They were kind of metaphorical. Nobody is really asking me for an accounting of the paperclips or staples, but I am forced to sit and take stock of what in this situation is really mine--meaning, where did I make things better, where did I not make things better.
I really have inventoried my office, but mostly because I wanted to. Knowing what I brought here to this place: physically, theologically, spiritually, and what is just old baggage that they will have to deal with when I'm gone is a tiny step towards healing and someday, wholeness.
I'm leaving behind their junk: the stuff they brought into my office because this 97-year-old building has no closets, the precious membership records from the Civil War Era, their narcissism, their sense of entitlement, their crappy old computer.
The bright sticky notes written by the children on Reformation Sunday two years ago? Those babies are mine.
Also, my dignity. I'll be taking that with me, thankyouverymuch.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
About the paperclips
If you read on Spacehook that I was counting paperclips and wondered what the heck that was about, remember: I cannot take anything with me that was here when I got here. Nor do I want to, for the most part.
Now do you understand?
Now do you understand?
Monday, November 09, 2009
I Still Hate Wednesdays
and my life is still largely unbloggable.
But soon I will have, um, lots of time for blogging.
But soon I will have, um, lots of time for blogging.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Dots of stuff, some sucky.
- I have come to hate Wednesdays. I just do.
- This Wednesday is without the redeeming quality of all Wednesdays: GLEE. WTF?
- Yes, I know it is all about a baseball game. Whatever.
- I will have an international visitor next week.
- SQUEE!
- I said some stuff to some people in a church building last Sunday evening, and they liked it.
- Haven't done that in... a very long time.
- I LOVE that friends are cheering me up and buying me meals and stuff, but is is making me fat. er.
- Today somebody helped me plan to clean out my office. It depressed me and made this day a tiny bit suckier.
- It is also premature.
- I told Teh News to a friend today, but she was totally unable to hear me.
- Another tiny bit suckier.
- Somebody who should know better asked me today how I am doing. I told him the fracking truth.
- Are you srsly still reading this crap?
Friday, October 23, 2009
E B. and Me
I have this friend who I'll call E.B because her name is kind of like that, but more complicated, really. She has known me for many years, since my days "under care". We drift in and out of each other's lives on a rather random schedule. I knew it had been too long since I had talked to her when she asked me if WG had fun at the prom. I had to break it to her gently that WG lives in Semi Famous.
But I called her to tell her about The Troubles*. I have avoided telling her because, well...The Troubles** are embarrassing. They make me a sad statistic, a footnote in the volume titled "Things That Sometimes Start Out Okay But Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong".
But E.B. is in my corner, like so many people are. I told her what is going down, and her righteous indignation flared up like a torch! She is about 4'11" and about 90 pounds soaking wet, but man, can she be the momma bear to end all momma bears!
Once again, I'm really lucky.
* Not comparing this to any strife in Northern Ireland.
** Really not.
But I called her to tell her about The Troubles*. I have avoided telling her because, well...The Troubles** are embarrassing. They make me a sad statistic, a footnote in the volume titled "Things That Sometimes Start Out Okay But Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong".
But E.B. is in my corner, like so many people are. I told her what is going down, and her righteous indignation flared up like a torch! She is about 4'11" and about 90 pounds soaking wet, but man, can she be the momma bear to end all momma bears!
Once again, I'm really lucky.
* Not comparing this to any strife in Northern Ireland.
** Really not.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
No Contest
I made my first "no contest" plea today, by circling the words on a piece of paper.
A very nice gentleman (but a bit of a "low talker" as Seinfeld would say) flashed the red and blue lights of his motorcycle as he followed me at a safe distance yesterday evening as I went traveling down a fairly country road, albeit a few miles faster than the speed limit.
It is not the first time I've been caught going too fast. In fact, it is the fourth in about 25 years. It is the second since I moved back to Snow Belt 5.5 years ago, the most recent occurrence being right smack in front of my seminary friend's church two counties over as I was depositing his daughter back home after spending the night with Wonder Girl, her childhood friend in Semi-Famous.
The very first time in ~1986 I was driving to work at the mall and the Tracy Chapman song "Fast Car" was on the radio. I kid you not. The second was several years later as I was driving to an early morning CPE shift at Regional Trauma Center here in Snow Belt, before I moved to Semi Famous. Don't remember what was on the radio, but I had cut through a residential neighborhood and got caught in a speed trap. Then in front of my friend's church.
Now this.
Each and every time I have been caught I have been guilty. The patrolman had me dead to rights every single time. My name is Cheesehead, and I often exceed the posted speed limit.
My options on the reply form are either "Guilty" or "No Contest". Spouse and I had some discussion about the difference between the two pleas. There is not a lot, legally speaking. The consequences with each are exactly the same.
I am facing another kind of trial, though. One that is not so much legal in nature but emotional, psychological, social, and theological. There are those who feel that the evidence would show that I am guilty. It is not real evidence, as in a screen on a radar machine, but it is real to them, just the same. They are arguing it as if their very lives depend on it.
For the "peace, unity, and purity of the church" I am facing another "no contest" plea soon.
There will be no winners. Everybody loses.
A very nice gentleman (but a bit of a "low talker" as Seinfeld would say) flashed the red and blue lights of his motorcycle as he followed me at a safe distance yesterday evening as I went traveling down a fairly country road, albeit a few miles faster than the speed limit.
It is not the first time I've been caught going too fast. In fact, it is the fourth in about 25 years. It is the second since I moved back to Snow Belt 5.5 years ago, the most recent occurrence being right smack in front of my seminary friend's church two counties over as I was depositing his daughter back home after spending the night with Wonder Girl, her childhood friend in Semi-Famous.
The very first time in ~1986 I was driving to work at the mall and the Tracy Chapman song "Fast Car" was on the radio. I kid you not. The second was several years later as I was driving to an early morning CPE shift at Regional Trauma Center here in Snow Belt, before I moved to Semi Famous. Don't remember what was on the radio, but I had cut through a residential neighborhood and got caught in a speed trap. Then in front of my friend's church.
Now this.
Each and every time I have been caught I have been guilty. The patrolman had me dead to rights every single time. My name is Cheesehead, and I often exceed the posted speed limit.
My options on the reply form are either "Guilty" or "No Contest". Spouse and I had some discussion about the difference between the two pleas. There is not a lot, legally speaking. The consequences with each are exactly the same.
I am facing another kind of trial, though. One that is not so much legal in nature but emotional, psychological, social, and theological. There are those who feel that the evidence would show that I am guilty. It is not real evidence, as in a screen on a radar machine, but it is real to them, just the same. They are arguing it as if their very lives depend on it.
For the "peace, unity, and purity of the church" I am facing another "no contest" plea soon.
There will be no winners. Everybody loses.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Love Shouldn't Hurt--a sermon for Domestic Violence Awarenss Sunday
Love Shouldn’t Hurt
October 18, 2009
Mark 10: 35-45
10:35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."
10:36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?"
10:37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."
10:38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"
10:39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized;
10:40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
10:41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John.
10:42 So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
10:43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,
10:44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.
10:45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."
Her name is A, and she was my first college roommate. Tall, athletic and blonde, she was a communications major from a big city, the oldest child of a single mother who was, like me, in college on scholarship. Being a city girl, she seemed more worldly, and more street smart than anyone I, the country girl, had ever known. Another girl in our dorm suite had gone to A’s high school, and they formed a cohesive twosome that made me feel like the third wheel most of the time. They had dated more boys, been more places, and had more big-city experiences than I ever had. They could speak a whole secrete language about who they knew, where they had been, what they had done, and I just watched and listened.
Freshman year went on, and eventually we fell into a rhythm of school work, social life and dorm life. A and I both met young men who lived in our same dorm, just a couple of rooms apart. Her boyfriend was, like her, a city kid. Only he came from a well-to-do family and one of his parents was a politician in Michigan, the other a doctor. The boy I met is sitting in the choir today.
A and her boyfriend were inseparable, as is often the case when young love and newly won adult independence collide. Since I was her roommate, it meant that I spent a lot of time with him too—not always out of choice. I didn’t always like the way he spoke to her—the names he called her, the way he bossed her around. Their plans always seemed to revolve around his schedule, and she was expected to be available when he wanted to see her. But she was over the moon for him, and I certainly understood what that felt like. We both felt pretty lucky to have found such great boyfriends so early in our college career.
It was at the beginning of our sophomore year, however, when I noticed that things had changed over the summer. A lost a lot of weight that summer, had grown out her hair, and seemed to have some new habits that hadn’t been part of her routine freshman year. She wore a lot more makeup, and long pants and long sleeves, even in the non-air conditioned Indiana humidity of our campus in late August/early September. Since we were roommates who were young, and had known each other for a year already, we changed clothes in our room, of course. I noticed things I hadn’t seen before: an ugly black bruise in the middle of her back, a purple hand print on her leg, the way her eyes looked different this year when she took off her makeup. I asked her about those things, but A didn’t want to talk about any of that. She wanted to tell me about the couple of weeks right before school she had spent in Michigan with her boyfriend and his family. She wanted to tell me about how he came to her city during the summer and met her mother, how her mother had declared him the perfect boyfriend for A: strong, handsome, successful, and rich.
I saw less and less of A that year, as she spent more and more time with her boyfriend. We still roomed together, but we seemed to have little in common any more. Whenever I would notice something new about her—a sprained wrist, a black eye—she always had some explanation: she fell on the icy campus sidewalks with her arms full of books, she ran into the door. I began to think of her as the clumsiest person I had ever known. I believed every story she ever told me about how she got injured, because I didn’t know any better.
Eventually A moved off campus with a couple of our other friends, then moved in with her boyfriend and got engaged to him. It was my friend K who told me that A had shown up on her doorstep one night, crying and bleeding from an injury that her fiancé had inflicted. I was speechless when K explained that he had been beating her for years, but that she refused to leave him, refused to press charges, refused to consider a restraining order. “But I love him! And he loves me. And he’s always, always, sorry the next day.” she’d reply. Every time. But love—love that is genuine and true and lasting—shouldn’t hurt.
The Bible, written in patriarchal times and places, when women were regarded as property of whatever male had control of them, and men certainly lived under a certain set of carefully constructed expectations, is a tricky place to look for a text that deals with the modern-day subject of domestic violence. We can be sure that there were many women that Jesus encountered who had been abused by the men who claimed them as either wife or property. But domestic violence is not just a woman’s issue. Men are sometimes not the abuser but the abused. And it is even more difficult to find a text in scripture that deals with a man being overpowered by a woman. So, except for a few selected passages about women being submissive to men, it would seem that the bible has very little to say about the issue.
But what if we broadened the subject of power and the abuse of power to encompass how we treat each other, even outside of domestic relationships? The two brothers in this text from Mark, these sons of Zebedee seem to be pretty enamored of the idea of power. They make a bold and ridiculous request of Jesus that he hold them in the highest of esteem, almost even with him in the kingdom of heaven. Its ridiculous because, frankly, if you have to ask to be Jesus’ favorites, it probably doesn’t count for much, does it? That’s rather like voting for oneself for Miss Congeniality. And Jesus, who had a patience of …well…a saint, instead of telling them off, offers them a challenge. If they can go through everything he is about to go through, they can share the spotlight with him. Of course they cannot. Not really anyway.
James and John’s power play has a strange effect on the other disciples. It makes them jealous. Or maybe they are just sorry they didn’t think of it themselves. Power does strange things to people. It changes their perspective, makes them sometimes forget who they are and where they stand in the scheme of things.
Statistically, we know that many people who exert undue power and influence over others in ways that are destructive and violent have often been victims themselves. When I think of my roommates’ boyfriend, I wonder how he got into a situation where he felt he had to lash out at someone else, overpower someone else, and own someone else. Some of the most angry, vitriolic, unhappy people I have ever known are also probably people who have lost control and power over some other aspect of their lives. Thinking that there is no way of saving face in the face of this loss of power than taking it out on someone smaller, or less powerful, or more open and vulnerable, they find themselves in a prison of their own making, and from that place, seek to imprison and terrorize others. The only kind of love they understand is the kind that hurts.
And in every story in the Bible where Jesus encounters those who have been victimized by power, Jesus always answers with grace, with love. Not the kind of phony “love” that must beat a person to keep them down, but a love that builds up. Christ always invites a love and a relationship that is about trading places. Christ invites us not to become or create victims, but to lower ourselves willingly to serve another, just as they are serving us. Christ will indeed be martyred, but he recognizes that our call is not to be subservient to our fellow humans to the point of our own demise or victimization, but instead to live in service to others in relationships of mutuality. The power of Christ in the world, and the truth of the gospel are a great equalizer: we succeed together, we fail together. We are faithful together and we falter together.
If I had known then what I know now about abuse and violence and power, I would have probably tried much harder to get my friend away from her boyfriend. But I didn’t. In fact, they got married one week after Blue Eyes and I did, and I lost track of them completely. I do not know if there was ever a transformative moment in their lives, whether he was able to get the help he needed to realize how his own sense of extremely low self-worth, and his endless quest for power in the absence of self-esteem was destroying others around him. I don’t know if she ever fully understood that she was beautiful, strong and beloved as a daughter of God. I don’t even know if she is still alive, honestly. Many women and men who find themselves in those unbalanced relationships do not survive. They fall victim to a love that wounds, that destroys, and overpowers and minimizes. In other words, a love that is not real.
The love for each other to which we are called by Christ—the love which he modeled for us in his living and in his dying and in his resurrection—is a love that asks us to be willing to trade places with others, it asks us to be brave in the face of adversity, and to lean unto Christ when we cannot be brave. It affirms that we are created good and strong and beautiful and that we are beloved of our creator. It requires that we remember who we are and Whose we are, so that we never misuse power against others. It behooves us to deal gently with those who are victims and to trade fear for justice in the lives of those who victimize. It challenges, it builds up, it accepts the love of another, it transforms. And it never hurts. Thanks be to God. Amen.
October 18, 2009
Mark 10: 35-45
10:35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."
10:36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?"
10:37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."
10:38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"
10:39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized;
10:40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
10:41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John.
10:42 So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
10:43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,
10:44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.
10:45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."
Her name is A, and she was my first college roommate. Tall, athletic and blonde, she was a communications major from a big city, the oldest child of a single mother who was, like me, in college on scholarship. Being a city girl, she seemed more worldly, and more street smart than anyone I, the country girl, had ever known. Another girl in our dorm suite had gone to A’s high school, and they formed a cohesive twosome that made me feel like the third wheel most of the time. They had dated more boys, been more places, and had more big-city experiences than I ever had. They could speak a whole secrete language about who they knew, where they had been, what they had done, and I just watched and listened.
Freshman year went on, and eventually we fell into a rhythm of school work, social life and dorm life. A and I both met young men who lived in our same dorm, just a couple of rooms apart. Her boyfriend was, like her, a city kid. Only he came from a well-to-do family and one of his parents was a politician in Michigan, the other a doctor. The boy I met is sitting in the choir today.
A and her boyfriend were inseparable, as is often the case when young love and newly won adult independence collide. Since I was her roommate, it meant that I spent a lot of time with him too—not always out of choice. I didn’t always like the way he spoke to her—the names he called her, the way he bossed her around. Their plans always seemed to revolve around his schedule, and she was expected to be available when he wanted to see her. But she was over the moon for him, and I certainly understood what that felt like. We both felt pretty lucky to have found such great boyfriends so early in our college career.
It was at the beginning of our sophomore year, however, when I noticed that things had changed over the summer. A lost a lot of weight that summer, had grown out her hair, and seemed to have some new habits that hadn’t been part of her routine freshman year. She wore a lot more makeup, and long pants and long sleeves, even in the non-air conditioned Indiana humidity of our campus in late August/early September. Since we were roommates who were young, and had known each other for a year already, we changed clothes in our room, of course. I noticed things I hadn’t seen before: an ugly black bruise in the middle of her back, a purple hand print on her leg, the way her eyes looked different this year when she took off her makeup. I asked her about those things, but A didn’t want to talk about any of that. She wanted to tell me about the couple of weeks right before school she had spent in Michigan with her boyfriend and his family. She wanted to tell me about how he came to her city during the summer and met her mother, how her mother had declared him the perfect boyfriend for A: strong, handsome, successful, and rich.
I saw less and less of A that year, as she spent more and more time with her boyfriend. We still roomed together, but we seemed to have little in common any more. Whenever I would notice something new about her—a sprained wrist, a black eye—she always had some explanation: she fell on the icy campus sidewalks with her arms full of books, she ran into the door. I began to think of her as the clumsiest person I had ever known. I believed every story she ever told me about how she got injured, because I didn’t know any better.
Eventually A moved off campus with a couple of our other friends, then moved in with her boyfriend and got engaged to him. It was my friend K who told me that A had shown up on her doorstep one night, crying and bleeding from an injury that her fiancé had inflicted. I was speechless when K explained that he had been beating her for years, but that she refused to leave him, refused to press charges, refused to consider a restraining order. “But I love him! And he loves me. And he’s always, always, sorry the next day.” she’d reply. Every time. But love—love that is genuine and true and lasting—shouldn’t hurt.
The Bible, written in patriarchal times and places, when women were regarded as property of whatever male had control of them, and men certainly lived under a certain set of carefully constructed expectations, is a tricky place to look for a text that deals with the modern-day subject of domestic violence. We can be sure that there were many women that Jesus encountered who had been abused by the men who claimed them as either wife or property. But domestic violence is not just a woman’s issue. Men are sometimes not the abuser but the abused. And it is even more difficult to find a text in scripture that deals with a man being overpowered by a woman. So, except for a few selected passages about women being submissive to men, it would seem that the bible has very little to say about the issue.
But what if we broadened the subject of power and the abuse of power to encompass how we treat each other, even outside of domestic relationships? The two brothers in this text from Mark, these sons of Zebedee seem to be pretty enamored of the idea of power. They make a bold and ridiculous request of Jesus that he hold them in the highest of esteem, almost even with him in the kingdom of heaven. Its ridiculous because, frankly, if you have to ask to be Jesus’ favorites, it probably doesn’t count for much, does it? That’s rather like voting for oneself for Miss Congeniality. And Jesus, who had a patience of …well…a saint, instead of telling them off, offers them a challenge. If they can go through everything he is about to go through, they can share the spotlight with him. Of course they cannot. Not really anyway.
James and John’s power play has a strange effect on the other disciples. It makes them jealous. Or maybe they are just sorry they didn’t think of it themselves. Power does strange things to people. It changes their perspective, makes them sometimes forget who they are and where they stand in the scheme of things.
Statistically, we know that many people who exert undue power and influence over others in ways that are destructive and violent have often been victims themselves. When I think of my roommates’ boyfriend, I wonder how he got into a situation where he felt he had to lash out at someone else, overpower someone else, and own someone else. Some of the most angry, vitriolic, unhappy people I have ever known are also probably people who have lost control and power over some other aspect of their lives. Thinking that there is no way of saving face in the face of this loss of power than taking it out on someone smaller, or less powerful, or more open and vulnerable, they find themselves in a prison of their own making, and from that place, seek to imprison and terrorize others. The only kind of love they understand is the kind that hurts.
And in every story in the Bible where Jesus encounters those who have been victimized by power, Jesus always answers with grace, with love. Not the kind of phony “love” that must beat a person to keep them down, but a love that builds up. Christ always invites a love and a relationship that is about trading places. Christ invites us not to become or create victims, but to lower ourselves willingly to serve another, just as they are serving us. Christ will indeed be martyred, but he recognizes that our call is not to be subservient to our fellow humans to the point of our own demise or victimization, but instead to live in service to others in relationships of mutuality. The power of Christ in the world, and the truth of the gospel are a great equalizer: we succeed together, we fail together. We are faithful together and we falter together.
If I had known then what I know now about abuse and violence and power, I would have probably tried much harder to get my friend away from her boyfriend. But I didn’t. In fact, they got married one week after Blue Eyes and I did, and I lost track of them completely. I do not know if there was ever a transformative moment in their lives, whether he was able to get the help he needed to realize how his own sense of extremely low self-worth, and his endless quest for power in the absence of self-esteem was destroying others around him. I don’t know if she ever fully understood that she was beautiful, strong and beloved as a daughter of God. I don’t even know if she is still alive, honestly. Many women and men who find themselves in those unbalanced relationships do not survive. They fall victim to a love that wounds, that destroys, and overpowers and minimizes. In other words, a love that is not real.
The love for each other to which we are called by Christ—the love which he modeled for us in his living and in his dying and in his resurrection—is a love that asks us to be willing to trade places with others, it asks us to be brave in the face of adversity, and to lean unto Christ when we cannot be brave. It affirms that we are created good and strong and beautiful and that we are beloved of our creator. It requires that we remember who we are and Whose we are, so that we never misuse power against others. It behooves us to deal gently with those who are victims and to trade fear for justice in the lives of those who victimize. It challenges, it builds up, it accepts the love of another, it transforms. And it never hurts. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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