Writing Isaiah Entry #17

Writing Isaiah 

Entry #17

August 30th, 2013

Alicia Van Riggs 

My question, which is really a reflection of my own experience right now. I'm finding these first weeks of nausea to be similar to earlier pregnancy experience - generalized nausea , all the time. Reprieve can come from various actions - eat, but also poop, pee, fart... It's like the signals from my abdomen are suddenly passed through a mixer before reaching my brain. Is this at all echoed in your experience?  How do you trust these fuzzy signals?   What translation tools do you rely on for internal communications?

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds

There is some stuff in life that feels generally unfair. As in me and you now on our second round of pregnancies so very very far away from one another geographically. I can't believe our pregnancies paralleled each other, time wise, again. Makes the whole absence harder. Like Sunny and Aurora haven't even met face to face and yet we are discussing how to get the snuggle sleeper back to you through the mail. It's kinda cosmic jack-assery that we haven't been able to touch each other's bellies or attend our daughters' baptisms. And NOW we can't even converse about fuzzy body signals with the very subject matter at hand at hand! I miss you Alicia. I miss you tons.

I didn't have generalized nausea and don't relate personally to the symptoms you're describing. They say each person's experience of pregnancy is different and that each pregnancy of an individual is different. Must be true. Sorta. I don't often relate to other womyn's pregnancy symptoms or experience. But there has been a similarity between my two pregnancies with only a slight variation. The second time most everything is the same, in terms of progression, sensation and symptoms, with two exception. This time everything is slightly less intense. Like on a Richter Scale, the experience of pregnancy with Aurora was a 6 and with Isaiah it's a 4. Does that makes sense? The food aversion was there, just not as pronounced. The exhaustion of first trimester had its impact, but not as disruptively this time. Again, the kicking and hiccuping came about in the second and third trimesters but not as forcefully. The (second and) only thing that's significantly different is the weight gain. I weigh right now (at 32 weeks) with Isaiah what I weighed when Aurora was born (40 weeks) and the baby is supposed to gain a 1/2 a pound a week from here on. My body is "heavy laden" so to speak. Imagining carrying this body around, a body that will hold more and more weight, for another 8 weeks, is rather scary, honestly. Some days I come home and strip immediately and just lay naked, sideways on my bed, because even the presence of clothes or having to stand up make me feel oppressed. There's too much. Body. Matter. Weight. I long to be in water. I want some kind of unforeseen gravitational equation to set me free. 

The last two questions of your prompt are intriguing to me. In fact, I love them. Thank you. 

"How do you trust these fuzzy signals?" 

a) I wonder how fuzzy they are. What's the source of the fuzz? Is it the fact that we aren't conditioned to nor supported in developing our carnal ear? What if from the earliest moments of our lives, we'd been told that listening to our bodies (as opposed to silencing them) was the most important listening we could ever do? Something tells me there'd be less fuzz. Of course the body is mysterious. Fuzz would be present in utopia, i'm sure. But there'd be less. My former coach and mentor Wayne Muller used to say "the body never lies." He's right. But Lord have mercy do humans struggle to hear its truth.    

b) How do I trust them (the fuzzy signals)? I guess by practice. Pay attention. Discern. Obey. Discern again. Repeat. Like, with food, for instance. Somewhere deep deep down I believe that whatever my body craves is what it needs. So I pay attention to the craving, discern what it'll take for me to satisfy that craving, obey it, and then discern whether the entire process led to corporeal delight or something else. First trimester it's all about noodles, tomato-based sauces like marinara and ketchup and TONS of gatorade. Balsamic vinegar and diet coke started calling my name in second trimester. And now I can't get enough raw vegetables in third. Like avocados, bell peppers, radishes--totally rocking my world every day. Can't get enough. The more I eat the stuff I actually want, which does include ice cream and/or Hershey's mini-chocolate squares every once in a while, the more pronounced, in a specific way, my hunger becomes. The signals of pregnancy hunger have become more and more trust-worthy over time. It's pretty wonderful. But all the signifiers of pregnancy aren't wonderful. Of course I'm not telling you anything you don't know. With both pregnancies I got plagued with acute anxiety between weeks 6 and 12. Unfortunately I didn't remember going through it the first time when I was going through it the second time, and so I kept wondering: why is this happening? something must be wrong! My colleague, dear sweet Tom Ryberg, reminded me in the 9th week with Isaiah that I'd gone through this, almost exactly the same, with Aurora. What a gift he gave me with that reminder. I keep wondering about the source of that anxiety. Was it too a trustworthy signal from my body? I have to believe on some level, yes. But it was hell going through it. I'd have day terrors about miscarriage, nightmares about dead babies. Torture torture torture. I don't know what purpose that anxiety served but I do trust something necessitated it. Perhaps I'll discover more in the future. One can only hope. 

"What translation tools do you rely on for internal communications?"

Wow. I have to really really think on this. Translation presupposes a difference in language. Or some kind of need for interpretive assistance. This of course takes me back to Marion Grau's class on hermeneutics "Interpreting Bodies." Best class I've ever taken in my life. One thing tattooed forever in my brain from that class is that bodies create interpretations and interpretations create bodies. Both/and. Not either/or. Which is, of course, entirely fascinating and kinda scary to think about when it comes to pregnancy. Do we have a common language? What is it? Is my body the shared language right now? Doesn't that erase some kind of existing separation/distinction between us? Obviously Isaiah is a concrete entity within my body but not synonymous with it. What needs to be translated between baby and mom? And do I have the interpretative frameworks I need to even discern our differences of language. Does the baby? If so, it can't be because he posses some kind of awesome cognition. That's not even biologically possible at this phase in his development. If in fact the baby is able to communicate/translate, signify and discern, there must be some kind of natural (as in bio-mechanical) force at work in that. Like, ugh, God. 

This is actually about humility, I think. Stay with me. 

It's so easy, as the grown-up, as the adult carrying, as the maternal vessel, to assume I know what's being communicated by the baby through my body. But isn't there danger in that? Maybe I'm all wrong when I make assumptions about what's motivating this exhaustion or that craving or this kick or that hiccup. One of the things I'm always always always trying to teach through my ministry is Anais Nin's famous quote: "we don't see things as they are; we see things as we are." Knowing we cannot NOT see things as we are doesn't let us off the hook. I think this fact of our conditioned (not determined) interpreting necessitates that we work even harder to pay attention, to listen, to discern beyond our initial impulses, our initial reactions, our initial connections. This is about allowing the other to remain w/holy other. Maybe I think the baby is thirsty at first, but can I leave room for the possibility that my body temperature is too high and what baby really needs is both a cold drink and a cold shower? Holding out the possibilities for a different word/meaning/understanding is hard when there are no actual words to pass back and forth. This is all through the prehension of feeling. But, oh, what a practice. What a novel novel practice! To hold space through feeling for more feeling. One might consider this the ultimate self-centered navel gaze. But I suppose it's also possible, as it goes with most radically incarnate spiritual practices, that one could slip into a consciousness of one's own multiplicity too. As in listening/feeling for Isaiah's translative Word, I become aware that even here, here inside my own corporeal systems, there are mysteries not my own.  That my life, which belongs to me and yet transcends me, and his life which springs from me and will one day be entirely independent of me, deserves a kind of humility all/ways. A kind of humility that leans in to lovingly listen and at the same time laughs at the absurd idea that I'll ever even remotely understand what I'm leaning in to hear. 

It's funny. I feel like I've ended up saying two wildly different things here that might appear contradictory. But, good Congregationalist that I am, perhaps there's a way of holding them both or squeezing them into a third space. Radical trust in the body. Sheer humility in the mysterious presence of the body. To know and to know you don't know. That's what I'm aiming for, I suppose, in pregnancy, in parenting, in life, with God. 

Love you, my beautiful and far-away friend. 

On the way to Comerica Park

Jazz standards by Rollins 

as we drive to Detroit 

where Miguel & Prince 

will take the field in T-2 hours. 

The ride alone 

is worth the ticket price: 

body to body, 

space for silence and sounds 

uninterrupted by a baby 

or household duty. 

All this after a morning of quiet coexistence 

in separate rooms 

where writing projects unfolded themselves 

to their respective authors.

He sent a copy 

of the outline 

for his upcoming manuscript

and I sobbed reading the chapter headings 

as the baby inside me 

kicked for kicks.  

What a life this married life. 

Who knew? 

Not me. 

Writing Isaiah Entry #16

Writing Isaiah 

Entry #16 

August 26th, 2013

Tricha Grajek 

How has your body/life/mind been healed in new ways since and during your pregnancy?  I can only imagine at this point...

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds 

I remember the first time someone referred to me as a 'healer.' It was my mentor/spiritual-mother/pastor Rev. Marjorie Denise Matthews Wilkes. She was introducing me to someone on the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) campus, someone who had just preached at our Black History Month chapel service, someone who brought me to my knees and brought me to tears all at the same time--a man named Rev. Dr. James Noel. Professor of American religious/church history, incredibly talented visual artist and ordained minister in the Presbyterian church. It was one of those introductions that made my knees shake because I didn't feel worthy to be in the presence of such greatness. And when it came time to introduce me to him, Marjorie put her arm around my shoulder and said "Dr. Noel, this is Emily Joye, current student at PSR. She is anointed, this one. A prophet and healer." When she said it I felt this squishy, uncomfortable sensation in my belly. My eyes immediately hit the concrete pavement and an incredible force of shame washed over me. How could she say such a thing? And especially in front of *this* man? For one, I'd always considered myself mostly broken and in need of healing, not any kind of source of healing in and of myself. Secondly, when I thought of 'healers' back then I thought of folks like Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa...and well, Marjorie...and I was *nowhere* near that level of personhood. Third: I was too tattooed, too activist and angry, too queer, too confrontational, too formerly addicted and confounded to be a "healer." I imagined Dr. Noel could see all of that just looking at me and so I was embarrassed about the gap between what was being said and what I felt was true. Now I know my projections of what Dr. Noel saw merely reflected back what I thought about myself. Problem was: I knew Mama Marjorie was incapable of lying. Her words always have been and always will be "solid rocks" on which "I stand." There's the Word (which is Christ) and there are the words (Christ's treasured earthen vessels who in their unique, personal way incarnate the Truth/Gospel) in our world today. Marjorie is one in the great Other, without a doubt. So in that moment, forced to grapple with the discrepancies between what she said and how I felt, there came a reckoning. Was "healing" a part of my vocation and I just didn't see/feel/know it? 

Ever since then, I've been discerning what 'healing' actually is. Perhaps i'm not alone in this kind of discernment. In some ways I feel like biblical stories/images get in the way for contemporary Christians. We are taught to think of healing in non-consensual, ableist, ex-nihilo models. Like out of nowhere, we encounter suffering on the street, and without relationship, without being asked, we reach over and extend our hand to some poor soul in need and because the power in us is so great, that person is "fixed." What a patriarchal, Western imperialist wet dream that is! Of course there's context for this kind of imaginative conception. While it comes dangerously close to the same ideological power dynamics that exist in colonization and rape, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't biblical, theological and Christological precedent right underneath it. We've got to grapple with this stuff as contemporary believers and theologians. We just do. I've been grappling for a long time. All this to say, when I read/see the word 'healing' there are parts of my conditioned white supremacist, ableist, patriarchal, imperialist thinking/mind that I must work hard, consciously, to identify and deconstruct. 

Tricha, you may think I have forgotten your question totally by this point. But I haven't. You asked me to reflect on healing in the experience of pregnancy. In order to do that, it felt necessary to be honest about the identity and contextual struggles that present themselves whenever I try to engage this topic. So now that I've done that, I'd like to move into more beautiful things. 

Last week my mentor Jo Ann Morris was in town. She sat on my office couch for 3 hours, which felt like the longest drink of water my thirsty soul has had in a long long time. We talked about all kinds of stuff: personal life, family, work, politics, love, justice, etc. But one thing Jo Ann shared with me has been ringing in my ears (and heart) ever since. She has an incredible sense of urgency in the work she does as a professional author, coach and facilitator in the area of diversity. She doesn't let *anything* get in the way of risk, courage and truth-telling (3 things that cannot exist without each other which she reminds me often and is evidenced by her life). When I asked her about what sustains that level of urgency and relentless pursuit of risk/courage/truth in her work/life--she said, "I'm going to die." This is apparently a refrain she is using a lot right now because she referenced it three different times throughout the course of our conversation, once rather casually, once folded into huge husky laughter, once dead-ass serious. "I'm going to die," she reminds herself, she reminds others, she reminds me. 

Is not the fact of death the most healing balm there is? For some it's fear. For others an abstract. But for those who have faced it or brushed up against it, whether willingly or not, there can be an endless supply of life-giving permission in embracing the reality of our mortality.

Isaiah is now 32 weeks developed in the womb. He is flapping, kicking, flipping, hiccuping, sleeping, etc. I feel him (even in stillness) now every single day in a way that I will not feel him soon. This morning, one of the first things J.R. said to me upon waking up is: "little Isaiah was kicking up a storm last night while you were asleep." You know what that means? That means right now, in this phase of pregnancy, my husband is able to spoon me and feel his son's force materialize in the spaces between us. In a matter of 8 or so weeks, that will no longer be the case. When Isaiah emerges (God willing, safely) I will feel his newborn body on my chest, feel him breathing, even feel him move towards my breasts for the first time, which will be the source of his nourishment in the months ahead. And, there will come a time, not shortly thereafter when he will no longer breathe on the stillness of nor fit so perfectly on my chest. Later he will require solid foods and will no longer breast-feed. I know all of this because I've gone through these phases with Aurora. They do not last. They come so beautifully and then before you can even fucking blink, they are gone. 

Things die. They go away. What we have now we will not always have. Acknowledging these realities gives me permission to be fully present in every moment of my life, but particularly those moments that feel perfect. And honestly Tricha, those moments are pretty frequent these days. There's healing in that. Frequent moments of encountering perfection after many many years of not even believing perfection was possible--there's healing in that. 

This morning Aurora began to stir around 8:00 a.m. I was in the living room, storming the key-board in the midst of another writing project. I really really didn't want to stop writing because I was on a roll, and yet J.R. was in the shower and her little voice kept calling over the baby monitor: "babba. hello. babba. mommy. daddy. babba. hiiiiii." Begrudgingly I went to the kitchen, filled a bottle, and then way-less-begrudgingly picked up my baby girl's body and carried her with me back into the living room. She placed herself square in my lap. It was just about that time that Isaiah began stirring within. I had a baby on the outside and a baby on the inside, both freshly awake, both gently moving in their own way. I was between them and yet it felt like the closest we'd ever been. There was a moment when Aurora's soft breathing and Isaiah's tender kicking and my body prehending it all overwhelmed me: how did love find its way to me like this? How is it that I get to be the thin layer of existence that right now separates these two by skin, but once Isaiah emerges will connect them biologically forever? I had no idea my life could or would ever be/feel this useful. 

So healing. 

I've written ad nauseum about the way womyn's bodies are mythologized, disregarded, and trashed in this society. So I won't go into all that here. But I will say that I think 'healing' is about re/discovering power where larger forces have rendered us powerless and therefore mothering (whether biologically or by choice) is an unparalleled time for womyn to discover their power. I've never felt powerless in my body. My body has always been a source of strength for me. I've told you that before. But I have felt absolutely powerless when it came to my capacity to be/do/have family, to bare/bear connective, biological relations and to abide in the love of my bloodline. These perfect moments are healing me from that mythological/narrative about powerlessness by putting me in touch with the power I do have. I cannot tell you what a difference that has made and is making in my vocation. 

Pastoral ministry is full of all kinds of stuff. But one thing we swim in, constantly, are the myths that others bring to our work. Like, folks think we are inherently more spiritual than them, and therefore more capable of insight, prophecy, healing, and leadership. If you are a pastor who likes your ego stroked more than you care about the will of God being done, you will confirm these myths for people while losing your soul. If however you know that you are going to die and everyone else is going to die and that time for folks to discover the Gospel in themselves (as opposed to perpetually discovering the Gospel-according-to-their-pastor) is limited, then you earnestly and hopefully humbly get about the business of putting people in touch with the power they do have--which is always, as St. Paul the Apostle reminds us, the power of God at work in them. Often that will entail deconstructing the myths of power they carry about themselves, others and God. Some people will not hang out for that part because it gets wickedly fucking uncomfortable. "Never under estimate the inclination to bolt." Right? Many of those myths give people their sense of identity, sense of world, sense of place. Destabilizing that is risky. But/and. My friend Kayla Bonewell used to have a quote on her Facebook that seems relevant here: "World-views create worlds." They hammered this into us in seminary. I think partly because if we dared going into a 'healing' profession, we better know that what often stands in the way of people's healing are the worlds and views they hold to be true. If people's views/myths/narratives of power are rendering them powerless, there's no way to heal from that except through deconstructing those views/myths/narratives about power and creating new ones. Which is of course about facilitating space for people to tap into and experience their own power, like women's writing group and our fitness group with Taryn. Not an easy (pastoral) task if people think that a pastor's job is comprised of listening compassionately and giving answers. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Creating new ones--views and worlds--doesn't happen all at once, though it does happen simultaneously. It happens in this really interesting matrix-y kind of way where you do new stuff that makes you think new stuff. Or you think new stuff which enables you to do new stuff. And then all of a sudden your thinking and doing are dancing to a different beat, shifting forms along the way, passing information back and forth, enticed, like best friends on an old sofa telling each other radically risqué and totally tender love stories. 

Pastors don't heal people. People who heal (which pastors can be part of, of course) do so because they courageously move into discomfort, dance bravely into new territory and willingly embrace and share widely the gifts that come as a result. Because of my own healing experience, I have come to think of my pastoral duties differently. I don't heal people. I make space for people to move, dance, embrace and share. Healing happens in those spaces if God and humans collide. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Whether it happens isn't my responsibility. Making the space is my responsibility.  

 

In that regard I think many of us on this Earth are 'healers.' Mama Marjorie was right about me, and, I'm just one of many. I suspect Tricha that you are one of many too. In fact, I know you are. And I cannot wait to see how your current pregnancy and those to follow will engage this question/prompt of healing in your own life and in the life of others. Be sure to write back. Some day. 

Love,

eeJ 

Sermon Writing & The Preaching Moment: Memory, Family, Religion & Power

Just spent the last 24 hours writing a sermon about family values. Now I need a vacation.

Seriously though...

Part of the experience of writing that sermon included a memory/flashback to the 6th grade. It was 1992 and that whole Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown mess was all up in the news. My pastor, Rev. Dr. Homer "Butch" Henderson preached a sermon about "family values" that changed my life forever. I don't use that phrase lightly. Literally: changed my thinking about family, about values, about the Bible, about being a Christian. That sermon is responsible, in large ways, for the beginnings of my feminism and queerness and my introduction to progressive Christianity, biblical hermeneutics, and theology. Can I even quantify or qualify my life without those things? Would I be a pastor today without that sermon? Would I have the family I have fought to incarnate without that sermon? How is it that a preacher can have that much power? 21 years later and I still remember that sermon. I was eleven years old dude. Eleven.

Dear God: may I never ever forget the life-transforming potential of preaching. May I always be responsible and faithful to you first and foremost, and then, carefully, tenderly, powerfully willing to give the best of what I have (from you) to the flock who so surely deserves it. Amen.

Achieving Mental Sanity in the Morning: A Formula

If you wake up in the morning and you're nuts
like bat shit crazy
wheels spinning
anxiety soaring
no anchor, no root, no tether to speak of--
welcome to the pressures of pastoral ministry
(or just the normal stuff of human-being-awake, literally and figuratively).

While it's presumptuous to think there's a once-size-fits-all remedy
to pre-sunrise panic, I'd like to share what worked today,
yes for you, my beloved readers, but more for me, in case I forget
and need to be reminded of a formula-for-relief later down the road.

Move your body out of the bed before any one else stirs.
Give thanks for a moment of quiet.
Make the coffee extra hot.
Eat a peach.
Wrap a hand-knitted, prayer soaked blanket around your shoulders.
Read James Baldwin. Read that paragraph that you underlined,
the one that knocked your fucking socks off, at least three times.
Read the bible, specifically a parable, about seed-sowing and 3 types of soil.
Remind yourself: what kind of soil you choose to be is up to you,
and it has everything to do with how you listen and how you respond.
Pray in the silence. Ask for help, specifically, with the shit that vexes you--
name it, name them, name yourself. Then see how it feels to acknowledge your limits.
Give thanks for a place to be powerless, in all honesty.
Pet the dog whose needs are real. Let the dog out, whose bladder is real.
Hug the college student, the one whose like a daughter to you,
before she goes back to NY. Squeeze her tight: it's going to be a while.
Tell her about a dream you had: about how she doesn't ever have to choke,
not for the sake of anyone. Give thanks for feminist writers who taught you not to choke.
Go back to bed and stare at your spouse holding your child,
behold how their still-sleeping bodies signify all that truly matters.
Crawl back in with them, snuggle as a threesome for a while,
 and after taking the baby back to her crib,
make love to the person whose partnership you cannot fathom living without.
Feel it: the connection, the intimacy, the love, all in skin. Feel it.
Get up. Go to the kitchen. Play Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day"
and give thanks for growing up on early 90's Los Angeles hip hop,
while stirring the pancake batter with just enough force to leave some luxurious lumps.
Prepare yourself, mentally and physically, for door-knocking in an hour,
because queers are the liberation of the Earth and they deserve legal protection.
Write something to remind yourself that there's thinking and then there's living.
And living is best just.like.this.

Love,
self.

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. 

Writing Isaiah Entry #14

Writing Isaiah 

Entry #14

8.12.13

Chris Kindy 

So, I've been thinking about what it was like for me being the first born in my family, a girl and my brother being the second born, the boy.  Even at the tender age of four, I felt the undercurrent of a perceived level of importance that we now had a "boy" in our family.  I can remember thinking inside my little head when my brother was brought home from the hospital, "So this is what everyone is so excited about?".   As an adult, I continually hear young mothers comment," I just feel different about my son then I do my daughter." While I'm convinced that those different feelings are real, the comment has the implicit air of meaning that the feeling is "closer" or " better" or somehow the ultimate of feelings once a boy enters their family.  I explain this observation to you, so that it can be the backdrop for my question.  How do you think you might feel different about Aurora and Isaiah with respect to their gender?  How might you respond to those people who you will encounter who will project the stereotypical response to the importance of having a boy?  What will it take to insulate Aurora from the feelings that I had that somehow I wasn't as important or enough?  I ask you these questions because I love you and Aurora so much and if anyone can counter these cultural gender stereotypes I know you can and will.  How can you teach others to understand that the differences in feelings may be just that, not better or worse?

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds

The first thing I want to acknowledge in this writing is the acute pain that percolates in your prompt. It is not a pain foreign to me--the pain of being a female-identified person trying to make it in this male-adoring culture--but the pain here is unique. It is the experience of a girl child, confronting perhaps for the first time (tragically so within the one place that's supposed to be sturdy and safe, family) being unseen and undervalued vis-a-vis the male bodies around her. You write: "at the tender age of four." And while many four year old elder sisters have probably been erased, somewhat, when their new baby brothers came home, what's unique about this story, at least in my reception of it, is that it's you telling it, remembering it, offering it up for my consideration. You. My friend who knows too much and feels too much to ever really be comfortable. Whose memory of the past and whose presence in the present and whose premonitions of the future concoct a consciousness that stands alone in its abiding wisdom and unrelenting torture. If you weren't so fucking observant and connective (body, mind, spirit), you probably wouldn't look back on this episode at the age of 4 and feel how implicative it is for what was to come in your life. Your life, Chris. Our collective life, womyn (and men). That's what makes this unique. You refuse to look away. Then and now. It is what I have come to love about you more than anything else. Your clarity. Your bravery. And because of this wide-open-eyes-heart-&-head phenomenon you possess, I often grapple with powerlessness as your friend. You are destined, again because of who you are, to suffer. Suffer in unapologetically and unwaveringly staring at the utter wreckage of inequality, inhumane insanity, and needless, inexplicable tragedies in this life. As your friend, there exist moments when I wish I could remove that yolk from you. Not fix it. Because then I would lose the you-ness I cannot fathom living my life without. But rather, remove it, temporarily. So as to relieve you. 

Like, is there anything worse, than hearing about the painful episodes we endure as children? The moments when our innocence is lost? When the soul-crushing bully enters from stage left? Or the first racist joke is told at the lunch table? Or the defining "you're fat" stare descends upon the flesh, murdering the uncultivated, merely natural love-of-body claimed by kids? This shit makes me ache. I can listen to my mom and husband tell stories about contemporary adult struggles that are serious and hard, fully confident that they will navigate the turbulent terrain and come out on the other side mostly unscathed. But if either of them share stories with me about how they were picked on, silenced or mistreated as little ones, I feel a blood curdling scream and rearing-up dragon come to life in my gut. Like, who do I need to breathe fire on? So it goes here. When I read your words, I felt this immense sadness, because of patriarchy of course, but mostly because it was you. And then sadness gave way to vicious rage. But enough about me as an Enneagram 8. Weeks of time to ponder your story have proven kind: I am now ready to respond with a combination of head, heart, and warrior fire. 

How and when do we learn difference? How and when do we ascribe meaning and a gradation of value to  difference? Lyssa Howley and I were intellectually masturbating the other day, in the fellowship of Junot Diaz, after watching his interview with Bill Moyers. Diaz said something that has stuck with me in a palpable way all week: "Saying a distinction is different than drawing a conclusion from a distinction." I think many of us learn distinctions by observing the world around us, taking in the information available to us, and applying those observations and information in our own thinking processes. If those learnings and applications work, meaning we are able to integrate in an ongoing way what we experience with our inherited cognitive concepts, then we tend to hold on to the observations and information and continue using them. But if too much cognitive dissonance arises, we are forced to retread what we've seen and heard, what we've been taught and swallowed. Well, I guess we aren't forced. Some of us deal with cognitive dissonance by employing denial or making ourselves numb to it. But again, you're not one of those types, so I'll keep going on the other track. I don't know about you, but gender (and race a close second) has been cognitive dissonance facilitator #1 in my life. Part of that is because of the distinction that Gayatri Spivak writes about: how there is no essential identity and yet identities materialize into realities based on the essential properties we (sometimes intentionally, most of the time unconsciously) arbitrarily attach to them. Like, I know I'm not and you're not and no person is society's brand of "girl/womyn/female" and yet because that brand exists, and some of us fall within its fictional yet material reach, we must grapple with the reach itself. There's no way to escape gendered realities in our world. But unfortunately I don't think we enter into the complexities of gender first. I think we enter by imitation, assimilation and acceptance in order to survive. It's only later when shit gets uncomfortable or feels unfair that we begin to question the category. 

I'm not sure when I learned that girl and boy were different, though I do remember a penis/vagina conversation at the breakfast table when I was...uughhh...3 years old after I'd been staring at my dad's genitalia in absolute bewilderment. Isn't that interesting? In your story and in my story a body outside of our own body becomes the signifier by which we come into an awareness of difference. So when did we learn to draw conclusions about the distinctions we made between "our" bodies and "their" bodies? Sounds like you took in, or at least figured out quite clearly, that male supremacy was a value in your family. The people who brought you into this world, who were most responsible and well-disposed to influence you, taught you through agency and unconscious bias, that you were less than. Is that when internalized oppression began? Or is that when a life-long fight was inaugurated? Probably both, right?

So here's where I get tripped up. 

I've done so much work on gender, in therapy, in academia, in spiritual life, through queer community, on myself, with others, ad infinitum. I've gone through the phases of imitation, rejection, and integration. I feel pretty comfortable in my own skin these days. Which is nice. But I fear for the gendered realities my children will face. And since we're talking about fear and reality, I'm also afraid of the racialized realities they will face. Both of my children will face supremacies that they don't fit into. Aurora will contend with patriarchy. Isaiah will have light-skin privilege but he will have to face, both outside and inside himself, white supremacy. If either of them have disabilities or find themselves affectionally-oriented outside of hetero-normativity, there will be other wars waged on their lives. This is terrifying for me as a parent. And yet...

Religion has its merits. Lately I've been thinking a whole lot about the phrase "be in the world not of the world" as it relates to the radical incarnation of Jesus. I'm pretty convinced that all the supremacies, all the oppressions "of the world" stem from a logic of body-hatred. That somewhere in the history of humanity, we looked upon our bodies and upon the bodies of others as some huge horrifying mistake. Maybe that was the original "Original Sin." Maybe. Anyways, I'm also pretty convinced that the eternal magic of Christianity, what I simply cannot tear myself away from, is its inherent (yet easily explained away and avoided) insistence that the Divine became flesh and dwelt among us. Which suggests to me that God loves bodies. And we should too. All of them. All bodies. No exceptions. If God made body home, then home is the body. Right? To be "in the world not of the world" as a Christian, for me, right now, means employing a body-love-logic at all times, but especially in relation to those bodies that are most hated, stigmatized, oppressed "in the world." Gustavo Guiterrez, a Latin American liberation theologian, wrote that God exercises a preferential option for the poor. That when it comes to justice, God takes the side of the poor, always. I'm trying to believe and do the same except i'm broadening the category of "poor" to include "all bodies, but especially those most marginalized and despised."  

What I'm trying to say Chris is that I think fighting supremacy is one thing. But radically loving is another thing. I was writing with both Tricha and Dominique this last week, along with a host of other womyn (some you know and some you don't) about spiritual power, body phobia, healing and love. What I took from almost all of those interchanges is what the world needs now is love sweet love. And it needs it tangibly, fiercely, in the flesh. Like, womyn looking upon each other, whether in family, friendship or romance, with affirmation, kindness, care, erotic devotion and unfetishized desire is needed now. We need this from all genders, actually. Last night I spent 7 straight minutes holding Aurora's little soaking-in-the-bath body up to my adult soaking-in-the-bath-body. Talk about endorphins of love. It comes close to breast-feeding in the spiritual union category. Anyways, I don't think we can undervalue how moments like those, moments of skin to skin, unpressured, touching and loving for the sake of touching and loving, go in the way of building incarnational and relational esteem. We need to love ourselves, yes. We also need people on the outside to show us how magnificent and worthy of intimacy we are.

So my commitment in the way of breaking down male supremacy in the arrival of Isaiah into our family is to love Aurora more tangibly and fiercely in the midst of the distinctions drawn for her and those she draws for herself. Not apart from Isaiah. But in the dawning of his presence, in the company of his life with her life. It's good modeling. For both. And, you know me, I'll probably have to go off on some folks who try to impose their body hatred logic on my family from the outside. Then I'll come to you, tale/tail between my legs, in need of counsel on how to atone for the fall out. You'll listen, give sage advice. We'll walk around the block, to the park, and back again, sit down on the couches and chalk it all up to another day in the life of those who face it all, feel it all, fight it all, forgive it all, and still somehow find the energy to keep on loving/living.