Writing Isaiah Entry #15

Writing Isaiah 

Entry #15

August 13, 2013

Nikki Rinkey 

The idea of "naked spirituality" meaning to be your most vulnerable, pure self with God, seems to be appropriate when thinking about the actual process of birthing as it can be such a holy and wholly transformative experience.  In what ways did Aurora's birth invite you to be "naked" with God, and now, in the months leading up to Isaiah's birth journey, how/ is he leading you to be "naked" with God?  In what ways have both experiences transformed or empowered you as a woman?

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds

I love how specifically theological this question is. I love how you engage the material of our faith community in ways that are relevant, you know, applicable to real life. Nikki, you are in a place of spiritual hunger that is exciting to witness from the outside. As your pastor and sister I find delight in your questions, grapplings and discoveries. I've said this to you and your husband again and again, but we are so lucky that you've joined us at FCC. Your desire for enlivening, non-bullshit theology and formative, authentic community meeting up with our need for deep, committed seekers shows me that G-d is still alive and well in the match-making business. I can hear a Fiddler-on-the-Roof melody somewhere up above my head :-). But enough mixed metaphors and song references. (Artist that you are, I hope you can compassionately forgive me...)

In some ways I will address the question, but I suspect, because this question is explicitly theological, that I will queer the question, or perhaps veer off into some all-together unnamed territory, because that's usually what happens with me and G-d. There's the prompt and then there's the writing moment. They go together, but only in the way notes on the page and jazz musicians go together in improve: with a whole lot of creative spontaneity in between them, which of course creates something different, something novel, something all together brand new. In a seminary class I once wrote a paper about how we could learn to 'handle' the Bible ethically if we learned to read the Bible like jazz musicians learn to play music. It was a concept I picked up from Bruce Ellison (I think that's his name, i'll go back and look) who fleshes out the difference between training as a classical musician and a jazz musician. That difference of course has to do with the role/goal of learning itself: is it to make possible perfect repetition of the classics or to master the craft so as to make possible new creations? Is the best of the best already available or are there new notes/meanings to be made?  My hope for every musician, for every bible reader, and for every theological endeavor, is that there is discovery to be had, not just reiteration of what's been. Writing, particularly about G-d, if you do it honestly, is like the perfect incubator for spiritual discovery. But the funny thing is how far you travel between beginnings and arrivals. Most of the time I/we start with G-d and end up with our skin, or our treachery. On the best pen-to-paper/keys-to-board days, we place our final period behind a story of love. Regardless, there's a distance, a vacuum of space, just beckoning the daring heart to plunge. To try. To risk. 

In an earlier blog post to my girl Jes Kast Keat (a progressive, white, queer, fashionista, justice-loving, bad ass Rev. in the RCA denomination serving a church out of NY), I wrote at length about certain aspects of the birth process. So I won't repeat all that but if you wanna go back, here's the link: http://ejoyes.blogspot.com/2013/05/writing-isaiah-entry-6.html 

What I do want to recall about the process, which I touched on briefly in that post, is the moment when enduring turned into pushing. The moment of the highest pain and the greatest potential. That moment, a blip in time, taught me everything I need to know about being faithful in life. And maybe a characteristic or two about G-d, though I'm less certain about claiming that with any kind of, well, certainty. Truth be told, and I've said this before but it bears repeating, my birth experience just reinforced a lot of the reservations and suspicions I already carried about "God." It did, though, place a grand affirmation on the Mystery, capital M, a sacred reality I'm always trying to explain even though I fail miserably with my limited mind and the sorry ass tools of language. 

Yesterday while driving back from my Ob-Gyn appointment, I said to Abbey Labrecque who was in the car with me: "We are little earths." I was trying to describe this thing that the Hindu faith explains better than any other religious tradition. They render it like this: atman/Atman. That the whole is in the parts and the parts make up the whole. That's what it felt like giving birth. I felt the whole Cosmos in myself and myself completely part of the Cosmos. No separation. So to get specifically tangled up in your question/prompt, I'll say it this way: I felt naked before God during birth the way I imagine the Earth feels naked before the seasons. The wind is made by collective trees and yet individual trees are subject to the wind's gigantic whims. Does that makes sense? A force that is you and yet transcends you comes about with its foreign, yet intrinsic rhythms, sweeps you up in its power, makes you become that power, takes you to the precipice where that power is rendered powerless (a paradox, I know), and then splits you apart so that you and what emerges from you become the next phase of y/our Becoming. Is this not some kind of spring, summer, fall, winter and spring again? 

For three days after Aurora was born I felt no distinction between myself and my environment. I was in complete union with everything. It was the most spiritual clarity I have ever ever had in my entire life. My greatest regret is that I didn't write about what I was experiencing. This time around I hope to change that. In fact, Nikki, if all things go according to plan (and who can ever truly rely on that?) I hope you will come to my hospital room and work with me around this once Isaiah is born. Like, be a midwife of my (second) birthing story. What do you say? 

I've never felt more naked, more beautiful, more starkly human and divine, than I did in the birthing process. I am stunned and kinda stupefied that I get to do it again. I know it won't be the same, but I do believe the rhythm will feel familiar. And in the moments when I am asked by that rhythm and by my body to become One with it/them: there is some kind of salvation to be had by saying "yes."              

I could end here. But there's a part of me that yearns to go in another direction. 

More than anything else, I think the birthing process affords womyn (and any other bodied witness, if they're really really paying attention) insight into the spiritual realities of pain. 

You were there on Sunday so I know you heard the sermon I just preached on the word "abide," in response to the passage from John's Gospel (the 15th chapter). It was a timely passage to be confronted with, to sit with, to write with, to preach about. They say you only preach 1 sermon your whole life, just in different forms. I'm not sure if I believe that or not. I think you preach 5 or 6 sermons your whole life in different forms. They also say that you preach the sermon you most need to hear yourself. That I totally believe. Anyways, this notion of abiding is rather new to me. I have often preferred leaving when shit gets hard. In relationships. In communities. With family. With myself. For a long long time, leave-taking seemed like a way to free myself from oppressive dynamics, people, environments, etc. But when you always leave, you always end up alone. In my teens and 20's, I left a lot and I was alone a lot. Lots of grief about that. Lots. 

In the Fall of 2010 I attended a retreat in the sticks of Michigan with some other activists. There came a time in that retreat when I was asked to do some writing on my ancestry. Everything in my spirit revolted against "going there." I literally had no contact with any of my extended relatives on either side of my family at that time. Writing about that would mean plunging into the most painful facts of my life: being abandoned by my father, estranged from my sister and brother, and completely out of touch (partly by choice, partly by circumstance) with all my maternal relatives. It also meant acknowledging how that separation and loss resulted in my utter inability to trust anyone or to stay connected in the joy or pain of intimacy. There came a point in the moments leading up to the writing when I realized I was at war with something, in myself, in the universe. I didn't think I could endure the pain of that writing project, but there was a still small voice that whispered "just write." I'll never know why I gave in to the still small voice over the screaming "no!" in my head, but thank G-d I did. Memories and pain and powerless poured out on the page, accompanied by tears of terror, tears of rage, tears of loneliness, tears of abject sorrow. What became abundantly clear to me in that exercise of endurance was how desperate I was for family. For love. For intimacy that abides. And most importantly, that I was completely incapable of knowing how to do it. I asked G-d for help that afternoon, a patchwork prayer that went something like this: "I am too alone. I can't live without family and I don't know how to do "it" whatever "it" is. So please help." That prayer came from a place of utter exhaustion and acknowledged powerless. Sometimes, and I think the twelve step community would agree, those are the most sincere prayers you can whisper. And perhaps the most effective. 

Within 3 days of whispering that prayer my brother, whom I'd never met in my life, reached out to me over email. We met, along with my sister, about 10 months later. My sister had compiled a document full of pictures of my paternal ancestors, including pictures of my father throughout his life. Seeing his face at the age of 30, the age I was at the time, sent me to edge of surreality. I was connecting to a history that had been missing all my life. A month after whispering that prayer, one of my mom's cousins reached out to me over facebook and sent me a geneology of my maternal ancestors totalling more than 200 pages. I got to see faces and read stories of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents who migrated here from places like Poland, Russia and Germany. Again, I was starting to feel my "place in the family of thing" (to use Mary Oliver's words). Within a year, I felt enough spiritual power with me as a result of these connections, to start trying to have a baby. The right donor fell into place in ways I could never have predicted. The process of insemination was discerned between us with healthy, consensual, communication. We prayed before each attempt. And on the second round of trying, little sperm-swimming Aurora made her way. Six months into my pregnancy with Aurora, I realized I was in love with J.R. The day Aurora was born I woke up to the fact that J.R. was my life partner because his presence in the birth-room assured me I would never find anyone more quietly capable of strength, more loving, more sturdy, more capable of supporting me in any/every way. And who doesn't want that in a partner and co-parent? Marriage came next. Isaiah will be here in October (G-d willing). 

I went from nothing to so much. So quick. An answer to prayer? Maybe. The capacity to endure pain leading to miracles on the other side? Absolutely. 

Something happens to us when we are brave enough to endure pain. We realize our capacity to bear down through hard stuff is greater than we thought. That knowledge of strength enables us to abide. What I've learned in the last 3 1/2 years is that the only things worth having/doing/being require a whole lot of abiding. This lesson has changed glacial portions of my life, including how I pastor. More on that some other time. 

What I'm trying to do, with this entire post, is make a parallel between the apex of pain in the birthing moment and the other little (though they often feel huge) apex's of pain we approach throughout our lives. If we can lean into them, endure them, and surrender ourselves spiritually in the midst of them, there is no stopping the growth, power, and miracles just waiting on the other side.

May G-d give me all that I need, when the cramping contractions feel killer, when the diarrhea won't stop, when the crowning feels like a stretch too big, when the bleeding feels too immense, when the pushing is impossible, when the placenta comes next and I'm already too tired, when the shaking of after-birth feels like an earth-quake of epic proportions. I ask for all this in prayer, because my little boy is one of those other-side miracles just waiting to be seen, held, and adored, and by this time in life, I know without Her there is no him.