Wordpress is not on Kristin’s list of likeables right now.  Can anyone tell me why my AuthImage plugin isn’t working, even though it’s activated?  And can anyone tell me why my blacklist of words is not actually deleting comments that contain blacklisted words?  I am up to my eye balls in poker spam.

Hi again, after a brief hibernation! I hope your holidays have been full of good things, or at the very least sprinkled with many of them.

N and I went back to our home town, where both of our parents and some of our siblings still live, and enjoyed a week full of family and friends. We’re home again now, though, and after all the busyness and time away from routine, and as the year comes to a close and the wings of a new one flutter only meters away, I find myself restless. I’m hungry but not. Tired but not. Lonely but peopled out. I’m homesick for something I can’t quite name.

Do any of you feel this way?

Maybe a blessing is in order for all of us, as we sit in this strange post/present holiday, pre-new-year spot…

May your day today, and the days that follow it, be in some small way like a seed sending up a fresh, green sprout. May the places in you that ache and feel small or dark or lonely or cold get touched by fullness somehow—the kind that makes you feel warm and loved and like maybe it’s gonna be okay. May the questions you carry that do and don’t have answers, and the fears you have that can and can’t ever be comforted, and all the ways you wish that you or your life could be different—may you discover a layer of living that happens right alongside these things, where there is hope, and a gentle sweetness, and beauty, and wonder.

May your year ahead, and even the days of this week, be marked by a new kind of rest, and whatever it’ll take for you to find yourself falling into it.

Bless you.

I’ve been thinking about how to answer Lori’s question from the comments last time. Just now before sitting down to type a response, I got an email from N, forwarding the update I added to the last post. If you haven’t read the update, it says the president of the board of AJS got a text message today saying, “You are next.”

I’m caught right now in a very dissonant chord. Finding it hard to write. I feel helpless and angry. And incredulous. Who kills people? What events brought them to this? Were they not loved very well? Is it kill or be killed for them? Are resources so scarce as to push entire regions of our globe into survival-of-the-ones-with-the-biggest-guns? It appears to be so.

I’m sitting in the library right now of one of our world’s most wealthy institutions of higher education. The temperature is just right. Sun shines through the window next to me. My stomach is full. The biggest threat I can imagine to my life is an earthquake.

God, what a world.

I want to push this chord I’m sitting in clear off the table, onto the floor, back into a dark corner where I don’t even pass it by. I want to pull the blubber close around my neck, around my head, where the brows are so furrowed, and my shoulders, with their knots. I want to go home tonight and eat a warm meal and play with my baby, and then make Christmas cards with the new stamp I bought at the stationary store, with the red pen I got for the addresses, and the Mary and Jesus postage.

I want to forget.

While I’m sitting in all this dissonance, I think I’ll have to postpone answering your question, Lori. Apparently awakening, like getting up in the morning, can lead to wonderful possibilities, but can also include those moments when the very last thing you want to do is open your eyes.

A few posts back I said I wanted to spend this advent blogging about things that fill me up with wonder. Those of you who have read here for a while may remember my review of David James Duncan’s book, God Laughs and Plays. I quoted him on wonder:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

What I didn’t quote was what Duncan said about wonder’s underside:

“Wonder is anything taken for granted–the old neighborhood, old job, old buddy, old spouse–suddenly filling with mystery. Wonder is anything closed, suddenly opening: anything at all opening–which includes Pandora’s box, and brings me to the dark side of wonder. Grateful as I am for this condition, wonder, like everything on earth, has a dark side. Heartbreak, grief, and suffering rip openings in us through which the dark kind of wonder pours. I have so far found it impossible to be spontaneously grateful for these openings. (pg 9)

I’m filled with dark wonder today. I’m going to write about it, both as part of my spiritual practice this advent season, and as a means of wishing and praying and hoping the brighter side of wonder toward the situation here in question.

My husband, N, has been getting email updates for the last year from an organization in Honduras called Association for a More Just Society (AJS). This is a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting justice for the poorest and most vulnerable people in Honduras. They focus primarily on labor rights, land rights, crime victims’ rights, and creating access to legal and psychological services. From what we can gather from their website and email updates, this is no flimsy deal. These people literally put their lives on the line for those they serve. Their boots are covered in mud from all the trenches they spend their days tromping: organizing, investigating and reporting injustices, and offering legal and psychological services.

Last night N told me about their work, and I was filled with the bright kind of wonder. Their inspiration is Jesus, and they’ve taken into their bones his revolutionary way. Theirs is not an aspirin-Jesus, or a prop-up-the-status quo Jesus, but one who seems to have awakened them to the notion that they can do something about the sources of our world’s darkest things. They can do something. The words ring in my ears and move toward my heart. They can do something. It’s true for me, like them. It’s true for you. We can do something.

I feel like life is an amazing narcotic for most of us, or like layer upon layer of blubber. We live most of the time with a thick and sometimes sanity-keeping layer of blubber between us and deep awareness of the suffering in our world (we all suffer, this is true. But surely there are degrees, as in “I can’t leave my front door without getting shot” suffering, compared with “my child will not eat her vegetables” varieties.). We live with blubber between us and the awareness that these lives we’ve been given, these thoughts and feelings and the money and tools we’ve gathered along the way? They can address and alleviate the things that should instill dark wonder: AIDS, poverty, corrupt leaders and governments (!), global warming. I feel heavy even listing these things, heavy trying to think of more. The blubber is trying hard to close the opening I’m making in it here–the air hole that’s my connection with the kind of Life I want to live.

I want to be awake. I WANT TO BE AWAKE!! I scream it through all the insulation: I want to LIVE! I want to be awake to the things my hands and voice and written words can do for all the parts of me that are ill–the parts that are poor and fired for no good reason. The parts whose parents have died from AIDS. The parts that are being abused, and have only slum dwellings as options in which to live. I want to be awake. I’m one who likes to see the many layers of any issue, and so am well aware that one person can’t and should not do every good thing possible. I’m not advocating a kind crazed giving that takes nothing of self or family into account. I’m just saying I want to be awake. And in my wakefulness, I want to do what my little heart tells me is mine for the doing.

Last night N told me about a progression of updates he got from AJS this week. The first was a request for prayer. One of AJS’s lawyers, a man who represented clients abused by two of Honduras’s major corporations–one of the corporations a security service, no less–had recieved a death threat for the work he’s doing. Yesterday N got a note saying the lawyer had actually been killed. Just outside the courthouse, masked gunmen took him down. He leaves behind a wife and young son.

A hole is ripped through all my insulation. Dark wonder still pours through. This man was awake. Maybe he still is, in some other form. But not in the way his wife and son need most. Not in the way his clients need, and his colleagues, who, awake though they are, surely must be quaking in their boots right now. And grieving. Yes, grieving. Fear and grief are some of the best blubber producers, I think (though sometimes they’re the opposite…), and may be reason, in the case of AJS, for enormous setbacks.

I don’t know what to say about all this. I don’t know what to say about the powers in our world that pulse against everything I understand Life to be. I don’t understand them. Are numbness to their reality and self-centered living the best responses we have to their presence?

I’m planning on donating money to AJS, and invite you to do the same. But even more than that, I extend an invitation, as one who needs the invitation too, to not wait until tomorrow or next week or ten years from now to find a way through all the blubber. Maybe read Duncan one more time, thinking both sides of wonder as you do, rather than only just the bright:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

UPDATE:  Here is a note that N recieved from AJS today:

The enemies of justice continue to oppose the poor and those who would help them in Honduras . This morning Carlos Hernández, president of the board of AJS (and also director of Genesis) received a text message in English on his cell phone sent from the internet that read, in part: ” You are the next.” We do not know whether this is just a sick joke or whether it was sent by someone who is truly a threat. But circumstances do not allow us to take this lightly. Carlos at this very moment is denouncing the threat before the national Human Rights Commission and other organizations.

More than ever we at AJS need your prayers right now. We also need your help:

1. Send an email to Honduran officials urging them to address Dionisio’s murder and to guarantee the safety of the rest of AJS’s staff and board.

2. Donate to one or both of two funds we have set up in memory of Dionisio–one to fund the education of his 7-year-old son Mauricio and one to help AJS continue Dionisio’s work of promoting labor rights.

To do either or both, please visit www.ajshonduras.org/dionisio

Thank you, and may God bless you,

Abram Huyser Honig
AJS Communications Coordinator

I’m still making my way slowly through Sam Harris’s End of Faith. I just finished a pair of chapters that details the brutish histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The second of the pair is on Islam, and by the end of it I found myself more afraid of Muslims than I care to admit–more afraid of their God, their customs, their worldview. And seeing “them” as something unified, too–something all, or at least mostly, alike.

I think Harris is scared, too. His whole book is about how religion, and Islam to the greatest degree, will either have to die, or be the death of us all, given the kinds of mass destruction that modern warfare-combined-with-religion is capable of. But here’s the most robust irony: he is actually giving himself more, and increasingly legitimate, reason to be afraid. By means of his book, he is creating more division, more distrust, more fear of the “other”, and therefore more layers of violence, than would otherwise exist had the book not been written.

This evening I attended a lecture given by Reza Aslan, a scholar of world religions, and expert on Islam. He’s written a book called “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” and lectured tonight on what he’s calling the Islamic Reformation. According to him, Islam is in an extreme state of flux right now, with authority shifting increasingly away from its clerics/scholars and into the hands of everyone (think Martin Luther, sola fide, sola scriptura). Groups are popping up across the globe of people reading Koranic texts differently, newly, outside of mosques, in the equivalent of home churches. And like in any decentralized institution, groups are forming along the whole spectrum of liberal to conservative, feminist to misogynist, violent to peaceful.

Aslan’s excitement to be alive in this season of change is palpable, and too his eagerness to present a more accurate picture of today’s Islam than any unified story can tell.

I know little of Islam (and plan to read Aslan’s book). But I know lots about Christianity, and can’t imagine, now that Aslan has popped the fear-bubble Harris created for me, that Islam is any more immune to the forces of peace and of violence than Christianity has been. While I plan on finishing Harris’s book (and to explore here some of the good points I think he makes), I’m eager to get a broader picture of Islam in my brain, in my bones, so that I can more fully participate in this project I’m giving my life to, this work of undoing fear.

Bob from The Corner has invited anyone who is interested to participate in a gridblog inspired by Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead). He writes (and invites to be shared around):

I am emailing you to ask if you would consider joining a gridblog to share your own experiences with the loss of a loved one – a gridblog entitled THE MARIGOLD PATH that would be across the Internet on Nov. 1 & Nov. 2. This gridblog is inspired by the experience of Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead)…with the gridblog name inspired by the practice of children carrying yellow marigolds as they follow the procession to the cemetery.

I thought of Trish, who has been thinking and writing and composing in honor of women who are dying or have died, and of others I know who are grieving the deaths of people, and also the deaths of dreams. If any of you are interested in joining this blogwalk of reflection and remembrance, whether for a person who has died, or for some other thing in your life that has passed, go here for more details.

I’m in.

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Towers falling, and hundreds more of waves of effects, rippling out from that day. 

When the Towers fell, I had just finished seminary, was one month into therapy, and about three years into the most paralyzing identity crisis I had known.  It was the second day of a week of testing my blood sugars hourly in attempts at getting them controlled.  The stress of the preceding years had taken it’s toll on my body, and I had developed hypoglycemia.  I was hunkering down by this and other means to be more careful, that is, full of care, for this body that is me, and this psyche that was so in need of attention.

So my reaction to the attacks was different than it would have been at any other time in my life.

At any other time, I would have probably cried a lot that week.  I would have probably focused in on all the images of tears, of horror-stricken faces, of bloodied bodies and terrified eyes, hanging posters of loved ones, hoping them alive.  My soul would have conformed to these images, taking on the feelings I saw there, experiencing them, at least fractionally, as my own.  By the end of that week, I would have been exhausted.

But I already was exhausted at that point, so the energy I had to give new feelings was low.  I was also freshly learning that my tendency to become the suffering around me was more about me suffering what was inside myself, and needing outlets for that, since I wasn’t doing it consciously for me.  It was also about suffering for the people I was close to and cared deeply for, but felt powerless to help.  Displaced care was what it was, at least largely.  And not by choice, I was learning fall of 2001 that the compassion I sloshed over everyone else needed channelling toward me.  If, in fact, I was interested in healing.

And I was.  Desperately.

So my heart sunk like everyone else’s that day, and I stayed shaken from any sense of normalcy.  But I didn’t descend toward despair like was my former style.  I kept checking my blood sugars.  I kept eating snacks.  I went to therapy the next day and talked, after the first number of minutes, about things other than New York.

Surely there are degrees of connection, and were I living anywhere near New York at the time, or had I known anyone injured or killed in that Nightmare, I would have appropriately been consumed for months, if not years, with fear and grief and rage.  So I want to tread carefully here, and say what I really mean.

What I mean is that there are awful, awful things happening in our world every minute.  And not just far from where I am.  They’re next door.  They’re in the next block.  They’re all across our country.  And there are wonderful things, too, and wonderful movements of people to join–people caring about and engaging all the yuck, and with hope and courage and imagination.

But since fall of 2001, only coincidentally starting at the same time as those attacks, I have been working hard to more mindfully listen to myself and tend to my own suffering first, so that the tending I do outwardly might be more true.  By true I mean being less about displaced compassion–less about spinning subconscious wheels to try to get my needs for self-love and attention met, or to try to be helpful in a world where the people I care most for appear so unhelpable–and more about compassion bubbling consciously up from the wounds that I’ve tended inside myself.  And from knowing, because of that tending, who I am and the kind of "tree" that I am–the kinds of yuck that my shade and shelter instinctually move toward.  Those are the things to which I want to give my life.  Those are what I want to be missional about, and do what it takes to engage.  To not become indifferent toward.

Everything else is torches others must carry.  I have only two hands and one heart, and not just any hands and heart, but mine, which are wonderfully fashioned for a certain kind of engagement with our world–with its ugliness and it’s breathtaking beauty.  They’re poorly made for other kinds, and the more I learn to recognize which is which, the less money I’ll need to spend on therapy.  And the more all of us benefit. 

Or so I’m thinking.

So I live in this post 9/11 world.  I live under a president whose decisions I’m ashamed of and angered by.  I live in a region where poverty gets shuffled to the other side of the tracks and keeping up with the Joneses is considered high moral ground.  I live where people know more about work than they do about their families, and where they have to, because it costs that much to live.

But I’m not giving a lot of energy to these things.  And not because I don’t think they need lots of people, pouring lots of energy into addressing them.  I’m not because my energy for doing what seems like good in the world is being spent elsewhere, being nurtured for other things.  I’m pouring it into trying to stay awake to the souls around me, to inner change, to possibilities for healing.  To what it means to heal after being hurt by religion and by being silenced and by feeling shame.  To talking about beauty and calling attention to it.  To honoring what often goes unnoticed.

I’m trying to find that space where care for the layers of suffering in our world is neither narrowed by tunnel vision on these things that I’m about, nor made bland by getting spread too thin.  Where I own my own suffering, and tend to it, so that what I end up spilling inadvertantly around me is hope, of the realest, most authentic kind.  Is shade from my branches, reaching naturally toward sun.

It’s a dark day here, where sunshine usually warms the pavement well before noon.  Misty and cold.  Elijah got his shots last week and hasn’t been sleeping well since.  My dreams last night were scattered with his noises.

I want to write about what was happening in my life five years ago when the Twin Towers fell, reflect on what that event and the dominos it’s pushed over since have meant to me.  What kind of outlook I have as I think about the world and its powers now, as I continue being me, but a me in this world, under this administration.

I want to, but my bigger drive to be a patient mommy wins out.  E has just gone down for his nap, and I need to too.  I’m so tired, and he only takes this one nap now, and the day is so young.  It’s a choice between the inner peace of getting thoughts on a page, and the body peace of getting some rest.  With E’s sleep so hit and miss, and consequently his mood, I think I’ll choose the latter.  I think we’ll both be glad I did.

Blessings on you this day.

It’s been a busy week, with visitors on each end and sickness in between, and I’m finally getting back to naptime blogging. I’ve been wanting to say more about this conference I attended last weekend–Blogher, in San Jose.

Blogher is a national (well, mostly. There are other countries represented, too.) network of female (well, mostly. There are other genders represented, too. :) bloggers who, among other things, gather yearly to learn more together about blogging and each other. The first day of this year’s gathering dealt mostly with blogging technology, and the second with the personal and communal aspects of the trade. Lots of networking and discussion and question-asking filled both days.

In preparation for this event, I wrote out a list of things that I am (writer, friend, wife, mother, blogger, etc.), anticipating an atmosphere where I might unwittingly lose myself, where the powers of high school cliques turned adult-bloggers could make me wonder who it is I am, anyway, and why it was I thought I was okay. I consider myself confident, in many ways, but there I was, earnestly reading my list on the drive there. I approached the registration table like jumping into cold water: nose plugged, here I go.

What unfolded couldn’t have been farther from my expectations. At numerous points I found myself tearing up, moved by the hearts and minds of these hundreds of women bloggers, changing our world one post at a time–organizing relief efforts, pooling resources, unveiling injustices, working through inner pain and outer conflict, helping people laugh, helping people feel less crazy and alone.

I felt honored to be an observer of and participant in these conversations, honored to be surrounded by so many people engaged so meaningfully with life, eager to learn and grow and cultivate and contribute. I met Erica Rios who works with Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and talked with her about her work of bringing together women of technology and women who don’t identify at all with technology to engage both sides in conversation and sharing of ideas. I met Jen, who loves to write, and uses her blog as a place to practice her art, as well as a place to explore what it means to be a woman with complicated interests and feelings and experiences and relationships; in short, to be human. I met Leah, who converted to Judaism in her 20s, and is writing what sounds like a fascinating book about that, Kety Esquivel, who is passionate about justice and giving an alternative voice to Christian activism, Tish who studies religion in the media and breaks all stereotypes of what it means to be a Catholic scholar. And can’t forget Erika of HadashiWorld, whose bare feet have been sign and symbol of living authentically (read her about page; it’s beautiful), nor Sage Cohen, poet, essayist, truth teller. I felt instant kindship with Sage. And of course Jen Lemen, whose companionship as my writing group partner this last year and half has been invaluable, despite never having actually met in person!

I could go on.

What I really want to say, though, is how struck I was, in being in this crowd, by the beauty of each person that made it up. By the beauty there was in each person doing their thing. No two people had or have the same voice, the same words to give to their interests or observations. The same sort of peace that’s grown in me as I’ve written about bodies these last weeks grew there in relation to other aspects of being human. None of us is exactly like anybody else. Why not run with that, and be the most “me” any of us can be?