Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

Thanksgiving The week before Thanksgiving was not a very good week for me. I had a touch of fever on Thursday and Friday, so I missed work, as well as a conference I was supposed to attend over the weekend. I was suffering from a mild sickness, the kind I would usually force myself to get through, but I was also deeply depressed, so I decided to let myself crash. I wasn’t sure at the time what had caused me to crash, so to speak, and this was driving me crazy. For the first day of my illness, most of which I spent it bed, I alternated between restless, nightmare-filled dreams and waking panic: why am I sad now, when I’ve been single/ alone/broken up since June? Why are the looming holidays depressing me? On Friday and Saturday, I gave in and just let myself be sad even though I didn’t understand it. I let myself cry to friends, feel sorry for myself, wonder about my sanity, and worry that I’d never get out of my funk. My friends helped me make the decision not to go to the conference; ...

Soon it will be Ohi Day (or maybe it is today?--I am forgetting whether Ohi Day is October 25 or 28!), the Greek holiday celebrating Metaxas' decision to say "Ohi," or "No," to Mussolini. According to the legend, Mussolini showed up at Metaxas' door one morning when Metaxas was still in his pajamas and said, "I'm going to take over Greece now." Ohi! Metaxas shouted, and that was the beginning of Greece's involvement in World War II. Of course it didn't really happen that way, but that's the version I heard as a child. I have spent much of the last three weeks saying no. No, don't leave Morris, please stay and fight, I said to the victims of a recent race-related hate crime in Morris (still unsolved). No, I won't stand for a bias incident reporting system that doesn't work, I told our administration (thankfully, it is in the process of being fixed). No, I won't stand for the administration's silence about the re...

Two questions I have been pondering lately, both of which came to me in a dream from my grandmother, who spoke in perfect English as she never had in life, pressing in against the cold, asking me: What is your life’s greatest regret? To what are you called to bear witness? Let me begin at the beginning, in September 2001, when the GLBT campus organization at the University of Minnesota, Morris, called Equality, nominated a gay man for Homecoming Queen. He wins in October of that same year; the student who is crowned king is also a gay man. Let me bear witness to what happens next. The letters to the paper, from farmers and ministers and out-of-town parents, saying hateful, horrible things: We are all going to hell. How dare we break such a sacred tradition. How dare we live in Morris. How dare we exist, period. Let me bear witness to the phone calls the student receives, hateful and threatening, and to the way he quietly leaves the campus and the town as a result, gives up on college a...

“And who knows that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” That is what Mordecai tells his cousin, Esther, who had been in his care as a daughter for many years before becoming queen. She has the chance to save the Jews, her people, and Mordecai tells her that perhaps she became queen exactly for this reason. I love this story, and was delighted this morning that it was my Bible reading for today. But it is also a dark story, a story of powerlessness and bigotry and hate. First, Queen Vashti is deposed simply because she does not follow her king’s/husband’s commands. Then, the king searches for a new wife from all the beautiful women in the land, and the book of Esther describes in great detail all the preparations each woman made before being presented to the king. Eventually, the king chose Esther, a Jewish girl with no parents. (Mordecai encouraged Esther to put in an application). Only he does not know her history. He knows only that she is the most beautiful of ...

I am getting over a week-long illness that literally knocked my breath out of me. It was by far the sickest I’ve ever been, with the exception of an operation I had in college, and it came about a week after almost all of my friends or their children had been sick, a week of providing dinners and babysitting and other kinds of help. Of course, as always, that help came back to me tenfold when it was my turn. I am back to work now, almost completely well, thanks in part at least to the love everybody showed me this past week. Finally feeling better enough to be back to something resembling a normal routine, I read the week’s Bible passages this morning. The gospel reading reminds us, among other things, that whoever welcomes a child into her life welcomes God. On that note, I have three stories that I will just leave here, not bothering to interpret them, except to say that they are wonderful testaments of God working in our lives through children: I am lucky to have many little people ...

So much has happened that I hardly know where to begin. I have a new home! It has been a blessing in more ways than I can count. First, purchasing it was an accomplishment, one I can’t pretend didn’t matter. For most of my 20s, I refused to take the responsibility of managing my money seriously, and I continue to pay for it now in my mid-30s. The fact that I was able to purchase a home, and that I am now completely in control of how I spend my money, has given me a new lease on life and put the end of my credit card and student loan debt in sight. More importantly, the weeks I spent cleaning, pulling out carpet, and painting, and the move itself, reminded me of how lucky I am. I was surrounded by friends at every moment, all of whom helped for countless hours. Their labor was, of course, important, but so was their company. It is never easy to end a relationship, to begin again, and I had all kinds of fears about what such a change would mean in our small town, but I have realized in t...

A couple years ago (I don’t actually remember when!), two people I love very much asked me to marry them. Apparently, they told me, I could become a “minister” in three minutes over the Internet. If I did this, I would be able to legally marry them and any other couple (that is, any couple with the right to legally marry in this country). They aren’t religious, at least not in the strict sense of the word, but they are spiritual in a thoughtful, humanistic, practical way that I admire. They wanted somebody they knew well to be the officiate. I was honored, and also a little terrified. As usual, worst-case scenarios sped through my mind. What if they wanted me to write the ceremony and found what I’d written terribly cheesy and meaningless? What if I ruined their wedding by having a panic attack right there in front of 100 or so of their closest relatives and friends? These fears were short-lived, but there were at least three other reasons that I waited a fairly long time before givin...

Anele Rubin’s first book of poetry, Trying to Speak, is the best book of poems I’ve read in over a year. Rubin’s poems are both perfectly crafted and deeply resonant with a range of emotions as varied as the notes the keys on a piano can generate. Lately it seems I find books that do one or the other, but not both—they are either carefully crafted but not deep enough, or full of a raw, real truth that is, unfortunately, not conveyed in language precise or stark enough to leave me breathless. I feel awed only when the poet is engaged with a question or idea that is sustained throughout a manuscript and explored courageously and meticulously and tenderly. Perhaps I am so drawn to the poems in Rubin’s book because they are about the struggle to be fully present in one’s own life, one of the topics I wanted to explore originally in this blog. This struggle is always present in the poems, and the poems’shapes reflect the content flawlessly. The narratives and images feel reticent, small, ca...

That Time of Year In the academic world, this is the time of year full of engagements, picnics and end-of-semester galas and graduation parties. It is a little dizzying, all this celebration, especially in a time of so much pain. The service-learning end-of-semester celebrations—including an art show at a coffee shop, a poster session and recital on campus, a poetry reading at the local nursing home, a picnic at my place, and a mural unveiling at the Salvation Army, in about that order (did I mention I’ve been busy?)—have been colored by the realization that we will be working with a much smaller budget and possibly fewer staff next year due to budget cuts and the looming end of a federal grant, and that two of our most dedicated student workers are leaving the program, one because she’s graduating, and the other because she’ll start student teaching in the fall. All week I have been saying goodbye to many students whom I care for deeply, who have helped build the service-l...

Tonight I went to church for the inaugural Academy Awards movie night sponsored by the social action committee. I thought the new event was a great idea—a chance to see some good movies (most of which I would never otherwise get a chance to see), and to have some good, and, I hoped, deep discussion about the issues the movie addressed or reflected. Tonight’s movie was Crash. There were about 20 people there, ranging in age from five to 80-something. I won’t even attempt to write an astute review of the movie itself. I have a terrible memory, and I need to see a movie at least three times before I feel like I’ve really taken it in—and while this is also true for the things I read, I seem to be especially flawed at following a plot on screen. I was excited nevertheless to talk about the movie afterwards, to see what a movie about race relations in L.A. might say to a bunch of liberal Christians living in West Central Minnesota. After the movie, as usual, everyone was reluctant to talk....

I decided I would read each of the Greek Orthodox Holy Week services this year in place of my morning meditation. This morning, I read the Monday night service, which centered around the parable of the 10 virgins who wait for the bridegroom to show up to take them to the wedding feast. Half of them run out of oil while waiting, and of course the bridegroom comes at exactly the moment when they have gone looking for more oil. Because they aren’t there when he arrives, they are locked out of the wedding feast. The parable is part Boy Scout motto, part Mean Girls . (Did I mention that when the “unprepared” virgins ask the other ones to share some of their oil, they are refused?) It’s always been more than a little troubling. It reaffirms already problematic stereotypes about women. It positions God as a man-to-be-desired, one who takes his time, who deserves to be waited for, one with the power to turn people away. In the story, there are no second chances, no rewards for the women who to...