Today is the day …

Trick or treating for LightBoy in the guise of Fimli, Gimli’s second cousin (that is, a dwarf of MiddleEarth). He is beyond excited. I’m not certain what beyond excited is, but he’s there.

LightGirl, on the other hand, has hockey practice. But things are are looking up for her too. She is, for the first time since late June, playing in the goal for practice. We think her knee can manage that. It’s a short practice. She is also excited. I put together goodie bags for the girls who eschew trick or treating to come to practice. This is a surprise for them. It is also possible that I’ve put too much candy into these bags. I tried to balance it out with some lip gloss and nail polish and CoachWonderWoman is adding some sillystring (and more candy). But after all, Halloween really is all about the candy.

Here’s LightGirl with GoalieGirl … our new goalie. Yes, she is wearing LightGirl’s jersey. She borrowed it for team photos that were taken last night as her red jersey has not yet arrived. They have become really good friends.

Well … it’s a great day.  My much maligned Red Sox have won the World Series.  LightGirl won a game and so did LightBoy.  For a woman who ordinarily doesn’t pay any attention to sports, it’s quite a day.

I was amazed that the Sox won so handily and quickly.  They did well this year.  I watched from afar.  I never hope for too much.  As a Red Sox far since I was a child I learned young.  They fold after the All Star break.  But not in 2004 and not this year.  Who knew?  Every win is a surprise and delight and every loss expected.  I’m such a pessimist when it comes to baseball.  But you know?  When you’ve had 2 World Series championships in 3 years … but the one before that was in 1918, you kinda get a little cynical.

To my friends who are Rockies fans … I am sorry.  Just not very much.

So, here’s to the Red Sox …

And here’s to LightGirl and her team.  I watched something truly remarkable happen this weekend.  I watched a group of girls learn how to play as a team.  I watched synchronicity happen.  They won too.  But the best part was watching them finally “get it.”  Yeah … that was grand.

Here’s my young woman … playing hard last Sunday morning against a tough team. I’m pretty proud of her and her whole team.

Today we’re off for another hockey, hockey weekend. LightHusband and I are taking the Girl up the coast to LibertyCity to play two games and watch a professional game. We found that the NHL hometeam developmental club (or American Hockey League) team is playing tonight. So we’re going to see that game as a team. What fun. LightBoy is staying here with his friends on his team.

Maybe I’ll get Leopard installed next week … sigh!

Well … what do you see here? Tell me in the comments. I’ll tell what I see later too. I found this at My Blue Puzzle Piece, but it’s a fairly common optical illusion. I like how the author of the site presents it though:

Have you ever been with other people while looking at one of those optical illusions? Have you ever been the one person who couldn’t see what everyone else sees? It’s frustrating! It’s easy to suspect they’re just playing a prank.

I particularly suspect they are playing a prank when someone hauls out one of these … Just stare at this for a while the instructions declare … so everyone does, including me.  So … just stare at this for a while.

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I could stare at that for the rest of my misbegotten days and nothing would happen.  Not one blessed thing.  The rest of you would chatter on about all the wonderful and cool things you saw.  Me.  Nothing.  It’s a prank.  Only, I know it’s not.  I know for certain that all of you saw something.  I wish I could.  I know that I have sucky eyes (astigmatism, near-sighted and who-knows-what-else and am legally blind without correction).  It could have something to do with all of that.  Or perhaps the way my abi-normal brain works (I do have a seizure disorder with an abnormal EEG).  Who knows?  It’s frustrating.  So when people haul out these party games out, I mostly just walk the other way and find something else to do.

I was thinking about this optical illusion quite a bit lately though.

Depending on whether you look more at the white space or the black space you can see either two facial profiles or one chalice.  I’ve been involved in several conversations in a variety of places this past week about women in church (that’s the Body of Christ worldwide, not necessarily any particular church).  I like this illusion because it’s a good visual for me (just me) about how I feel about women in church.  I’m pretty committed to the idea that it takes balanced participation from both men and women to present a holistic picture of God to the world.  So I like this visual because there are two equal profiles and one chalice … to me the chalice represents the wine or Blood of Christ poured out for us.  And this is an easy illusion to see through.  Most people can “get it.”  They can see both sides easily.  I like that.  It’s helpful in pushing the envelope to opening up the other side.

In my conversations I’ve thinking about what the contribution of women might be and how women can fit in.  I’ve been asking, of myself and others, what does this look like?  How can women fit into the picture?  Yesterday, I realized that I had been making some assumptions about the painting that had been all askew.  Look again at the illusion above.  You’ll see some very wonderful symmetry there.  The two profiles match exactly.  It’s makes a great visual … but it suddenly occurred to me that trying to find that same symmetry in real life was not terribly effective.  I had that thought as a result of reading the following on GodSpace, the blog of Christine Sine:

It reminded me of a book I read many years ago written in 1970s by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier called The Gift of Feeling, in which he reflects on what the world would look like if women found their true place.  At one point he comments “If women dared to be themselves, to realize their special mission and if their influence increased, would our society become more humane?”
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Father Dear writes in his article:

“Women are the peacemakers. The world will not achieve peace without the energy and the work of women.” So writes Dolores Huerta of the United Farmworkers. Gandhi said the same thing in 1947: “Women are the natural messengers of the gospel of nonviolence, if only they will realize their high estate…. It is for American women to show what power women can be in the world. You can become a power for peace by refusing to be carried away by the flood-tide of the pseudo-science glorifying self-indulgence that is engulfing the West today and apply your minds instead to the science of nonviolence…. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with women.”

“It” is an article by Father Dear in The National Catholic Reporter to which Christine links. And, I must confess, I’ve really given you most of Christine’s post.  Because it’s good.  I must also recommend the article in the NCReport by Father John Dear.  It’s also a must read. Discover the power of clomid forms! Are you struggling with fertility issues? Don’t lose hope! Introducing the game-changing clomid forms that are designed to support your journey towards parenthood.

As I reflect on both and my conversations that I have been involved in, I continue in my commitment to the having space for women in the picture of God.  For having a full profile for women as well as men in that optical illusion as it were.  But I’m beginning to understand that my understanding and perspective on symmetry may need to be adjusted as I wander down the path.

The doorbell rang … 9:52 a.m.

… the question is now.  Can I live without my computer long enough to install it today?  Or do I do the install overnight?

The other day I was cleaning the kitchen. It was a long and frustrating task. You’ve heard of people being color-blind? My family is trash-blind. They do not see trash. It is invisible to them; it blends into the flotsam and jetsam of all the stuff surrounding it. So I was tidying up. I found the hotdog rolls in the hotpad basket. I found a hard crumpled roll behind the breadbox. I found two (2) empty papertowel tubes. Yeah, I don’t know why the person who was kind enough to replace them with a full roll of paper towels was unable to take two extra steps and throw the empty tubes away … but there you have it … trash-blind.

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Then I found this:

Emergency Vampire Garlic

Yes, that would be LightGirl’s handwriting.

I almost fell out laughing. I will keep this for a long, long time. Maybe it *will* keep the vampires away. Kinda like clapping your hands keeps the polar bears away.

Later on LightBoy and two FlamingLambs came through giggling and laughing, chattering happily about what Halloween costumes they had planned this year. LightBoy is going to be a dwarf, one FlamingLamb will be a devil, I missed the other descriptions. They all inspected the garlic and agreed that it was an important addition to the kitchen. The conversation continued as they discussed a neighbor girl who does not celebrate Halloween, “… she’s Catholic and thinks Halloween is of Satan. She just follows what her church tells her to do without thinking. But she’s nice anyway.”

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Wow. Out of the mouths of babes. We used to not *do* Halloween. We used to go along with the whole Halloween is evil thing. I never quite understood it, because I’ve always known about the real history of Halloween and understood it’s roots as All Hallows Eve … that is the eve for All Saints Day. I’ve always understood that the history behind dressing up in costumes and putting candles in hollowed out pumpkins was in order to frighten evil spirits away, not call them down. In any case, in this day and age, I was always a little confused about the whole evil spirits running rampant on Halloween thing anyway. It seemed a little … well … medieval.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to make waves over something so insignificant. So we went along with all of it. We kept our children safe and sound and went to “Harvest Parties” at church. Truthfully, I never saw what the difference was. All the children got dressed up, ran around getting pumped up on too much sugar, and came home with bags full of candy. The only difference was they’d stayed in one place doing it … and had boring, dorky costumes.

Then I got belligerent. If there truly was something wrong with Halloween, we plain old weren’t going to do anything at all. One year we went out to dinner with friends. Another year we went to the mountains. Then I began to realize … there’s nothing wrong with Halloween. So we decided to celebrate it.

My kids have been pirates and witches and cave people and this year LightGirl wants to skate as a vampire. She is infatuated with vampires this year. There is that last tiny part of my brain that wants to me to be afraid of this. The rest of me is assured that this is a phase. In part it is a phase of exploration of something new and shiny. In part it is to test me and see if I will holler. So I just look at her when it comes up and try not to roll my eyes at the ridiculous makeup.
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Here is the other reason I am unconcerned. I know her heart. During the years that we did not do Halloween, I was told that it was important to keep my children safe so that they would grow up to be “Godly.” I’m still wondering what that means. I thought I knew what it meant at the time. At the time, what I did know was that it was important to keep my children separate in order to be safe and thus become “Godly.” If they were not separate they would lose that chance … somehow. It was a weird and strange logic as I began to really think it through. There were some sane underpinnings to it, despite the oddness. But the stark command that I could not get past without bruising my forehead on it, was this:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘There is no commandment greater than these.”

I began to consider that loving God and loving our neighbors included living and being amongst them … including on Halloween. That there was nothing to fear. And so … there is nothing to fear. Including vampires. LightGirl’s heart is wonderful. She is of an age now where she is struggling through who she is and what she believes. She is discovering what her faith is and what it will become. But I rest easy in the fact that she has the heart of a Jesus-follower. She does not know this yet, but she loves God and she loves her neighbor. She has learned and is learning the role of being a light in the world. I see this played out over and over again as she brings her teammates together on her hockey team. It is a remarkable thing to see 11 or 12 eleven, twelve and thirteen year old girls who get along and do not form cliques. The parents all shake their heads in wonder at this … but I know that a very small part of the reason is that LightGirl wanders amongst them with her shepherd’s heart looking for the lost sheep; pulling them back into the flock. And that is the best vampire protection of all.

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The October 24th SynchroBlog includes 26 people sharing their thoughts, their experiences, and their expertise on the subject of “A Christian Response to Halloween” (or at least something remotely connected to that idea.) Perhaps not all the writers are Christian, and that is actually even cooler. Please check out these offerings of love, and gore…uh, I mean lore.

The Christians and the Pagans Meet for Samhain at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Our Own Private Zombie: Death and the Spirit of Fear by Lainie Petersen
Julie Clawson at One Hand Clapping
John Morehead at John Morehead’s Musings
What’s So Bad About Halloween? at Igneous Quill
H-A-double-L-O-double-U-double-E-N Erin Word
Halloween….why all the madness? by Reba Baskett
Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
KW Leslie at The Evening of Kent
Hallmark Halloween by John Smulo
Mike Bursell at Mike’s Musings
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Removing Christendom from Halloween at On Earth as in Heaven
Vampires or Leeches: A conversation about making the Day of the Dead meaningful by David Fisher
Encountering hallow-tide creatively by Sally Coleman
Kay at Chaotic Spirit
Apples and Razorblades at Johnny Beloved
Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
Fall Festivals and Scary Masks at The Assembling of the Church
Why Christians don’t like Zombies at Hollow Again
Peering through the negatives of mission Paul Walker
Sea Raven at Gaia Rising
Halloween: My experiences by Tim Victor’s Musings
Making Space for Halloween by Nic Paton

We have two pets. Hmmm … well … that’s not quite true. We have two animals that are considered pets and then we have a fish tank. So if you count the fish in the fish tank, I don’t know how many pets we have. I don’t count the fish. So we have two pets. They are Sam (the golden retriever) and Monty (the black cat).

Sam is also known as Samuel Allen Dawg. That’s his registered name … he is registered with the American Kennel Club. Samuel Allen is for the man who was Ethan Allen’s father. Ethan being the Revolutionary War hero … um … not the furniture store. We added the Dawg because you have to have three names for the AKC and we couldn’t think of anything else. It seemed appropriate.

Monty is also known as Montgomery Montgomery from the Series of Unfortunate Events. He was born in our laundry room on Patriot’s Day 2005. He is a beastie cat. He yells a lot. He also purrs a lot. This has saved him from many trials.

Today, as I heard Monty yelling from across the field that he wanted to come in the house (the door was already open), I remarked, “That cat is dumber than a sack of hair.” Which sent LightBoy into gales of laughter. When he recuperated he said, “Mom! That cat *is* a sack of hair.” We were eating lunch out on the deck. It’s wrong to be able to eat lunch outside in the end of October. I’m enjoying it, but it’s wrong.

Monty has been in one too many cat fights lately and he’s looking a little raggedy. His back end looks as though a five year old took after him with a set of electric clippers … and the clippers lost. We imagined what it would take to make a set of cat armor for him that would work. He needs to let his fur grow back. But I don’t imagine he’ll stay inside for vanity’s sake. Does anyone know where we can get some kitty kevlar?

After lunch we came inside and settled into our seats in the family room. The door to the deck was open. The wind was blowing. Sam is worried. He keeps watching the door waft back and forth. What is making that door move? No one is standing anywhere near it. He looks at me. He looks at the door. Why is the woman not worried about that door? Why doesn’t she see it move? The door should not move! Make it stop!! The door keeps gently moving. Now some papers flutter in the breeze. Oh wait … the breeze fans his feathers and he likes that so he forgets about the door and faces the wind. Then … the door moved in his peripheral vision again and the worry returns. I watched this for a while bemused.

Our pets are a source of almost endless amusement for me. Especially Sam. I wonder what it would be like to not understand the wind. To see a door move and worry about it’s source. Then I think … maybe that’s why the church is struggling so right now. We do not understand the Wind. We see it move a door and worry about it’s source. Instead of just enjoying the Wind and allowing it to blow and letting the Wind curl around us and embrace us, we worry about it. Maybe we should just relax and let it be.

Yesterday I made some wonderful discoveries and had some hard knocks. It was an odd day all around. Let me ‘splain.

It sort of began with Sunday. Sunday was LightHusband’s birthday. We tried to make it a special day for him, but circumstances piled up against us. There was, of course, the brutal hockey game. Afterwards we stuck around for a scheduled Capitals practice … but they didn’t show.

We drove home exhausted and made plans to go to a new Indian restaurant in town for lunch, but by the time we got home everyone just needed a nap. So we changed that to dinner. By then my newly delicate stomach was in revolt at something I’d eaten earlier in the weekend … who knows? Stupid pancreas. So, Plan B. Pick up kabobs at our favorite stand … which is in a gas station near our house. LightHusband and LightBoy went out to hunt and gather our kabobs. No such luck. The stand has closed. Out here in Backsasswards County, authentic Pakastani kabobs didn’t do so well I guess. Pheh. So … Chipotle.

LightHusband loves to gather the family around and watch a movie together. He loves to make popcorn while watching the movie. So we did. We decided to watch “Return of the King.” At first it took a while to find the disc. By “a while” I mean at least half an hour … maybe longer. We had given up. Movies (among other things) are not organized the way I would like them to be. I’ve given up. The rest of my family does not seem to mind these long searches when we want to watch a movie. It bugs me. So we watched the movie. Correction … we watched approximately two-thirds of the movie. The disc (because it is not properly cared for or kept in a proper case) is badly damaged and has been rendered unwatchable. So … that too was a bust.

In the midst of all that frustration, LightHusband was also working. Fielding e-mails and phone calls from his employees who were busily preparing the building that was being grandiously opened yesterday. Yesterday was one of the biggest days of his life with this company. He left the house (he works primarily from home as a contract manager) early in the morning and returned approximately 13 hours later. As he left, he said, “When I get home tonight we’ll finish swapping the livingroom and family room furniture.” Of which only one piece had yet traded places. Finish was sort of a misnomer … we really had yet to begin.

So I called two friends. BlazingEwe and another friend we have taken up with lately. I’ll call her TallDeerWoman. I told them the story of LightHusband’s birthday and how I wanted him to come home to a calm house with dinner cooking, etc. They cheered. They both love LightHusband too. So we spent a couple of hours moving and rearranging the furniture. We also vacuumed both rooms thoroughly … so thoroughly that TallDeerWoman even went after the cobwebs high on my family room wall. She turned and said ferociously, “Spiders piss me off!” I even learned that you can vacuum lampshades. The lampshades on my lamps were embarassingly clogged with ubiquitous red clay dust … but I found out that they can be vacuumed and look as good as new! Those are good friends … friends who teach you to vacuum your lampshades without laughing at you when you are more than 40 years old. But, you don’t know what you don’t know.

LightHusband was pleasingly astonished when he walked in. No … he was thrilled. He was so happy that all he had to do last night was change his clothes, sit down in a favorite chair with a glass of wine and eat his dinner. A favorite dinner too – white chili (actually … every dinner is a favorite dinner, he’s easy 😉 ).

It made me think about our relationship and how different it is.  We take care of each other, but we don’t let gender roles get in our way.  By that I mean we just do for each other what needs to be done and care for each other’s hearts.  If what he needs is for me to move the furniture, then I do.  If I need him to cook dinner for several months, he does and with a cheerful heart.  It’s a gift from one to the other.  My hope is that our children are learning from this.  I hope they are learning that it is more important to give of oneself to one’s spouse than to live within the confines of a gender role.

It was good to know and be aware of these things as I did some reading in the blogworld.  I took some hits.  I won’t say where.  I will just say that I becoming more and more aware of a persistent desire for hubris in the world of the church.  I don’t have these issues among my non-church friends.  I only have them amongst so-called “Christians.”  This problem where people read what I wrote and decide for me what I wrote, despite it being something completely different from anything I ever intended and then they go so far as to impute motive too.  I am rapidly losing any sort of desire to have anything more to do with Christians.  There seems to be some sort of innoculation that occurs in youth that allows them to put people into boxes.  Or something.  I’m not certain what it is.  I’m also not certain I care to find out anymore.  I am certain of this … I tired of feeling like Frodo at the Battle of Weathertop.  If you’re interested in what I have to say, then actually listen to me, but do not impute to me the ghosts of your past … and leave your sword at home.

We just got home from an early hockey game. We played at a new rink in the area. It’s the rink that the Washington Capitals practice in. Ooohhh. Aaaahhhh. There was a certain sweaty aura about the ice there.

It was a hard game. The girls played really hard and really well.

They lost. 8-0.

This morning it was hard work to be a hockey mom. It was, I’m certain, even more difficult to be a hockey girl. It was heart-breaking to watch these girls who I’ve come to love skate their hearts out, do the moves, and get wiped up.

Then, it made me angry.

We faced a team of seventeen 14 year olds. We had 11 on our bench. 2 of those girls just turned 11. So … them’s the breaks you might be saying. Yeah … I could say that.

Here’s the thing though. The team we faced is part of a club that supports girls hockey. It opens up space for the girls to flourish and grow. They don’t just have travel teams. They have house teams that feed into the travel teams. The club board supports the girls program and knows what’s happening on that program at any given time. They get special coaching at the same level that the boys teams get.

Our team? Our team belongs to a club that pays lip service to girls hockey. Last year’s club president didn’t support girls hockey and this years club president doesn’t really either. So we have girls hockey teams. Yep. They’re invited. Yep. We have equality. Girls are present and they are part of the program. Backsasswards County Virginia has girls hockey. Guess how many girls are in the house program right now?

Five.

Five. That’s right. One hand’s worth. That is what happens in a program that does not open up space for the girls to flourish and grow. There is no one coming along in the wings to build the program on. We essentially have a developmental team as a travel team. It is disheartening.

Slowly it seems that things might have a chance to change. CoachWonderWoman has spoken of her plans. The girls have taken some initiative to learn more and practice harder. But still … without that support, leading and space. Without those younger girls coming in from behind to feed into each of the older more experienced teams, all of the plans and initiatives in the world aren’t going to help a team of eleven grow against a team of seventeen. The problem is not with the team … it’s with the club. The problem is not even with the notion of equality. Because that is evident in both clubs. Both clubs have equality of gender, right?

I imagine if you were to talk to the men on the board of our club (which I do need to start doing), you might hear things like, “Maybe we do have a responsibility to do something, but everytime we do the response is, ‘It’s not good enough,’ so I’m sick of doing anything.” or “We have two girls teams … isn’t that good enough?” (two girls teams vs. eleven boys teams) or “I’m tired of everything always coming back to the gender issue, can’t we talk about something else?”

Maybe we can … someday, when we face that team with a more equitable bench.

(Any resemblance the reader may see to the discussion on gender in the church is purely in the eye of the writer.)

I’m not quite certain how to begin this post. It’s been fomenting for a while now. There were posts by Makeesha and Julie earlier this week that fed it. Then Bro. M. posted on EMasculinity yesterday, quite independently of Mak and Julie. I know it was independently because he’s at a Missional Order Gathering in Washington this week and had pre-loaded his posts. So … it just so happened.

Then there was the piece d’ resistance … photos of the Missional Order Gathering sponsored (I believe) by Allelon in Washington posted by Rick (Blind Beggar) Meigs. Shock and awe at the length of Bro. M.’s hair!! I’m still trying to put that first photo in perspective … because my mental picture of Bro. M. does not look like this. And I’m jealous of his hair. Whenever I grow my hair out that long it gives me headaches because it gets so heavy 😀 So I gave up years ago and keep it short and sassy … the sassy part is to go with my personality.

In any case, Rick mentioned that there were only “four or so women” at the conference. I spluttered and squawked in his comments (and later apologized). FOUR??!!!! Peggy updated that to six, but noted that since every woman is worth 2 or 3 men things were probably more or less equal since there were only 41 total people at the gathering. I like Peggy’s math ;-).

A number of years ago (maybe five or six or more), LightHusband was involved in the Wild At Heart, er, movement (not sure what to call it). He went to one of their conferences and read the book. I read it too. I guess if you take all that stuff out to the n’th degree it’s really nauseating … and it is. But there was also a lot there to value and at the time in our lives when we experienced it, there was a lot there that was really freeing too. To keep it simple, we ate the meat and spat out the bones (and there were many). This was not an ideology that we camped out on for long.

However, there were some meaty things that we both took away from it. One thing is this. Men (and yes, I’m generalizing here … not every man does this, but many men do, so bear with me here, okay?) in general, are protectors and defenders. Women, in general, respond well to this. Now … before you get all up in my face … keep reading, because I do NOT mean this in the traditional sense. I can best describe this by how it has worked out in my marriage. There are a few of you who have met me and LightHusband and we’re not what many would describe as traditional. But … he does protect and defend me. What I mean by that is this, he protects my space and my needs. He looks out for me and feels that his role in our marriage is to create space where I can flourish and grow. Now, I have that role as well to a certain extent but not in quite the same manner. I support and guide his heart in a fashion that is more feminine, but if you were to look at the “jobs” we do in the home they are often reversed.

I’m bringing this up because I think that the men who are in and of the emerging conversation have an important job to do now. Many of them have said that they value women more than their counterparts in the institutional church. But it is becoming imperative that they guard and protect those women. By this I mean that those men need to not just say the words that women are their equal, but they need to create space for women to flourish and grow. This is going to mean looking at the conferences that are planned and thinking about things such as childcare both at the conference and back at home, and when the conference is planned, where it’s planned, how much it costs … per person, and per couple, and per family, what are travel costs, etc. How many women leaders vs. men leaders are involved? It might also mean stepping back to allow a woman to take the stage or the spotlight.

More important than any of the above questions it will mean looking at women culturally to see how to include them. Women *are* different from men. We have been socialized differently. We respond to “open invitations” differently. It was pointed out in the conversation over at Rick’s blog that the Allelon conference was open to anyone who wanted to come. Yet as I reflect on the literature that was available for that conference and how women respond to those and how men do … it is very different. Women do need more of an invitation, especially in the church, they need to feel that they are indeed included and welcomed. For a woman to just “invite herself” to such an event goes against all the social norms we have been taught about being a “good girl.” Or to invite herself to participate in many of the group efforts going on is simply not done. It’s very, very difficult to overcome those social rules taught when we’re very young.

On the flip side, women are going to have to meet the men at least half way. I don’t know what any of this is going to look like. But I do know that we’re all going to be in uncharted territory. I also know that it’s terribly terribly important to the Kingdom that we’re able to represent it with a gender balanced view of who God is and we cannot do that with only one gender.