Boldness

Hosea 1:2-10
Colossians 2:6-15
Psalm 85
Luke 11: 1-13 (16-19)

After my mother died when I was 13, I struggled with my faith for years. Her death set off a series of outcomes—most importantly my father’s ongoing struggle with mental illness and anger/violence—that threatened on a daily basis to submerge me. I am thinking of this today because I have been talking with a new friend about the violence she experienced in her own home. She is young and angry. The idea of forgiveness, much less of actually making it through to the next day, seems completely impossible. As her friend, I have to be present where she is, to recognize that whatever journey she takes to heal, it can’t be rushed. I have to let her know it is OK to be right where she is, and I realize those are the most loving words I can offer her now.

Last week I told her that what I admired about her was that she wasn’t trying to pretend that the ugliness, the darkness, wasn’t ugly or dark. In a way, though the story in Hosea seems horrible to me, that’s probably what God was trying to do, too. He tells Hosea to marry an adulterous woman because everyone is adulterous. He asks him to name his first child for a town that he will later destroy, the second “not loved,” and the third “not my people.”

But then, after the third is born, he says, “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’” There God is again, telling his people they have to attend to the long view—that what will happen in the next hour or day or even in their own lifetime isn’t the whole story.

In the reading in Colossians, St. Paul reminds Christ’s followers that Christ came into the world to create a new religion that is based on Christ rather than “human tradition and basic principles of this world.” In a way, he’s also telling the Colossians to pay attention to the long view—to see themselves and their experiences with Christ as part of an ongoing story of the relationship between humans and God.

At 13, I didn’t understand that I was part of this story. When I heard, in a church camp song, the words from today’s reading in Luke: “Ask and it will be given unto you.
Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you…” I felt angry. I read these verses, predictably, as being "all about me." God didn’t answer prayers, no matter how hard you prayed, or my mother would be alive. He didn’t help you find answers, or I would understand why she had died, I would see a larger purpose to her death. (Even now, I have trouble when people say that a tragedy has a larger purpose—even though I have been inalterably changed by my mother’s death, mostly in ways that I now consider positive, I would still have taken more years with her than the positive outcomes I received from the loss). And he certainly didn’t come to the door when I knocked—I got nothing but silence.

I have a memory of lying on the floor next to my aunt Katina in her house. I don’t remember when it happened—sometime between my mother’s death and my graduation from high school. I don’t remember what we talked about, either—and after her death, I really wished I could remember--only that I felt deeply loved and, for the first time, thought that maybe I was going to be OK. Later that night, I prayed to God, “I don’t really get any of this, but I think I’m ready to let you back into my life anyway.”

It was a beginning. I could have stayed angry and bitter, closed off from other people, but my aunt had nudged me just enough to get inside to some real place where it was OK for me to be open to something larger than myself, than my own little life. Even now, when I feel like I’m doing things more for myself than for the world—when I do something kind for someone just so that I’ll feel better about myself, rather than doing it because it’s one concrete way I can care for the world—or when I go into an angry, self-obsessed funk—I think of that night. I try to put myself there again, praying that prayer, open to the mystery of not knowing, not understanding, of being led in some way. In time—and this took many years—I came to understand those words as meaning something different than simply, your prayers will always be answered, or even, as a priest once tried to tell me they meant, your prayers are always answered, though not always in the way you expect.

Neither of those are exactly right. Those verses are more about an attitude of boldness—of knowing when to ask for something even if you don’t know how you will be answered, to knock even if the door is closed. As Jesus said in the parable in today’s reading, God responds to boldness: “yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” In a way, in that moment, my aunt’s presence was “as much as I needed,” and telling God I wanted the spiritual side to my life back, even though I was still angry at God, was a bold response to that abundance.

Last year I was in the adult version of the same place--feeling hard and angry most of the time. It was a hard year for me; I’m only just beginning to realize just how hard. My father was finally OK, for the most part, after a long struggle with a nervous breakdown and then bankruptcy. During that time I had been busy taking care of the details—helping him get legal help and medical help, helping him move out—but I didn’t have the strength to actually be present to his pain, because I still hadn't found my way through the pain of my own childhood. When it was over, and my relationship, for different reasons, was also over, I was angry that nobody was around to take care of me—my father was fine, my partner was fine (or at least, it seemed so from my perspective), but I wasn’t.

Always capable of handling practical details, I did what I had to do: moved out, bought a house, tried to recreate my life in a new image—the whole time feeling lost, even though everybody kept telling me how amazed they were at how brave I was, how well I was doing. This made it worse—I had no way to break down. I did and said lots of things I regret to the people around me. For an entire year, I was not myself, and when others came to me for help, I helped for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways, always because it made me feel good and superior to do so, and always because doing so meant I might be able to find some of my own healing through the act of helping. In the process, I probably did more damage than good.

I had no way to connect to others because I was living so deeply in my own pain. It’s not that people didn’t reach out—some did—but I always focused on those who didn’t, or said or did the wrong things. In retrospect, I needed to tell them what I needed, but I didn’t even know myself. If I’d paid attention to the memory of my aunt and I lying on the floor in the dark, saying whatever it was we said to each other, I would have realized that what I needed was time, quality time in which I could be myself. Everyone seemed too busy for that, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.

But this summer I’ve started to listen again, to pray the prayer, “I’m knocking, even though I don’t know why or what the outcome will be.” And this week I was called upon to be there for people in ways that should have been hard for me, should have triggered painful, angry, self-centered responses in me because they hit so close to home. Besides the new friend just starting to deal with the violence in her family, I also heard from an old friend who left Morris five years ago after she was a victim of a hate crime. I had tried to help her then, but I was more focused on catching the perpetrator, on politicizing what had happened, then on being present for her. I’m glad to have this opportunity to make amends, to talk about that confusing time in both our lives, to admit that my work, which I pretended had been on her behalf, was actually not about her at all, but about me, about my own anger and pain at all the people who had hurt me because of my sexual orientation.

I am now, finally, at a place where I can be present with another person’s pain and struggle without being consumed with it. I am learning how to listen with my soul and not with my heart and brain, learning to keep things from becoming about me. I am learning to be present at exactly where the other person is instead of trying to push her to some other place, or pretend, for my own benefit, that she is somewhere else.

Maybe I had to learn this lesson before I could become a mother. My new friend said to me at the end of one of our conversations, “You will be a great mother.” It meant so much coming from her—it meant that I’d found a way to be present to where she was instead of pretending she was in a different place or trying to take her somewhere she wasn’t ready, or didn’t want, to go.

"Will you be angry with us forever?" The psalmist asks. "Will you prolong your anger through all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?" God doesn’t answer, so the psalmist himself goes on to sing, boldly, "Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. The Lord will indeed give us what is good.”

Priorities

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

This year, I was a member of the Relay for Life committee for Stevens County, helping to organize the American Cancer Society's largest local fundraiser of the year. Each year, businesses, groups of friends, and other organizations sponsor teams of people who collectively walk a total of 12 hours along a path lit by luminaries baring the names of those who have died from or survived cancer.

For years I've been organizing the UMM team. Each year, I purchase luminaries for all of my loved ones who have died of cancer: my mother, my uncle Elias, my aunt Sophia, my cousin Chris; and for all those who survived: my cousin Meredith, my godfather, several friends and students. Each year, I have walked after dark, surprised when I turn a corner on the path or happen to glance down and notice a family member's name suddenly visible among the hundreds of luminaries. I should be used to this by now, but each year, I am moved by the tangible reminder of the pain cancer has caused so many people I love--and, of course, so many others. When walking the path, it is impossible not to feel a connectedness even to those I have never met.

This year, I decided to go one step further and join the organizing committee; I was in charge of invitations to the survivors' supper, writing press releases, and organizing children's games at the event, and I also put in a good number of hours doing everything from walking in the Prairie Pioneer Days parade to serving food at a pre-fundraiser to making last-minute calls to area businesses for door prizes.

But the process of getting the event organized was not easy. There was tension at almost every meeting; we felt a great deal of pressure to ensure that the event would be successful. Before the last meeting, one committee member who could not attend sent me an e-mail asking that I ask the committee members to take a moment to talk about why we each care about Relay for Life, why we had chosen to be involved. We had started our first meeting this way, but in the process of sorting door prizes and making decisions about food and arguing over details, we had not returned to this important conversation. For some reason, mostly because I didn't have the energy to get the group to focus, and because there was so much to discuss at the meeting, I didn't do this, but now I wish I had. It's important in the midst of our work, when stress and frustration and exhaustion threaten to take over, to take some steps back, to remember why we're doing the work in the first place.

In today's gospel reading, Mary sits at Jesus' feet, listening to his teachings, while Martha is busy in the kitchen keeping everybody happy. Finally, totally frustrated with her sister, Martha says, Can't you tell my sister to get up and help me? To which Jesus replies, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed." He then tells her that Mary has made a better choice than she.

I have always had sympathy for Martha in this story--after all, she probably wanted to sit and listen to Jesus, but there was so much to do! I have known so many women like this, women who literally have no choice but to attend to the mundane tasks of life, often joylessly, while others in the family do what they please. It's hard not to feel for Martha, and not to be a little annoyed at Jesus' answer.

But, of course, Jesus was right. We need to take the time to listen--and since he's not around to talk directly to us, this means paying attention to our hearts, making the deep listening that should be more than half of any conversation, including prayer, a priority. Strangely, as I have begun to slow down, to pay more attention to my heart, to read more and pray more and write more, I find that I have more free time than I realized. By the end of this summer, I will have taught four summer classes of various types, completed a grant report, planned courses for next semester, completed some significant work on two writing projects, seen friends regularly, started and maintained vegetable and flower gardens, learned to use a letter press, planned a major fundraiser, raised funds for an internship in Greece for our students, and been part of an effort to purchase the local movie theater in order to ensure it remains a movie a theater. (At least, I hope I will be able to see all of the efforts listed here through; I am done or more than halfway done with each of them!).

I've also been, of course, deeply involved in the adoption process--and glad, frankly, to have this summer to remember just how full my life is without children, and just how many activities and people I have to offer to my children when they arrive. Yes, I will have to cut back--but for now, it is good to be doing so much.

I am sometimes tired, but I'm not exhausted. Exhaustion belongs to people who don't care for themselves--I have been caring deeply for myself, giving myself the time to reflect alone and with friends who are able to truly listen; allowing myself long walks and writing time and exercise and time to make good, healthy meals. Perhaps most importantly, I've chose work that has meaning. I am privileged to have such work to do--and grateful to all those who do the work with me. When I'm encouraged by someone to either brag or complain--"You must be exhausted after staying up all night at the relay"; "You're not going to do that committee again next year, are you?"; "Aren't you getting a break this summer?"; "It's so great that you're so committed; congratulations on your effort."--I've been able to honestly respond with, "Yes, and I feel great." It's a good feeling.

Strangely, as a result, I find that I come to clarity a lot more quickly on what I am feeling; I know what to do if I'm frustrated or sad or tired or with someone who is not making me feel like I can be myself. In other words, because my priorities are clearer, I am acting with more authenticity, and loving myself more completely, but with less effort.

"And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind," St. Paul writes to the Colossians, now have been reconciled to God, "provided that you continue seculrely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised in the bible." And the psalmist sings, "But I am like a green olive tree in the honor of God. I trust in the steadfast love forever and ever." And God presents Amos with a basket of summer fruit, not unlike the okra, tomatoes, and peppers just now growing ripe in my own garden, saying, "I will never again pass [my people] by."

Yes, I seem to be ignoring important parts of each of these stories, the details of darkness and destruction that lead to the promises, the songs. But I am not cluelessly pretending the darkness does not exist; I am not smiling through it, being inauthentically optomistic, or stuffing my less-than-happy feelings. I am, instead, passing through the darkness, feeling it, and coming into light.

"I have hope" one little girl wrote on a poster she made at the Relay for Life kids' corner. Why do you have hope? I asked her, and she said, "because my mom has survived for four years, and because I love God." I wanted to say something in response, but before I had a chance, a three-year-old ran up to me, handed me a bottle of bubbles and said, "Open." I did, and he knew what to do: he pulled out the small, plastic wand and blew a stream of round, shiny, easily shattered planets into the wind. And then he chased them until he had popped every single one, giggling, shouting, "Look! Look! Look at the bubbles!"

Later, when I was walking the candlelit path and saw my mother's name, unassuming among the more artfully decorated luminaries, I thought to myself, "Look! Look!" As I walked, I prayed that I would be able to hold onto this new perspective, to live hopefully and fearlessly even in the face of the deepest darkness, to walk the path, to give attention to loss and survival in equal measure, to pay attention to the most subtle change in the sky's light, and after, to the morning.

Patience

From today's epistle: "We always thank God...when we pray for you...we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with knowledge of God's will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray that in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please God in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to God's glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience...

Today, I feel enveloped in this prayer, as if St. Paul and Timothy wrote it for me. And I am lifting my friends up in the same prayer, fully grateful for their love for me, for all I am learning from them--most importantly, "endurance and patience." Yes, I am learning endurance and patience from the most unlikely teachers, or, perhaps, the most likely: old friends, new friends, my garden, and an old printing press.

I have always been in love with gardening. My family had a gigantic garden, and I loved everything about it--turning over the soil, putting in the plants, tending them, picking the vegetables, finding ever new and creative ways to cook zucchini. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would not truly learn to love my home until I put a garden in, and I wasa right. I feel a new sense of groundedness since putting in about 10 tomato plants, 10 peppers, different varieties, eight eggplants, four okra, and several different herbs. I almost didn’t plant a garden this year; I had no time to do it before leaving for Greece, and the planting season was over when I returned. I had to scrounge around town for plants, sometimes getting them from friends, sometimes purchasing half-dead plants from one of the nurseries in town. There are things I wish I could have planted: zucchini, cucumbers, spinach, beans—but that wasn’t meant to be. Still, turning over the hard ground, removing left over sod by hand, putting in the plants, nursing them back to health with organic concoctions I’d read about but never tried, and weeding—especially weeding—have done wonders for my soul. These actions are teaching me to wait.

And in the process, deeper friendships have also grown, as neighbors have stopped by to offer advice (about gardening, adoption, and other spiritual matters), to make witty comments ("You must be from the old country," said one 80-something year old who is trying to marry me off to his son), to offer new plants, or simply to admire the work. These chance meetings are teaching me to pay attention as much as the act of weeding is teaching me to love every moment for its smell, its feel.

I am at the most difficult part of the adoption process. Everyone I know who has ever adopted has warned me about this part, but I didn’t listen; I thought that since I was adopting out of foster care, I would have a child shortly after my home study was complete. I left Greece thinking I would hear about my child when I returned; I continue to wait. Each time I get a file, read about a child or sibling group, and dare to say “yes,” I begin imagining myself parenting the children, start thinking about how my house will need to change—then wait. And wait. What are those social workers doing? What’s wrong with this system? Why can’t I get any information about where they are in the process? Have they picked another family for these children? Have they gotten caught up in another case? And what are the kids doing now--how are they doing, and where are they?

Already they feel indelibly connected to me--even those I have had to reject. "Reject" is a word a friend of mine said I shouldn't use, but it's the reality. These children have been rejected enough in their young lives--it would be insulting to call it anything else. Yes, I "rejected" them for good reasons, because I knew I was not the right parent for them--still, there is a twinge of guilt, and I try to garden that guilt into prayers for their safety, prayers that they will find the family they are supposed to have.

But what of the impatience? I am actually ahead of schedule--I didn't expect my home study to be done until August, but it was complete in May. And ultimately, whether I have a child in my home next week or next year makes very little difference. But I work in a profession that is, in many ways, all about outcomes. I have to report on outcomes of the service-learning program regularly in my grant reports; the program's success is directly related to my continued employment as well. The academic system is based on rewards that are based on how much research academics complete, how well they teach, and how much time they put into keeping the academy going. Even for people like me who are not on the tenure-track, it’s all about self-preservation and achievement, which teaches, for better or worse, that we are in charge, at least to some extent, of our own fates.

Of course, there are parts of the profession that could potentially teach patience—send off your work and wait to find out if a journal has accepted it; wait until long after the end of the semester to find out how your students really liked your class, what they really felt they learned; send out a grant proposal and wait to hear about funding. But in all these cases, if the outcome is negative—if the piece is not accepted, if the evaluations are down from last year, if the grant is rejected—then you did something wrong. There’s no doubt about it; you’ll have to explain to someone what you’ll do better in the classroom, you’ll have to revise your work, you’ll have to write another, better grant proposal. Never mind that students can't possibly completely conceive of what they have learned until much later, or that the effects of any published piece or committee contribution can't be understood without the passing of time.

In many ways, my immigrant background was also very outcomes-focused. While Greeks in Greece are known for taking it easy, caring more about family, friends, and get-togethers than work/money/success, the Greek immigrants realized quickly how hard they would have to work. Many first-generation parents were wildly successful in starting new businesses, getting new churches off the ground, and raising children to do well in American society while also loving their heritage. Still, they counted their children's successes as much more important than their own. They traded tidbits about their children’s accomplishments as if they were the most precious collectibles available. I will never forget my father keeping a copy of the first book I edited my first year out of college on his coffee table—never mind that it was called The Teddy Bear Sourcebook and had absolutely no connection to anything I cared about—it was just something I did for my job. I can’t even remember how he got ahold of it, but no doubt I gave it to him to appease him because he asked if my name had been on the spine of a book yet.

So all of this focus on outcomes, on proving oneself, has been damaging to me over the years. When I choose to value a long phone call with a friend over work on my writing, when I invite friends at the last minute to come over and go to the fireworks when I ought to be catching up on my work, I feel guilty. I am learning to let go of this guilt, but part of doing so has also meant letting go of some of my goals. For instance, I’m still working on my writing, but I am not as focused on getting it published. (I have this luxury because I chose to be a part of academia but not on the tenure track). I no longer feel like if I don’t have a book published by the time I’m 40 I’m a total failure, no longer imagine myself going to my 20th high school reunion and proving to everyone that I became a success after all, even though I was an acne-covered, shy, nerdy, closeted, shame-filled lesbian when I was in high school. And I no longer feel the need to try to prove to my father that my job is important. When he asks questions intended to give him something to brag about to his friends—even more important to him now, since I’m not married to the Greek man he imagined me marrying and haven’t produced any children--I always answer by saying, “I’m happy. I love my life. I have great friends and I love going to work every day.”

This drives him crazy.

But back to the adoption process—I can’t help but think that my impatience is due at least in part to my lack of confidence in myself, a remnant of all those years of being the smartest kid in Greek school, the A-student in "American" school, the one who certainly would never fail but was terrified she would. Some part of me probably thinks I’m not cut out to be a parent, that someone in the system has already figured this out. Couple this with the messages I have received since coming out from the culture at large about GLBT parents, and there's a real problem. It doesn’t matter how glowing my friends’ recommendations were, how supportive everyone who knows about my process has been. There is a part of me that is outcome-focused, and until I have the perfect child living in my perfect family, until I can prove to everyone that a single lesbian can, indeed, be a good mother, I am not good enough.

And herein lies another problem. I’ve chosen to adopt out of foster care, to take a child who has deeply suffered, has been rejected or hurt in one way or another, who may not have been in school regularly, who is, in short, “not OK.” I made this decision largely because, in the process of investigating my options, this seemed the best for me because of my skills, my interests, my lifestyle. A friend of mine recently said, wisely, that I will have to realize that the standards I use to measure my children’s success may have to be different than standards I would have used to measure the success of a birth child, and he is right. My family may not be able to brag about how smart or well-adjusted or funny or talented my child is, because even if he or she is all of these things, they may not be recognizable in the way my straight-A grades were to my family.

In short, I’m going to have to walk the delicate balance of believing in my children, but not worrying about outcomes--beyond the outcome of ensuring they feel safe and loved, that they learn the importance of living a life guided by integrity and love. I need to make sure I don't buy into the things that others consider important. Maybe my child will have straight A’s, get into a great college, have a wildly successful career—but I have to be OK with the fact that he or she may not. Maybe my child will be a really “good kid,” never getting in trouble, never acting out—but in a way, this would be worse that the other alternative, because, after all, any child adopted at an older age who is not acting out is probably internalizing the pain of his or her early childhood, which has got to be much worse. There is the danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy; there is also the danger, however, of setting unreachable expectations. I suspect I will have to manage the balance between the two day by day, moment by moment.

When I confessed to another friend that I was having trouble with being patient, with waiting--when I confessed that I felt deeply connected to two children and afraid of what might happen if they did not become mine--she said to me, “Maybe you are not meant to get the children you’re waiting for right now, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t meant to consider them. Maybe you’re supposed to feel everything you’re feeling because you’re going to learn something about yourself through this process that you couldn’t have learned any other way.”

Thank God for my wise friends. They are sustaining me now--taking the time to talk for hours on the phone, offering their living rooms or offices if I need to talk, praying for me.

And then there are the friends who have not been directly involved in my process, who don't even know it's going on, but who have nonetheless played a huge role in my coping with the wait. One of them is an 80-something retired professor who still teaches occasionally. He also plays tennis, gets writers to visit Morris, volunteers for the DFL, gives lectures about Walt Whitman at the local Senior Center, writes regular angry letters to the paper…and for all of these reasons and more, I have a great deal of respect for him. (I’m also a bit partial to him because he was the head of the search committee that hired me).

Recently, he came to my office and told me he had Parkinson’s. "It's getting worse," he said. "I can still play tennis and run the press, but not for long." And then he surprised me with a question: I be willing to take it over? I knew the press mattered to him, but I had never been particularly interested, even though I loved the poems and invitations and other pieces he had printed over the years. But I said yes, nonchalantly, too busy worrying about getting ready for my summer class to think through what I was doing.

And then he asked again, a more serious look on his face—he wanted to make sure I really understood. “I want this to go on,” he said. “And I would be counting on you.”

What a gift to get this kind of request, to be trusted in this way. My immediate reaction was that this was an impossibility--I am teaching two summer classes, helping to plan a major community event, involved in other community organizations this summer...not to mention the adoption process. But something about the way he asked me made me say yes.

I had my first lesson last Tuesday, and I loved it. It took me two hours, approximately, to set and then dismantle my name and address. In the process, I learned how to find the letters and numbers in the tray, the age-old logic of where they were placed, to tell the M's from the W's, and to set the type so that it aligned perfectly and tightly, ready to be printed. He was the most patient teacher I’ve ever had, just watching, occasionally correcting what I was doing. When I told him so, he said, "Damned right. That's one thing I know for sure. I'm a good teacher." And, as I was searching for the capital “M” for my last name, and then setting it upside down and having to turn it around—I realized that I was supposed to pay more attention. My mind slowed down. I won’t claim it stayed slowed down—the conversations I refer to with my friends happened later in the week, at other moments of near-panic—but I was there, and I was focused, and I was letting myself care about nothing except correctly setting that “M.”

The friend who told me I was going to learn from this, no matter the outcome, also told me that this time in her life—also a time of great change without much control—made her feel like she was riding a river. “It’s not violent exactly,” she said, “but it’s not totally safe, either. But I know I’ll get washed up somewhere, and that it will be the right place.”

Iwas immediately reminded of my last visit to Magganiti before I had to leave Greece. Magganiti, my father's village, is perched in the mountains, but at its foot is the most beautiful beach in the world. On this particular day, the sea was crazy wild, and we probably shouldn't have been in it. At first I fought for awhile, swallowing water, considering fighting my way back to the shore, but I was determined to get in one last swim before leaving Ikaria for at least another two years. And then I remember letting my body go at some point, thinking to myself, I can’t fight this. I have to trust that this place that birthed my family, this history, will take care of me. And then I was able to ride the craziness of the waves. Eventually, tired, I swam back to shore and sat on a large rock and looked over the ocean. On that rock, I felt so at peace—I remember thinking, “Whatever happens next, I have this memory now. I know how to let go. I know I'm not in control.”

I need to carry that peace of not-knowing and not-controlling and not-fighting into the next months, years, however long it takes to have a child. In the meantime, I’ll keep weeding, keep nurturing my plants. I’ll keep learning to set type, enjoying the weekly lessons with my elder, wise teacher. And I’ll enjoy the time I have with friends.

This weekend was the annual Prairie Pioneer Days in Morris, a weekend of fun activities celebrating our community--and best of all, most of them occurred in the park right across the street. My house was full of people who gathered before and after the annual Prairie Pioneer Days talent show on Friday and the fireworks on Saturday and the parade on Sunday—former students, new friends, old friends—ranging in age from one to 62. Last night I looked around at the people on my porch and realized how lucky I was to know them, to have had the opportunity to see some of them (former students) grow into amazing, thoughtful activists. How lucky, too, to live in a town that is relatively safe for GLBT people thanks to the work of the first queers to come to Morris, including a 60-something friend who was on my porch last night. We talked about soldiers we knew who were coming home, about what was left to get done for the Relay for Life next weekend, about friends we had lost, about the Prairie Pioneer Days parade the next day (today).

I am lucky to have friends who teach me "endurance and patience," who lift me up in whatever spiritual tradition or practice they have--porch conversations or telephone conversations or prayers or some combination thereof. I am reminded of what matters, how sometimes we find ourselves inexplicably living the life we want but didn't know we wanted. My life that is ready to open even more widely for my children, whoever they turn out to be, whenever they come. How blessed I am to have come this far, to be preparing to bring children into this crazy, lovely, broken-but-always-healing life. How blessed I am to be sure that I will be stretched and changed--that I will continue to learn and grow--because of their future presence in my life.

Chariots

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20
Galatians 5: 1, 13-25
Luke 9: 51-62

Chariots

Today’s story from 2 Kings is the story that inspired the hymn “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Elijah is taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot; there is nothing left after of his body on earth. I learned this song in elementary school music class, and I didn’t realize it was a religious song at the time. We learned it as part of a unit on African-American music, but our teacher, as far as I can remember, didn’t explain the historical significance of the song. I distinctly remember daydreaming at one point while singing, thinking of the Greek sun god Helios with his chariot, dragging the sun across the sky, and the powerful but hard-to-control horses at the lead. I knew we didn’t pray to this god anymore, and yet sometimes on the walk down our long driveway to catch the school bus, I swear I could see him. I liked the idea that there was a being who struggled with this task day after day just for us: to give us light, to give our garden sunlight so the plants would grow, to keep us from getting either too hot or too cold.

This story now seems to me to be emblematic of how I understand the part of my faith tradition that focuses on the hereafter. Looking back, there’s no way I missed the words “coming for to carry me home,” but I chose to ignore them, focusing instead on the image of the chariot itself, and choosing the earth-bound story of the sun’s journey across the sky over the song’s story of being lifted up, out of this world, into heaven.

A friend of mine who is now a scientist remembers the awe she felt when she began, in elementary school, to learn the secrets of the natural world. She was particularly awed by the idea of our earth as a sphere, hurling through the universe, and of the perfect constellation of planets, stars, and moons that make our lives as they are possible. I never felt the same awe at scientific knowledge; I was awed instead by the myths, the archetypes, the stories ancient people had used to explain what they believed. They became for me a kind of imaginative escape when I was younger; when I was older, the myths held truths that would take a lifetime to unlock about human nature and societal problems. I spent much of my time in graduate school rewriting these ancient myths through contemporary lenses.

Understanding the power of story as I do, it makes sense to me, though I have not studied this topic in any depth, that slaves would be drawn to the Old Testament stories to map out a way for their own freedom; the Jews’ story, after all, is an epic story, multi-generational, and it must have given the slaves some hope to see the care God had for his people as a whole, even though at certain periods in their history they were subject to slavery. They chose to transform an oppressive faith handed to them by white folks into a redemptive faith. And when there was little hope on earth, there was the promise that they might be lifted up in chariots of fire like Elijah was at the end of his ministry.

From my early teens, I was suspicious of any talk that involved the promise of eternal life. Partly this was because I was sick and tired of the way people used this talk as a way to comfort me before and during my mother’s death. I couldn’t imagine her in the heaven that was so central to the funeral and memorial services in the Greek Orthodox Church; she was all body, all words, all presence in my world. She was not a spirit; she was not an angel; she did not belong in a place where all there as to do was to praise God and feel ecstasy.

It’s not that I don’t believe that there is life after death exactly; I do believe that the dead are still alive in some way in us and probably in another place as well; I just didn’t like the idea of heaven being used to comfort the dying or those who love the dying. It seemed to me to be a mask for grief.

I have a memory of being at my best friend’s home in middle school. My mother was dying at the time, and I spent a lot of time there, with her family. They were a strange family; she had a father who was born in Yugoslavia and barely talked to his wife or daughters; unlike me, my friend had no connection to her heritage. Her mother was a very large woman in every way—huge, loud, constantly in our faces. She drove her daughters crazy. I loved her and was disgusted by her at the same time. I liked that she had taken an interest in me, that she treated me like an extension of the family, but I was also a little afraid of her motives. She was an evangelical, and she liked to talk about God, especially to anyone who was polite enough not to interrupt her, which described me, at least in the beginning. (My friend’s father had left the Catholic Church years ago and refused to go near a church, and this always seemed an odd dichotomy).

On this particular evening, we were all sitting in the family’s tiny T.V. room. The father was asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. My friend, her sister, and I were on the floor, staring at the T.V., which seemed always to be on at their house. Her mother was sitting in a chair in the corner, mending a pair of slacks that belonged to one of her daughters. “Ow!” she exclaimed suddenly, and we all looked up, including the father, and watched while the mother inspected her thumb. “It’s OK,” she said. “I just poked myself, but I’m fine.” And then she went on, apparently realizing this was a perfect moment to witness about Jesus since she had our attention: “When Jesus gives me my special room in heaven that is all my own, which I believe he will give each and every one of us when we are saved, there will be lots of soft things there. And no needles, and no mending.” Then, she said, “Argie, what do you think will be in your room?”

“I don’t know,” I said absentmindedly. But then I decided for the first time, for some reason, to talk back to her, and I added, “Is there something in the bible that says we’re each going to get a special room with all our favorite things?” We locked eyes, but I turned away first. I immediately felt guilty; there was no reason to challenge a woman who was so nice to me; she was challenged enough by her own children. But I was both horrified by how ridiculous and simplistic this idea seemed to me—I can’t say why, even now—and intrigued. Even as I was challenging her, I was imagining what my mother’s room would look like. No hospital beds, or pills, or machines, that much I was sure about, but what else?

“MOM!” my friend said. “We’re trying to watch T.V.”

I was as annoyed as my friend, and not just because heaven seemed too simple an escape from the horrors of this life. I was beginning to understand, though I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, that some Christians used heaven as a way to get out of doing the real work that needed to get done on earth. Why focus on the afterlife—why even worry about it at all—when we are so clearly called to create changes here on earth?

Now I understand that my inability to accept this theology is a sign of my own privilege. I have been privileged enough to work for change; I have been privileged enough to, on occasion, see the change I’ve helped to implement make a difference in a community. The language I use, terms like transformative love and social justice, is language I have the privilege to claim. I don’t have to rely on the hope that someday, God is going to come down and carry me away; I have enough hope right here. Many people do not; the slaves certainly did not, and my friend’s mother, whose daughters were growing more and more annoyed at her every day, who was working a dead-end job and had an absent husband, did not, though the scale of her suffering certainly cannot be compared to the suffering the slaves faced.

There were times, in all honestly, when I did not, when I wanted to just curl up and hide from the world. I had such a time only a year ago. I had made the decision to leave a six year relationship, but I was moving through the decision too quickly, not feeling any of it. In a kind of daze, I decided I wasn’t going to leave my job, because two huge changes would be too much, even though this meant living in a town of 5,000 and facing the break up head on. I started the process of buying a house. Then suddenly there were problems with my contract; I would have a job, but it wasn’t clear if I would continue to work over the summer, which would have cut my income significantly. The process of getting out of the mortgage I shared with my partner was taking longer than I’d expected. Suddenly, while I was sitting at the university’s booth at the Twin Cities Pride celebration, I thought to myself, “What happened to my life?” And then, I thought, I need to get out of it, out of my life.

At that moment, I longed for a chariot. I longed for a God who would just swoop down, maybe not to take me away, but at least to fix my life. What I got instead was Helion, the chariot-god of the sun. At first, I let myself sleep and weep and shout into pillows. I was in a nondescript, low budget hotel room with one tiny window, and I didn’t open the door or the curtains for at least three days. But on what I think was the fourth day, I happened to wake just as the sun was rising, and I opened the curtain and watched. I would like to say I felt some kind of awe or hope in that moment, but instead, I thought only, “You see, Argie, the world is going on without you. You could stay here as long as you wanted, and it would be OK.” It was a comforting thought.
That night, I actually walked out into the parking lot of the hotel and watched the sun set. This time, I thought, “You see, Argie, the sun god is dragging that sun across the sky to give you the light you need to do your work. You might as well get back in it.”

And so, eventually, I did. I went back to Morris, I bought a house, I got the contract I wanted, I went on with my work, I started the adoption process that I had been dreaming about for years. I learned from those days in that hotel room two very different lessons that seem contradictory: I don’t matter much; the world was constantly inviting me to matter, though it would be OK if I never accepted the invitation. I have no say in the outcome of my own life; the world was challenging me to make decisions when I could, and when I could, I should aim to make them out of love and not fear.

I think the slaves must have lived in a much more dramatic and painful version of this reality. They didn’t matter much; the world was constantly inviting them to matter by finding meaning in their lives, by looking for ways to escape to one kind of freedom or another. They had no say in the outcome of their lives; so when they could, they should choose to act out of love instead of fear. And many did; many escaped or tried to escape only to be beaten or killed for the act; many found a spiritual way to understand redemptive love and suffering and death in imagery they could understand.

So in the end, maybe the belief in a heaven—even a silly version of heaven like the private rooms that my friend’s mother believed in—isn’t so incompatible with the kind of spirituality I believe in, rooted in love, rooted in action. We have to know when we need rest—temporary or final. When necessary, we have to know when we are called to risk our lives, or to take some other risk, large or small, that plays with our destiny or the world’s destiny. More likely, though, we will have to find a way to live in the in-between place where we can see God as a divine comforter and a divine invitation to do the hardest work there is to do, even though there is so little we can control. We are called to the work the brings greater freedom and dignity to ourselves and to all people, and we are called to do it in love, despite our fear.