The temple.

Tonight, I told my daughter that God is alive

In her body.

No one ever said that to me.

Instead, people told me all about the Commandments,

Ten of them.

Also, Seven –

deadly sins.

Some handful of Beatitudes

And what a fuck-up Eve could be.

God breathed God’s breath into the human body,

in order to make a living being.

Genesis says so.

It’s the first written words about human beings

in my own tradition.

This gorgeous scene.

A man and a woman, made from dust.

Through their nostrils, they are filled

With God’s breath.

And when the breath of God leaves

them,

and each of us,

we are returned again

to dust.

But what of the time between?

While God’s breath is breathing Itself in us,

how holy can we be?

You’ve heard it said, “mercies are new each morning”,

but I tell you,

New mercies ride in on each breath.

God’s breath,

In each of us.

No one knows what to do next.

Me neither.

But, I told my daughter what I wish

someone had told me.

Listen for God in your body, sighing softly.

Sometimes rattling.

Feel God, too.

That rhythm, the movement in and out,

filling up and letting go.

Rupture and repair.

Expansion and contraction.

Life, Death,

Re-birth.

Every cell and atom in the universe is dancing like this.

Later, I will tell her even more subversive things.

Forgiveness.

I once heard Marie Howe say

that being present

hurts

a little bit.

Some people call her

a religious poet.

She says she isn’t sure

that fits.

I do think,

however,

Only a religious person could admit

any of this.

Religion,

That word.

It means to re-ligament.

Or, to reconnect

what was once adjoined.

Now separate.

It’s in the body,

That gap,

And also the way back

Together.

She’s right,

you know.

Being present hurts a little bit.

You have to say you’re sorry

every time.

For having ever left

And forgive,

and forgive,

and forgive

And come back.

Right here,

Right now,

Re-ligament.

I’m sorry,

you say.

And then you let go

Getting caught up

in all your separateness.

Shame,

or blame

My excuses are limitless.

These human traps,

sticky,

and seductive, and so real

when we feel it.

But not true.

Have you ever seen a pebble shame itself?

Or a raindrop cast around blame?

The lilies of the field don’t worry about their clothes.

What did Rumi say?

“I’ve gotten free of that ignorant fist

that was pinching and twisting”

me into an illusion

of separateness.

So we forgive,

but we don’t forget

It’s very hard to stay.

Right here,

Right now.

I’m sorry, you say.

Followed by, “it’s okay”.

And then, come back, come back,

come back.

Re-ligament.

Of course, that hurts a little bit.

Nevertheless,

it’s all still here for each

and every one

of us

Right after forgiveness.

I AM.

The day Moses met God, he asked,

“What is your name?”,

“I have no name”, comes the reply,

From a Source now unnamed.

All alone atop that Holy Mountain,

Moses worries after those waiting down below.

“Without a name”, he pleads, “How will my people come to know

You from all the other gods

Belonging to these poor, lost, wandering men?”

Was it courageous, or cowardice to stand there in that place,

And so boldly ask God for the Grace –

To become small enough for them?

“This, not that” was the first and only Law given

By God to those two humans in the Garden.

An instruction for an era lost,

The Garden now invisible,

And yet –

Just like Moses and his people, most of us here

Are still believing “this, not that” will save us

From the pain of our uncertainty.

Shaped by years of wandering through deserts

Of our own,

Are we not guilty of thirsting after the image

Of arriving –

Somewhere, each one of us a beggar.

“This, not that, black or white, Please Lord, make it simple”.

Moses could have said that.

I hear it in his question.

Yet, God, unchanged and ever changing, always sets the tone –

A riddle for an answer.

Or perhaps, an Answer for minds too riddled to hear it:

“I AM”.

Do you ever wonder what that sound was like in the ears of the man who heard it first?

Could it have been pronounced “A-UM”?

I’ve heard that sound fall from the mouths of people

Perched atop holy mountains of their own.

Spandex on their bodies,

Twenty dollars for enlightenment.

Do they know the Holy mountain upon which they are standing?

They’ve at least removed their shoes.

“OM”, it is written, but as it moves from breath, to throat, to tongue, to lips

It sounds

Nothing is wrong with you: an Easter message.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to hear Anne Lamott speak about her new book, “Hallelujah Anyway”. The conversation was so honest, and soul-stirring that I followed it up with a couple days of binge-listening to several different interviews Anne has done in the last few years. During one of these interviews, she mentioned something a Jesuit priest once said to her about what he called the “5 rules on how to be a Good American”, which we are all forced to learn as early as possible.

1. Don’t have anything wrong with you.
2. If there is something wrong with you, fix it immediately.
3. If you can’t fix it, hide it.
4. If you can’t hide it, stay home—just don’t show up or you’ll make other people uncomfortable.
5. If you insist on showing up anyway, at least have the decency to feel ashamed.

Some of my earliest, earliest memories involve a growing, nagging, sweat-inducing certainty that something was terribly wrong with me. One of the primary reasons I fell so completely head-over-heels into the psychological refuge of Christianity was that it seemed to possess the answer to this precise problem.

“Yes”, Christianity said to me, “there is indeed something very wrong with you. Of course, this will continue to be painful for you and everyone who knows you for as long as you live. But, BUT: if you believe in exactly precisely this one thing, in exactly precisely this one way, and try your best to imitate exactly precisely the attitudes and actions prescribed by this one thing, your reward will be this: immediately AFTER you DIE, you will then finally become perfect”.

What a relief.

So, naturally, I swan-dove into this ideology at 12 years old, and really didn’t start to look underneath the hood of any of it until I was about 22 years old.

Eleven whole years of messy, beautiful, clumsy, miraculous, painful, healing, mentally ill, and spiritually sublime moments later, I have decided that this is not at all what Jesus tried to teach us. In fact, I now believe that to the degree with which we have confused his actual message with the nonsense described above is the degree to which we will wind up abusing ourselves and everyone around us.

So then, if not that painful personal pretzeling our way to salvation, what do I think Jesus did try to teach us?

Well, when I read the gospels now, I hear – over and over – a message that sounds more like this: “Oh, you beloved over-anxious, grasping, clinging children. I need you to try really hard to put your listening ears on for a whole minute while I explain this to you again. Heaven is not somewhere else, it’s right here. Communion with God is not later, it’s now. The Holy Spirit is not behind a curtain in the temple, it’s in your own body”. (Paraphrasing, hi).

Don’t believe me? Read it all over again for yourself. Start with Matthew, finish with the first part of Acts. Consider setting aside your preconceived or previously conceived interpretations, and going very slowly through the story again. Because it’s all right there – every beautiful, relieving, grace-soaked word – hidden in plain-sight.

I love Eve.

Eve, my favorite bible character, or otherwise known by the patriarchy as “Adam’s wife”, showed up in a TIME op-ed piece co-written by one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle Melton. This particular bit or writing right here (click link) is the whole reason I couldn’t stand being a woman in the church any longer. In fact, I think I have now spent a cumulative 7-8 years in therapy working this poison out of my own self-concept.

More pressing still, I now have a daughter, and I’m genuinely afraid to bring her up in the church for fear she might receive the same messages I did. In fact, I go visit churches by myself like an adult pre-screening a PG-13 movie to make sure it’s not going to be too corrupting for my child’s eyes and ears. Sometimes I actually picture myself sitting in the back of her fictional Sunday School classroom, and when we get to the whole bit about Eve, standing up and saying something like:

“Alright. That’s enough of that then.

Listen up kids, let me give you a brief little background about ancient semitic oral tradition and language, and how that fits into a much larger puzzle of religious and cultural context than the story itself reveals on the surface.

You tracking with me?

Okay, cool, next up: the ‘serpent’ as a symbol of feminine spirituality and the cycles of life-death-and-re-birth innate in a woman’s developing consciousness.

Any questions so far?”.

(Somehow I’m still waiting for my invite to be a guest Sunday School teacher at any church in town?!).

As Christian women (and men) start to wake up and demand better for themselves and their daughters (and sons), the church is going to have to decide how to respond. And as they do, I sure hope they look to JESUS instead of Mike Pence for guidance. Because Jesus spent plenty of time with women, all by himself, without a chaperone. In fact, they were some of his closest companions.

Remember well today.

It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Elie Wiesel is one my personal heroes of faith, doubt, and the re-birth of faith. He was also tireless champion of social justice. I remember his life, his words, and his vision today.

#DearWhiteChristians:

“…I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows…In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

From book, “Healing My Religion”.

During the spring semester of my freshman year of college, I decided to enroll in a class being taught by one of the most popular Religion professors at my university. The class was called “Psalms and Old Testament Wisdom Literature”. The course title alone was enough to convince me that by the end of the semester I would become a 19-year old near-expert on ancient biblical wisdom.

Turns out, here is the only thing I remember from that 4 1/2 month long experience: President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq.

My professor, an Ivy League educated Baptist minister and Vietnam War veteran, walked into class the morning after President Bush made his announcement with a guitar under one arm. After closing the door behind him, he was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, he invited us to pray with him. When he prayed, his words were thick with grief. After he finished praying, he got out his guitar and put melody to the most mournful of the biblical Psalms:

Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am faint;

O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish.

How long, O LORD, how long?

Turn, O LORD, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love.

No one remembers you when he is dead.

Who praises you from the grave? I am worn out from groaning;

all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.

(Psalm 6:2-7).

My 19-year old self was stunned.

No “man of the cloth” – and certainly no professor in a business suit – whom I had ever known had engaged with a political crisis in this way. The only explanation I can really remember him offering to our class on that day was this: “How many of you have been to war? None? Well, I have. And let me tell you this: war is hell. Hell on earth”. He said this with a kind of solemnity that shocked me.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

(Psalm 22:1-2).

“You’ve heard people say, ‘there are no atheists in a foxhole’?”, he asked us. “Well, in my experience there were only atheists in foxholes. The idea of benevolent God seems impossible when you are surrounded by hell”.

My heart is severely pained within me,

And the terrors of death have fallen upon me.

Fearfulness and trembling have come upon me,

and horror has overwhelmed me.

(Psalm 55:4-5).

He continued to sing until his singing faded into silence. The silence that followed continued until the clock on the wall signaled the last second of our scheduled time together. I don’t remember who left the room first, or how we managed to do this at all, but I do remember that when I did finally walk out of that classroom, I felt ill.

“Of course war is hell”, I thought. “Why has no one else ever said this to me before?”, I wondered. “And why in God’s name have I never really let myself consider this before?”. The day before when I had learned about the President’s declaration of war, my response had been very detached. I remember that I said a quick prayer of protection for the troops, resolved to trust God with the outcome, and reminded myself of the promise of eternal peace in the after life. “What the hell was wrong with me?”, I marveled.

Suddenly – and I do mean suddenly – I was extremely troubled. Troubled by the thought of war, and troubled by the realization that I had never been truly troubled by it before then.

The idea of war was so far removed from me – both historically and geographically. Born in 1983, I only had vague recollections of yellow ribbons being tied around trees during the Gulf War. My dad had been drafted to Vietnam, but was excused from duty because of legitimate health concerns. My maternal grandfather had done clerical work in WWII, and my paternal grandfather had served in the Navy in WWII. Yet, neither one of them had ever discussed it with me – other than to tell me about their visits home, their relief when the war ended, and the people they met along the way.

The following Sunday while attending church, my pastor mentioned the war, and prayed that the men and women fighting in the war would “seek God’s face”. He then invited us to trust in “God’s sovereignty” and the promise of eternal life for those who believe in him, and then moved on to the regularly scheduled programming.

I sat in my row of chairs feeling supremely disappointed. “Is it possible that I learned emotional detachment from the church itself?”, I wondered.

After the service was over, I sat alone for awhile and tried to recall a time the church had invited me to weep and groan in response to human suffering the way my professor had earlier that week. I knew that I had cried quite sorrowfully over my own ‘sinfulness’ on many occasions, and that I had shed happy tears during baptisms and faith conversions, but I couldn’t remember having ever been shown how to get down onto the ground level of human despair alongside those who were feeling it.

Later that evening, during my regular end-of-day reflection time, I thought about how Jesus responded to the pain of the world.

I didn’t doubt that he had faith in God’s goodness, of which he preached about regularly. Nor did I doubt that he trusted God during times of great pain, which he demonstrated quite dramatically. And yet, when confronted with human pain and suffering, he wept. He healed. He reached out. He cried out. He touched the people no one would touch. He talked to the people no one else would talk to. He lived amidst pain. He died in pain. He went willingly into hell himself, and he emerged with physical, touchable scars. Nothing about his life, ministry, death, or resurrection was removed from the pain of being human.

He was human himself, after all.

It took me weeks, maybe months, or perhaps years to understand why and how my “Psalms and Wisdom Literature” professor’s real-world engagement with the Bible impacted me so viscerally, but it made me feel thirsty for more of the same.

Another excerpt from the book.

When I was 12 years old, my parents started sending me to a Christian summer camp located in a much deeper part of the Bible Belt than I had been raised.

During that first summer at camp, I spent two weeks living with the nicest, most encouraging strangers I had ever met in my life. The people I met at camp seemed to value me simply for breathing, celebrate my uniqueness, and care deeply about the things that troubled me the most.

I won literal awards – in the form of actual medals and ribbons – for simply being myself.

One afternoon, I got presented with a ribbon for giving “110%” of my effort during a water-skiing lesson earlier that morning. On another occasion I received a standing ovation in the dining room for something so insignificant that I cannot even remember what it was now. At the end of the two-week term, each elective activity gave out some kind of award to a very large percentage of it’s participants, each cabin gave a special award to each camper, and the camp gave out many gender-specific awards to a handful of campers in each age group.

I often felt like I was being baptized in accolades.

And it wasn’t just the camp staff that made me feel special. The campers who had been attending this camp for years before me were also surprisingly skillful at round-the-clock encouragement. It probably helped that there were ribbons given out for being an excellent encourager, and often times campers were singled out for public praise if they had behaved in especially generous ways towards other campers. Yet, if you asked any of them why and how they were so relentlessly kind towards their peers, they would always tell you it was because they loved Jesus, and because Jesus had said that “we should treat other people the way we would want to be treated” (Matthew 7:12, paraphrase).

Being the beneficiary of this spiritual benevolence probably would have been a positive emotional experience for any adolescent girl, but for a girl who had spent the last three years being somewhat mercilessly harassed by her peers at school, this was sublime. By the time my parents would arrive to come take me home, I didn’t want to leave.

At the wise old age of 12 (and a half), I didn’t consider the complexity of my experience, nor the simplicity of my impression. I didn’t think about the uniqueness of my isolated environment, and the positive reinforcement it provided. I did not consider the multiplicity in anyone’s motives – i.e. ribbons and medals, “bonus points in heaven”, and/or something more inspired. Neither did I care about whether or not there would be strings attached to the sense of inclusion I had been offered that summer. All I could comprehend back then was that Jesus seemed to make people want to be kind and good towards one another.

Frankly, he made me want to be kind and good too. (Still does).

At some now-forgotten moment during my two-week stay in this camp, I became pretty passionately convinced that Jesus was the all-encompassing answer for me. But. Here’s the catch: I also became simultaneously certain that Jesus was the answer for everyone else too. Earnestly, I often thought to myself, “if only everyone else could get to know Jesus like the people at camp know him, then they too would start acting in loving, gracious ways, and the whole world would be so much better”!

And this, my friends, is how an ‘Evangelical’ is born.

Or, perhaps I should say: this is how one young evangelical was born.

Yet, as it is with all births — expelled along with wondrous new life, you might also push some poop out onto the delivery table. In this case, alongside the instructions about how to treat others with generosity and love, I also learned that being a follower of Jesus meant that the good things I did were just as important as the bad things I did NOT do. In fact, I often got the impression that manifesting an abundance of love or grace towards my fellow man was not as meaningful as avoiding a very important list of explicit and implicit “don’t”‘s:

Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t have sex outside of marriage, don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t swear, don’t lust after anyone, don’t have gay feelings or “tendencies”, don’t be jealous, don’t be lazy, don’t lie (unless the truth is impolite), don’t gossip (unless you can disguise it as concern), don’t dress provocatively, don’t dance provocatively, don’t make men feel uncomfortable in general, don’t disrespect your parents, don’t challenge your elders, don’t ask questions no one can answer, don’t be a downer, and don’t be too ambitious.

Now, if that sounds a bit more like a “Southern Manners Manual for Making A Nice Christian Girl out of Your Teenage Daughter”, and less like “The Ten Commandments” or
“The Sermon on the Mount”, it might be because THAT’S WHAT IT IS.

(… once again: more later).

Excerpt from my book…

Healing My Religion (Working Title)

For my daughter, Evelyn. My hope is that I might leave you in this world with a sense of how the Sacred is alive within you.

And for my grandmother, also Evelyn, who loved me like Christ loved her.

Disclaimer:

This is not a story about a prodigal return to my Christian origins after years of living in sin. By many people’s standards, I am probably still ‘living in sin‘. Instead, this is my literary attempt to wrestle with my own religious tradition, acknowledging both the pain and the joy it has offered me.

Part I

Chapter 1 (In The Beginning)

I was born and raised in a suburb of Kansas City, KS – just outside of the “Bible Belt”. My parents took us to church every Sunday, and taught us to pray before dinner and before bedtime every day. I don’t think I knew that there were people who called themselves Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or Sikhs until well into my early adolescence, and I did not get exposed to a single piece of thoughtful dialogue about any of those spiritual perspectives until my junior year of college.

This is the backdrop for my earliest religious sensibilities.

My parents were – and still are – very decent, very hard working, and very generous people. They have always modeled to me a general benevolence towards humanity, which they would likely ascribe to their religious sensibilities. For me, however, being raised by socially responsible parents did not completely inoculate me against some of the uglier aspects of church culture.

Like most busy parents of small children, my mom and dad could not supervise every single Sunday School lecture I received, nor mediate every interaction with other kids or their parents in our wider Christian community. And at some point along the way, one of my Sunday School teachers (note: these were often volunteer parents, and not necessarily seminary graduates) explained to me that the only way anyone could expect to get into heaven was if they believed Jesus Christ was God’s only Son.

So, I’m 7 years old, and I repeat this revelatory new information at school one day.

I don’t know why I said it, other than that it had been said to me, and I had a pretty bad habit of sharing the secrets adults shared with me. I want to believe that somewhere in my 7 year-old brain, I must have thought I was trying to be helpful. Like, “Hey guys, FYI, there’s this religious test coming up that you do NOT wanna fail – the consequences are brutal. So, here’s the cheat sheet! Catch you on the flip side!”

Appropriately, many of the children in my elementary school class were upset by this announcement of mine. My teacher, and my parents were also very upset. And thank God they were, because it was my first big lesson in how religion could hurt other people, and that made an enormous impact on me.

(….. more later).