Poking at sin and grace with a real long stick

One of the interesting conversations I didn’t prioritize last week was over at when love comes to town – a series of RJ’s reflections on the theology of sin and grace. This is chewy material for me. RJ is a UCC pastor and a theologically orthodox, socially liberal Christian (and RJ, if you’ve wandered by, I hope this is a fair characterization!). I’m a UU pre-seminarian with a real hard push-and-pull relationship to Christian orthodoxy in even its gentlest manifestations. RJ leads me to think about difficult things; that’s why I keep reading. Christian theology is an angel I will likely wrestle with for a long time.

I am far from the only person of faith (or something resembling the same) who slams hard into the ghost of bad theology left over from a toxic church. I imagine the opinionated visitors to his church a couple of Sundays ago might be laden with similar baggage. That would explain their concerns, at least, if not their rudeness.

“Sin” is three letters worth of difficult, almost as difficult as “God” – because, though I am learning to see the possibility of this language pointing toward spiritual places that are wholesome ground, that possibility is wrenched hard from what RJ described thusly a few days later:

More often than not simple-minded and shame-based spirituality preaches that if you just take your problems to Jesus they will all be solved. And if they aren’t, then you aren’t being serious or honest enough. Such mean-spirited and stupid religion only deepens our sense of shame and inadequacy when what we actually need is community, hope, humility and a way to trust that God is sufficient.

I’m consciously trying to strip that three-letter word of the weight of guilt and fear and self-loathing that is burned into it, hoping there will maybe be some small core of the thing left that I can use as a pointer for “that spiritual gulf between the finite, limited human condition and the Infinite Mystery for which it yearns (and fruitlessly reaches).” I have to make these mental substitutions whenever I read material written in the language of the Christian tradition. It does not always work. The old patterns are still painfully strong, a quarter century later.

Your average lay person is not going to do this much work to get past language with toxic associations. And that is part of the basis for expressing these ideas in other ways, even if modern language has not yet stood the test of time. Peanut butter is tasty and nourishing, but not if one’s allergic to it.

Oh, there is so much more to be said about this, but it’s past midnight and I don’t expect to have quiet internet writing time until some time this weekend, maybe. I really need to get done with my job, for my own sanity, but for my financial stability I need to work as far into the first term as I can manage, and that means figuring out a way to concentrate and read and write while Spouse is awake, puttering around the house, and talking to me at random intervals…

Drive by posting

There are so many interesting conversations I would like to continue this week, but there have not been enough hours.

Things I did accomplish:
• Spent Wednesday evening in a brainstorming meeting for Theme Based Ministry, which my home church is moving into next church year. Volunteered self for “resource circle” of people who will help the minister and worship team come up with material for each theme, once those have been decided.
• Spent Thursday evening in choir rehearsal, as always. We sang two Sundays in a row this month. Once more, in mid-June, and then we are done until after Labor Day.
• Spent an agonizing amount of time filling out my career assessment application. NOT the enormous bundle of paper they need to start the assessment, which is scheduled for this fall, just the application that I should have sent in two weeks ago.
• Wrote a short, nondescript little notice for the church newsletter as to my future intentions, in the hope that I have not missed the deadline and it will go out before Annual Meeting in June, so I can quit sitting on this thing.
• And I spent nearly all of Saturday catching up on lost sleep.

Now. Off to my day job, in the rain, and another week of juggling emails and commitments and trying, somehow, to fit all the good parts in.

What the hell is authenticity anyway?

One of the buzzwords that comes up over and over again in this thing I am doing is “authenticity.” I am struggling with it. I don’t know what it means – sure, okay, dictionary definition, fine. But that is not helping me figure out what it means to “live authentically” or be my “authentic self.” It’s one of those words that if you say it over and over again it ceases to mean anything, becoming just a string of sounds.

It’s like the old exhortation to “Just be yourself!” when I don’t know who that is.

There are days when I have no idea who I really am, stripped bare of all the layers of appearance and all the roles that I’ve taken on. Nearly forty years of living and I’ve still not figured that out; sometimes it seems that every time I’ve tried to stretch my wings I’ve hit an electric fence with them. Is it any wonder that I’m anxiously waiting to be contained this time? Stretching cautiously, one eye over my shoulder, wondering when I’m going to run into the invisible boundary of “Do what you want – just not that. Stop being that way. You know what I mean.”

I see myself in my cat – not the sassy one who divorced Spouse and adopted me, but the spooky Doofus Cat with big golden eyes who can go from Oh-yeah-oh-yeah rolling off the sofa kitty bliss to wide-eyed OH SHIT EVERYBODY PANIC in milliseconds. Sometimes I wish that cat would just relax.

Sometimes I wish I could just relax.

It comes down to a life of not ever having been quite one thing or the other; I have always been “from away” and I am well adapted to being in places where I do not quite fit. But something in my soul aches for that fitting, for the comfort of being able to unfold completely and discover what it is I look like, whole and complete, imperfections and quirks and all. I have struggled for a long time with perfectionism and the urge to hide anything of myself that did not measure up to expectations – mine or those I attributed to the people around me.

I think I need to learn how to not do that.

I read somewhere recently, and can’t find where to attribute it, a reminder to us seminarian types that we are not preparing to be a generic minister to everybody everywhere, but rather to be the minister we are each called to be and to serve as we are each individually called to serve. I have been tumbling this around in my head trying to figure out how it applies. Not that I am anywhere near needing to know the ultimate answer (as if there was a single one – I am starting to suspect it is just knowing which “thataway” to set course for in any given moment.) But it would be comforting to be able to articulate this direction more clearly. It would also be comfortable to have clearer direction in the first place – right now I am in one-step-in-front-of-another mode, feeling my way through the fog (which is better than the emotional and spiritual freefall part) but where I am going? I would love to be able to tell you, friend, but I am not sure myself.

I will go where I need to go and do what needs to be done when I get there. That is what I do.

Another drive-by

Sweet, blessed rain washing the pollen out of the sky. The humidity is not great for my breathing either, but I’ll take it.

Day job is eating my soul. Church is eating my time. Still haven’t mentioned seminary to mother-in-law, who is out of hospital and in a rehab center for now. Still lots of work to be done getting their lives back into order.

I really, really need to get off the Book of Face and engage in some long-form introspection. Wrote a couple of difficult but necessary emails this week; still have some processing to do there.

And, so help me, I’ve volunteered to lead service the week before fall convocation. Need to come up with a topic…

One thing at a time. Breathe. Just… freakin’ breathe…

Round and Round

It’s gone from mud season into full blown spring in the last few days. Everything is sprouting and growing and blooming. I haven’t been able to breathe for a week.

Spring is not my favorite season. I am trying to appreciate the warm sunshine and the vibrant new colors of life returning to the earth but mostly I am just trying to get enough oxygen to my brain to stay upright and functional without making too much noise coughing my lungs out.

Between being predictably seasonally ill, wrangling paperwork, holding down a day job, and the ongoing situation with my mother-in-law, I have not made a whole lot of time for introspection and reflection this week. Mother-in-law may be returning to Maine tomorrow from her stay in a Boston hospital. Or not. What we know keeps changing. She will not be headed directly home, but to a nursing facility for the interim recovery period. There is still a lot of work to do at the house and I have not been up to any of it.

Paperwork wrangling is an ongoing source of despair. I have just about made peace with the financial planning form, but the student loan request is taunting me. I do not want to take out loans the first year if I can possibly manage without doing so; I anticipate needing to borrow more heavily later into my degree program and I don’t want to front-load the debt. On the other hand, I haven’t been able to figure out how much trouble I am going to get into if I don’t submit the request promptly, now, and then decide halfway through the academic year that I should have borrowed more money.

I also made some inquiries about CPE programs for next summer, and reviewed the application form for that, and had another moment of existential angst, because of course they want an academic reference and I will not have started classes yet by the time I need to submit that application, but if I don’t submit the application early enough to get a space in the program that’s available at the right time then that throws a cascading failure into two years worth of coursework and this, this, friends and readers, is the down side of being a “Big Picture” person with long vision and vivid imagination. Because I can see, so clearly, all the ways that things can potentially fail and fall apart and turn into a catastrophic clusterfuck of epic proportions… and I am really, really weak at seeing the next discrete step toward avoiding disaster.

Work, of all things, is going surprisingly well. Have been discreetly working on exit strategy with supervisor, who is very sorry to see me going and also very supportive, which I suppose I could have expected (but I didn’t dare trust the latter, in light of the former and my own propensity for disaster modeling). I am planning to be there through at least most of September – longer if I can manage to balance my workloads, because I need the cash flow. But I also need silent reflection time and trying to do too much at once is not conducive to that.

I should have gone to bed an hour ago. I’m going to be dead exhausted tomorrow. But I’m already dead exhausted thanks to my promiscuous plant friends trying to pollinate my respiratory tract, and my immune system with all the hair-trigger paranoia of a mad third-world dictator threatening to nuke everyone in the vicinity for looking at him funny.

Breathe. Just…. breathe.

Faith and Finance

So I’m trying to do this financial paperwork, and it’s making me crazier than I was already.

Part of the problem is that I’m going from having an income and modest expenses, now, to having no income and an income’s worth of new school expenses on top of the expenses I already have. There’s the tuition and fees and books and such, which adds up to A Big Number; then there’s the indirect school and credentialing related expenses of travel and lodging to go to Chicago three times a year, and CPE program fees, and Career Assessment program fees, and extra gas and lodging to drive down to Boston a couple of times and to commute to whichever CPE site I get (there are two in my state, about the same distance from here.) It totals out to about my entire income right now.

But I’m not going to have that income when I stop working to give my full attention to school. Which I will need to do, if I’m going to get what I need to out of this course of study. And I still have my ordinary living expenses, which aren’t going away – certainly there are things I don’t need to buy, but there are things I do: fuel for ordinary errands, car insurance, prescription meds, toothpaste, socks, etc. The sundries and incidentals and five dollar entertainments that add up to money I will not have next year. (This has been one of the reasons I’ve started building my professional wardrobe this year, while I have money.)

Sure, I can probably get student loans. (I’m sitting with the form in hand, wondering which is worse: to eviscerate my investment fund, or to borrow the max available this early in the seminary process. Neither one really appeals.) I’ll send in the application form soon; just because I apply doesn’t mean I have to take any out this year. But if I don’t borrow (from the fed or the bank), and I don’t steal (from my own future security) then what shall I do? Beg? I’m considering doing some fundraising before this thing is over. But I am resisting that too – pride, maybe; a combination of fierce independence and underlying that, the sad fear and mistrust that if I ask for help, it will not be forthcoming. (I am trying to learn to know better than this, but it is hard doing and I am not even remotely close to there yet.)

Dear Universe, You called me to this work I am undertaking.
I still don’t understand why You want me, as fumbling and small as You know I am, but You called me and I said that I will go, and now I’m trying to figure out how to make that happen.
I am trying to trust that You will let me know how this is going to work when it needs to happen.
I am trying to trust that when I shrug and say “It’s just money,” that You will show me the way to make the scraggly ends meet.
I am trying to trust Your abundance, that when I have needs they will be met.
I am trying to step, O Holy Mystery, where I trust that you have put the stepping stones; or, if I miss, that You will teach me how to swim.

Introspection and the lack of it

I have not had too much time to put toward the spiritual life lately – the material life has been unusually busy and chaotic. Tonight there seems to be something of a lull in the storm and while it would be good to call it an early night and get some extra sleep, I’m feeling the need for some quiet reflective time.