when my husband knows what’s best/ following jesus is hard

 

I haven’t, historically, written much about my life on this blog before, but since many of you who read this (and aren’t just looking for pictures of tea) actually know me, I thought I’d give a snapshot of my week and the current skirmish in the overarching narrative of the universe there in.

I think a combination of hormones, the stress of an impending (unwanted) move, a lot of travel this summer, good old fashioned low-dopamine levels, and some other things that aren’t really the sort I discuss on the blog have conspired in my person and, thus, over the last week I was pretty depressed.  On Thursday, the gnome and I went to see a Bill Mallonee concert, and, afterward, I was feeling numb with a small twist of sadness and bitterness.  So after we dropped our great and amazing friend off, I thought we’d just go home.

Me: I’m tired. Let’s go home.
Gnome: There is no way in hell I’m taking you home. You are depressed. You need Chocolate. 

So we went to Dolce Vita, a gelatto bar, one of those trendy spots where the drinks and gellato are so yummy and overpriced, every one there is super hip and the baristas are sexually ambiguous.  I had dark chocolate gellato and a Dolce Vita coffee (coffee with bailys and fragelica), which we took to go, and then walked around one of the prettiest neighborhoods in Austin.

We ended up sitting in a parking lot and having a good talk about following Jesus.  I have a lot of friends who have walked away from the faith in the last few years and it has really been brutally painful to watch.  And I’m at this place that many of them came to where I’m having to make some choices that I don’t want to make in order to be faithful to Christ- places where it feels like death to follow the Way and I have to believe (by the miracle of faith alone) that what feels like death is life and what feels like life is like fool’s gold.  The gnome said that this may be the first time that following Jesus is costing me something.  If you saw my life, you’d think that that was crazy.  I’ve always tried to be “hard-core”, given stuff away, gone overseas, worked with poor folks, stayed a virgin until I was married (which wasn’t easy to do) and have been on staff at a few churches– I’m really grateful for these things in my life, but all of them were my choice.  I chose how to “sacrifice for Jesus” and I got the thrill of the fair amount of ridiculous self-righteousness that comes along with those choices.  But now I’m in a place where he is calling me to follow him in ways that I didn’t choose to, in ways that I wouldn’t choose to.  And he’s calling me to trust him when it is really hard to do so. He’s calling me to “sacrifice” my desires and trust him to fill up the holes that the sacrifice leaves in my heart. 
So I cried in the parking lot into my coffee.  And the gnome prayed for me.  This is the abundant life, but it isn’t always the dolce vita.  But I’m learning, that following Jesus only becomes real when it costs you what you don’t want to give up. 
And I’m still here, as John Bunyon would say, narrowly fleeing the “castle of doubt” but still a pilgrim on the path.    

Jesus for President update and where I’ve been

I just came back from papa fest in Illinois, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve had in years.  I met some other “ordinary radicals.” Learned a lot more about being ordinary and being radical and generally grew from the good nourishment that comes from being with thoughtful brothers and sisters.  Got hot. Got sweaty. Danced. Sang. Got dirty. Pooed in pootown.  (That’s my disembodied voice in the video–apparently I got cut from the visuals.–I’m not cool enough for poo.) And grew maybe just a little more into the freedom I was made for.

I saw Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw give their presentation that they are giving on their book tour of Jesus for President. They (along with musical guests Jay and Scotty) do a bang-up job. Go see it, if you can.

It really hit a nerve with me.  If you read this, you know I have supported Obama, but, honestly, I do it somewhat reluctantly. There are ways that I disagree with him and, honestly, ways I don’t quite trust him, so giving him my vote is a bit awkward for me.  I am trying (often faultily) at being a biblical follower of Jesus, and, as such, there are ways that the republican platform is just sickening to me (economic justice, war, race issues, death penalty, humility, etc.) and at the same time I’m not quite at home with my leftist friends, and there are beliefs I have that make my most non-violent, good-natured lefty friends want to kick my butt (abortion, sexual ethics, pluralism/absolute truth, humility, etc.).  The fact is that at the end of the day, I don’t have much allegiance to the donkeys or the elephants, but, instead, follow a different king, a slain lamb, and exist in a different kingdom.  And the other fact is that, when push comes to shove, even Obama is willing to drop a bomb to defend the best interest of the nation-state and our consumption habit.  I can not support that as a Christian. I’ve been radicalized beyond either candidate.

So what do I do? not vote? vote but keep quiet about it? vote and don’t keep quiet but admit that even Obama may end up being against all that I embrace? 

Shane and Chris never encourage or discourage anyone to vote and they don’t endorse, but they make a good point.  As a believer, voting for any one is, at best, damage control.  No one can be our savior.  That job has already been filled.

“Christians know that the world did not change on September 11th. It changed in 33 A.D.” -Shane Claiborne

we trade in triviality. sigh.

FightTheSmears.com 

 

more to come. i’ve been sick and out of town.

Sound Bite: John Kavanaugh

 

So I’ve been MIA…Those of you who read this frequently know that that means that I’m either (a) sick (b) gone (c) in the middle of a big hairy theology class or (d) all of the above.  Well, the answer in this case is c.  I’m working on an independent study on theology and consumerism.  It is amazing, but leaves no time for blogging or anything else really.  

So I’ll share some of it with you…

This is from the latest edition of John Kavanaugh’s Following Christ in a Consumer Society-  highly recommended. This man is intense about prayer.  No wonder it is so hard for me to find space and time for prayer and solitude–it goes against the grain of our culture.  

Silent solitude is filled with risk.  It lacks pragmatics.  It is hopelessly unmarketable.  The centering of prayer is an exercise of honesty, in getting in touch with our needfulness and poverty so shrilly denied by commercialism and materialism. …Prayer is an assalt upon the fradulence of mere roles, of social and cultural pretense, of the idols we cling to and are enslaved by.  As such it carries with it all of the existential terror of any act of intimacy with another person.  Afraid of being “found out” we avoid intimacy…Yet we long for personal communion . Somehow we long to be found out, to be seen as we are–to be accepted as we are. This is what takes place in the intimacy of prayer.  We discover that God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ has “found us out” already and not rejected us. …the declaration of our poverty, of our dependant needfulness of our incapacity to save ourselves through idolatry, of our ontological incompleteness, is not a shameful discovery, but a discovery of our being loved for what we actually are… Thus, prayer is not only a countercultural act.  It is a reappropriation of our personhood and identity. It is a dealienation, a decommodification of our very lives. 153-154

Happy 75th Birthday Catholic Worker!

 

“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” - Dorothy Day

 

 Today is International Workers Day- a day to remember,celebrate, and work for rights of the worker worldwide.  I also heard that it is the National Day of Prayer.

So all day long my mind played with this idea of prayer and the worker. The call to work for those who are often neglected and oppressed, crushed in the wheels of the capitalist machine.  And the call to prayer, to trust, to worship, to pleading, to rejoicing.  This interplay between Christianity and the marketplace.  Personal piety and holiness and social good and equality.

So, of course, all day long, I had Dorothy Day on my mind.  Because this woman embodies a love for God and a commitment to the worker. 

And after feeling like I was walking around with Dorothy Day all day long, I found out that today was also the birth of the Catholic Worker. (A surprising non-coincidence). Today the movement celebrates 75 years. 

So our challenge on this day is to pray and to pray for the worker and to thank God for Dorothy Day. We celebrate the legacy of Dorothy Day and all the thousands of folks who have been part of the Catholic Worker by continuing the work she and Peter Maurin began to make a society where it is “easier for men to be good”- to love God with all that we are and get our hands dirty loving our neighbor. She loved the Church.  She loved Jesus. And she loved the worker. She believed that work should have dignity and that the teachings of Jesus challenged the hegemony of the free market.  I am no where near the woman Dorothy Day was and I hope to be more like her, but I want to say thank you to her and the Catholic Worker, God has used her and it to help challenge and shape me. 

My favorite book in the world is the Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s auto-biography.  And if you never have read it, I highly recommend you do so. I wanted to share a quote with you from it, but it is impossible.  It is the story of Day’s life and to take any one passage out of the rest would just not represent how rich a meal this book is. 

But as an appetizer…

Here is a great little article by Jim Forest, who knew Day and was part of a Catholic worker house.

Smallness is a big deal. And so is Michael Pollan.

So the theme of my year is smallness. These huge problems: global warming, violence and war, greed and consumerism can be overwhelming and what I’m finding is that there is something good and rich and buried in small places that offers hope and, to use the buzz word of our year, even change. 

 

This year I’ve thought a tremendous amount and written a tremendous amount about Christian practice.  And Christian practices are, by and large, small. We are called to earthy (not earthly) things like bread and wine, prayer, stewardship, service, and faithfulness in the ordinary stuff of mundane life.  It often feels like the things of this world- absolute relativism, violence, and endless consumption are Goliath, and we’ve been given such small stones.  The word. The sacraments. The Community.  Hospitality. Stewardship. Sabbath. Forgiveness. *

 

But we have to trust that what we’ve been given and called to is sufficient.

 

This is an article about smallness. ** I’m a huge Michael Pollan fan, and while he is not a Christian as far as I know, this article fits into to this year’s “small is the new big” theme.  It is a great article, easily digestible and tasty. You should totally read it.

 

*Granted, the resurrection is big, not small, and it infuses this smallness with eternal weight. This is most true– however, subjectively, as teeny little humans, our experience of mundane life is often one of smallness.

** Thanks to the urban farmer for sending me this article.

Umm… Dude, where’s my banner?

My banner just disapeared 9the thingy at the top pf the page). Can anyone explain what happened? dit-dit-dit- DOT-DOT-DOT-dit-dit-dit 

Expensive food and simple solutions

A recent cover on the Economist proclaimed, “The End of Cheap Food.”  Part of the worldwide soaring food prices is due to fuel, but the other issue is meat.  As developing countries, specifically China, creep toward the “developed” finish line, and gain wealth, they eat less staple foods like rice and wheat and, instead, opt for a steak.  Since we typically feed cows corn or wheat (a shame since they actually were created to be primarily grass eaters) to fatten ‘em up real nice and quickly, more land is being used to feed cows, instead of people and being that one cow feeds a lot less people than does all that that one cow might consume, there is a less land for the millions and millions of folks who survive on staple foods. 

 

So what do we do about food shortages world-wide?

 

1. Ignore them.  This won’t work because starvation breeds desperation and food shortages on the other side of the globe will ripple in its affects and end up affecting our own back yard.  We can’t afford to ignore our neighbors, and, as Christians, we ought not to, primarily out of love, but also out of the deep sense of connection between all of us.  (Remember the Rich man who ignored the starving Lazarus. Yeah, it didn’t really work out well for him).

 

2. Live more simply. 

            (a) We need land redistribution so that smaller, sustenance farmers can have land to grow food for their families.  The less importing, the less fuel we use, and this is not only good for the environment, but for limiting the effect of food prices.

 

            (b) Eat less meat.  Hey, I like a burger as much as the next Texan. I’m not a vegetarian. But if we care about the food on our neighbor’s plate (or lack there of) we have to think about our eating choices.  So we still eat meet at our house, but we are trying to eat it less and less, and when we do eat it, it is mostly deer that this total city boy that I know actually went out and shot in the woods. I don’t do this because I oh-so-love rice and beans. I do this because it is really yummy to share. And we only have enough land on this little blue-green planet of ours, if we share land.  And I think that Christians ought to care about that because we believe that God created this planet, so I’m thinking that he knew what he was doing when he did it. 

 

Talk back: Food as Grounding Image

All my significant conversations happen over smoothies.

How about you? Any grounding images in your life?

Food for Thought and a Lenten Review

So if you’ve been wondering why I’ve posted less the last few weeks, this post may explain some of it.

I’ve practiced Lent in years past, but not really. It was more like Lent with training wheels. I was never at a church that made a big deal of the church calendar and, though I craved it personally, liking the idea that time itself is shaped by the life of Christ and his bride, I never was able to experience high church Lent–that is, Lent with my whole, local congregation celebrated in symbol, ritual, and worship. But last summer, we began going to an Episcopal church, so this year, the training wheels were off and so was I.Here I give a review of two of many things that I learned while practicing Lent.

_______________________________

Ash Wednesday service was one of the most profound experiences of mourning and hope that I’ve had maybe ever. I’m still reeling from it. The ashes marked on all of us, every kneeling soul felt like a mark for execution. We were all going to die. It was bleak. Honestly, I felt rage. I wanted to go knock the ashes out of the priest’s hand. Could not one be spared the curse that he spoke over us- even the babies were marked! The sanctuary was perfectly silent and I wanted to scream “Do you people know what is going on here? We are being marked for the slaughter by God himself!” I wanted to beat on the altar and cry foul, but like the rest I acted like a civilized person preparing for my funeral. But then, as I knelt, preparing to take the Eucharist, angry at death and ashes and black robes, it dawned on me that Christ himself was marked by the same execution ashes. The cross on my forehead was not a stranger to God. His own holy forehead was marked, but ever so much deeper and darker and with blood. And I knew that the greatest human suffering on earth was entered into and experienced to the full by our Rescuer. As I took the Holy meal, I was overwhelmed by God’s grace. He had submitted himself to the curse and broken it open to give us life.

________________________________

After Ash Wednesday, the church practiced Lent together. Many friends of mine fasted for some period of time and from all or certain foods. I have a minor but chronic medical condition that prevents me from fasting (I learned this after I tried to fast five years ago and made it two meals–we’re talking like only 10 hours here–and ended up in the Emergency Room dehydrated from vomiting). So I looked at my life and what I consume, and really what I consume is input, specifically media input. We don’t have a TV, but I still download episodes of some of my favorite shows; we watch movies; I listen to NPR like it is aural crack; and I surf. So I gave it up.

Now, I cannot say that I really went without any input for 40 days. I didn’t. I had moments of insanity when I binged on political blogs and had unavoidable run-ins with badly written Disney TV specials with my four year old niece, but, all in all, my time spent around screens and Terry Gross significantly decreased. It was a fascinating experiment because, like food, the very beginning of the media fast was no sweat, but also like food, (to my surprise) after a week or so without media input I began to crave it with a nearly neurotic longing. However, getting away from it is the best way to see the damage that all this input wrought in me–in all of us.

During my fast, I read Marva Dawn’s A Royal Waste of Time. In one of the very best chapters in an overall great (though overly wordy) book, she looks at the influence of TV and the web on our culture and, specifically, on our churches. I won’t outline the whole chapter here—you ought to read the book–but she lists twelve or so areas of fall-out from our media saturation and along with discussing changing brain chemistry in young children and the blinding assault of advertising and commercialism, she discusses insightfully what she calls the low information-action ratio of TV and blogs. Both television and the web connect us to a world of information, but give us very little idea of how to respond to the information that they give us. Therefore, we are trained to imbibe information passively. Whether the information be about tales of suffering in another country or down the street or the book of Luke, we are taught to take in the information and change nothing (or little) about our lives or our world. This low information to action ratio has enormous impact on how we live, worship, and receive the truths in the scripture.

Now it is Easter and I have begun slowly to venture into the world of blog-reading and NPR-listening again, but the time away makes my experience of media richer; it is much more aware and nuanced now. I am grateful for having means of input (especially NPR), but I am even more wary of media saturation than I was in January (and I was pretty wary then.) The bottom line is this: we are all being indoctrinated or trained by something all the time. As believers, we do well to be cautious and wise about what is primarily shaping us. Is it rhythms of worship and service, the scripture, and the community of saints or TV, blogs, and radio? Fundamentalists may decry violence, sexual immorality, and other woes of media (and this is often legitimate), but TV and the web’s more profound danger is how it trains us to be passive consumers of everything–information, communities, resources, people, and God. Like fasting from food, fasting from input can often lead to nourishing insight, wisdom, and worship. And practicing Lent with my church makes Easter all the more celebratory.

-thw