Lessons from the Monastery (When you are Bitter)

Do you ever have those days when “the shoulds “clamor but truth prevails?

I should have done the dishes piled up from last night’s dinner which are railing against me and what I believe—that one should always clean up after a meal.

I should have gone through piles of papers collected, hauntingly reminding me of bills due and deadlines I’ve likely forgotten.

I should have made an appointment to fix my daughter’s knee, which has hurt on and off for months. She will ask when she gets home: did you make the appointment Mama? Did you? When will you? Why didn’t you?

Rather, all I can think about is my bitter heart.

I am bursting with the awareness, the stinging tang of understanding.

Of how I have lived with it for so long – like Naomi in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament – bitter.

The awareness tastes sharp and severe on my tongue.

I sat in Taizé prayer today at the monastery — soaking in the echoing songs, the verse, the smells and comportment of the faithful gray-haired women sitting around me. For the first time I was hearing the story of the founding of the Taizé Community in France; learning of this tradition of repetition, listening and meditating, as we waited for the Lord.

But then, we were given time to pray. It was remarkable. I don’t know about you but I don’t pray – not much. At least not well. I am certainly no “warrior” of prayer. Martin Luther King Jr. said “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.” Okay, it’s not so much that I don’t pray I suppose, but that I have so many doubts. My conscience won’t allow me to simply tell God what I want or need.

My limited theological understanding and lack of faith simply don’t impress it upon me to pray – not much.

(I realized recently I don’t think I even know what I think about corporate prayer. But that is for another day…)

We were given space, within the service today to pray. So I did.

And so, I let go of my control on my mind and heart. And go it did, racing – Airborne, soaring like so many spirits.

I began collecting my worries like a slightly frantic, manic creature.

I began to set my worries down — like weighty, heavy stones.

I place them there, one after another.

… For a friend, who lives with chronic illness. I want to see her more. I have many regrets.

… For my children and specific things I worry about for each of them, faith, academics, relationships, health, and futures.

… For my 74-year-old mother’s future and all that is involved in her long-term care.

… For my future, for my past, for my days – it’s been two weeks since I really let myself stop, slow, truly listen.

… For my days, yes I worry so about my days. I worry about being wasteful. I worry about being useless. I worry about not helping others enough. I worry that my life is a waste.

And there it was. The awareness.

I have puzzled out what the book of Ruth means. Which character in the tiny book that I relate to, Naomi – bitter, Boaz – faithful, Ruth – Bold. Oh, there it is so crystal clear.

I am bitterness. Sure, I’ve come a long way. I have had some healing.

God has loved me through my addiction and through my fear of failure and through my bitterness.

I have believed {I am so bitter that} God has forgotten me and there is no longer any purpose for my life. I have tried to do the things in front of me – certainly the obvious one motherhood, the creative work of writing and photography, but deep, deep down I have felt abandoned by God.

There it is.

Aching, reaching, grasping for some deeper purpose to my life and surely knowing all the while, that this time of dearth, of learning was and is important. Just like Naomi, who said “call me Mara (which means bitter),” I have been bitter.

I sit with the weighty knowledge, almost crushed, but not. Still wondering what God intends to do. Jeremiah 29:11 says; “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

I do believe that. I do even as I taste bitter. As I sit and wonder and pray.

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This is part of a Lent Series, Lessons from the Monastery.

Lesson One.

I learned today this type of listening is called kenotic listening. It is characterized by reverencing what is sacred in someone else. So often, when interacting with each other, we dwell on all their faults. Their failings, their annoying bits and pieces, even how they disappoint us or let us down. A kenotic listener affirms the good in others.

Lesson Two.

I don’t find it hard to confess that dissatisfaction comes easily to me, along with the admission that my life has disappointed me. Disillusionment too, as my life is not what I thought it would be. I can admit this is true. Well, that’s not exactly right – I had no plan. No grand scheme. I didn’t have any idea what I would do with my life as a youngster. One thing I knew. From that moment when I was swiftly rescued, “healed” in an only God could have done it miraculous sort of way.

This was lesson three.

On Doubt & Growing up in the Church of (women) “Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.”

My daughter pushes me. She demands. Before coffee and time to wake up in the morning, she throws out at me like spittle in my face a withering challenge. She says, about my faith, my beliefs, something like ….

You follow some concocted foolishness, if only to comfort yourself, to be a part of something, to be less alone, to feel consoled by the idea you won’t spend eternity in hell.

Ouch. She’s fourteen. I listen. And take another sip of coffee. Silently wishing that I was more awake. Wishing that I had time to go to seminary and get back to her. Hoping that I can remain calm. And mostly, I am hoping that I am lucid. Does she not know this is not my best time of day? Of course she does. I am not freaking ready for this!?!

“And what sort of religion would sentence people to hell?” she continues. I’m thinking “Where in the hell is she learning her ideas about hell?”

Yes, that’s the sort of girl we’re raising.

Questioning. Doubting. Testing and pushing. And I love it, even as it scares me and I long for more preparation. No, I don’t fear my own doubt, because I have known the One who gives me peace beyond my comprehension.

But I fear her doubts.

She has a wonderful, active intelligence. How to answer the questions rattling about in her brain— which she throws out with such vivid scorn. How to answer, when it closely echoes the shadows of my heart and mind? One might think this would make it easier, but it isn’t because I don’t fear my own doubt I pursue it. I have even grown comfortable with it, mostly.

But her doubts loom bulky and cumbersome, large in the room. I feel them physically as she lurches toward her future. Away from me. Yes I feel her doubt pulling her away from me. This is what I must trust, that the One I know will make himself known to her and to each of them, my children. I only possess them for a short season, if at all. I once thought they were “mine” like a precious possession to be held on to tightly. Now I know I don’t. I can’t keep them for my own.

The day she came squealing into the world, so strong and perfect I should have known then that she was not mine. In the early months I was uncomfortable letting someone else take her from me, to hold her tight against their own chest in church. I fought letting her infant body be pulled away from mine. She was my first and the toughest, impossible, to let go of—I thought that I couldn’t do it. I began to trust others just a little. Our nanny. A nursery caregiver. Kindergarten teacher, first grade, second and up, over the years. And now she is learning from pastors at church and from leaders in youth group that are young and barely out of school themselves. And she learns from her friends. How much she is learning from equally fallible, impressionable friends.

I am reminded again, I can’t possess her.

I look at her speaking this morning, so sure of herself, and I think “I would hold you in my arms forever, if possible, so enormous is my love for you.”

A mother’s love and possession of her children is irrational. At first I trusted no one.

And she always resisted me.

She struggles, fights me. Argues about whether I like her outfits even when I say I do, she says I don’t; her hair, the shape of her nose which I think is quite perfect. But no, she is angry even as she tells me how very wrong I am. “My nose is not perfect” she wants me to know. And I marvel at the thought. To me, you are.

Perfection.

This is what I want to tell her.

You have always questioned. You were impatient, always. I couldn’t teach you fast enough — the alphabet, or to read. All of this could not be conquered quickly enough for you, in the midst of other babies coming along. Just fourteen short months after you a brother, and he was physically large but quiet, careful and followed you everywhere; happily occupied by his admiration and awe of you. My job and its demands getting me home at night exhausted, and there you were, already reading, even before I had the time to teach you. You are ahead of me in so many ways. At forty-five, I am just barely allowing myself to ask the hard questions, the ones that our faith community wouldn’t allow when I was growing up, somehow my doubt might mean that all of it isn’t true.

I am only just learning to accept my own questions, to seek the answers out myself. Yes, I learn from you my girl.

Your mother isn’t sure. I doubt myself all the time because I was told long ago in bible class in college (a Christian college) not to question. As the Bible was opened for me in class, and I began to learn as never before, my heart fluttered and sped up with the dawning, comprehension that I could know the actual Greek words for myself. I wouldn’t have to take anyone’s word for it. Just. Like. Anyone. I could study and know for myself. But when I sought this knowledge out, my professor asked “what would you do with it?” as if, I shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t learn for myself. There would be no purpose.

Indeed, what purpose would it have served?

Yes that’s the lie I bought into, that I fight against (almost) every day as a woman in the Church, that we shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, learn and teach for ourselves. It is a lie, but one that is so strong. I beat it back. It returns uninvited. Reading the words in Blue Parakeet, I am once again liberated. It’s a constant liberation required, when you are raised in the Church of women “shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.” Scot McKnight liberated me again when he asked of scripture’s Story “What Did Women Do?”

What did women do I want to know? We aren’t even to be allowed the stories in Bible of what women have done. These stories of women have been silenced, ignored, overlooked and (not always with bad motives but still) they are missing! As I have come into my own understanding of these things I have had to accept that to take a stand on this is threatening and provocative, and I am immediately perceived to be “liberal” and suspect, as if I don’t respect the Bible which I do, oh so very much from that moment in college when I had the profound thought “I can know this for myself. “ Oh what a sweet relief it was to read that even McKnight found it challenging to defend these things himself.

I am an evangelical, today anyway and I am only learning that I have read the Bible wrong. I am learning to read the Bible as Story, even while “many of the traditionalists read the bible as a law book and a puzzle. Traditionalists read the Bible about women in church ministries through tradition instead of reading the Bible with tradition.” (McKnight, the Blue Parakeet)

It is no small thing (to me) and I have spoken of this before. My pastors never mention female theologians or even woman scholar’s writings about theology and the Bible. I want my daughter to know that Christian women are thinking, can be academic, even scholarly, that we are wise and thoughtful. Yes women.

And yet she doesn’t see that in the Church of (women) “Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.”

What would it be like to grow up never hearing the old bible stories of what women did and are doing like Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah? To be a grown woman before you learn that these amazing legendary women spoke for God; they led the nation alongside men. They sanctioned scripture and they guided nations. What is it like to grow up never hearing from the knowledge and wisdom of women? As my precious daughter shares her questions and doubt, I wake up and I listen, take it in. I hope and pray. She is strong and her soul and mind are powerful already. Yes, I accept her doubts. I know Doubt like a close friend, even if mine has different origins, nuanced by my upbringing and by mistreatment in my life by few strong men who abused. I’m not afraid of my own doubt and I don’t want to be afraid of hers. The Church needs girls like her who soon will grow into strong, articulate challenging women. Her influence somewhere someday will be strong. Perhaps even in the Church, if she stays long enough. Are they ready her? Or will they remain the Church of shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t?

Is that what you want to tell her?

We live in a culture that doubts everything as a matter of principle. In such an environment, how can even faith be immune to doubt? Can I really trust in the gospel? Does God really love me? Can I really be of any use to God? We are taught to doubt but commanded to believe. Somehow we think that admitting to doubt is tantamount to insulting God. But doubt is not a sign of spiritual weakness–rather it’s an indication of spiritual growing pains. — Doubting, Alister E. McGrath

I guess we are both having growing pains –this slowly waking, grown woman, and this young girl . Is the Church ready for us? Will they echo that women couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t? Or will they tell us, yes, you can.

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These musings are like a journal and are not perfect. As always, I hope you will extend me grace as I write to figure out what I think.

Imagine my surprise. I read the Bible “wrong.” (logicandimagination.wordpress.com)
Blessed, Is She? [Re-imagining Christian Feminism] (logicandimagination.wordpress.com)

God is With Us. But Can We Find Him?

I have marvelled at my doubt.

I am going through one of my phases where I feel extremely disappointed by organized religion. Like Michael Jinkins, in Called to Be Human, I don’t understand what spiritual means any more than I understand what it means to be religious — but I know that today they are a pale imitation of what they should be, could be and this must grieve God. It is almost an insult to be called “religious” today whereas “spiritual” can mean almost anything and is somehow in its inclusivity found to be admirable.

“Faith is a matter of trust and reverence more than it is a matter of beliefs and belief systems. This is not to say that beliefs are irrelevant. It matters a great deal whom you trust and what you hold sacred. But the older I get, the more I see that life is mystery and the less certainty I possess. I take more of life on faith. I trust a lot more than I know. So my beliefs have become increasingly modest in their claims while they have become more extravagant in their hopes.”

When troubles come, when I am still, when I feel most devastated by this life, deep inside I know that the Babe of Christmas is real.

The Babe of the incarnation is not anything to do with sentimentality and materialism. Though my whole being is crushed by this season and though it is too strong to say that I hate Christmas — what it has become — My heart and soul are dragged down this time of year. And I know with certainty that I lack the courage to do something different with it.

I am no longer a child — the wonder of the season is gone.

I am so disenchanted by it all that I have trouble relishing “the silent and holy night, the sweet and heavenly peace” that the song speaks of. The Creator God entered into creation which is totally wrecked by our sin and He doesn’t hate nor is he disgusted by you and me, rather God takes our inconsistency, and selfishness and betrayal — the mess of our human heart and what we have done to this season — and by becoming the Babe he took it all.

That I can believe.

Christmas can be — Advent should be — about that recovery of our hearts. But it is so difficult and intangible if we cannot slow down our spiritually corrupt minds and souls and be conscious of the mysterious and ancient ways of experiencing time and place in the spiritual realm.

Advent, in the high church, was meant to begin the sacred year because it begins with anticipating the Babe. The Church also uses the act of remembering those Saints whose lives are an example to us all. For me, it is easy to look at those throughout history who were Saints and Martyrs of the church and believe. The act of remembering, through liturgy and worship whether corporate or in isolation, is beautiful and sweet. But it is the actions we take — today, now — “the physical gestures, prayers, or other customs — that make faith a tangible presence.” This is the Babe — the incarnation — this is why we offer our worship.

Advent is the time when we prepare for the mystery of the Babe — the arrival of God with us — God incarnate. My heart wrestles with the truth as my actions seem to do something else. It’s relentless — the gluttony of the Thanksgiving meal, then the shopping, endless carols playing on every radio, the searching for “happy” — that at a certain point I shut down.

And that is where I find myself today.

Advent seems that is should be more solemn, a time of anticipating. The mystery and miracle of Christmas is the Babe’s birth. We are challenged to be winnowing and sifting in our heart and preparing ourselves for when He comes. And it becomes clear that we are simply searching for God in all of our flurry and activity.

Almost a thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury said:

“God is that greater than which cannot be thought.”

God is Inconceivable. Incomprehensible. Unbelievable. That is our God. That is (perhaps) why God came in the form of the Babe — Immanuel, which means “God with us.” As I sit here wrestling with the truth that I have to work to find him, God is here. With us. Searching for us, some say. God is not lost. We have become lost — so distracted by the eating and drinking and shopping and giving and receiving, the singing and serving — lost by it all.

Advent means coming. Christ came. Christ comes. Christ will come again. In this Advent season, as we search for the Babe, we only need to understand more fully what that means. “God is enfleshed in our humanity.”

We only need to wake up and receive the gift that is already given, the fact that we are found by Emmanuel, God with us.

MH

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Called to Be Human: LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN ON LIVING A CHRISTIAN LIFE, Michael Jinkins.

GOD WITH US: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, authored by Scott Cairns, Emilie Griffin, Richard John Neuhaus, Kathleen Norris, Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw. Edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory Wolfe.

I Traveled to a Dreamland [A Poem]

It was a long week. I traveled to a Dreamland.

And in that magical place where I know Everything,
I am Powerful.
My prayers are Answered.
I am Whole.
The future holds no surprises, for I am filled with
Visions telling me All.

As I walk the streets of Perfect Knowledge I asked
what’s left?
After Total Acceptance
Complete Understanding,
Perfection and Glory
what’s left?
I have no Need.
No Confession.
No Sorrows.
No Desire.
No Curiosity.
No Thirst.

No Need and All Knowledge is in fact Unbearable.
In that Dream Land, I found myself
Longing to Wake Up
to My Life, where my days and nights are Full of Questions.
Where I wonder about Almost Everything and every day
still hope for Perfection.

Sure, I shake my fist at God because I remember that Place Without
Hate, Pain or Suffering.
Here Without Complete Understanding, I cannot imagine how
it will come again.
I can only
Rest in Him.
And be grateful for the Absoluteness of My Unknowing.

I hope that I am not one of the Crazies.

I wake from a recurrent dream. It unsettles me. Always

in slumber I am Searching for meaning

to life. For love,

taking on many forms. Assurance

of the illusive, improbable God to talk. To me. Give me some sign.

Speak my LORD, won’t you? Prove [again] that you are real.

Shake the heavens — Flood the earth– Heal the sick — Give sight to the blind, yes sight for me. Today.

I feel ashamed of my doubts. Fear

that religion is some celestial apothecary, erected by the weak in our need

to silence our spiritual afflictions. A contrivance.

And yet that very Truth that I seek is a need — So exacting.

Out of my heart comes my deepest longing for God, meaning, Truth. How do I sometimes know

so clearly, so absolutely? And other days I feel a universal, colossal Absence. And I am terrified

of the possibility — Are the heavens vacant?

Ashamed

of my heart, so quick to Doubt — Demand — Need.

So many crazies, I do not want to be one of them. I want Knowledge. I Seek Truth.

I Seek absolution and forgiveness.

I Need reassurance that our buildings, our rhetoric, our activities aren’t simply tokens

of our need.

Anne Rice rejects

the bricks and mortar of faith — Stepping

away from judgment and scorn to something else.

A Floridian pastor chatters hollowly about prayer for God’s will to burn a Holy Book, taking a civic stance

against America’s “enemies.” A lesbian cleric challenges us to love our enemies, meaning her.

I try to stay open, loving, faithful — and some challenge the very core of my faith.

Absolutes come with human judgment. Scriptures wrongly translated

and easily misunderstood. For thousands of years Men

have held their power over women, crushing spirits, and then questioning

our faith when we stand up against this treatment.

Why would a loving God not give me complete access and authority?

Why would a loving God not accept the prayers of gays and lesbians, dear faithful people

seeking Truth as much as me? Why do Absolutes bring judgment and misunderstanding, when put in the hands of misguided men and women?

Thank you, but I’ll take my doubts and questions to scripture. I’ll stumble my way through original meaning, cultural influences and climate. I’ll implore the mystical and Holy Spirit of God. [who on most days I know is active and real]

to teach me, a Woman, but also forgiven

sinner first before a sexual being. Teach me, I am humanity

with desires and longings unfulfilled over a lifetime. Teach me, I am humbled.

And I fall prostrate and hope that I am not one of the Crazies.

That God hears Me.

** I use the term “Crazy” for the lunatic fringe.

Tag: Doubt