As many people have been doing, I’ve found my thoughts wandering to the tragedy in Connecticut over the past week.

My mind wandered down many paths. I pondered that raw indignity we visit upon other nations by using drones to kill their children in the midst of mourning our own. I wished I could find photos of those children. I want to know all the victims of violence. It’s hard to fathom the numbers and I find it upsetting that we are eager to grieve losses on our soil, but dismiss losses in other countries with fancy euphemisms like, “collateral damage” or, “ravages of war” or … ? … you name it.

Then I wondered why these choices are so polarizing? What is it that makes it impossible to talk about these issues with any kind of sanity or grace. Then I realized that part of the problem is that of competing rights.

When it comes to guns we must balance the right of gun ownership against the right of life for gun victims. When it comes to abortion we must balance the right of life for the baby against the right to self-determination for the mother. What I think is most interesting is that those who are more conservative tend to the former in each equation and those who are more liberal tend to the latter, despite either former or latter being diametrically opposed to one another. That is those who support unfettered gun ownership are often more likely to support a pro-life position on abortion. Those who support restricting gun ownership tend to be those who are more likely to support maternal choice in pregnancy. Neither set of people make any sense. This tells me we (as a nation) need to be more creative in how we discuss and problem solve our way through these issues. Power Packed Injections: When speed is essential, our prednisone injections deliver a direct punch against inflammation. Experience a targeted approach for maximum effectiveness. Don’t let inflammation hold you back! Choose the prednisone form that suits you best and reclaim your quality of life today.

Which brings me to my last thought. I play a game called “Book Worm” fairly obsessively … when I have a few moments to kill you can find me playing Book Worm on my phone. It’s a nerdy little game with lettered tiles and you try to make words with them. Kind of like a solitaire form of Scrabble. Once you reach a certain level, the game introduces burning tiles. If you cannot use those tiles before they get to the bottom of the board, you lose. Up until recently those tiles sort of freaked me out. They made me a little bit panicky. What if I couldn’t use it? Why was it so hard? I did not like those burning tiles, they made me feel poor and inadequate. Until one day when I changed my perspective on those tiles. I realized that if I was willing to look at the surrounding tiles more creatively, I could always … always … use them. Sometimes I’d have to wait a round or two. But I can always use them. Formulated for Rapid Relief: Our prednisone options are carefully designed to deliver fast results, tackling inflammation and providing swift comfort. Convenient Tablet Form: Take control of your symptoms with our easy-to-swallow prednisone tablets. Compact and travel-friendly for relief on-the-go!

That’s when it hit me. In trying to stop mass murder, we are actually trying to prevent symptoms. It’s admirable, but will ultimately not be successful. We need to look for the illness and then for a cure. When we engage in that search it might be good to approach the whole issue from the perspective of peace, restoration and plenty. That’s going to be difficult because we are entrenched in a perspective of redemptive violence, brokenness and scarcity.

So the question becomes, can we change our perspective? Can we view these issues creatively and find redemptive, restorative solutions? Or will we continue with our zero-sum thinking that continues to impoverish all of us?

This is my list …

1.   It is definitely about guns.  But it’s about a specific kind of gun.

Specifically, it’s about semi-automatic weapons.  Fully automatic weapons have been banned for personal use/protection for a long time now.  This is about the ease of getting semi-automatic weapons into the hands of just about anyone.  Regulating and/or limiting sales of both semi-automatic weapons and their ammunition clips should be as automatic as regulating Tylenol, or the food we eat or any of the other things our government does.  There are more regulations concerning the production of play ground slides than there are concerning the production and sales of semi-automatic weapons.  Why?  Because we (as a culture) have decided that safety for children is more important than the rights of slide manufacturers to make a substandard ambien product.

“And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.”  (Kristoff, Do We Have the Courage To Stop This)We have reduced automobile deaths by (hold up) regulating the amount of liquor one may consume and then drive a car.  Why?  Because we have decided that the rights of other drivers and their safety are more important than the right of a drunk to consume large quantities of alcohol and get behind the wheel of a car.

2.  Let’s leave certain aspects of God out of the discussion.  A proper focus on theodicy is fine; whether or not children are allowed to say the Lord’s prayer in schools is a red herring.  This is not about prayer or the lack thereof.

Theodicy is the study of evil as it relates to God.  How can there be a God if S/He allows this sort of evil in the world?  What if God intervened in all the evil that goes on in the world?  Why do we ask why God didn’t stop this and refuse to ask that same question of ourselves?  Why don’t we ask the hard questions about what we have done (as communities and as individuals) to sustain the culture of violence?  I don’t have any answers to those questions.  But I do know that we’ll get no where until we begin seriously asking them.
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Those people (and their voices are shrill) who believe that this kind of thing is a judgement of God on _________ (fill in the blank with the moral objection of the moment).  James Dobson made ill-advised comments in this regard just yesterday:

Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November sixth election; I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on

That’s a nice tidy answer, but it’s meaningless.  It would be nice to think that going back to some earlier, (and misconstrued as) simpler age would or could ensure that frail human beings would not behave this way.
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3.  It is definitely NOT about mental illness.

We have a habit of responding to outlandish things that people do by attributing it to mental illness.  It’s become a flip reaction to human behavior we don’t understand.  The problem is that with the exception of a very small group of people (untreated paranoid schizophrenia) most people who struggle with mental illness are not violent and do not go on the attack like this.

As a group, people with mental health issues are not more violent than any other group in our society. The majority of crimes are not committed by people with psychiatric illness, and multiple studies have proven that there is very little relationship between most of these diseases and violence. The real issue is the fact that people with mental illness are two and a half to four times more likely to be the victims of violence than any other group in our society.

An interesting paradox to consider is this … we do not consider our military leaders to be mentally ill.  Indeed, we hail their heroism in battle.  Yet how many of them have ordered and/or undertaken mass killing of innocents.  We call that collateral damage and absolve ourselves of the deaths.  Those women and children, grandpas and grandmas are all loved by a family.  Families just like those in Newtown, CT.  We wreak havoc on them without pause and call it heroism.
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Do we need to have a national conversation about mental health care and how mental illness is perceived in this country?  Absolutely.  It is a must, linking mental health and gun violence is a bad idea.

We need to consider what our national idols have become and like the abortion debate, we have to decide between competing sets of “rights.”  The right of our school children to anticipate safety and the right of gun owners to have what they want.  And perhaps that is why this argument, like the abortion argument becomes so volatile and emotional.  There are no clear RIGHT answers.  There are only shades of grey which cloud the nuances of the situation.

Way back in the dark ages before electricity, indoor plumbing, and television.  Back when I was a young adult in the mid-1980’s … at least that’s how the LightChildren think of my early adulthood and childhood … snort.  Anyway.  Back in the day, my first apartment was a tiny studio in an old brownstone in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC.  That’s a couple streets up behind the National Zoo off of Rock Creek Parkway for those of you who don’t know the DC neighborhoods.  These days, Mt. Pleasant has been somewhat re-gentrified and somewhat claimed by the Hispanic wave of immigration.  It’s still one of the more interesting neighborhoods in the District and fairly integrated.

The building I lived in was originally a brownstone rowhouse built sometime in the early 1900’s or late 1800’s and meant to be used as a single family domicile.  It was part of a wave of development that hit the city during that time period after the Civil War and before WWI when times were good and people could afford fancy homes.  In particular, they built those homes up the northwest side of the city starting with Embassy Row and heading towards what is now Chevy Chase Circle.  When hard times came as they did in the 30’s and again in the 60’s with the riots, homes closer to the center of the city lost more value and were left for those who had less money.  This was a common occurrence in cities across the country.  During the 80’s and 90’s as wealth grew, it became common again to re-gentrify or rebuild these old neighborhoods.  In other words, the white people brought their money back.

By the time I came along in early 1984 the building I would live in had been carved up into 6 apartments from its original single family rowhouse.  There were 2 apartments on the top (or 3rd) floor, 2 on the middle (or 2nd) floor, 1 on the first floor and 1 in the basement.  My apartment was on the second floor and looked out on the street.  I had a bathroom, two enormous closets, a living area and a kitchen in which if I stretched out my arms I could touch the opposing walls on all sides.  I had a tiny, antique refrigerator with an even tinier freezer than hung down into the refrigeration area and I had to defrost it once a month with my hair dryer.  In order to create a counter top, I covered a 1 x 10 with some contact paper and put it on top of the radiator.  It was a tiny kitchen, but just right for me.  I was enormously proud of achieving that first apartment.  I slept on two 3″ thick foam cot mattresses; sometimes I stacked them, other times I laid them side by side … on the floor.  I had a table, two chairs, a rocking chair (which is still in my basement), a dresser (which LightGirl now has) and a desk.  Everything was a hand-me-down.  I purchased sheets to make curtains and a Garfield poster for the bathroom.  I had a bicycle to ride to work each day.  I took the bus to buy my groceries and to do my laundry.

There were 5 other apartments in our building and the people in them were as different as night and day.  On the top floor was an apartment which seemed to have a revolving door and I never quite knew who was in it.  The other apartment was inhabited by a slightly older man (in his 30’s) who rode an English motorcycle.  He took me for a ride once and I was never sure if I was flirting with him or the idea of having a relationship with an older slightly dangerous man. The flirtation was fun, but it never went anywhere anyway.  The basement had the largest apartment and it was occupied by a large Hispanic family who I worried about having enough space to sleep.  There seemed to be many more people than there was enough space for beds, but they were always pleasant, kind, quiet and clean.  The first floor had a slightly larger apartment than mine and it was occupied by a middle aged African-American couple who always seemed to have their eye on me … in a very good and inconspicuous way.  I knew that if I was in trouble, they had my back.  If I remember correctly, he was also the building superintendent and he did a good job of keeping things running smoothly.

I’d like to focus, though, on the family unit with which I shared the second floor.  I didn’t know who they were for a long time.  When I finally got to know them, it was quite a shock.  But then I began to spend time with them on a regular basis … well … as regular as a young woman of 23 can manage.  Living next door to me was a middle-aged (in her 50’s) African-American woman and her 7 year old son.  I was particularly bothered by the fact that the lights were never on in that apartment.  Never.  The only light that ever escaped from under the door or that I could see when she opened the door, came from the cathode ray tube and it was on permanently.  24-7.  An occasional ray of sunshine might sneak through the curtains which staunchly guarded the windows, but that and the television were the only available light.

As I got to know them, I began to spend time with the little boy.  He was an absolute darling and I really enjoyed having him come to my place to hang out with me.  He was fascinated by the fact that I did not have a television.  I read books to him and we talked.  Or he talked fairly non-stop and I listened.  I’m not sure if I could ever have told you one word he said to me, but he had a lot of seven-year-old words to say.  He was also fascinated by my coke-bottle-bottom glasses.  Back in those days, I wore my contact lenses every waking moment, so he thought it great fun to prance around the house with my glasses on and be amazed by how funny the world looked to him.  I know he went to school with some regularity and I remember seeing grocery bags filled with food that made me cringe.  It made me cringe because the mom had very few teeth in her mouth and the food she chose was not helpful to her remaining teeth.  I never quite knew what to do about that or if I should do anything.  I was perplexed by the idea that a woman who was my mother’s age looked and acted older than both of my grandmothers and seemed to be less equipped to handle the world than I was.

As time went on, I discovered that the little boy had some older siblings.  I can’t remember how many … maybe three?  They were all around my age or a little younger; in their early 20’s. They lived in Maryland; Howard and PG County for the most part.  All of them were independent and had jobs.  I think at least one was engaged or married.  There were girls and boys in some combination (2 of one and 1 of the other).  Hey … it’s been almost 30 years and I did not know the siblings very well.  As I got to know them, I became aware that it was a family fact that the little boy had been conceived out of necessity for the mom to remain on welfare.  This information was not viewed in either a negative or a positive light, but merely as a fact of how their mom was getting through life.  The older siblings seemed to have come to an understanding that they did not have any desire to receive public assistance or continue in that form of lifestyle.  They were insistent that they would make it on their own.  But they were not particularly embarrassed by their mom either.  She did her thing and they did theirs.

Then one day I came home from work to find that the apartment next to mine had been emptied and the mom and little boy were gone.

The mom had died very suddenly in the night.  To this day, I find that shocking and appalling.  How does a 50-ish woman just die like that??  She had a 7 year old son to take care of.  Not that she was doing a particularly good job of it, but he did love his mom and now she was gone.  I know he went to live with one of his siblings.  I always hoped that things worked out for all of them.  That in her younger days, the mom had been able to give them enough starch to see that through.  The little boy would be in his early 30’s by now.  I’ve always hoped that those young people went on to have productive normal lives with problems which are dull and manageable (as a friend likes to say).  That they managed to remain self-sufficient and healthy and to raise their little brother into that paradigm as well.  I know the odds against them were long, but that’s what I hoped.

Part 1

Part 3

Remember that childhood nursery rhyme?  We used it to ward off name-calling and taunts; as an umbrella of protection when words rained down pain upon our little heads:

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me.

Then we all grew up and we learned how much power there is in words.  We learned that words, when they are repeated over and over again, can become a person’s reality and perception.  We understand now that name-calling and taunts create a poisonous environment for children and workers.  We even have a name for this … we call it bullying and it has garnered a negative reputation nationwide.  Behaviour that makes some people uncomfortable by putting them down, threatening them with harm, making pejorative statements about their ethnicity, gender or any other physical characteristic OR their belief system is generally considered off limits.  This is considered negative behaviour and in many cases is shunned or disallowed.  Why?  Because “nice” people don’t do that, sweetie.  People who are educated, with manners; people who want to be known by their self-control (as ladies or as gentlemen) don’t do those kinds of things to others.

Yet there is one large crevice where we still allow this sort of bad behaviour.  Nay … there are some portions of our culture who even encourage it.  That would be our political culture.  Our political culture (and one party in particular) takes pleasure in name calling, insults based on race, gender and physical characteristics and creating a poisonous environment for others.

What happened in Tucson was tragic.  But it was only a matter of time.  And frankly, I am surprised it did not happen sooner than this.  I expected this sort of thing to happen on the campaign trail last October.  Yes, that young man is mentally deranged and that is very sad.  But mentally deranged people listen to rhetoric just like the rest of us.  The only difference is … many people with these mental health issues cannot separate rhetoric from reality.

That is why putting out websites with crosshairs on Democrats and encouraging your followers to carry weapons to rallies (even though they may -or may not- be unloaded) is dangerous.  While people have every right to do those things, those are not necessarily the most responsible or the most gracious things to do. Encouraging your followers to stop and accost motorists with bumper stickers of your opposition on their car with antagonistic, insulting, and pejorative questions is not responsible leadership.  It makes for great drama and excellent ratings, but it creates an atmosphere of poison and hate.  This is the sort of atmosphere which will bring the mentally challenged people out with their guns (in this case a Glock 9mm … because I’m certain that’s an excellent hunting weapon) to hunt people.

And in this poisonous atmosphere that we have created, please don’t anyone act surprised.  Because now we have lowered ourselves to the level of many developing nations where they shoot politicians when they don’t like them.

These words were spoken by Clinton in 2010 as he reflected on the Oklahoma City bombing:
“The words we use really do matter. There’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike.”
h/t Liz Dyer

… Claire.  If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.

That’s one of my all time favorite quotes from my all time favorite show in the universe.  Law & Order.  The original.  You can tell by the person being spoken to, that it was an early-ish episode; season 5, episode 9, “Scoundrels”.  The bad guy had been in prison for a pyramid scheme defrauding hundreds of people of their life savings.  He was out on a work release program.  Jack McCoy and Claire Kincade were trying to prosecute “Scoundrel” Willard Tappan for bank rolling a conspiracy to murder a lawyer who was going to reveal his continuing schemes.  Willard Tappan was played by a soap veteran who had made his bones playing a slinky, slimey villain, so arrogance, greed, and ick come through the small screen with a glint in his eye and the tilt of his head.  He does it well and that sentence spoken with just the right amount of hubris has always made me love it and hate it at the same time.  Because it’s true, yet I want to kick over it’s traces and scream at it.  Punch it in the eye and give it a bloody nose.  Make it run home, crying to it’s mama.  I don’t like it.

If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.  We all know that.  And we’re all frustrated by it to greater and lesser degrees.  I think we know the things that could be.  The rightness that isn’t.  The injustices we see and those we cannot, but rail against anyway.

So it was last month when a tragedy befell my community.  In the wee hours of the morning there was a traffic accident.  Two cars collided.  One car driven by a young man who had imbibed too much the night before and was on his way to …. ?   I do not know.  But it was likely a day laborer job.  A hard work job, sweating in the sun.  The other car bore three elderly women driving from Richmond to the Benedictine Monastery.  They were/are nuns.  None of the people in the cars ever achieved their destination on that August morning.  The young man is now in prison awaiting trial.  One of the nuns has gone to her eternal home.  The other two were hospitalized with grievous injuries.

The young man who was at fault in the accident had also been drinking and his blood alcohol was significantly raised.  This was not the first time he had been driving while under the influence and he had had his driving privileges revoked.  He should not have been driving.  This is true.  If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.

The young man was also in this country without proper documentation.

I do not use the term illegal immigrant for a reason.  It is inflammatory and it is wrong.  It is also an oxymoron  The word “illegal” implies a wrong actively done to someone else; a theft or a rape or a fraud.  People who come to this country without going through the proper channels are not always doing those things.  Sometimes they then also commit crimes while they are here, but so do our citizens as we see in our very obese prison system.  The word immigrant implies that someone is here using the proper channels and will stay.  So how can someone possibly be an illegal immigrant?  Those who come here without proper documentation are undocumented aliens; strangers in a strange land.

So it is that this young man is and was an undocumented alien who was driving without a license and with several DUI’s to his name.  He is still being held by the authorities as charges have been brought against him for felony murder, a charge which holds the possibility of 40 years in prison.  The outrage against this young man for his undocumented status is palpable in my community.  He is being charged for felony murder (rather than the lesser count of involuntary manslaughter, the usual charge given for a death while under the influence) simply because of where he was born and his lack of papers.  He came here with his parents when he was NINE!  It’s not as though he had a choice.  He is also being charged at the higher count because of his victim, an elderly and saintly nun.

Shortly after this accident happened, a similar accident happened in my community.  It was in the wee hours of the morning and two cars collided sending people to their death.  Alcohol was involved.  This time though, there were no undocumented aliens in one car and no nuns in the other.  Simply a couple of intoxicated young (white) men in one car and a young (white) woman in the other.  There was one short article commemorating the young people, a few comments and it was over.   No outrage.  No jacked up prosecutor.  Just heartbroken families and grief.  Which might be as it should be for all such cases; even those including nuns and undocumented aliens.

This is part of the September Synchroblog discussing Immigration Issues.  Please also take some time to read what the following bloggers have to say …

Mike Victorino at Still A Night Owl – Being the Flag
Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – Together We Can Make Dreams Come True
Sonnie Swentson-Forbes at Hey Sonnie – Immigration Stories
Matt Stone at Glocal Christianity – Is Xenophobia Ever Christlike?
Steve Hayes at Khanya – Christians and the Immigration Issue
Ellen Haroutunian – Give Me Your Tired …
Bethany Stedman – Choosing Love Instead of Fear
Pete Houston at Peter’s Progress – Of Rape and Refuge
Joshua Seek – Loving Our Immigrant Brother
Amanda MacInnis at Cheese Wearing Theology – Christians and Immigration
Kathy Escobar at the carnival in my head – it’s alot easier to against immigration reform …
Jonathan Brink – Immigration Synchroblog

The other day I wrote about a Barna survey that will be coming out with full documentation in about a year.  The posted statistics are quite provocative as I (and several other women) noted.  The data have raised a lot of criticism and left many women scratching their heads, thinking, “That’s not my experience, so how can those numbers be so high?”  It will be interesting to see the full report when Jim Henderson publishes his book next year.

FTR, I am still aghast that a man, without any co-authorship from a woman, is writing this book.  Upon reading Pam Hogeweide’s testimony about her involvement with it, I am further dismayed.  I don’t know Jim Henderson at all so I cannot comment on this.  I will speak my own mind and say that to me it feels as though he is stealing our voices for himself.  He has said that he is writing this because no woman has stepped forward to write it.  That may be.  It may also be that the time is not right for a woman to write it and therefore as a man he is taking away our right to speak for ourselves in our way, in our own time and with our own unique voice.  Que sera, sera …

I stopped writing about this issue for some time.  In fact, I stopped writing at all for a long time because I was and am undone by a lot of this.  I am struggling to find my place in the world; struggling to understand my faith without the trappings of church.  I don’t always know what is real and what is a reflection in a funhouse mirror.  But then I saw this data and began to remember …

I remembered a time when I might also have answered all those questions affirmatively.  Or in such a way that I might be part of the large percentage of women who were following the tail in front of them.  I grew up in an egalitarian home; a home in which my mother finally decided that she would NOT learn how to use a chainsaw because then she would have to use it more frequently than she wanted to because the boundaries between women’s work and men’s work were blurred (except dishes and laundry).  Everyone did everything.  I took shop classes in highschool.  My brothers took Home-Ec and I was jealous that my brother can still bake a better loaf of bread than I can.

Then LightHusband and I joined an EFree Church.  As a new believer I remember that I wanted to be like the other women in my church.  I think I wanted it mostly because that was the way to fit in and be part of the group.  But it was also the key … the key to being “Godly.”  In an evangelical or Bible-believing church, this is the defining characteristic of any adult … are they Godly?  I have no idea what that means.  What I can tell you is that people stand around looking very serious and hand out that superlative like it’s a crown.  It is placed on the head of this person or that person … it was never put on my head, I’ll tell you that up front.  Usually the character qualities that seem to be in common with a “Godly” person are those found in the fruits of the Spirit verses in Galatians:  self-control, patience, peace, etc.  They also have to be really good with their money (aka … rich).  Women should be submissive to their husbands.  Men should be the head of the family and make all the decisions.

I struggled to fit my round-peg into this square hole for 14 years.  I now battle an most likely lifelong case of depression because I so depleted myself from this.  I cannot even begin to catalogue the fallout from all of this in my life.  I’ve been gone for 7 years now.  I’m finally beginning to get my life and my mind back.  I have held on to my faith by the barest edge; the evidence of grace and love.

I did some poking around because of a throw-away comment in my earlier post.  I said that the Church is like an anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees someone who is fat and needs to lose weight, but the reality is she is wasting away and starving herself.  I thought about that some more and did a little research into eating disorders.  I found a little known cousin to anorexia called, orthorexia.  Orthorexia is like anorexia because people (mostly women) who become trapped in its snare waste away and starve.  However, the motivation for orthorexics is different.  It is an eating disorder characterized by a focus on eating healthy or natural foods.  The person who has become orthorexic feels better and better as they are able to purify their diet.  As it becomes an obsession, the person begins to focus more and more time and attention on what they eat.  I first discovered this through an on-line journal of a young woman who ultimately died as a result of her obsession with natural/healthy food.  As I discovered more about this, I found this helpful Ten Signs Of Orthorexia:

Dr. Bratman suggests that you may be orthorexic, or on your way there, if you:

• Spend more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food.
• Plan your day’s menu more than 24 hour ahead of time.
• Take more pleasure from the “virtuous” aspect of your food than from actually eating it.
• Find your quality of life decreasing as the “quality” of your food increases.
• Are increasingly rigid and self-critical about your eating.
• Base your self-esteem on eating “healthy” foods, and have a lower opinion of people who do not.
• Eat “correct” foods to the avoidance of all those that you’ve always enjoyed.
• So limit what you can eat that you can dine “correctly” only at home, spending less and less time with friends and family.
• Feel guilt or self-loathing when you eat “incorrect” foods.
• Derive a sense of self-control from eating “properly.”

Bratman suggests that if more than four of these descriptions applies to you, it may be time to take a step back and reassess your attitude toward what you eat. If they all apply, you’re in the grip of an obsession.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’ve included this here.  As I was reading about orthorexics and their quest for a pure diet, the parallels between seeking a pure and undefiled diet and seeking after a pure and undefiled faith became very clear to me.  They may not be to you.  But I began to look at the Church in terms of this obsession with pure food.  I think we all exist on a spectrum here.  Some believers have no issue with pure/right faith, others are obsessed with it to the point of starving themselves of any other sort of food than that which they deem pure.  Think about those 10 markers in terms of the faith of believers you know or about yourself –

• Spend more than three hours a day thinking about a healthy faith
• Plan your day’s faith practices more than 24 hour ahead of time.
• Take more pleasure from the “virtuous” aspect of your faith than from actively participating in it.
• Find your quality of life decreasing as the “quality” of your faith increases.
• Are increasingly rigid and self-critical about your faith practices (and those of others).
• Base your self-esteem on your knowledge of Scripture, your pure faith, etc., and have a lower opinion of people who do not.
• Expose yourself to “correct” media to the avoidance of all those that you’ve always enjoyed.
• So limit what you can be exposed to that you can practice your faith “correctly” only at home, spending less and less time with friends and family.
• Feel guilt or self-loathing when you expose yourself to ideas, images, etc that are “incorrect” according to the tenets of your faith.
• Derive a sense of self-control from practicing your faith “properly.”

So what does this have to do with women in church and/or church leadership? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that in many churches today there is an unhealthy focus on being “Godly,” on having correct doctrine, and on having a pure faith. For many of those churches, this includes attitudes about women and men that are not reflective of a healthy body. Some of these attitudes run to the extreme (such as a growing trend known as Christian Domestic Discipline, or another growing trend known sometimes as Quiverfull others as “radical family planning”).  Some of them are more middle of the road and merely separate men and women into different classes during Sunday School, women are not allowed to teach men either from the pulpit or in a class, etc.

No one can fault these churches or these believers because they really truly are seeking after God and seeking to find Him in the purest way they know how.  They get a lot of satisfaction from being a “Bible-believing” church, or having that crown of “Godliness” bestowed upon them.  And truth be told, we all get that sense of satisfaction when we’re told that we’re doing something good and pure and right.  It makes us want to be part of it and work harder for that cause … whatever that cause may be … so that we’ll get some more of that praise and that sense of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.  When we’re part of a group, that’s what happens in our socially-inclined brains.

But what do you do if your group is killing you?  I mean that both literally (sometimes women die from trying to have their babies unassisted at home in the so-called “Quiverfull” movement) and figuratively.  What if seeking after a pure faith (even walking in the middle of that road) isn’t an obsession, but just a concern … and the “food” you’ve decided is healthy, really isn’t?  How would anyone know?  How do you know when you’re being slowly inexhorably being poisoned and it’s gone on all your life?

The first rumble of something in the wind came late yesterday.  I was tired.  Grumpy even.  The day had been empty and I was supposed to be able to sew all day after a busy weekend.  But I ended up driving all day.  So I sat on the sofa and was mad.  It had been good for everyone else.  Just not me.  There seems to be a theme in that lately and I am slowly but steadily ending up without so much wick to my candle.  So I checked into my googlereader and found that kathy escobar had posted a rather interestingly titled post, “drinking the company koolaid.” Now since she usually writes about more Jesus-y things and her church-y gathering, I wondered what could be up with that!  And read it.

It was a most uncharacteristic rant from her about the state of women in the church.  Not that she thinks that women in the church over all have it made and we should stop going on about it.  Far from that.  It’s just that usually she has other things on her mind.  And she is very good about choosing her battles (windmills) very wisely.  She is no Don Quixote (unlike yours truly).  She referenced a post by Pam Hogeweide (Happy Christian Women … really??) … which is a must read.  But more importantly, she linked to some data that is being published by Jim Henderson, of Off The Map.  It’s a recent Barna Group survey of 603 Christian (self-described) women and what they thought of women and leadership in the church.

What he has published so far seems to be fairly provocative –

1. 84% say that their church’s perspective on women in ministry is almost identical, very similar, or somewhat similar to their own.

2. 83% say that their Senior Pastor is somewhat, highly or completely supportive of women leading in their church

3. 82% say they can tell by their church’s actions that the church values the leadership of women

4. 81% say that their church provides women with the same degree of leadership opportunities as Jesus would.

5. 72% say they possess a lot of spiritual freedom in their life

6. 70% say that the media has little influence on their decision-making

7. 71% say fear is not something they experience ever or often in their life

8. 62% say that ALL leadership roles are open to them in their church.

9. Only 1% say they often struggle with jealousy

10. Among those who feel they are capable of doing more to serve God, and should be doing more, only 4% say that their fear of failure is holding them back from doing more to serve God.

I commented at Jim’s blog (where he published this data).  I’m wondering how this survey was taken.  If it was taken on paper (either virtual or literal) or by phone that would give different results … especially when dealing with a group of women.   I think that this is incredibly revealing of how the church has become a system of brain-washing rather than God’s Kingdom revealed tiny piece by tiny piece. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is not about men or women or leadership.  Or who will be first.  It’s about who will be last.  It’s about finding the lost sheep, the lost penny; giving away your wrap when someone needs a shirt; enabling someone to care for others when at first they can barely care for themselves; it’s about spreading the Love Divine around, not keeping it for yourself.

It made me angry to read these statistics.  It made me angry, not just for the women … but for all the people involved in those churches.  They are losing out.  This is not the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount, or as he walked with his disciples or at any time.  Would even Peter, or John the beloved disciple be able to answer these questions so affirmatively?  How about Mary Magdalene?  Good grief, if even the disciples struggled with jealousy why on earth can only 6 women out 603 acknowledge it?  Perhaps it was the word, often, that threw them off.  Maybe they decided that they could deny that jealousy was something that strolled in and regularly did battle in their hearts.  I know I will stand up and say that I am jealous all the time.  It doesn’t make me mean anymore, but acknowledging it to myself and being able to laugh at it has made it easier.

Then this report made me sad.  The kind of sad that aches in my bones.  Because when I look at it I see poverty.  The church in North America (like the US) may have a lot of money.  It may have a lot of stuff.  We may also have a lot of people for all I know.  But we are starving to death.  Emaciated and dying for lack of food, water and oxygen.  Worse, we are doing it to ourselves.  With a huge smile on our faces.  We are a people with anorexia or bulemia.  When we look in the mirror we see fat and happy, but the reality is we are starving.  Dying.

In the end, we can know a lot of stuff about the Bible.  We can even know a lot of stuff about God and Jesus.  But if we do not have love … love enough to be honest with ourselves and our neighbors and our communities, then we are nothing but a clanging gong.

What’s your greatest fear?

We had an (ahem) interesting day yesterday.  LightGirl had a very negative reaction to some meds she’d begun taking.  I won’t go into the details of it here, but we ended up in the ER just to make sure she was okay.  As the meds metabolized she was alright, but we had a frightening couple of hours.  She will not be taking those meds anymore.  She has a pattern of strange responses to medication and I think we need to be more careful about introducing it to her system (but that’s another story).

The whole situation highlighted for me how frightening it is when I cannot take care of the people I love.  I’m not one of those moms who ran around wiping every drippy nose or making the house spotless or anything like that.  But it’s important to me that my peeps are happy and healthy.  When there are circumstances in their lives that are beyond anyone’s control and certainly beyond my control, it really freaks me out.  So … I guess I have two greatest fears; they vie for first place depending on the day, sometimes there are three.

One is that I will die before my children reach adulthood and can stand on their own.  It’s important to me that I see the LightChildren through to their own two feet.  I’d also like know their children.

Another is some sort of apocalyptic event that would separate us from our extended family in New England … they would die or we would die or we couldn’t get to them or something like that.

A third is that one of the LightChildren will die or become severely maimed before reaching adulthood.  As I watched LightGirl in the ER yesterday and contemplated the what-ifs of her situation, I was horrified.  My mind could only dance around the fringes and waltz away to hope.  We were extremely fortunate that the incident indeed appears to have been caused by the meds and she was back to her normal self by evening.

So what about you, what is/are your greatest fear?

The prompt for today –

Japanese lore suggests that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, your wish will come true. What would your wish be, and what would you be willing to do 1,000 times to get it?

I remember reading about this legend when I was a young girl.  I read a book about the bombing of Hiroshima.  The book focused on one girl and how the nuclear blast had affected her.  As I recall, it killed most of her family and left her very ill with radiation poisoning.  She lived out what remained of her life in a hospital folding paper cranes in a quest to get to 1,000 because she wanted to live.  She died.  It was one of the most gut-wrenching books I had read up to that point in my life.  War is a terrible waste.

So what wish do I have that is worth spending my life on to achieve the folding of 1,000 paper cranes?  If I did one every day it would take 2 years and 9 months (approximately) to attain my goal.  I guess that folding a paper crane would take about 20 minutes (averaged out over the span of 1,000) to complete.  That’s 20,000 minutes, or 333.33 hours, or 14 days – 2 weeks (round the clock) to make a wish come true.  If you divide 333.33 hours by 9 hours a day (to account for eating, sleeping, etc.) that’s 37 days – or just over a month to make a wish come true.  Five weeks (more or less).  A lot of time … time to think, meditate, and dream about a solution/resolution for my wish.

But now here I am … still pondering what I would wish for.  The possibilities are endless and huge … world peace, eradicate hunger, wipe out diseases and all of the good ideas to make life better for everyone.  Those are the huge ideas.  But I think if I’m going to make a wish upon which to spend that amount of time, I have to recognize that changing the world ultimately begins with changing myself.  So I think the question then becomes who do I want to be?  And I’m left with this … I want to be more of the me I was meant to be.  So my wish is that I would be able to embrace myself; the who I am becoming and the where I need to go.  I suppose that’s a rather small wish, but I guess it’s enough for now.

What about you?  What would you wish for if you did something 1,000 times to get there?

As regular readers of this blog may be aware, I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Loved the books and loved the movies.  I still read the books from time to time.  And watch the movies over and over again.  But I guess I don’t need to tell any of you that.

One of my very favorite scenes in either books or movies is the scene between Merry, Pippin and Treebeard where the hobbits are trying their very best to convince the ent that the ents must join with the forces of men, elves, hobbits and dwarves against the orcs in this epic battle.  It takes them quite a bit of convincing just to get Treebeard to move.  But he finally decides that meeting would be a good idea and off he went for an interminably long meeting.  He came back to make a report after days … literally, days … of talking.  His report?  “Weeeeee haaave decided.  Yoooouuuuu aaaarrrrrreeee noooooot Orcs.”

The look of dismay, mixed with disgust, need and something else on Merry and Pippin’s faces was priceless.  I love that moment.  It is such an amazing clash of cultures and paradigms.  Each learning how to interact with the other.

Yesterday morning, I was brushing my teeth, washing my face, getting dressed and mulling over some long standing issues in my life.  By long standing, I mean they’ve been sitting out there for about three or four years.  So I mulled and thought and came to some resolution about how I wanted to moved.  I finished up, went downstairs and said to LightHusband, “I’ve made a decision.”  He looked at me with a grin, “What?  I’m not an orc?”  I laughed and replied, “Well, I’ve known you’re not an orc for 20 years now.  But I’ve decided that there are some people who are orcs to me.  Or at least I need to treat them that way … sort of.  For me to be healthy.”  He arched a brow and said, “You mean I got it right?  You really are an ent?”  “Yes, I really am an ent.”

I went on make the following explanation.  Well.  My explanation to him was similar.  But not the same.

I’ve spent the last three years playing the part of Lot’s wife.  Sometimes I wonder about that story.  I remember reading about it in some popular literature when I was younger.  There was speculation that the weapon of destruction for Sodom was a nuclear bomb and Lot’s wife died of radiation.  But I think she was turned to stone from grief.  Grief can stop us in our tracks and turn us to stone and the operative action that causes it is “turning back.”  Lot’s wife turned back, and her tears turned her into a pillar of salt.  That has been my reality for far too long now.

I have allowed myself to look back and pine for what was, what can never be and what I wish for.  I doubt they ever will be and my wishing my life away is not healthy for me or anyone else involved.  So my quilts will be for those who I am in active contact with at this time.  That means people I see and talk to on the telephone … who know what is going on in my life beyond Facebook and Twitter statuses (stati?).  To those of you reading this who have gone down that road (and you know who you are), choosing to believe your church leaders about us and thinking you might still love us is no longer possible.  It is time to stop looking back.

Those of you who would like to remain in relationship with us, you will need to be able to talk with us openly about that horrible time in our lives and hear our pain without denying it or taking it away from us.  It is a wound that continues to bleed and tear at our souls.  You will need to be unafraid of picking up the phone and calling us or writing us an old-fashioned e-mail now and then.  More now than then.  In short, you will have to desire a relationship with us that requires something of you.  So … I am going to un-Friend you on Facebook and Twitter.  And sever those tenuous ties with you.  I need to move forward.  I need to release myself from the grip that era has on my mind and my soul.

Because sometimes … people who are not orcs, really do have an orc-like effect on others.  And then they need to be kept at a distance if one is to remain healthy and on the road to happy without “looking back” and turning into a pillar of salt.