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{I don’t do Joy, very well}

Pu-leeeese, don’t tell me to lighten up – I take great pride in my seriousness.

It’s a part of my M.O.  It’s not that I don’t laugh at all, I do.  And I love to laugh till I cry, tears streaming uncontrollably at something my little sister said or the guy next to me at Bible study, who absolutely cannot let anything go without a wise ass remark.  Oh that’s me making the sarcastic reply under my breath.  It’s both of us giggling disobediently and with such pleasure, ducking a scowl from our leader. Do not make eye contact. Or at my husband Tom’s witticisms — he is frequently cracking me up.

But in all earnestness, the world is so damn sad.  Don’t you agree?  Or it is just me?  I am a bleeding heart “liberal” yawl.  How can you not wake up with the weight of the world on your shoulders, especially if you are the parent of teenagers?  Or have bills.  Or just turn on the news?

I find myself exclaiming about or at least ranting, and aching and hurting over many things.

  • Poverty and injustice.  Unnecessary wars.  Third world starvation and first world waste of the planet’s resources – does that not make anyone else want to scream?
  • And the fact that kids come to school without breakfast and live in neighborhoods without a grocery store? Am I the only one who thinks about these things?
  • I find myself aching for the thousands of undocumented kids here in America that were simply born in America to undocumented parents. For high school girls getting pregnant, forever changing the trajectory of their young lives. Young black boys who get shot for being nothing more than young and black and a boy.  That one really makes me mad.  Or the fact that women still don’t earn the same wage as men?!?

These things are heavy.  These things matter.

I expressly get upset about mean kids. Where do kids learn to hate?  Why can we not represent Jesus better?  And love any child no matter their sexual orientation? What would Jesus do, indeed?

I could go on, but this is about joy right? I do need to lighten up. I cannot even talk JOY for five minutes?  Sheesh. 

I found myself saying in a group recently I don’t “do joy.”   Awkward silence there and I can feel it here now.  (It’s not that I’m against it in theory.  I just don’t know how to get some.)

I know that it is good to laugh!.  I just don’t know how in and of myself , I have always been slightly melancholy — the only time I am an incoherently laughing kind of person is when others are having fun around me — they bring the fun out of me.  I am the sort that has to work for joy.

The next best thing is Tim Hawkins (I know how’d I get here?) who has “the magical blend between two comedic ideals: A genuinely funny comedy show that caters to the entire family. ” This guy makes me pee in my pants, he’s so funny.  It’s good clean fun and it feels so good to enjoy his shows.

Check him out won’t you?

It’s all I could think of,

now back to my regular programming.

Melody

———————————————-

This was written as a part of the May 2012 Synchroblog centered on the idea of what it might mean to lighten up a little–personally, spiritually, professionally, or in any area of our lives.   You can write about why that’s easy or hard for you, share something funny or humorous, or any other angle that feels easy and right (remember, part of this is about lightening up!)

These are the wonderful people that participated.  (I don’t know them personally.)

{on writing, prayer and photography}

I have reflected on the idea of prayer and I am reading (with a friend) the wonderful book  Prayer by Hans Urs von Balthasar.  This book is so rich that I’m left both breathless for more, even while being totally flabbergasted by his meaty thoughts.  I find myself studiously copying down paragraph after paragraph.  I will be writing on prayer soon, after I have more time to learn from friends on the topic and think.

I don’t get prayer – it isn’t easy for me to understand or practice. And the longer I am a person of faith the more crazy I feel in group prayer meetings.  I’d value any insights.

Also, I’m thinking about the tensions and paradox of the life of faithfulness to God pursuing this illusive life of a writer.

I scribbled this down earlier in the week in my moleskin.

If someone would tell ME

or tell THE WORLD that something

I wrote

move them, and I

would choose for them to tell THE WORLD, then

I know that I write for the wrong reasons.

Forgive me.

Other than that.  I will leave you to the rest of your Sunday – whether you practice Sabbath or not, I hope you will enjoy a moment, walking through the Botanical Gardens of Madison.

If you’d like to see my whole set of the walk through Madison’s Botanical Gardens, it is here.

Melody

A Good Day Is (a poem)


A good day is
one where I don’t remember
[dad yelling]
and everything I never finished

     just
     to make
     him mad.

A good day is

one where I don’t remember

everything that I  

     lost,
     gave up,
     was too afraid to try.
     or simply
     fell
            down
                    doing.

A good day is
accepting Plan B is the plan.
Forgetting the things that need forgetting.
Remembering too.  

A good day is.

——————————————————————

Thanks for a great week ya’ll. I’m trying something new, no technology on the weekend. (We’ll see how I do.)

Peace,

Melody

EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer

For the last two weeks I have been enjoying life meat free.  I never thought that was possible.  Here’s why I no longer eat animals from America’s factory farms.

This review originally appeared on The Englewood Review of Books website.

 

“99% of the meat sold in the United States today comes from a factory farm.”

In the 1970s, my missionary parents uprooted us from the barefoot paradise of Papua New Guinea and planted us in Southern California.  My mother, suffering a bizarre set of health issues, began looking for answers in healthy eating practices.  While other kids ate Twinkies and Ding Dongs, Mother read Adelle Davis books on nutrition and force-fed us cod liver oil.

Perhaps because of this, my need to fit in urged me to become a steak-loving “normal” person. Food, for me, was always more than mere sustenance; it was a visceral, beautiful, even creative thing. But as far being a political statement or a critical health issue, well that was strictly for the weirdoes.

Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals was the first time that I seriously considered that the Chicken Parmesan in front of me or the meat neatly stacked in my refrigerator was once a living thing.  And confronted by the horrors of modern animal farming, as recounted in shocking detail by Foer, I had to face certain facts: factory farms are disgusting and dangerous for our health.

Foer made a three-year investigation into the sickening story that is American meat, describing with ghastly precision the disease, deformity and eventual mutilation of animals that defines factory farming today. I was filled with revulsion as Foer chronicled his grisly experience and quickly came to understand why Ellen DeGeneres has called Eating Animals “one of the most important books [she’s] ever read.”

The story is heart-wrenching, repulsive and barbaric.  One learns that the idyllic family farms we picture in our minds (think Charlotte‘s Web) have been transformed into secretive, highly secured factories lined with rows of “confinement pens” where animals languish, never seeing real daylight.  Foer admits to clandestinely breaking into a turkey farm to discover locked pen doors, gas masks on the walls, chicks with blackened beaks, and both dead and living birds matted with blood and covered in sores.  He details dozens of eerily similar stories indicting the farming of pigs, chickens, cows and even fish:

“The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.”

In a riveting (if also occasionally, rambling) narrative, Foer contends the meat industry is corrupt, with structures supporting the consumer-driven “need” for cheap meat.  Foer notes that prices haven’t substantially increased since the mid-fifties, and that the “efficiencies” of the factory system are the source of this “benefit.”  I was stunned to learn that only 1% of the meat we consume comes from family-run old-fashioned farms.  The rest is from factories where biodiversity is replaced by genetic uniformity, and the antibiotic-laced animals may be contributing to strange flu like symptoms ravaging millions of Americans.

With gritty specifics, allowing for many perspectives, Foer draws personal conclusions, while making it clear that our collective actions can change these practices.  But only by agreeing individually to stop purchasing factory farmed meat.

In this philosophical horror story, I was confronted with my “need” and realized I can no longer be a part of supporting this corrupt system.  A “normal” evangelical Mom, I am choosing to no longer eat animals unless they come locally and humanely from a farm.

We the collective consumer must make conscious choices, even sacrifices.   Foer says it well, “We are defined not just by what we do. We are defined by what we are willing to do without.”  We need to put meat in the middle of the plate of our public discourse.

Melody

Stopping Time (a poem about friendship)

With some friends,
you take down the words, moments
are scribbled onto your heart.

For their life
is a book of wisdom.

Leaning
forward, keening
for a moment of clarity
and goodness, even
as if you are sitting together in a holy place.

Sacred space

is created
in the meeting of spirits, souls
mystically blended,
time stops
with some friends.

When our Traditions and Tired Beliefs are Calcified into Orthodoxy (Brief Thoughts On Women)

 

Yesterday as I was sitting across from one of the people I respect most in the world when my life changed forever. 

You see I have had many long years of being in pain about being a woman in the church, though I am on a path of healing. Yes, this story does have a happy-ish ending.

Okay happy isn’t quite right but I feel hopeful in the knowledge that we have not seen the end of Our Story.

Being a woman in the evangelical Church can be painful.  Being a natural questioner is too.  

More than a decade ago, I began to question the roles of women in the evangelical church and this has brought me a lot of personal pain.  The process of learning what was True – scriptural, cultural, and relevant for us today, was slow and difficult because no one really wanted to talk to me about it or help all that much, as I questioned my pastor, and the elders, and pursued it with others.

Little did I know that in some cases it was because others didn’t really know what they thought.

This is a part of what makes this issue so slippery.  I pushed, sought clarification, and ask for perspectives and read a lot of books! The process of the last ten years has been uncomfortable, isolating and even at times agonizing.

I learned recently that I have even scored a “reputation.”

Not as I would hope of being a thinking, theological person – because I have asked the biblical basis for these things and sought truth. That I would take as a backhanded compliment.

And not as I might wish for being a questioner –because I do have many questions and never saw that as liability as a person of faith.

Rather, I have been called the f-word, yeah that f-word – Feminist. And even more malevolent, an “Angry Feminist.”

Actually, the angry part is true. Once I am able to step back from my defensive, hurt posture, I’ll confess that I have been angry.  I have carried around inside me, close to my heart, an oozing, pussy, and infected spiritual sore and this has been  very bad for my soul.  I even picked incessantly at it.  I have been wounded, offended, bitter and angry and worst of all to me is this.

I have felt unheard.

Sitting there across from my beautiful, big-hearted and loving, Bible cherishing, Jesus following, Holy Spirit filled, Bible Church attending friend, she uttered the most unbelievable words.  And she repeated them when I seemed to just look at her bug-eyed, in shock.

“You are not alone.  You are not the only one wondering what’s true,” she whispered to me.

She asked me this simple question:

 “What did Jesus say about women?”

Well, nothing that I am aware of and I will double-check because she asked. But I am not aware of anything prescriptive that Jesus said about women.

Jesus saw women,

Jesus spoke to women,

Jesus healed women,

Jesus taught women,

Jesus was financially supported by women,

Jesus loved women,

Jesus listened to women?

Jesus was persuaded to change his mind by a woman.

All in a culture and time when women were unseen and unheard, unworthy, unquestioningly invisible.

So I ask you friends.  What did Jesus say about women? And what parts of Scripture bring you hope as you consider the place of women in the church today?

I’ve had a healing of that sore that I allowed to fester for more than a decade.  That incredible story is here.

And I have a renewed challenge by my friend, someone who I never thought would ask about the injustices toward women in the Church.  Because of her, I now dream of somehow bringing a riptide of change into the middle of this vast ocean of tradition and tired beliefs which have been calcified into orthodoxy.

These days, most days, I feel hope about the place of women in the Church. Other days it feels foolish and the lack of certainty is soul crushing.

On the days that I maintain my weak hold on Jesus, I do believe change will come.  And hearing the questions coming from this dear friend meant everything.

I am resolved to begin again to study and write on this topic — I gave it up for a good long while.  The angry feminist in me has become resolved and certain of Jesus and his love for me and all women.  Something shifted in my mind and heart , in my soul as I sat listening to my friend.

I am not alone.  I am not the only one asking.  I am not the only woman looking for answers.  We will find the Truth together.  We have not seen the end of Our Story.

Melody

Other things I have written on these subjects.
//

My Duct Taped Heart (a poem)

I’m awake early, even before my alarm.
Lieing in bed listening
to the rolling thunder, wondering to myself.

I know a rain spout is loose,
it was duck taped on.
It worked for a season but even that

finally came loose and free.
I don’t know how to fix things.
I wonder about my father and why he never taught me

how?  Now he’s gone.
I can’t ask him that and many other questions.
So I wonder,

Lieing in bed
listening to the thunder and knowing the rain pours down.
There are so many things I want to fix.

I was raised to think I can’t.
For now, I will lie here
and wonder.

What’s changing, so that I can be writing!

This is such a busy time for folks with kids.  We are living the last month or so of school and for whatever reason my kids seem to teeter on the brink of things this year academically, spiritually, emotionally — this has been a challenging and demanding year.  With summer looming, there will be any opportunities to stick our feet in the river and less time to write.

I am thinking about that tension.

I’m starting to work more seriously on writing projects. As I listened hard at the Festival of Faith & Writing  and looked at my writing life and habits, I realize that I need to cut back on some things before I can ever dream of space to write every day.  (I know I have a lot to tell you about that experience, the festival.  We’ve been back a week and there’s been no time!)

Projects that I’m working on:

I am working on a book review of the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer for The Englewood Review of Books and hope to do more of those, both for Englewood and other publications.

I continue to write for Provoketive magazine:  This included a review of  the book Resignation of Eve by Jim Henderson, a piece titled The Accidental Stay-At-Home Mom and others, but by far the most popular essay was The Voice of the Feminine.  That content is not repeated here on my blog  so you will have to pop over to there to read it.  I hope you will.

I am working on a short series of articles on “The F word and the Church.” (Yeah, that F word: feminist.)

I am really excited to hear that I will have some poem in a book about fear titled Not Afraid to be published around August, 2012 by Civitas Press.  (This is the same press that published my essay on Depression in their book Not Alone which is available now. If you know someone who suffers from depression this book may help.  I have been told by many people that it has been a good, honest resource.  I also have many pieces on my blog about my personal trials with the black dog of depression.  They are collected here. )

What I want to change:

One thing that I find to be soul crushing and destructive for me is Facebook.  Being at-home with such great flexibility to my schedule  I see that I allow many things to interfere with the “work” of writing and with spiritual growth.  Facebook is such a time waster for me.  I’m inherently curious, nosy kind of person and the fact that I can vicariously follow along other’s lives is bad for me.  That’s where the soul crushing part comes in.   It’s like high school insecurity all over again.  So I’ve been tempted to quit completely.

Image by JJ Pacres on Flickr

But at the Festival of Faith & Writing I heard over and over that writers must have online presence and following.  We have to nurture that and  be able to “prove” our popularity to a publisher.   But the flip side of that is that it is just not good for me!

If I don’t have time

to think,

to be,

to write and

to allow the Holy One to mold and move me (not really in that order.)

So I’m backing off of social media  for a season — except here.  I’m really going to try to do this moderately.  When I got hooked on Farmville (of all things — proves I can get addicted to anything!) I had to quit cold turkey and I did.  I don’t want to do that with Facebook because I don’t like being an all or nothing person.  But I’m going to try to limit my time there.  And set some writing goals for the next few months.  I look forward to sharing those with you.

Another thing that I learned at the festival was that I need to hone the purpose of my blog.  Mine has multiple messages and intents.  I have been known to write about:

  1. family (dysfunctional and otherwise.)
  2. God and devotion, faith and (dis)belief
  3. women in the church, feminism as a Christian’s option
  4. various justice issues
  5. my alcoholism and addictions
  6. my church – Blackhawk Evangelical Church
  7. poetry on all these topics
  8. prose on all these topics

Is there anything in particular that you come here to read?  Where do you see my passions and strengths converging in helpful ways?  Would you add more of anything?

Grace & Peace. Melody

Resentments (a poem)

Sitting.  Fingers frozen, tapping on my laptop with
birds really chirping!
A cacophony of praise to the Holy One.

The wonder of it.
Sun shining. Blessed,
I am conscious of my dirty heart. So often
resentful, feeling left out or uninvited

to the party.

(I’m starting to think Facebook isn’t good for my soul) and

He says to me:

Enough.
I want to be enough.
I Am.

When you are Afraid of Home

It was stunning for me to realize that I had no anxiety the entire time I was away at the Festival of Faith & Writing. The thought of returning home brought the familiar burning in my chest — so unwelcome.  I do not want to accept its presence. And just for a minute I know that I must drill down and try to find the truth there, asking myself Can I figure out why I am afraid of coming home?

There was a small sense in which this place, this moment wasn’t real.

Just as I lament to myself (a regular foible  of mine, to be sure) that I didn’t have any real relationships here at the festival, another part of me knows that it was quite wonderful to wander anonymously.  Soaking in wisdom and not be expected to say anything. I didn’t have to be wise or special in any way. I could many times, for hours on end, not utter a single word to another human being; which I found was peaceful, even liberating. (Not speaking except perhaps to an infrequent stranger in a seminar, so that I wouldn’t come off a weirdo.)

But mostly, I was silent. 

I wasn’t even writing this week. My head was going, of course. Especially my dreams which were full of thoughts, words, conjectures and I would wake every morning with all that magical and perplexing jumble.  Words.  Ideas.  Inspiration came unbidden, naturally, because of all the incredible people and ideas surrounding. And then it would drift away as my mind became clear and the caffeine settled into my veins.

And then, we return home  and there it is. The fear.

Here it is.  I didn’t have the sense this week that God is disappointed in me. It was gone – that feeling that is always hovering in and around me that I’m not measuring up. The legacy of a childhood gone awry, the anger and disappointment of my human father killing joy.

Where did it go and why did it have to return?  Drilling down, still further, to that little place where I feel God’s displeasure.  I have a hunch this is not of God or from God at all.

I was having this amazing conversation at dinner with Tom. He expressed his belief that most American Christians have this lover relationship with God, I knew that I don’t. I have a disappointed-with-me-and-angry-at-me-parent type of relationship with God.

I think I know God. Fact is I hardly know God. If he is even knowable fully in a human lifetime, I sure doubt it.  And God knows everything about me. And God is very much not disappointed with me. In fact he’s thrilled. He made me to be a creative, a thinker, a deeply passionate, mostly introverted whittler of words and pictures.

And God likes me – generally.

Of course I’m am still an ugly sinner. Deeply aware of my spiritual lack. Needing a Holy filling daily, even moment by moment.  Needing a Holy shaping, a changing by the beautiful Potter who is creating something beautiful out of the pieces and parts of my little life.

No, he’s not disappointed and there it is, that’s the source of my anxiety. That’s the place that I must return to work on, over and over, and again, even as I perfect this craft of writing it is the being that matters most. I must always, and frequently, sit with him and allow the Holy One to perfect me.

It’s a homecoming I am unused to — this beautiful welcome he is offering.  It is so good to know that I am home.

When I’m Scared

Scared. Scared shitless and no plan to make it better, makes for a very hard week. 

Too much comparison with others’ lives, careers, talents, jobs,  kids, health, weight, even others’ sense of humor.  It all kills all my joy.  Not enough trust kills my ability to enjoy my incredibly blessed life.  Constantly thinking about all the ways that I am frequently scared. Knowing how often I am just plain terrified to breathe.

I used to be a pretender.  (Not so) confidently white-knuckling my way through leadership, creativity, people  and their problems, service.

I thought I could to anything. And I just about did. Though there was always a price.

But I was scared and my faith, well that was missing.  I didn’t have faith in anything and I worried endlessly that someone would find out just how little I believed.

Jesus loves you, this I did not know.

It wasn’t until I lost everything  (I thought) and I fell down, down, down into depression, and alcohol, and isolation from good people and into what was for me deep depravity, that I knew Jesus as my source.  It was days without God, stretching out for what seemed like perpetuity – no, it wasn’t until I was living those hopeless days and nights that I came to know and believe.

I’m still scared, and I still can’t believe that there is something good out there for me.  I sit and sometimes I cry.  I just cry hopeless tears and the fear flows out of me, and I ask God for something that only I can do, but then I do the only thing I know.

I lean into the Holy One and rest.

This me, the one you know and see today, she’s no pretender because she’s got nothing left to hide.

Still scared, yes but down low with Jesus, resting in him.  Sometimes, when your fear is clutching your heart tight, you’re blinking back the bitter taste of anxiety and you think you cannot bear it another minute, that’s when you must sit and rest in the Holy One.

I’m not saying I know how to do it, only that I know I must seek the sweet release of Jesus.

He took it all, already.  The pain, anxiety, addiction, sin, crappy self-esteem, fear and disbelief, lack of self-love, lack of trusting others, lack, all my lack!  He already nailed it to the cross.

Why do I keep taking it back down and walk around wearing it like a heavy armor, dragging it through my life, making my days slow and painful.  Why?

I know I must give it back to him.

Still scared, yes. But down low with Jesus.  Resting in him.

Choosing. (A Poem about Change)

[Being wounded] came effortlessly,

like an comfortable sweater

she put it on easily, too often.

Frayed and worn,

pain became her fate.

[Being changed]is hard, and only

comes by choosing.  An old woman or a toddling child,

each must take

a step.  It’s faith in the making.

Being wounded or being changed

comes in the choosing.