woman silently pulls down the shade in the window and the house is left empty, but heavy with the memory of life.  The body is not a shell, not deserted, not vacant, but rich and fearful, somehow.  To witness death, even this small one, is to stand at the edge of something huge and vast, and to know in our gut that we're standing there always, but rarely feel it.