I’m thinking about bodies these days.  Partly because I’m constantly carrying and feeding and wiping and changing and redirecting and cuddling a little one.  Partly because I’ve got an enormous bruise on the back of my left leg that makes me look like I got hit by a torpedo, and I can’t for the life of me think how. 

But partly because of this integration work I’m doing, and the memories I’m re-membering.  We are such bodied creatures, and how we experience life can’t be separated from that, I don’t think.

What I’m wondering these days is whether there are folks out there who love and accept their bodies wholely, and whose body experiences throughout life have by and large been good.  Do people like this exist?  And I’m wondering, of those whose body experiences have not been mostly good (and I know there are lots of these), but who have come to love their bodies anyway, how have they/you come to have such love?  Bodies have been, or at least have been experienced, as such a thorn in so many of our sides–such a source of frustration and anxiety and shame–that the question seems worth asking:  Where can we go from here?  The tall ones and the short ones and the fat ones and skinny ones and the ones with four limbs or three or none.  The ones with bad eyesight, and muscles that won’t work, and joints that ache in the morning and sometimes all day.  And the athletes and dancers, and the children whose energy won’t end, and the diseased ones with and without diagnoses, with and without anyone believing they have something wrong. The big busted and little busted and pimply and smooth, and horny and don’t-even-think-about-it-tonightness ones.  The ones shaped like pears and bean stalks and pregant ladies and bulldogs.  The ones who stoop because they have to, or stoop because of shame, which in some cases amount to pretty much the same thing.

All of us–all colors and frecklednesses and smells!–can’t forget the smells–and textures and amounts of hairiness and wherenesses of that hair:  Where can we go from here, if loving us, not who we aren’t, but who we are, is where we’d like to go?  We are bodies–yes, more than that, too–but we are bodies.  All of us.  How to love that, how to embody these bodies well, and open up space for those around us to love like that, too:  that’s what I’m pondering.

Since writing that last post I’ve been thinking about grace.  I’m wondering whether grace is something we need in experience, but not in reality.  To explain…

All of us experience the feeling of being bad at some point, mean or self absorbed or vindictive.  Rebellious in an unhealthy way.  Hurtful.  Like the spiritual says of grace, "how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."  Very few of us feel deserving all the time of kindness or gentleness or love.

And yet…isn’t life a pretty…how can I put it…difficult challenge for all of us?  Don’t we all carry our own loads of suffering, our own satchels of wounds and accompanying fears, histories that are ours, but also the inheritance of all who have gone before us…with their loads and satchels and fears?  So on a level maybe deeper than surfaces sometimes, don’t we all deserve kindness?  We did not ask to be here (so far as I’m aware).  We did not ask to be situated on our plots of history, or to be forced to cope with the nature and nurture and worlds in which we spin.

The dear girl who was homesick on her first night from home, did she need grace for her misery–undeserved kindness–or simply love?  Tenderness and reassurances that she was fine, and she wasn’t trying to hurt or innconvenience anyone, and it’s okay to learn slowly that sleep-overs can be fun?

I’m wondering whether this isn’t true of something far more expansive than innocent little girls, spilling even into hatred and awfulness and meanness of every kind.  Could it be that the worst of us, the worst in us, doesn’t need true grace, which is something undeserved, but rather love, which I think is?  That in fact the absence or unfeltness of such love, at crucial points, and when we most need it, is why we become "wretches" in the first place?

Maybe experiencing grace–what we percieve as undeserved kindness–is a necessary step toward recovering a sense of what’s actually true:  we deserve kindness.  We are, in fact, okay.  Deeply so.  And the more we come to know it, the more our wretchedness transforms.  The more it starts becoming itself a source of love, which, I think, is what all of us deserve in the first place.

On a day of conflicted thoughts about being American, conflicted feelings about freedom (whose? and at what cost?), my thoughts turn back to another highway experience, different from the kind I wrote about yesterday.

It was three or four years ago.  I was tuling along in my car–70?, maybe 75mph–on a patch of semi-full road.  A motorcycle cop passes me on the right, and cuts a diagonal swath across all four lanes.  All of us slow down, wondering which of us he’s caught.  But then he cuts his swath again the other way, slowing his own self down.  The cars ahead of him race on as he gets his speed, and consequently ours, down to something like 30.  We quickly realize he’s herding us, keeping the whole pack of us behind him with his slow, graceful turnings.  B–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h, b–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h.

And up ahead, on the now-empty stretch, I see chunks of furniture, splintered from a fall.  A second cop is working fast to get them off the lanes and onto the shoulder.  We’re only 20 or 30 yards off when he clears the last piece, and he and the cop on the bike salute each other as the cop on the bike speeds off toward the sun.

I cried.  Seriously.  It was that beautiful.  That perfectly orchestrated.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wanting to clap.  Catastrophic danger and silent, graceful protection overlapped on that stretch of burning asphalt, and other than those of us at the front of the pack, no one even knew.  I’m sure some were even peeved by the slowing speeds.  We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t even know we needed it, but help was there, at work.

I often think of that scene when the trajectory of things as big as history, as big as institutions, big as wars or countries or administrations therein–things I feel so small and helpless in the face of–look headed for (or seem smack in the middle of…) disaster.  I think of that scene and hope, deep in my most earnest places, that there are people and powers more seeing, more knowing, more capable than any of us alone can be, to help navigate the dangers that most of us can’t recognize.  I want to join in their work, too, and sing blessings along the way, more expansive than God Bless America, more generous than America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.  I want to help imagine and live into existence a world, rather than only a country, or subset within, that is land of the free–truly–and home of the brave.

So it looks as though my posts this summer are circumambulating (!) around the topic of faith change/worldview change and healing, and by circumambulating I mean winding, touching in and moving out from different angles of a core.

Wednesday I made a couple of points about self interest. Today I want to say more on the second one–the idea that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. There are exceptions to this rule for sure, like when kids need to be fed, or neighbors need us turning our music down, or bosses need us showing up for work on time. I’m not peddling hedonism. The okayness I’m wanting to explore is something other than that. It’s about respect, actually, of the deepest kind, because I think it respects self at the same time as other people.

I want to lean back into talk of Christianity here. I certainly can’t speak for the whole thing, but I can for my experiences with a few subsets of it, mostly Protestant, mostly evangelical, and the challenges the structures in these places create for okayness with not meeting others’ self interests. Leaders’ self interests, specifically.

As I’ve observed it, there’s a combination in these places, a mixing of three things, that makes for a lot of pressure. I’m thinking here of pressure particularly by leaders, on leaders, which for the purposes of this conversation include anyone at all who volunteers or gets paid to do things at church. The combination is a) a belief in hell (defined as eternal, unrelievable torment) and the responsibility of Christians to help deliver people from that fate, b) a societal culture of busyness, where fewer and fewer people can sanely participate in church leadership in addition to everything else they’re trying to do, and c) a decline of interest in religion at all (partly because of ‘b’, but for other reasons as well), and the feeling like fewer and fewer promising-leader-types are pursuing or sticking with leadership in religious places.

Add these up and mix them around and I think what you have looks a lot like fear. Which makes a ton of sense. If we have a mission to accomplish, a terribly important one with eternal consequences, and the people who are best equipped to lead us are not interested or available to do so, a very real, very genuine crisis ensues. Maybe not unlike the feeling I had as a child when I lost my mom in the abyssal chaos of a large department store. By the time I found her again (or she found me), I wasn’t about to lose sight of her legs one more time.

Which corresponds with some of the pressure leaders feel to stay leaders. To maintain or increase church involvement and commitment to the mission. Fellow leaders don’t want to bear the increasing load of responsibility that declining church involvement represents, so the motivation to “keep those legs in view”–to keep our “mothers” and “fathers” operating as such–is high. When a “mother” or “father” hits a crisis, or enters a season of spiritual darkness, or needs time for whatever reason to step back, to make a change, maybe for good, they can get christened bad guys. Deserters. Traitors. Or simply huge disappointments. I felt some of all of these things in my moves away from church, and prior to that, toward others making similar moves. I got back what I gave, I guess.

But here’s what I think now: It’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to be disappointed. And it’s okay to be stumped about how an important mission will ever get accomplished. But it’s also okay to be the one on the other side of those things, the one causing them (or at least thought to be). There is no inherent equals sign between shocking or disappointing or angering people and doing something wrong. In fact, and as history has demonstrated so many times, evoking such responses could very well mean you’re doing and being exactly what you need to do and be. Christianity orbits around such a story.

It takes courage to walk our paths authentically, courage to be who we are, owning and pursuing our convictions and the questions others may not want us asking, let alone finding anwers to. It takes courage to stick with our paths, too, long enough to see what they’re leading us *toward*, rather than only away from, and particularly when there are highways (thoroughfares of paths alligned) anywhere nearby. Highways are magnets, I tell you, if for nothing else than pulling out our insecurities.

But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think authentic lives are ultimately the best tonic for everyone. I think they’re the best tonic for the people afraid their mission won’t get accomplished, and for the people who don’t think that mission is the one they want to live, and for the people who don’t give a rip right now about mission at all. Authentic lives honor everyone, I think, and maybe I’ll write another post or more exploring why I think that is. For now though, go read Christy. Her post is why I got this one out of my draft folder and am actually posting it. Her authenticity frees me to be that much more…me.

Before his current season of studenthood, N (my husband) was a community organizer. Part of his job was to meet with people one on one in the neighborhoods where he worked to determine what people’s self interests were. Organizing around what people already want is way, way easier (I didn’t say easy; I said easier) than running yourself into the ground trying to rally support for things people couldn’t care less about.

During those years of organizing, N and I had many conversations about self interest, and the ways it seemed to knock heads with the altruism pushed in the religious environments in which we moved. In those environments, self interest was often equated with selfishness, and was therefore something to try to tame and eventually, ideally, get rid of altogether. The goal was to have God’s interests at the helm (or, I suppose, have these genuinely become your own). How to define God’s interests was and is and ever shall be a whole nother truckload of worms.

The more we talked, though, and the more we lived and observed ourselves and those around us, the more we came to see self interest as not only the air we humans breathe, but actually something, when gotten conscious about, that’s healthy. Something we actually trust more than altruism to keep “good deeds” truly good. If I can be honest that I’m giving money to a beggar because I want to feel less guilty for the wealth I enjoy, and not because I actually care about this person in front of me, I have more options for figuring out whether I’m comfortable with not caring, and if I don’t care, why that might be, and if I do, whether tossing a few coins is really how I want to express that. Self interested good deeds with an altruistic veneer on top are a wonderful recipe for dehumanizing people, I think, for using them harmingly, and not actually helping in ways that are needed.

So I guess my first point is that I think all of us are self interested, and all (most? all sounds so extreme) of our good deeds are at their roots attempts at meeting our own iterests (for feeling important, establishing ourselves as nice or generous, not being lonely, staying out of trouble, not pissing someone off), and not only do I think that isn’t bad, but I think it’s good, and that getting conscious of what we’re actually wanting is the best way to avoid hurting people, and even the best way to actually help people. If I know what my self interests are and try to understand what yours are, we can negotiate a mutual sort of playing field where we both benefit. Mutuality seems like the safest place to be–no matter who in a pair has the most age or money or positional power–the best space for humanizing and protecting and truly serving everyone involved, not the least of which (and I mean that) is you or me.

Trying to empty ourselves of self interest seems to me to be the best way to nourish blind spots, and the best way to push our truest needs and motivations underground where they have no choice but to express themselves subconsciously, which is to say in ways we aren’t choosing, which is to say in ways we can’t evaluate with our conscious minds and values. I’m guessing some of the darkest things in our world, some of the ugliest abuses, could have been avoided were people free to acknowledge their self interests (sexual, emotional, vocational, intellectual) and find conscious and healthy ways of meeting them in mutual sorts of exchange.

The second point I want to make is that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. I’m thinking here about people we really care about, specifically. Because those are the ones we can get caught in cycles with, cycles of being so driven by our need to make them like us, or be happy with us, or prop up their egos so they don’t pout or get mad, that we lose sight of our other needs, which include honoring and listening to our own selves. It is a painful lesson to learn that people in our lives cannot be everything we want them to be (can’t meet all the needs we thought they could or should); it is a freeing lesson, though not always painless, to learn that when we can’t be what others want us to be, that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. (Can you tell this is a pep talk aimed at me?)

But what do you all think of self interest? Does true altruism exist? What are ways that religion/spirituality can free us toward humanizing involvement with the needs around us, and not something that only masquerades as such?

During the season that was the epicenter of my internal shifting–the religious and worldview-shifting I’ve begun talking more about here–I was in a state of constant dissonance. The worst of it lasted about three years, I think. It was dissonance between the me of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, and the me that was newly getting born. The two felt like totally different people, not the natural unfolding or growth of one, and when I finally found myself on the other side of the storm (abyss?), I felt like I had amnesia. It felt like my life before age 25 was mostly blank, and the people who had known me before that point were vestiges of some other lifetime, their attempts at interacting in the present with the me of my past things I watched as a third-party observer. “Now, I know I used to know how to answer this sort of question,” I would think to myself, “but I can’t for the life of me remember now.” I would hear people using my dialect of Christianese, and recognize it, but not have words to answer back. Sometimes I wouldn’t even understand anymore what the words meant at all.

The last five years (I’m 30 now) have been a lot about exploring the world anew–a world far more vast and full of Life and Light and Wisdom than it used to appear to me to be–and about building a new sense of self and identity. They’ve been about releasing the “I’m not this” way of defining myself that was so much a part of that tumultuous season of change, and trying to figure out who and what I actually *am*.

Which brings me to the point I’m really wanting to make, which is that I think even those of us who experience things that shake our worlds to pieces–deaths or illness or break-ups or life just going radically different than we ever wished or imagined it would go–even those who experience such things carry inside of them the worlds and identities that they used to inhabit. There aren’t two of each of us, or four or sixteen or a hundred (however many life-altering experiences we have); there is just one.

I think one of the most difficult parts of healing (or growing up, for that matter), the thing that takes the longest time beyond trust, is the process of integration, the process of finally sitting in the presence of all our former selves, and being able to say, “Hello, dear friends. You are all me.” Being able to recognize them as part of who we currently are, and have gentleness and acceptance, rather than shame or repulsion or feelings of alientation from the ones that embody such different values or drives or assumptions than we feel like we have now.

I’m in an integration phase of life right now, trying to learn how to hold in tension the me’s of all of my years. Trying to find ways to tell a Story about myself that holds all of these stories, that gives them all the sense that they’re Home.

Humor me for a second. Before I tell you what this post is about, I’m wondering if you can think of something you believe all the way to your toes. Like something really important. Maybe that your family loves you, or people are fundamentally good, or we’re living in the midst of unprecedented social change. That God exists. Think of whatever it is, whatever thing that you almost don’t need to talk about you know it’s so true, but maybe simultaneously can’t help talking or thinking or writing or preaching about. Just picture it. Hold it here for a second.

Now. Picture someone giving you the irrefutable news that that thing is not true.

I think of John Nash in Beautiful Mind in that scene where he’s been hospitalized and the doctor is talking to his wife about what it must be like to learn and comprehend that you’re schizophrenic, that those people in your life who are real like yourself, real like the ground beneath your feet or the sound of your own mother calling you by name—those people don’t exist. No one else sees them. Only you. What can you trust anymore, if this fundamental thing, this thing that helps you make sense of the world, or your life, or your work or marriage: when this bedrock thing itself can’t be trusted? I imagine very little.

Or rather, I don’t have to imagine. This was the experience of my early 20s. No, not being institutionalized for schizophrenia. Mine was the experience of pulling a thread, a little snag of something in my religious worldview, and watching the whole thing unravel, row after row, until much like that lamp I wrote about last time, only piles were strewn all around, wiggly threads freed from the straight lines and geometric shapes they had made only moments before. My world was pulled apart, and it confounded me that life itself kept on going, kept on turning like the earth was still in orbit, like the sun hadn’t just exploded and every means I knew of sustaining life and hope and meaning hadn’t just flung off into space along with it.

Not everyone loses something so important. Just like not everyone has a lover cheat on them, or a child die. Not everyone has awful memories surface, or gets a terrible disease.

But many of us do. And I guess I want to say a word, or a few, for how long it takes to recover from these kinds of losses. How working through the shock and the anger and the numbness and the disorienting, debilitating pain can take years, decades even. How learning to trust again—anything, let alone what’s associated with the thing that was taken away—often can’t happen in strides, but comes, if at all sometimes, in tiny little breaths, tiny centipede steps sometimes, and that anyone who tries to force it on us faster can make it come more slowly.

It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime, to trust again. A long time to honor the thing that was lost. And I think it takes a longer time yet to have eyes to see the things that weren’t lost, things that maybe just got hidden behind what was. To grow a stomach that can actually be filled on these things, a tongue that can taste their sweetness, even when the lost things still remain lost.

I’m standing among shards and threads of many colors, weaving back together my insides, my heart, even as I weave and build and search and find a life that has meaning, that once again feels filled up with God.

At the vertex of our couches sits a table, and on that table a lamp with a bead-fringed shade. The noteworthy thing, the thing that to this day confounds me, is the utter magnetism of that fringe. We cannot sit near it without touching those beads, handling them, spinning the whole shade so the row of them tap tap tap taps along our fingertips.

Needless to say, our baby likes them, too.

The problem for the baby is that we don’t want him grabbing the shade and pulling the whole lamp down. We’d prefer the toy upright (the shade spins better that way). This means he is left to reeaaachhh as far as he can from the arms of the couches toward those beads, only to brush them barely with a fingertip, maybe two, before switching hands and reeeeaaaaching as far as he can with the other hand in hopes of a better angle. If ever he actually grabs hold, one of us immediately loosens his grip and he has to start reaching again.

This is exactly how I felt for a long time with God.

While God hasn’t been a lampshade so much, a certain version of God has had the same draw. It’s the version you hear about sometimes at church—the one people sing about and give testimonials describing. The one in certain Bible stories. It’s a he, usually, and a lot like a person. Only more…spiritual. Super powerful. Super interested in all the details. He knows everything and loves everything…except sin, but even that he takes care of…and he wants people asking him for things, in fact likes this, because he loves giving people what they need and then some. Ask and it shall be given to you. If you worship him and honor him and listen for him and believe that Jesus takes totally care of sin, you’ll hear him (he’ll speak to you), and you’ll see him (he’ll do things obviously in your life), and you’ll feel how much he loves you, which is so much it’s almost funny. He’s like the dad and brother and friend and every once in a while mother you could only ever dream of having, all rolled into one.

I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s a lot of pull in that. I suppose there’s wistfulness, too, for a bit more privacy maybe, a day off from such unrelenting observation. But by and large it sounds nice. A lamp totally worth pursuing. Which is what I did.

I reeeeaaaached with all the Bible reading I could muster. I reeeeeaaaached with prayers and weekly fasts. I leaned over every armrest I could find, nearly to my detriment, joining prayer teams, planning study groups, doing missions (even in Africa!), leading worship, running kids clubs, running period (the body is God’s temple), moving to the inner city, earning seminary degrees, teaching Bible classes, ET AL, in hopes of catching the prize: Union. Oh, the thought! Handfuls, fistfuls, even mouthfuls of God! (If the baby had access, I’m sure the entire shade would be in his mouth.)

In all honesty, the longer I live the more it looks like that’s actually what I got. Or rather, never didn’t have, since God seems suspiciously inseparable from everything there is.

But defined a certain way, that prize was always just beyond my reach. It was visible, and that’s what was so maddening, luminous, even, in the light of so many songs and scriptures and heartfelt testimonials, but always either further than my fingertips, or taken from my hand the second I thought I took hold. This God, dear girl? This magnet planted smack in the middle of our living space? It’s only to look at. Because honey, if you do much more than that, the thing could fall down.

I’m here to say you were right (you being a voice I made up). It could and, well…did fall down. I got big enough and strong enough and finally grabbed that fringe tight fisted, and one excruciating, deafening crash later, I was lying, quite stunned, on my back among shards.

There’s a legend in Jewish lore about a universe preceding ours, one so filled up with God that it broke into gazillion pieces. POW! So filled, in fact, that the light itself broke apart. Now each of us is, or at the very least has within, a piece of that light, and lives among the mingling of broken universe and broken light. It is our world, and our God, we’re commissioned to mend.

Here’s what I wonder: I wonder whether that lamp I so tenaciously reached for, the one that seemed so totally whole and so totally desirable for so long, was already broken to begin with, already part of this universe we’ve inherited that needs mending. I wonder whether knocking it over was the only way I could ever come to know obviously what that lamp already was: shards of God-light and broken stuff mixed.

I can’t put that lamp back together (believe me, I’ve tried). I can’t have the God I thought I wanted. But what I can do is handle the pieces now, freely. There’s no danger of anything breaking. Those beautiful beads aren’t attached to a form anymore, aren’t set just so to catch light. But I’m thinking many of them actually are Light, or flecks of it, and I’m willing to spend a lifetime with so many others, picking through pieces not just of that lamp, but of our world, finding and being and putting back together God.

The last few days have felt like bootcamp around here. Baby wakes at 4am, and then fights every naptime tooth and nail. I will say it hasn’t been hard to feel gentleness toward this creature who is cause for so little sleep (including his own). He doesn’t know how to sit down yet, and is programmed to be only virtical now that he has the skill to get that way, so the dear just stands there, exhausted, crying. Lie him back down, and up he goes again, ad infinitum.

Last night as I lay exhausted in bed (I won’t even tell you how early it was), I wanted to pray. I wanted to ask for a blessing on all of us–of peace, of deep rest. Of bars of a crib that won’t beckon Pied Piper-like at 4am. I wanted to ask for help with my writing, too, and knowing how to talk and think about who I am and all the other things bouncing around my brain.

I tried, but the words wouldn’t come. I’m in an awkward stage with the All, if that’s what I might call God. Awkward in the sense that, well, to whom am I praying when I pray? Something that hears me? Something that has feelings about me? Or is it to myself? I believe that each of us has more resources, more depths of wisdom inside ourselves than we can ever know, but even knowing that is little consolation in the face of feeling helpless or small. In the face of sleep deprivation and hopes and dreams that sometimes feel way out of reach. Is it me to whom I pray?

Or is it something much bigger, something like The Universe, and are my thoughts percieved by this All, then, like that butterfly line, and somehow incorporated into the ongoing flow of creation, maybe even in such a way that what is created after that prayer is somehow different than if it weren’t prayed? I like that way of thinking of it.

All in all, sometimes it feels much easier, maybe even despite all the suffering everywhere that has such unsettling implications on its own, to pray to a personal consciousness, a person sort of God, that’s somehow distinct from everything. At least that would feel a little more possible lying in bed at night, at the end of a full day of mothering, when I’d really like to be mothered myself. When I’d like to be listened and tended lovingly to.

Maybe blogging is a kind of prayer, and all your ears are the real and personal, embodied hearing of God.

Blogs are interesting animals. Unlike face-to-face connecting, with blogs there’s no specific “other” to picture as you speak. And let’s face it: all of us tailor what we say and how we say it based on who we’re with. We talk differently to say, our mothers, than we do the guy next door, or the boss at work.

So this is one thing, among many, that makes it difficult to talk about my spiritual path: my readers are diverse. Some are like me and some not. Some are religious, some not. Some assume I’m who I’ve always been and others never knew the me of my past, don’t know anything about me but what they’ve learned here. And I don’t want to scandalize any of you.

Why, you ask? What’s your hang-up? Simple answer: I’m insecure. Longer answer: I want everyone in my world to think I’m great and just the right amount of spiritual and unspiritual, religious and a-religious, belief and unbelief, action and re-action…

I don’t want to be written off. By left or right. On whatever spectrum you want to bring up. Okay, so I DO want to be written off by huge chunks of them, but all the rest of those lines, not so much.

Maybe I need a stiff drink before sitting down to write.