Know Noise

Enough & Jesus' 3-fold Model of Discernment

2012-01-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

FCCBC Blog: http://inwardandoutward.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/enough-jesus-3-fold-model-of-discernment/

Wayne Muller asserts that thegood life is the life of enough. A life of enough is a life where we aren't wantingand grasping all the time, aren’t perpetually parched and dissatisfied, aren’trunning around wrecked by our own impossible schedules. The good life, the lifeof enough, as opposed to the frenetic, never-enough life, is one where webreathe easy, one that includes moments of relaxation and recognition of beautyaround us. A life of enough is one wherewe say "agh, this is it, I am content, all is well" and don’t feelguilty about our own sense of sufficiency. A life of enough is one of rhythmicharmony, of shalom.

I’ve never met anyone on thisEarth who seems to live the life of enough all the time. But I have known pilgrimsupon the planet who seem to get it most of the time, a majority of the time, orperhaps just when it matters most. And what I notice about all of them is theircapacity to make wise decisions. On page 27 of his “A Life of Being, Having andDoing Enough” Wayne writes these words:

We make only one choice. Throughout ourlives, we do only one thing-again and again, moment by moment, year after year.It is how we live our days, and it how we shape our lives. The choice is this:What is the next right thing for us to do?

The people I know who do “enough” well are people who havea knack for wisely deciding the next right thing. That is, they are people whodiscern well. I think discernment is the key variable in the life of enough.So, you might ask: what makes for good discernment? Glad you asked…

I think Jesus gives us theultimate model of holy discernment. Jesus spent time in solitude, in quietcontemplation. Jesus spent time in community, surrounded by people who wouldengage with him (both people like him and those who took issue with hisministry). And Jesus kept close to nature. I think all of us need these threeunique portals for discernment in our lives. We need time alone, time to thinkand read sacred text, time to pray and silence ourselves. We need time andsharing with other humans who have distinct experience of their own that canshine a light, pose a challenge and strengthen our own understandings/options.And we need to spend time surrounded by what poet Wendell Berry calls “thepeace of wild things.”

The Peace of Wild Things

When despairfor the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Wayne Muller is right: thegood life is a life of enough. And he’s right that the life of enough comesabout through constant decision making, comes through days and moments ofchoosing the next right thing. My sense is that we have a lot better shot atmaking wise decisions and choices if we follow Jesus’ 3-fold model of discernment,a model that keeps solitude, community and nature at the rhythmic center of ourlives.

Stacy

2012-01-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

Oh to see you again.

Literary artisans write poems about the way
eyes can lazer beam across time and space,
creating an interlocking for the spirit of love,
write poems about the way
eyes communicate unspoken truths
within and between their inhabitants,
write poems about the way
eyes do something beyond seeing,
like signifying the loyalty of looking itself,
like enacting fidelity.

We've never been lovers, not of the romantic kind.
You are a friend, though, of the highest loving caliber.
Your eyes never cease to amaze me
whenever we reconnect on couches after years apart
you talking (in the serene and simple ways you do) about the in's and out's,
odds and ends, hopes and cut up despairing of
being a daughter with a mommy gone too soon,
being a mother of twins that sparkle so bright you cannot help but stare,
being a committed partner in ravishing and restless times,
being a teacher that can't drop poetry or justice no matter the standardized demand,
being a devotee endlessly endlessly and again.

It is always about fidelity with you,
and yet amidst all the stories and enacted demonstrations
you've shared with me over the years, dear friend,
it is the sheer volume of your eyes
that does the convincing. And I,
I am convinced.

Showering in So Cal

2012-01-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

Baby showers. Two of them.
One in the hills of Pasadena,
the other in the flat lands of Riverside.

One full of my mother's earthly companions:
business women,
philanthropists,
(still/busy) working women with grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
regals with arched eyebrows and bows on their shoes.
There: fruit platter, sticky buns and egg souffle.
There: talk of time, how to find a toy that'll occupy baby for "10 minutes."
There: long conversation into the afternoon about policy, future, and justice.

The other one full of former church families and friends:
football-watching dykes,
recovering and slipping addicts,
single moms who didn't choose it,
kids (from broken homes) now adults listening (more) closely to talk of 'family,'
black and white, middle classing and struggling.
There: cake, purple wrapped kisses and lemonade.
There: advice about listening and trusting what's within.
There: a lullaby sing a long.

My mother, daughter and I--
the only similar variable in these equations of difference,
these moments of togetherness that cannot be compared
in anything other than loving quality,
and perhaps a shared tenacity among women
to proclaim and celebrate a sacred new dawn (yes, Aurora)
even in the midst of their impossible (assigned) inheritance.

Such worlds we inhabit,
such geographies we cross,
such bridging and stumbling between,
our bodies, cultures and time.

We are, I am, She will.

Congregationalist Article 2012

2011-12-28T05:13:00.000-08:00

Hey Know Noise Readers,

Peace be with you.

I know that last post was Scrooge-ish. Here's a follow up. Just the peaks and valleys of (a pastor's) life being played out on a blog...

Blessings in 2012 to all of you.

------------------------------------------------

First Congregational Church of Battle Creek

Congregationalist Article

January 2012

I am thirsty forWayne Muller. Thirsty for what he thinks, writes, and encourages in those braveenough to behold his spiritual guidance. He is exactly the person for us tojourney with as we walk together in religious community this New Year. Andhere's a bit of a confession that leads to my assurance that Wayne is right for us right now.

From the 18th tothe 25th of December we hosted 8 worship services, including the Longest NightService and a funeral for a beloved young man who died of a heroine overdose atthe age of 27. We did Reel Theology for young families, Christmas baskets for thecommunity, and our youth visited home-bound members to sing Christmas Carols.The heights and depths of Advent and Christmas joy, sadness, bewilderment, andprofound reverence were touched this holiday season, of that I am sure. I amconstantly in awe of how we show up, as a people committed to the Gospel,committed to the truth and love of God. We show up in the spirit of justice,with the hunger of hope, witnessing in action our belief that God's incarnationdoesn't beckon us to sit it out but rather to go more and more intimately intothis life's despairing and abundant realities.

And Christmas about maxed me out thisyear. All I could do was curl up in a ball and watch back-to-back basketballgames on Christmas day once our two worship services came to an end. Theexhaustion was palpable. I'd shown up in all the ways I could and given everyounce of energy I had during the Christmas season. Yet, all I could do for mostof the evening, as I sat on the couch, was think about the cards I didn't send,the parties or dinners I didn't attend (because I was double booked or tootired), the people I didn't see, the gifts I didn't give and why I didn't domore.

Crazy. Do any of you ever experiencethis thing? This not enough thing?

Please don'thear this as a laundry list of complaints. I love what I do for a living andwouldn't trade it for the world. In fact, it is because I love what I do thatI'd like to get into the deeper significance of this not enough thing.I also suspect that I am not alone in this struggle. I see many of you,particularly those of you who show up consistently in the ministry of thischurch, wrestling with similar push and pull.

In our culture,we are constantly asked to do more and to do more quickly. Technology hasincreased our capacity to 'get things done' with the click of a button. Themarket place and media have become around-the-clock enterprises that never shutdown, shut off or shut up. Some call this progress. I'm not sure. What I doknow is that more and more andmore--whether the demand is coming externally or internally—often becomes thecatalyst for burn-out, depression and feelings of guilt. We pair this cultureof excess with our inherited Protestant work ethic, the idea that we achievesalvation through works of righteousness, and there's a recipe for spiritualmalaise.

Tom Ott and Irecognized this cultural and Protestant recipe being cooked up in our midstover a year ago and began working with Wayne.We wanted coaching from someone who could help us discover another way, a rhythmic,sustainable way of embodying faith. I remember the first time I heard Wayne’s voice on thephone. There was blessed reassurance in his deep, thunderous tone. I felt an abiding calm the minute he opened his mouth and in most of our encounters I find myselfin tears because the beauty of his presence overwhelms me and brings me home tothe truth of who I am and who God is. Over the course of our sessions with him,I have discovered the true spirit of Sabbath (not as practice, but asembodiment) with/in Wayne Muller. His writing, his speaking, his praying, hissuggestions, all of it brings me into a greater awareness of and faithfulnessto the divine giftedness of this life which is enough.

And so, if youare burned out after Christmas, are disillusioned with this culture that’scompulsively calling you to busy-ness while simultaneously flushing yourself-esteem down the toilet, or if you just want to take your shoes off and feelthe holy ground unfolding as you walk upon the Earth—I want to invite you tojourney with us, with Wayne Muller, for the next 10 weeks as we explore “A Lifeof Being, Having and Doing Enough.”

Pastoral Confessions on Christmas Eve's Eve

2011-12-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

I did the funeral of a 27 year old yesterday. He was an incredible soul: creative, compassionate, empathic to a fault. And he was a heroine addict who died of an overdose.

Today I opened my browser to find out that Gov. Rick Snyder wrote LGBT discrimination into law in my (now) home state of Michigan.

For the last month, it's become increasingly painful for me to witness the rampant materialism and hypocritical hype of "charity" that characterize (most) North American celebrations of Christmas. Mass consumption of things and food are the markers of this cultural tradition matched with seasonal acts of sappy "service" that serve only as band-aids to social systems that need disinfectant and surgery.

...

Weary

Skeptical

Angry

Disillusioned

...

I am militant about honoring the life of Jesus. I am militant about justice. I am militant about our world being a place where sacred flesh (all flesh) can thrive. This world is NOT reflecting what Christmas is about, what Jesus enfleshed or what the beloved community can be. And so I'm having a hard time celebrating/ritualizing this "holiday." Please forgive me...

Maybe when the candle light goes up in the air

maybe when people I haven't seen for a while, people I love hug me

maybe when lyrics familiar, laced with grace come out through my throat without any effort

maybe when people see the stable as ultimate indictment of privilege--maybe then I'll feel it.

But until then, please forgive me.

A Portal

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

So the following link serves as a portal for me. An entry and lens into some of the embodiments that most speak to, remind, and invigorate me. Yet I cannot post this in more public venues because of the language. Balancing personal and professional ethics never ceases to befuddle me. How can something this beautiful be censored? And out of respect to what, exactly? My questions to wrestle with, I suppose. In the meantime, I share...here.

http://fuckyeahdykes.tumblr.com/

Rant

2011-12-08T11:10:00.000-08:00

I don't want to have any more conversations about individuals or specific acts when it comes to the following: violence, mental health, addiction, sex, race, ability, religion, over-privilege, under-privilege, employment or education. If there's no systems analysis, I don't want to hear it or talk about it. Period. End of story.

To The Women/s: A Poetic Letter/Plea at the Horizons of Feminist & Continental Philosophy

2011-12-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

Some of you have more to say now.

Others look away with greater judgement and speed than before.

Still others drop off gifts, quietly, sometimes anonymously--

gifts color-coded, gifts cloaked in generational grind.

Yet another group of you can't look at me without crying

because images of your abortions, miscarriages,

your torturous waiting that turned into a never,
that he left you for some vagina-that-could,

come flooding every time my engorged belly passes by.

Little girl creatures stare and stare and stare:

as if I'm some new constellation in the sky,

begging for a name and mythology all my own.

The oldest, those closest to death

say things so unfiltered, it's almost refreshing. Almost.

New tongues and traditions between us
and though I am delighted, I have something to say:

I see you.

I see it all.

But I saw you before, too.

Do you know that?

Before you began applying the universal woman/mother hermeneutic upon my flesh,

before you tiptoed through the entrance of a 'tolerable' discourse

in this culture that tries to annihilate anything authentic and creative between-women
outside of its Cosmopolitan, Better-Homes-and-Gardens, Madonna/Whore jurisdictions--

I yearned for you.
Yearned for your speech,
your glances and judgements,
your quiet and anonymous gifts,
your tears.

I've wanted to see/hear/touch/love all of you all along. Not just about this.

Not just about the labor of our love externalized, as Irigaray would say.

But about the labor of y/our interiority too.

Your questions, desires, and mad-ass plans to do it different,

the burning shame you hold because of too many nevers,

the way you touch yourself when the loneliness has become too stifling,

the way you make sense, the way you become incensed.

The books that burst you into belly laughter.

Why you cry in church like that.

Your stories and songs outside the obligatory and caved-in.

I've wanted all of you, all along.

I do not confess my longing,
as the framers of autocratic/phallic/fuckery would propose,
from a location of hyper-feminine, dyked-out insatiability.
This is not a petition of one who wears black leather, fish nets and red lipstick.
Does anyone else yawn in the face of such simplicity?
These are the yearnings of one who occasionally
glimpses the "one" we are not because of the dynamic, difference we are.
And it sets me free. Not to be you. But to be me, and in being totally me,
the possibility to love you, to love the ineffable us, which is
after all the greatest gift I can give this unborn daughter
coming into our fold, a line of flight her very own.

Aurora the Aporia: Learning Apophasis (again) from the Inside for Once

2011-11-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

Another thing you should know about your mother:
I spend a lot of time watching movement. Movement of the earth in seasons.
Movement of the Multitude in pursuit of justice. Movement of liturgy.
Movement from trauma to healing. But there's nothing, absolutely nothing,
that captivates my attention like the movement of the human body.
I spend hours, days in fact, watching flesh do its thing.
And I make countless guesses about what motivates human movement.

My seminary professor Dr. Marion Grau says this is hermeneutical,
that we are interpretive bodies interpreting bodies. She's right. About many things.
But back to the matter at hand, at foot, at head and heart and bone and all things body.
These guesses I make, that we all make, about how/when&why movement erupts
in ourselves, or in others--these guesses and interpretations reveal much about
the guesser, the interpreter herself. And in that regard, dearest Aurora,
morning's dawn, light of day, you are already reminding me of what I don't know.

Sometimes you are still for long long periods of time.
And then there are times, like last night, when you move rapidly, with fierce intensity
and repetition for hours. Undeniable, attention-grabbing force in what you are doing.
I wonder, in motionless moments and silence, if you are tired.
In moments when you are physically erupting inside of me I wonder
if you are hungry, excited, uncomfortable, seeking release, happy. What? I don't know.

And that's the gift of it all. I am brought back to the truth of not-knowing.
Best guesses and interpretations aside: I don't know what moved you to come alive,
to come into first, second and third trimesters.
I don't know what causes your dormancy or excitability.
I will never, completely, fully know you or understand your movement.
Not when you're born.
Not when you try to explain it to me with the
language this world extends to you. Never.
Unless I slip into sinful amnesia, you will always remain a mystery to me.

Which makes this life with you all the more inviting, which makes seeking
the who/what/why of you all the more enlivening.
The body: mystery. Motivation: mystery. Movement: aporia par excellance.
What a treasure to be taught this timeless truth from the inside for once.

Advent Congregationalist Article

2011-11-22T05:39:00.001-08:00

For the longest time I had visceral, negative reactions to the phrase “wait on the Lord.” I know it’s biblical. I know it’s been in our tradition for a long time. I know it brings (some) people comfort. But it often comes across to me like a sound-byte, cliche that people utter when they have nothing else to say. Further, far too many people “wait on the Lord” when they could be taking concrete steps in their lives to make their situations more hopeful. It always rubs me the wrong way when God’s name gets invoked in order to absolve humans of their responsibility. And on top of all this, waiting often seems like the exact opposite of what God calls us to be about in the world. I’ve understood faith to be about acting from a place of assured risk, acting from the place of hope secured in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I mean, you didn’t see Jesus waiting on Rome or legalistic, corrupt religion to change their behavior. He actively turned his face/life/ministry toward Jerusalem and actively changed the world forever with his active challenge of love and justice. So what’s with this passive, waiting business evoked in his name at this time of year?

In the Advent season we are told, again, yet again, “wait on the Lord.” And again, yet again, the promise of God’s incarnation is what we are instructed to wait for. God is going to show up, they say. A star will rise in the East, they say. Unto us a savior will be born, they say. So we get out our calendars and count the days. We invoke and plea with the spirit of God through song: “oh come oh come Emmanuel.” We watch a different family light a new candle in worship each week. It’s delightful, isn’t it? The purple and blue. The fire light. The familiar hymns. The way children get excited and remind us, literally, that miracles come in small packages. It’s new every time, this Advent thing, even though we do it again, yet again. It's new every time because we are different every year. That's the glory of religion: it connects us to timeless truths as we change week after week, month after month, year after year.

This year, it’s particularly new to me and it’s carving out a new appreciation and respect for a phrase I used to hold in high contempt. Something big is going to show up in my life this year. Something I can’t control. Something inside me, yet independent of me too. Something that will change my life forever. Every day I wait. Wait for the moment when she’ll show up. Wait for the moment when I’ll see her face. Wait for the moment of birth. I can’t control how it happens or when it happens. But I can get prepared, emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.

Pregnancy is teaching me about what I do have control over, what I don’t, and that the greatest spiritual gift I can give myself and this little one is to wait with awe-filled anticipation. There’s also some fearful dread, some uncomfortable moments of not-knowing. That’s also a part of Advent (which we’ll be hearing about as we journey with the Prophet Isaiah in church over the next weeks). But mostly, this waiting is filled with joy-filled curiosity and splendor. There’s nothing passive about it. It’s a choice, a choice born of love and surrender to the miraculous processes that transcend and live inside me simultaneously. Advent waiting is the same: it’s not passive; it’s a choice born of our love and surrender to God who transcends and lives inside us all simultaneously. We wait on the promise that God will be born, will show up, again, yet again. And that we will be made new, because of that birth & showing up again, yet again.

Pregnancy is teaching me the unmatched spiritual power of waiting this winter, the Advent, this sacred season. What wondrous love is this...

Amen.

2011-11-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

From Wilderness to Promised Land: Remember, Don’t Forget

By: Rev. Emily Joye Mcgaughy

FCCBC, Koinonia

November 20, 2011

Deuteronomy 8:1-20

I’m not going home this year for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but lots of my loved ones around here (and those I keep in contact with via phone) are preparing to head out, head home, go back, to return to the land of their ancestors. I’ve been listening to them about it all week. Many of them are experiencing a combination of excitement and anxiety, joy and dread, hope for peace & reconnection and ceaseless projections of potential drama. How many of you are or will go somewhere other than where you currently live during this holiday season at some point?

It’s amazing how before we even get on the plane, train or automobile to the place of our return, to the “home” that may or may not still feel like “home,” that place starts living in our psyche and talking to us about what’s to come. Before we even leave, that place has arrived within us. Perhaps American Novelist William Faulkner was right: the past is not the past. And our biblical text of this morning would have us believe that’s a good thing. But I’ve got to be honest…sometimes I don’t buy it.

Am I the only one who returns to the land of my ancestors and experiences instant psychological and spiritual regression? As soon as I cross the threshold of here/there, I turn into a teen-age ball of angsty yuck. When I “go back” somehow I am no longer a self-sufficient adult woman with a house, career and love life of my own. Instead all these insecurities rise up in me that I remember having when I was still dependent on my parents. And every time I forget that these feelings happen every time, and so: I eat too much; I’m offended too easily; I cry at the slightest provocation. It’s crazy. Further: it seems that every fight or awkward silence or total avoidance or dysfunctional dance my family has ever engaged in seems to get re-ignited at the very times of year when Hallmark tells us we should be delighting and devoting and merry merry dancing with one another. I just have to talk about the neo-colonial ideology of Thanksgiving and the Holocaust of First Nations people in America which spoils everyone’s appetite. And my mom’s husband just has to talk about how essential gender roles are for the proper functioning of society which makes the lone queer in the room go suddenly silent and sulky. And my mom just has to make peace between all of us which makes her feel hopelessly anxious and all of us hopelessly annoyed by her anxiety. It’s like clock-work.

And yet…

I also return, or go back to these slices of life, these ghosts of times gone by that connect me to the very things that have formed my body, formed my psyche, formed my world-view and passions and politics and positions for the good. Things that knock me over with thanksgiving, like my mother’s ability to turn a dining room table into an altar with her eye for harmonious color and candle light and the way she opens her arms when people arrive at the door, exhibiting the kind of hospitality joy that only God could inspire. Things that propel me into Thanksgiving wonder, like returning to the place where we spread my father’s ashes 17 years ago and being reminded of the ways he burned a love of political dissent, progressive theology and critical thinking into me as a young child. Things that soothe my heart into the Spirit of Thanksgiving, like hearing familiar music coming from the family speakers or seeing familiar works of art on the walls and realizing how shaped my aesthetics have been by these artifacts of beauty from the past. When I encounter these good things, sometimes I lose my breath because of how much I miss it all, how much I love it all. And then when it’s time to leave, I get lodged with overwhelming nostalgia, wondering if I can live away from these people, these memories, this landscape, these loves of my life.

Returning. Going back. No small endeavor. Ever. Brings out the good, the bad, the ugly and the unrelenting beauty of who we are as people, families, and community.

To return is to unravel the string of memory. And so our biblical text from Deuteronomy has something to share with all of us this holiday season, whether we are the ones returning or whether we are the ones hosting the returned. Deuteronomy 8 is a sermon in itself. It’s a sermon about the sin of forgetfulness and the salvation of memory. The timing of this passage is significant. The Hebrews have escaped slavery under pharaoh, have been led out of the wilderness and driven out all those who previously inhabited the promised land. They have settled in Canaan and are living in a time of security, wealth and peace. The authors of this passage, a crew of priests that have the nation of Israel’s future welfare in mind, warn the peaceful Hebrews: you may have it good now, but don’t forget where you came from. Verse 2: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you…” Verse 11: “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God…”

Remember. Don’t forget.

Biblical mandate.

Remember. Don’t forget.

This particular warning about forgetfulness is targeted at a prosperous people. These priests seemed to understand, like many wise spiritual writers from all the world religions throughout the ages, that humans are capable, most particularly when they are flourishing, of forgetting who and what they are. But most importantly, people in prosperity are most likely to forget God, to operate under the illusion that they are self-made, self-sustained and in no need of divine life or love. It’s not a sin that’s hard to understand. If you are capable of securing work, food, shelter, security and lots of material toys, when you’ve got it made, got it good and plenty—what is there to remind you of your utter dependency on things outside of yourself? The greatest danger of material wealth is the idolatrous notion of self-sufficiency that often accompanies it.

So here are the Hebrews, in a land of flowing streams, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, of olive trees and honey, a land were they may eat bread without scarcity, where they lack nothing. But instead of glorifying the Hebrews for this prosperity, the priests warn them: remember slavery in Egypt, remember starvation and drought in the desert, remember wandering in the wilderness. And when you remember those things and compare them to the glory you’re currently living in, do not say “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”

You know what happens when we return? When we go back? When we allow the string of memory to unravel us? We rid ourselves of the dangers of forgetfulness.

Entering the spaces of the past, whether through cognitive memory or geographic travel, affords us the opportunity to remember just how much power outside of us and how many hands not our own have shaped us. Such experiences annihilate this idea that we have created anything by our own power or by the might of our own hand. And that’s exactly what the biblical authors want.

Going back: we remember what gave us life, that we did not give birth to or raise ourselves. Returning: we remember what influenced us in the early part of our lives, that we did not shape our own world-views, spiritualities, behaviors and habits. Going back: we remember the landscape of our triumphs and terrible mess ups, the external contexts and social feed-back loops that either fostered self-esteem or stripped us of confidence. Returning: we recognize that much of who & what we are today comes from what we learned about ourselves back then. For better and worse. All that stuff we loathe, that drama, those regressive, coping behaviors we learned in the wilderness: that’s in us. All that stuff we love, that beauty and spirit of connection to our relatives that sustains us: that’s in us. Both are right here and memory unravels it all. And that’s exactly what the biblical authors want.

But here’s the kicker: it’s not memory for the sake of getting stuck in what was. It’s memory for the sake of being present—spiritually—to what is. What is now. What is present today. What occupies this moment. And the spiritual lesson in all of this is that God is. God is here. God is now. God is present today and occupies this moment with us. When we go back and return, it’s easy to see how God was with us and brought us through in the past. The gift of those memories is that they can, if we allow them to, illuminate the Divine life in the present. And this illumination can, if we allow it to, change the way we see and handle our current circumstances.

God brought the Israelites through exploitation, made water burst forth from a rock and made bread rain down from heaven, provided sustenance and mercy even in the worst of times; so surely it is that same benevolent spirit that provided in Canaan. Problem is, the Israelites considered the prosperity their own, like it belonged to them just because they were special/good/deserving/hard-working/chosen, whatever. No, no, the priestly authors warn: anything giving you life, anything sustaining your spirit, anything feeding/satiating your needs is from God and God alone. So treat it as gift. Let the memory of God’s goodness in the past inspire you to recognize God’s goodness in the present.

So beloved faithful: as you return, as you go back in these next weeks, in this holiday season: seize the opportunity to unravel, seize the opportunity to remember and to recognize. Seize the opportunity to treat everything that gives you life, everything that has sustained your spirit, everything that has fed/satiated your needs, seize the opportunity to enact your thanksgiving by treating these things like the gifts from God that they are. Listen to them deeply. Love them fiercely. Touch them tenderly. Gifts from God: remember, don’t forget. Amen.

Hinged

2011-11-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

The door across the street
keeps opening and closing
as the wind commands an effect
to her causal call.
On a hinge, helpless,
blown about, back and forth,
again and again.
Slightly open, suddenly a slam shut,
then flung so wide open that, in a five second flash,
the whole internal house--furniture, floors, hallways, all that--.
can be seen from the outside.

Entrance, exit. Which? Just wait a second.
Everything changes with a new arousal of the air.

Dare you stand in the way?
Dare you approach and try to touch the handle?
Dare you desire to come inside?

Just a quick glimpse. A simple foreshadowing season.
No grip.

To My Father

2011-10-11T06:21:00.000-07:00

For years the only comparison named
was the pinky finger.
Until blood tests could confirm,
it was the pinky finger,
mine exactly like yours even as a newborn,
that stood as paternity marker.
When the more scientific proof came,
no one was shocked, though everywhere scandal traced
what the two of you had done, and not done.
My skin and bones just the beginning.

Seven weeks ago I met your (other) children,
my siblings, for the first time. And I met nieces and nephews,
two face to face, others through pictures or memories shared.
We all have the same nose and wide smile. And there's something
reminiscent of fire in all of us, even your only son
who is patient, quiet and gentle but neverthless a power in his own rite.

Sometimes I want the dead to be alive,
but only in the way we, the living, can envision you, the departed, among us.
Present and watchful, subject to feeling but unable to fuck anything else up.

I wanted you to be dead but watching in the moment
he, your only son, my long lost brother
said my name outloud, looked me in the eyes, took me into his arms
and held me which you...you...
were unable to do before taking leave of me,
taking leave of us who now gather around your choices
like pilgrims and conscientious objectors
with only chards of glass and petals of devotion
to make sense of at our feet.

I want you to be dead but watching
in the moment my child is born. Grandchild number five,
bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, will come this Spring
in addition to Heidi, Bret, Luke and Elise.
And then, father-of-mine, when I arrive where you are
a long time from now, I want you to tell me what it was like to watch me,
the daughter you never knew, the daughter you deserted,
have faith enough in this life, despite everything that could have stripped me of it,
breathe and breathe and breathe and push and push and push
y/our blood line through another generation.

If, even there and then, you cannot love me
with embodied things like language, gesture, embrace
please know that this baby is already forgiving you
from the inside in ways I could not have foreseen.
So if even there and then you cannot love me,
I will throw my arms around you and thank you anyways
because there's no baby without me and no me without you.

Diagnostics: A Chaplain Reflects 2 Years Later

2011-10-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've been concerned about diagnostics for a long time. You know: the observation of symptoms, the evaluation of those symptoms vis-a-vis some long standing collection of knowledges, and then the naming of whatever those symptoms appear to be in their totality. My problem is that 'totality' is rarely taken into account, not in a social way that is. The criteria and framework for diagnostics and the practices of diagnosing feel dangerously isolated and individualistic to me.

This morning, while walking with my mom around the marshes on the island of Sandwich in Cape Cod, the veterans of Palo Alto flooded my memory, infusing my thoughts with their faces, stories, and languages. PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), Kidney Failure, TBI (traumatic brain injury), Bi-Polar, Drug-Addicted--whatever. These are hardly the things I remember. I remember the stories about war time, about why they signed up in the first place, what they saw and did on the battlefield, who they saved, who they let down, the poignant events & moments that carved a never-ending narrative into their minds be it about shoulda-coulda-woulda or I'd-do-it-all-over-again. I remember the stories about becoming a civilian again, about the struggles, pain, and relief of reentry: the stories about cheating wives, jealous siblings, weeping mothers and proud fathers, stories about how hard it was to look your kid in the eye knowing you'd shot someone else's kid somewhere else, stories about feeling like a foreigner in your own bed and like a zombie at work, stories about feeling your spouses' skin for the first time and feeling like everything was gonna be alright. And I remember the stories of their today's, stories not so racked with soldier-drama: stories of men grown old, now just trying to be good husbands and fathers and grandfathers, stories of mortages and financial woes, stories of disgust with government and a lazy society, stories of how they felt so emasculated by the health-care-system, stories of how they couldn't wait to go home and see their dog and drink a beer and watch football. I remember all that, but if you asked me their diagnosis I'd probably struggle to recall. Why? Because that's not the totality of a person.

What I learned (because of the privileged positionality of being chaplain) is that whatever diagnostic accompanied their hospital stay, it usually had a lot to do with their social experience, be it in the family, on the battle field, with religion, whatever. The mind-body connection is never isolated from the social ties that bind. And so I grew increasingly frustrated with what I saw as a devaluing (or perhaps denial/minimization) of the role social relations play both in creating phenomena and in healing that phenomena.

For instance, war is social. Wars usually happen in response to some kind of social conflict in the first place: there's social violence/threat that predates war-based conflict 9 times out of 10. Wars happen because people in relationships make decisions. Leaders decide together. Military personnel suit up and begin working with another in a coordinated effort to carry out incredibly complex operations. Society (to varying degrees, of course) participates in the feed-back loops of the ethics of war by voting for/against the candidates that promise to do something about them. What happens to an individual soldier on the battle field hardly belongs to that soldier alone. So why on earth, when soldiers get back, are they observed, evaluated and diagnosed as if the symptoms of their injury belong to them and them alone? PTSD doesn't arise in someone just because. It arises because one's experience of a relational environment has been traumatic. Yet diagnostics rarely take environment and relations into account when labeling the "problem." The problem gets attached to the (already fucking traumatized!) individual, as if he/she is the only one exhibiting symptoms. Do I need to emphasize how unbelievably unethical this is? Someone is hurt and then we add insult to injury by labeling them in such a way that they become the sole geography of that hurt? Please...

My guess is that if we started observing, evaluating and diagnosing environments and relationships as much as we do this unto individuals, the symptoms under analysis would be much more difficult to treat. A recommended exercise routine alongside some medicinal suggestion would barely cut it because said practice does nothing to cut off the injury-causing system itself and it certainly requires nothing of those who could potentially heal this soldiers's mistrust of his/her current social environment. If social environments are the location of injury, then the only hope for healing comes with repeated exposure to non-injurious and healing social environments. How many of us, leaders, civilians, family members, fellow church goers, feel compelled to create a non-injurious social environment for returning military personnel? Not many of us. Not many at all. Because we are never considered part of the problem and therefore never required to be part of the solution. For shame.

Now that I no longer work in the VA hospital I have zero contact with returning soldiers. Part of that is because they're being redeployed at such a high rate that few of them are actually in country. Part of this is because they are stuck up in hospital rooms by themselves, much like our senior citizens and mentally ill, being asked to shoulder the weight of war and diagnosis by themselves. If you don't circulate in and through the hospitals, or more militarized environments--which i don't--it's hard to see/hear/interact with them. Given the gratitude I have for the memories of faces, stories and languages that came flooding into my mind this morning, I can't help but grieve this disconnect between soldiers/vets and civilians. I might think tomorrow or next week about solutions/bridges, but today I'm just grieving.

Marjorie

2011-10-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

...a time to tear and a time to mend...(Ecc 3:7a)

Before I knew her well
I used to watch from the back pew
mesmerized by the long hair packed tightly into a bun
on the top of her crowned head (i wouldn't know about that crown till later).
She would sway and sing and cry. Cry a lot.
Always with a tissue tightly wiped around her index finger,
a practice she learned from her mommy Mae Rose
who, though shorter and less religious, wipes her tears exactly the same way.

From the back pew I wondered how anyone
so astoundingly beautiful (like all eyes in the room captured kind of beautiful)
but even more beautiful than what can be described in observing social response,
how anyone so poised, wise, esteemed and successful
could cry like that. I knew those tears were real,
I just couldn't imagine where they came from
or how she got lucky enough to learn the art of expressive grief.
I'd just stare in my curiosity, in church, in my own perplexed and frustrated pain,
probably watching with a hope of learning something from her
though my heart was still too hard to admit such need.

I'm no longer in the pews with her, much to my regret
and though we live a country's distance apart, I know now
about those tears. Don't totally know, but know enough.
She is everything I've ever wanted to embody
and learning her stories after years of witnessing her tears
has given me full confidence that only the broken and healed
can wear a spirit-something that beautiful.

2011-10-09T05:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Self,

There are things you love and you drop them in the day-to-day of living/working/routine-ing. Right now you are on vacation with the space to connect (back) with those things. They are not things; that's a misappropriated term. They are life-lines, bring-you-back-to-the-truth-of-it-all type stuff. Stuff feels wrong too. Anyway, language aside, I want to remind you of them because this space away/apart can serve as on-going memory kicker. So, my dear, remember these...

The New Yorker (the writing, dear God, makes you better by proxy)
Joni Mitchell (lyrics of love unmatched and timeless)
Ecclesiastes (dust in the wind: now that's good theology)
Reading all day long (makes you more human)
Memorizing texts/poems because you/they deserve it (discipline is dope)
Walking to places you've never been (it's like trepidation and discovery all in one)
Going to the movies (it's just story, silly, and there's some kind of retreat involved)
Being alone (don't be an ass; you're totally an introvert no matter how much demand there might be for an alternative reality)
Writing love letters (because you discover love in the writing, duh)
Being outside (like literally changes the composition of your face. trip out)

There might be more to come as there are still 4 days left. What a hallelujah. Oh yeah: another thing. The book you're reading right now "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss is amazing and you should tell everyone about it. Oh yeah: p.p.s. The article you just read in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about coaching is something you should share with everyone you work with, particularly folk in social service. Don't forget.

Between an Aged River and a Newly Flowing Stream

2011-10-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Turtle Bean,

Yesterday was your grandmother's birthday. She is 62 years old.

There are things about her that I know you will discover in time
like how she can create harmony out of thin air
like how grace is at the center of her heart
even though she fails to grasp it for herself
like how when you're struggling she's the most compassionate ear and tongue on the block
because she doesn't fail to grasp it for others
like how to love her is to hold her pain which is hard but worth it
like how being loved by her is supreme (yes, similar to the John Coltrane jam).

I want you to know, child of my womb, that her life has been big life,
in every sense of the word. And that you come from her.
This is important. You must understand this.
I know it won't happen immediately, as even I, at the age of 30
am still discovering what it means to come from her.

But this I know--
to descend from her blood line
is to be enthroned with a legacy,
one filled with promise and struggle (as it with every maternal lineage, I suppose),
where spiritual giftedness is supplemented by
histories of persecution, migration, survival-based fundamentalism and liberation
where leadership brilliance and precision come with
the seductions of ego-enhancement and possibilities to unethically dissolve
where passions of the senses bring portals for ecstasy and
cliff side walks with addiction.

These are bloodline legacies
that you will inherit (and this is only 1/4 of the bloodline!).
Though you are not restricted by them,
you are ultimately responsible to the spirit of them.
They will show up in your life differently
than they have shown up in grandma's life
or in your mother's life
but they will show up
because you, you you you
though singular and all-your-incarnated-own
are not separate from the flesh that has formed you.

Like any mother
standing between an aged river and a newly flowing stream
I am struck with the power and mystery of it all,
struck with the privilege that I inherited being had by her,
struck with the privilege that I inherit by having you,
privilege of knowing I will get to witness and tend to
the next phase of it all through your precious life unfolding.

When mystery and power of this magnitude strike me
I am full of fear and trembling. Wanting to be perfect
to and for you. Wanting to absolve you of the stuff that inevitably
comes and racks the human heart with suffering. But such is not the case with big life.

If there's anything I've learned
from the 30 years inside the 62 years,
it's that perfection and absolution
are nowhere to be found.
But harmony, grace and love supreme abound.
This is your legacy, child of my womb--
big life. And we cannot wait to receive you.

Side by Side: Prophetic & Maternal

2011-09-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

I am a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Religion is avocation deeply embedded in the history of my ancestors and I come from clergyblood on both sides of my family. Years ago I, like many of my forefathers,took an oath to conserve and uphold the traditions of the Church in all of myaffairs. Part of the ministerial office requires truth telling about issues ofmorality and justice, what many of us refer to as the prophetic aspect of ministry. Like the prophets of old (Amos,Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus), ministers of today are called to speak the truth inlove, particularly if society is falling into corruption. We are called to beverbal red flags in the communities where we find ourselves, voicing alarmwhere the streets have been bruised and breeched, and voicing invitation for allthose who are lost in sin to return to the loving presence of a grace that canalways forgive and set free. This is only one aspect of our work but it is animportant one. In all honesty, I believe many pastors go into this work becausewe have an extra sensitive ingrained sense of right and wrong and the Church isone of few public institutions that conserves and places a rite upon truthtelling even at the cost of one’s life. This is certainly true in my case andthe prophetic aspect of ministry has always felt most natural to me.

I am also in the second trimester of pregnancy, expecting myfirst child in the Spring of 2012. For the first time in my life I am lookingat issues of right and wrong, morality and justice as one who will bring achild into the world. All of sudden the prophetic is sitting alongside thematernal. Whereas before the prophetic alarm would sound in the direction ofparticular issues or events in society, I now think much more about how theseissues and events shape the thinking of children. For instance, as all of myfriends and colleagues were scurrying to write letters on behalf of Troy Davisthis week (a very important act in itself, make no mistake), I kept ponderinghow to explain to my child that the government feels justified in taking life. Andwhen I heard the news about racist vandalism being smeared all over Orchard Parkin Battle Creekthis week, I thought about the children witnessing hateful language about theirown skin-color in their own neighborhood. Such things certainly qualify as domestic,psychological terrorism. What does this do to the worldview of a seven yearold? Further, a report from the U.S.census came out this week reporting that 23.5% of children under the age of 18in the state of Michiganare in poverty. When my child is in school and hears in history class therecurring rhetoric of this nation being a place where anyone can make it, howdo I explain almost one of four kids crying of hunger pains at night?

Capital punishment has always mattered to me. As have racismand poverty. But what matters to me more than ever is that the single threadwoven throughout all of these issues & events become more and more clear toall of us: life. The dignity of human life. When we think about the politicianswe vote for, the churches we attend, the news stations we watch, the people wehang out with, the professional fields we go into, the words we use, theactions we take—perhaps the greatest litmus test of all is whether or not thesethings will shape the worldview of children to regard the dignity of humanlife.

A Psalm of Maternal Gratitude

2011-09-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Making your way.

So miracle.

I am joined, because of you,

to countless generations of women

who have surrendered

their bodies to the great unknown:

new sensations everyday,

hopes and fears and prayers everyday,

unraveling mysteries everyday

connective

disruptive

magical.

We women, oh my God:

what we do to continue.

You, joining me to that continuation

because you chose to be alive

and I don’t understand how that happens

but I cry envisioning the resolve in you,

you once a little swimming thing

in a group of other swimming things.

You of all them that made it,

made it into me like hallelujah, yes, here I go.

You precious, strong growing everyday.

And you are inside, but the external isdifferent now.

So much softer now, less willing to sharpen or harden now,

or fasten tight to futile protectiveness.

Now.
Yes, you are teaching me these things:

let it change you, reform you, stretch you, remake you evenif

it means being ripped apart in the process—

the world, this you-world-inside-me,

teaching me what it means to give absolutely everything,

which is loss and blossom at the same time.

How can I thank you?

Still inside, and

already

changing the whole wide world...

A Love Story

2011-08-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

A Love Story

By: Emily Joye McGaughy

August 30th 2011

"I cannot live with a single body cut off from the rest. I want ways of holding on to what surpasses me, of adding to myself a mother or other. (...) I am the finite that wants its infinite. Love infinites me. Without you I am a pebble, and my skin closes narrowly over me. Without you, stub, stump. All I need is you in order to pass over into infinity."

"...I pass through an incomprehension of you towards you, one that doesn't abandon you. (...) O you of whom I'm thinking...contemplated belly to your earth like contemplated from the ground up, you pure manifestation of you, you moon, you other, my togetherness with you I will never know, but it exists. (...) I tell you yes. I begin us with a Yes. Yes begins us."

--Excerpts from Helene Cixous’ Stigmata “What is it o’clock? or The door (we never enter)”

Every birth is a story. They are stories of flesh, flesh that gives of itself in love and risks rupturing the very foundation of the human body for the continuation of life itself. They are stories of seeds and beans. Stories of struggle, miracle and uncertainty. Stories of God. Stories that implicate history and herstory and every little crevice of incarnation that came before both of their stories. Stories of the body. Stories of the earth and her incessant need to return to herself, her constant craving to continue. Stories of love.

I’ve got a love story to tell. I have loved the baby that is now growing in my belly before I ever conceived incarnationally. Loved the promise of planting a seed and nurturing it into growth. Loved the promise of giving my body over to the threshold of life that is also the threshold of death and therefore meeting God in the process of birthing. Loved the idea of something coming out of me that is not me, something that will become outside of me and in the process enable me to be even more me than I’d ever be without it. Loved the idea of seeing this child become something entirely mysterious unto itself, someone that will change the very nature of nature just because she/he is here. Loved the idea of my mom becoming grandma. Loved the idea of continuing the bloodline. And now, now that the baby is growing within, I love the small changes happening in rhythms I do not understand. I love the heartbeat I heard at 7 weeks. I love the people who have promised to surround this baby with their love and support. I love that this baby is surviving and making its way daily. I love the welcoming “yes” that awakens me every morning. And then there is the love story I cannot tell because I am an apophatic theologian at heart and know the limits of human discourse when it comes to love, divine love, divine life, etc. I cannot, in the fullness of truth, describe the body yearning/knowing/truth of motherhood that has been with me all along, truth that only I can discern because it lives inside with incredible force and precision but does not employ language. I cannot explain that love to you because it is of/from God who is always beyond words, ever glimpsing and reaching into our capacity for knowledge beyond the alphabet, knowledge in the depth of our skin, bones, breath, heart, brain and willing wombs.

There is the love story of my love for this coming child. There is the love story of God’s movement within me, making way for this coming child. They are the ground of this birth story.

And while this story is one of mothering and divine love, there will be some who question its truth because the family structure and conditions of life for this child do not match our culture’s sanction on what’s normal. I have heard the critiques already, read them in bold print. I could spend hours writing responses to the fears people have for/about me/us. But instead, I just want to say this. At the heart of all things violent, arrogant, judgmental, erasing and distancing is the belief that we know the truth of someone else’s body/life better than they do. At the heart of all things loving, compassionate and supportive is the belief that God’s revelation is in the body of everything that lives, moves and has its being. Our work on this planet is to together discern and live out that revelation. That is what I am doing in the process of procreation: discerning and living out a revelation that has been in my flesh for a long time.

This pregnancy comes out of a two year discernment process that was originally kicked off by a diagnosis of potential long-term fertility impairments due to polycystic ovarian syndrome. That doctor told me that if I ever wanted to have kids, I needed to get busy. I took her words seriously. She also told me it might not be easy and that I shouldn’t have high expectations. The fact that I got pregnant after two attempts at insemination is, in the words of my Ob-Gyn nurse practioner, a miracle. The two year process of discernment has included accountability and support from the people closest and most important to me including my own family, ministry colleagues, mentors and friends. I gathered medical and spiritual information. I prayed hard. A donor came into my life in ways that still leave me breathless with gratitude. I have family-by-choice in place that will be present in the raising of this baby. I have a community of friends and extended family-by-choice that will support me. Every step of the way has been accompanied by mercies and miracles. I am the happiest I have ever been. I’ve never felt more gifted from the outside, careful, tender and attentive with the inside, never felt so humbled and empowered simultaneously.

I am due in late March. I delight in the promise of a spring baby that will enter the world right alongside the Iris’ and Marigolds of Michigan. Between now and then I pray you will join me in prayers for this little one: safe passage, welcome and sustaining support, love without beginning and without end. A life of infinite love. A life of yes. Amen.

Violence & Memory: Thank you Choir Camp 2011

2011-08-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

Today concludes Choir Camp. One of our music directors, Lucy Lower, gets kids from all over Battle Creek to come play, practice and perform various biblical stories each summer. Choir Camp lasts a week. I've done morning devotions for the kids the last two years. Last year the kids performed the story of Jonah. This year they are doing "Are We There Yet?" which is a production of the Exodus story.

Anyone who knows me well knows that doing "children's moments" in worship is about my least favorite thing on Earth. But Choir Camp devotionals are nearly my favorite thing on Earth. The difference being the presence of adults. In worship there are 100 adults surrounding the 5 or 6 kids drawn to the center of the sanctuary to be seen (rarely heard, though) for a total of 4 minutes. In choir camp, it's just me and the kids. No pressure from the on-looking grown ups. No real time constraints. Space and time for interactivity where the kids are seen and heard, and the text for each morning is consistent with the text that consumes their lives for the entire week. It's relevant to their day-to-day lives, it's meaning-making in a consistent way and I actually think the kids experience some critical faith formation as a result.

This year I've run into some core commitments of my own in the devotional preparation process. If you ever want to know how you *really* feel about something, consider whether or not you'd be willing to teach it to children. Great litmus test.

The biblical narrative of Exodus exhibits the best and worst theology connected to the historical and imaginative G*d YHWH. This is the G*d that so believes in freedom that He is willing to rise up as liberator a former criminal and power-hoarder: a man who is lied to about who he really is; a man who commits murder and then flees the scene. This is the G*d that so despises enslavement of any kind that He is willing to part the ocean into high-flying walls and create a dry path of deliverance for the aching feet of formerly enslaved captives now walking/running/dancing into the possibilities for new life. But/And.

This is the god who takes issue with Pharaoh for killing Israelite first-born sons and then does the exact thing in the final plague upon Egypt. Let me be specific: this is a god who kills children, lots of them. Let me be more personally specific: if I were to teach this story to the kids at Choir Camp in its fullness, I would be saying that God participated in a sort of ethnic cleansing and that the target of his wrath was the most vulnerable in society. Would you be willing to pass this theology onto 4 & 5 year-olds? I simply could not. So I skipped the plagues. And when we got to the ocean crashing down upon all the Egyptian soldiers, I cringed and wished there was a way to tell the story without including that part. But there wasn't. So even in the most deliberate attempt to keep violent theology out of the room, I faltered.

Not that I am afraid of deconstructing biblical violence. I preach against the Bible regularly. But I'm not sure there's cognitive capacity for this kind of sophisticated theological thinking among preschoolers, first graders or even seventh graders for that matter. I am reminded of Rev. Dr. Robert McAfee Brown (Emeritus Professor of Theology and Ethics at my alma mater Pacific School of Religion) who once said: "Any philosophy or theology I do must put the welfare of children above the niceties of metaphysics." We may not be able to guard against all theologies of violence making their way into the imaginations of children, but it's one of the deepest prayers of my life to do all I can in that vein.

The other theme of the Exodus story that’s causing sustained reflection for me this week has to do with memory. I’ve been using clips from “The Prince of Egypt” with the kids because the movie makes alive what comes across so bland and boring in the book. In the film, Moses’ sister Miriam plays a significant role of reminding the former-prince-turned-prophet-and-liberator who he really is. He is a Hebrew, not an Egyptian. He was born to a particular people and it is those people who need him to be reminded of his place among them. Moses has three sibling figures in this story, but as my colleague Rev. Thomas Ryberg reminded me this morning, there’s a direct parallelism between Miriam & Pharaoh. Pharaoh wants Moses to claim who he is in terms of power and empire building, an identity claim that could possibly bring Moses “personal comfort” and social esteem. Were Moses to acquiesce to this seductive invitation, he would have to continue denying his ethnicity, his blood-relation to those he is oppressing. Miriam, on the other hand, invites him to reject imperial power and to choose a life of truth, one where his ethnic and kin connections take precedence over personal comfort and social esteem.

How often are we confronted with these kinds of invitations?

The stripping of one’s ethnic and domestic identity is nothing short of psychological terrorism. Often this kind of stripping happens under the guise of ‘building something better’ for future generations. But which generations, exactly? Who stands to benefit, in the long run, from being lied to about their identity? No one. Not victims. Not oppressors. No one. When we lose who we are and where we come from, whether that happens to us or through our own decisions, there is tremendous loss. That’s why memory can play such an incredibly spiritual role in the redemption of individuals and communities. When we remember where we come from, remember who we come from, remember who we are—literally (not according to some new age “we are all children of light worthy of healthy snacks and hybrid cars” bullshit)—we cannot help but feel an obligation to the whole, which is healing and restorative and inspiring.

There’s a line in one of my favorite passages in Trito Isaiah, where the prophet is talking to once-exiled-now-returned Israel about what actually pleases God. It goes like this:

Is this not the fast that I choose (…) Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

As a fourth generation European American whose lost most of my ethnic heritage because of the ideologies of assimilation (yes, some “white” people get screwed by this too) and as a person living in Michigan who is the daughter of a mother once exiled from the Mid West—not hiding myself from my own kin has become salvation for me. It’s remembering that I was born to a particular people and it is those people who need me to be reminded of my place among them.

So yes, the bible contains horrific theologies. But/And. It also invites me into the lasting truths of my life and the truths of lives around me. How could I ever let it go? I can't. At least not today.

I want to thank Choir Camp 2011 for giving me the opportunity to teach. So I could learn. Amen.

2011-08-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

I used to think
in all my liberal, well-learned haughtiness
that internal stillness came from the clearing of distraction
which inevitably meant detachment from stuff.
In fact, I often scoffed at bells and fancy rugs
as the supplements to achieving peace.
Even texts I though superfluous.
But tonight I baked Amish friendship bread
which smells like cinnamon
while listening to Norah Jones
whose voice sounds like satin
and those two things
brought me closer to bliss than I’ve been in a long long time.
Takes a lot
or perhaps just the right little
to unlearn the absurdity of being well-learned.

The Threshold & Generations

2011-07-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

...approaching 30. my mom's arrival...

you (both) are here. flesh of my flesh.
i am here.
we are here.
together.

bears, believes, hopes, endures.

love.

this miracle, here--
testimony in your bearing
in my believing and hoping
in our enduring almost always the things that were too much
and yet surviving again and again
and there's more
to come; it's here already.

i'm stunned in love. here. today. now.

Father's Day Round Two

2011-06-19T03:35:00.000-07:00

This is dedicated to Rev. Gene Boutilier, Rev. Dr. Barry Sang, Rev. Dr. Bill McKinney, Pete Bellis and Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Kuan--fathers of my Spirit, fathers for the Earth. This is dedicated to Rev. William McGaughy & Rev. J.B. Schwartz--fathers of my body, may they both rest in peace. This is dedicated to Jaime Montenegro, Tom Ryberg & Corbin Tobey Davis--three friends and new fathers who give me hope for the generations to come. God is merciful.

Father’s Day Litany

We thank God for fathers, in body and spirit

inside this building and all over the earth

fathers who love and nurture their own biological children

and love and nurture children not of their blood line.

We thank God for fathers, in body and spirit

Who take time to see, hear, touch, nurture and provide.

Who take time to teach, discipline, support and strengthen.

Who take time to play, sing, dance, and walk alongside.

Who take time to be quiet, attentive, inquisitive and invested over the long haul.

We thank God for fathers who in body and spirit

show up faithfully,

put up with what’s hard, patiently,

who are willing to be changed themselves and

willing to make the world over through concrete acts of love.

We ask God’s forgiveness

for the conditions of evil and sin upon this Earth

that make fathering difficult and impossible for some:

conditions like poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration and war.

We ask God’s mercy and justice

confront and transform those fathers who

have hurt their families and children

because of dishonesty or selfishness or greed or fear.

We ask God’s peace and healing

be upon all those this day who are broken and pained

because they grew up fatherless without a choice.

God’s peace and healing

be upon men who wanted to but could not father children

with their bodies or spirits.

God’s Peace and healing be upon

fathers who lost children too soon to tragic death, miscarriage or abortion,

fathers who have living children lost to long-standing resentment or

addiction or untreated mental health disorders or

anything else that separates them.

We pray for all people living today and those unborn

for fathers everywhere to recognize the image of God

incarnated in their lives and we pray for their faithful response

in body, mind and spirit,

faithful responses of integrity and love whenever they are called

to be good stewards of the lives entrusted to their care.

Amen

Father's Day

2011-06-18T16:36:00.000-07:00

It's the day before Father's Day
and facebook has become the latest display case of the nuclear family
where everyone posts their father as their profile picture.
I have two fathers. How to choose? I refuse.
Besides neither one really counts.
It's this half life, half lie, half truth that's always haunting me, daddy.

On accident, I just saw a picture
of my biological father holding his (other) daughter.
It's the only picture I've ever seen of him where he doesn't have grey hair,
where he's a young man with black curls and bulging biceps and a smile
so devilishly gorgeous that someone as smart as my mom would fall for it.
It's the only picture I've ever seen of my father, fathering.

And I feel like screaming at the picture and screaming at him.
FUCK YOU. HOW COULD YOU?
I feel like making him the scapegoat for absolutely everything,
every struggle,
every love lost,
every staining abandonment episode,
every stinging inability to participate in healthy intimacy.

But I am in love too.
In love with this idea of him. This idea of my father, fathering.
Isn't it love that spikes the initial yearning for him? It is, yes.
And so I imagine it's me that he's holding.
Imagine it's me that gets to feel his hands on my 2-year old belly,
Imagine it's me smiling from ear to ear in between his sturdy black boots.
I imagine he is elated to be with little me
and that little me can't imagine a life without
this towering, tenderly holding him.

...and when I'm done imagining and done sobbing
because the contents of my imagination are always more generous than this life...

i pray for a world where dads can be dads to all their children,
where women don't fall for the bullshit,
where men don't believe their own hype,
where love can flourish in multiplicity without shame, guilt, fear or minimization of its power.

Praying/Dancing/Sexing/Collaging/Awakening

2011-06-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

This is how it goes.

When it's time, you move once.
And then wait.
Sensing a response--
a counter movement--
you consider the power
and take a deep breath.

Then you listen to what's racing.
Is it momentum?
Invitation?
Fear?
A melody crowning?

And again, you move.
This time, there's little guessing
because if it happens twice
it's not a mistake or the silliness of spontaneity.
If it happens twice, it's intentional.
It's rhythmic. It's relationship.

It's dangerous.

Patterns get established at this juncture.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Just listen and feel. Then respond.
That's the sequence, little pilgrim.
Don't step out of line.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Deep breath.

Yours? Maybe...

Just follow, but don't be misled
by listening too long to that which belongs inside
because the outside current
is what satisfies. It's paradoxical.
Just listen and feel and follow.

This is the best kept secret of the universe,
this secret locked in the bodied archives
of any wanderer hoping to come home
by belonging
(again and again)
(beat by beat)
(sound to sound)
(flesh for flesh)
to what's outside.

Here's the trick.

The trick is to close your eyes
when its most alluring
and to scream
when the silence signifies a great study
and to un/name the distance by becoming,
somehow all the more distinct

in total surrender.

Festering & Pestering

2011-05-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

I'm learning more and more that what's toxic and festering must be spoken out loud. Audre Lorde has taught me this more than any/other author. She and Frida Kahlo pester (not fester) me often. Both were incredibly creative and transformative. They took bullshit pain/trauma oppression and transformed their experience of those things into works of art. Courage. Fearless. Both of them. And so on days like today, I recall their legacies...and then I write. I write so I don't internalize the negativity. I write so that my body is free. I write to exorcise the lies that I (sometimes unconsciously) inherit by living in this unconscious/traumatized culture. I write so that I don't perpetuate the lies and hurt people. This is active/intentional channeling of toxicity in an effort to transform it. My prayer in this is for people to feel less alone (in the act of receiving my words) and empowered to actively/intentionally channel toxicity so it doesn't kill them either.

This morning during a brain-storming session at a council retreat I had to sit and listen to leaders of my church talk about "Open and Affirming" conversations as if they were that: conversations. As if gay bodies weren't in the room. Like: you want the luxury of a conversation about my person-hood and then want to congratulate yourself about it in my presence? Um, no. Reminds me of what I felt earlier in the week when the PCUSA decided to ordain openly gay ministers. It's never too late to do the right thing. I am glad about that decision. And there's a part of me that's like, ummmm just because you decided/figured-out that gay people aren't second class citizens doesn't mean you're righteous. You're repenting. That's different. Don't self-congratulate so quickly. Similarly: there's nothing to be sung about when white people actually acknowledge racism. That doesn't somehow erase the lie we've been telling ourselves for thousands of years. Realizing a lie doesn't absolve any of the pain caused by that lie, nor does it mean you're no longer enacting the lie. It just means you can stop being an unconscious asshole now and start working towards honest relations in life. That's it. What's radical and worth celebrating is flipping power and privilege over for good, which requires consistent acts over one's life time (that often get socially punished) of great risk and sacrifice by those who have power and privilege.

Oh: and if I had the capacity, which I of course do not, I would eternally ban the word "mission" from Christian discourse. (My next blog will probably be about this: just fyi.)

Rant done. Peace out.
EJ

Bloody Lightning: A Prayer of Confession and Petition

2011-05-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

Menstruation is privilege.
It is the possibilities of bleeding out
what is on the threshold of life/death,
thereby re-membering one's placement in the cycle
of birth/collapse.

It is privilege to participate in this
recycling system that is psychically and sexually rooted
in the body
in the body
in the body.

Last night I woke up twice. There was lightning in the sky,
thunder clapped, ripping through silence, awakening sleepy-heads
to the shameless power of nature that can do whatever It wills/wants.
Both times, my legs and sheets were covered in black blood.
I wasn't ill-prepared. She does what she wills. Shamelessly.

This morning I read that my current place of employment
hosted and organized minstrel shows, a legacy of
essentializing brown bodies
exploiting brown bodies
...for "entertainment"...
profiteering off of brown bodies
doing violence/rape/murder to brown bodies--
that legacy runs in the halls of my office and
runs through the blood in my veins.

This morning I recall my father's pastoral legacy of
using women,
dismissing women,
silencing women,
impregnating and abandoning women and then
lying about women to women--
that legacy flows through the blood in my veins.

And so this morning i thank
my body
my body
my body
for bleeding out and expressing death/collapse honestly
in ways that my job and my culture will not.

I am a student of this black blood
this luminous darkness
(to use Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman's theological language)
that incarnates honestly the need to purge and express
no matter how painful
(and yes, this belly cramps and collapses on itself every month, painfully)
what has not brought life,
what is painful and bleeding,
what needs to die.

Legacies of white supremacy and racial hatred
patriarchy and woman-hatred,
take your cue.
In the speaking of your legacy in this/my body,
in the honest confession that you
do not bring life and
that you need to die--
be transformed,
be recycled into truth that is life-giving, life affirming, and life-sustaining,
be gone from your current dis/embodiments,
be incarnated life and begin
with
this/my body
this/my body
this/my body.

Internalized Oppression

2011-05-05T15:42:00.001-07:00

When you love what you are

and come into contact with others

who are what you are

but don’t love what you/they are (together)

it can be maddening.

…particularly if you’ve had to

rip that self love from the sharp teeth of

all-consuming, triple headed monsters that

seek the exploitation & annihilation of your self

for the perpetuation of violent fiction,

the myth of a bottomless belly,

the myth of never ending hunger that must be satiated

by someone who is willing to be treated like something.

…particularly if you’ve had to

tenderly and patiently patchwork quilt that

self love back into/onto your body

with creative threading skills

that don’t always appear coherent to the external eye,

with nurturing touch

that feels foreign and clumsy at first,

and with compassionate placement

that takes incredible discipline of the always-suspect intuition.

It can be down-right infuriating

to encounter those who do not love those things you share,

who do not love those things you are together,

and thereby do not reflect back nor deepen

your endurance, victory and worth-fighting-for-ness;

who instead recycle the myths—with their bodies—

solidify some fiction—with their incongruities—

that keep your kind hunted, chewed up, swallowed and spat back up

because after all, it turns out

that monster’s hunger is always bigger than its stomach.

…and yet…

no matter how maddening & infuriating

it might be—this lack of love—

if you love what you are

there is no sense in resenting those

who don’t love what you are in common

because, if it’s really common, even if—no,

especially if

its still in the teeth of hungry monsters,

it’s still what you are, still what you love and

only by lovingly beckoning it out of the mouth of devouring lies

and into the truth of its inherent & unconditional rightness

can you truly claim an authentic self-love, the one

you’ve been living & dying to enact all the days of your breathing,

the one you’re willing to sacrifice for and wait for

and not give up on just because you’re tired.

This is why forgiveness is

still the most generous act

in the recognition of one’s love not loving what’s loveable in common/together,

because if love is love, even deferred love-in-return—

even bad behavior that mocks and spits at the loving-self

because of internalized oppression—

cannot dissuade it.

Traveling

2011-05-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

I don't know why
traveling always seems like such a vague notion
when it offers such concrete freedom.

like
perspective
connection
healing
awakening

I feel like writing myself a note for the future:
break away more
reconnect to the places you used to be more
discover new spots more
move more.

Next time that stuckness creeps in
and I'm spinning and nauseous
from my own chasing-tail game--
someone tell me to book a flight,
or a train, or to get in my car and just go.

Freedom knows...

2011-04-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to tell you something.
This is confessional.
And someone, somewhere may use this
to soapbox about all things heterosexual
to soapbox about all things nuclear family
to soapbox about all things trappings of organized religion
to soapbox about all things not-me.
I don't give a damn. I'm telling you anyways.

The loneliest I ever feel,
is right after worship.

Right after worship,
particularly after telling the deepest truth i've got.
And the loneliness is magnified on holidays
when I go home alone
and i'm not at home, but i'm certainly alone--
even if i'm surrounded by people.

There is no home for a prophet--Jesus was right about that.

But here's what he didn't say:
you go looking for home all the days of your life
and you never find it--not if you're honest--
because home is a fleeting moment that will not be owned
or married or institutionalized.

There is only the freedom in truth, that localizes in a body
that's willing to be a channel, that's willing to be
so fucking alone afterward that it almost makes
the freedom of truth worth forsaking.

Almost.

But I will never forsake freedom or truth. Never.
And that's how I know my soul is in tact
in this fucking monstrosity of a culture that
desires people to run from loneliness
straight into the chains that will enslave them.

Constant Ache

2011-04-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

Someday my pain, someday my pain
Will mark you
Harness your blame, harness your blame
And walk through

With the wild wolves around you
In the morning, I'll call you
Send it farther on

Solace my game, solace my game
It stars you
Swing wide your crane, swing wide your crane
And run me through

And the story's all over you
In the morning i'll call you
Can't you find a clue when your eyes are all painted Sinatra blue

What might have been lost -
Don't bother me

Rest in Peace Sue Creed

2011-03-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

Every Wednesday she came over and soul collaged with me. One day she was flipping through magazines and pulled out this poem. She loved it. When I was looking over the funeral file she left for us, I found the poem tucked into one of her collages. It reminds me of a Spring day, last year, when she still had zest and vitality in her body, when she could talk shit and laugh out loud. It reminds me of her Spirit that is now free...

So to her, I launch this poem, in the love of freedom and life.

Of Yield and Abandon

A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck,

created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches.

Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rocks wall's

coldness, never in sun, a few noisy grackles.

Our eyes find shining beautiful

because it reminds us of water. To say this

does not make fewer the rooms of the house

or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways.

There is something that waits inside us,

a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine

and stone shine edging the tail of the woodchuck silver,

splashing the legs of chickens and clouds.

In Russian, the translator told me,

there is no word for "thirsty"--a sentence,

as always, impossible to translate.

But what is the point of preserving the bell

if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?

A body prepared for travel but not for singing?

--Jane Hirshfield

Separation of Church and State

2011-03-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

The Congregationalist

First Congregational Church, Battle Creek

Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

People always try to make sense of God based on their encounters with the world and make sense of the world based on their encounters with God. In the late nineteenth century a protestant movement known as “the social gospel” took root in America in response to the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the world. Josiah Strong, Horace Bushnell and Walter Rauschenbusch were some of the pioneer theologians of the social gospel and they were all pastors firmly rooted in communities of faith. Members of the United Church of Christ today can trace denominational ties to all three of these men and their churches.

Economics (production, consumption, working conditions, immigration labor, and wage standards) and diversity (abolitionist, suffragist and child labor movements) were the worldly issues provoking new ideas about God at the time of the social gospel movement. As unbound freedoms and sufferings began impacting various sectors of society simultaneously, social gospel theologians took note and took to the pen. Some of their writings are the most brilliant theological texts of all time. The main thrust of social gospel theology—what separated it from the dominant theology of its day—is that life is not primarily individual, but rather social. From this claim, social gospel theologians constructed theology about God that focused on the social nature of sin and salvation with Jesus’ teachings about “the kingdom of God” as their moral compass. Their theology, if taken seriously, had direct political implications.

Much of what began with New York Pastor Walter Rauschenbusch (the father of social gospel theology in

America

) at the turn of the century was carried forth by 20^th century figures known as liberation theologians who were responding to The Great Depression, WW I&II, and the Civil Rights Movement/s. Again, social conditions of freedom and oppression were the worldly phenomena that provoked American liberation theologians such as James Cone, Mary Daly, Kelly Brown Douglas and Kwok Pui Lan (just to name a select few!) to envision God in creative ways that led to political momentum. In Latin America, Africa and especially Nazi-occupied Germany very similar content emerged from 20^th century theologians trying to take God and the world seriously without minimizing one’s impact upon the other.

I quit believing in God as a teenager. It wasn’t until college, when I stumbled upon the writings of social gospel and liberation theologians that I even began to consider returning to religion. What inspired me so much about these movements within Christianity is how unabashedly thorough and relentless they were in addressing the question of power: both God’s power and the power/principalities on Earth. The church of my childhood was hesitant to address that question and it drove me nuts…eventually drove me out the door. I don’t think my experience is unique for many young people. My sense is that most young people are spiritually hungry, but their search for spiritual truth is woven into everyday realities of freedom and liberation, realities that are tied up in power dynamics and are therefore political in nature. Therefore if we want to be a faith community that is attractive to the post-boomer generation, we must grapple with issues of power in our society. That means we cannot shy away from the political realities of our day.

Rev. Thomas Ryberg recently spoke at a political rally in town and some folk questioned his pastoral authority, wondering if he was doing an ethical job of observing the separation of church and state. Some questioned if he was speaking on behalf of the church or if he was speaking on behalf of himself. These are totally important questions for folk both in and outside of our congregation to be wrestling with on a regular basis. Communities must keep clergy accountable to oaths of ordination. And clergy must keep communities accountable to the truths of God. If any pastor allows political movements that are oppressive to wash over her community unchallenged, she is not doing her job of truth-telling. The separation of church and state does not bind politicians to silence on religious issues, nor religious clerics to silence on political issues. In fact, the separation of church and state provides the necessary space between political and religious entities for healthy accountability to be reached on both sides. We inherit this necessary space from the constitutional framers of our country and social gospel/liberation theologians of our tradition.

May we always occupy that inherited space with respect and courage for we are all citizens of this country and seekers of the truth of God simultaneously. Let us continue taking both our God and this world seriously, without minimizing the impact of one upon the other. Amen.

Prophecy & Hip Hop

2011-02-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

***This piece will be featured in a local, independent rag. FYI.***

Prophecy & HipHop

By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

February 17, 2011

Disclaimer

I want to talk about the intersection of prophecy and HipHop but first need to get some technical stuff out of the way. I am a trainedtheologian, which means I’ve been resourced to see, name and support themovement of God in the world. It is from this training and resourced-lens that Isee Hip Hop as the primary prophetic movement of/in our time. I do not claim tobe an expert on Hip Hop but I do seedivinity there and that’s what I am hoping to convey in this piece of socialcommentary.

Prophecy: Tradition and Problems

The Judeo-Christian tradition is a diverse religiousmovement with many historical, literary, cultural and institutionalexpressions. One of those expressions is prophecy.

Judeo-Christian prophecy has historical and geographic rootsin the Ancient Near East which was the context for early Israelite prophetssuch as Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jesus of Nazareth. The aforementionedprophets were speaking to persons, crowds, institutions and the empires oftheir day. Their prophetic works are located in the books of the Hebrew Bibleand New Testament. Many of us know these prophets and their words/works. Butmany of us—religious and non-religious alike--do not know the contexts fromwhich these prophetic works come, nor how those contexts parallel the world weare living in today. Therefore our ability to call upon the past while makingmeaning in the present is severely truncated.There are corrupt clergy and awhole host of brainwashed flock out there using prophetic texts in ways that notonly dishonor the prophetic tradition but also dishonor God. Talib Kweli oncesaid “life without knowledge is death in disguise.” Kweli’s words put on blastthose who out of ignorance lift prophetic texts for ends of death. Corruptionand power-hoarding are at the center of this ignorance. And it is my opinionthat if people really knew their Bible and really knew the living God, they’dbe paying as much attention to if not more attention to Hip Hop than scripture. Let me explain…

Prophecy: Movement and Spirit

There are two things about prophecy that are important toknow: 1) prophecy is about movement & 2) prophecy is of a certain spirit.

Movement

Prophecy is a cultural dialectic—a conversation that reliesupon movement. It relies upon movement between subjects: speaking andlistening, challenging and receptivity, love and change through action.Prophecy relies upon movement between persons and groups: individualsparticipate in a culture/community where people exchange various expressions oftruth like art, philosophy and ritual. Prophecy relies upon movement between communitiesand institutions: communities create political and social entities that aresupposed to serve them and those entities, in turn, recreate communities. Andfinally, prophecy relies upon movement between communities and powerstructures: persons and groups speak truth about the structural conditions ofpower impacting them and those structures reform accordingly (sometimeswillingly but most the time, structural reform happens begrudgingly).

Spirit

Prophetic texts and persons embody a particular spirit, aspirit that will not be contained or domesticated. The prophetic spirit is of andcomes from the Living God. The Living God is liberation. Liberation, period. Prophetic persons, prophetic texts, andprophetic movements--if they are truly prophetic in nature, and not just onsome silly “spiritual” psychobabble—are always speaking about power becausepower is the thing that either enables or blocks liberation. Prophets speak intruth about power: this is their nature, their duty and function no matter thecost. The prophet speaks truth to power and speaks to the masses aboutpower. Prophets are almost always speaking about power within the realms ofpolitics and religion. You don’t invite them home to meet mom. They do not makecasual conversation and they don’t remain on the surface…ever. The spirit theyembody doesn’t allow them to do anything but pursue truth in the hope ofliberation. If you’re on board with that, they are the best company to keep andthe best truth to come home to. If you’re not on board with the hope ofliberation: get the hell out of the way.

Intersections and Directions

When Christianity sold its soul to the devil by becoming theofficial religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^thc. CE, it lost its ability to be a/part/of prophetic movement. A prophet cannotbe sucking on a corrupt power source and critiquing it with the same mouth.Such crossed loyalty and hypocrisy stifles movement and kills the spirit.Again, without movement and spirit, prophecy cannot exist. So when Christianitysold out, the religion of God made known in Jesus became the arm of empire,colonialism and war instead of the embodied heart of truth, love and justice.What does it mean for a tradition that gave birth to a movement to not be ableto contain that movement any longer?

Well, the Living God does not die. So the movement justtakes up life somewhere else.

There have been many “somewhere else’s” since the 4^thcentury but I’m not here to do a history lesson. I’m here as a theologiantrying to locate prophecy today.

Hip-Hop is theembodiment of prophecy in our times. Hip Hop has been the movement oftruth-telling in the hope of liberation from its conception in the blackcommunity, from its birth in the South Bronx amongthose who were exchanging, creating, and resisting vis-à-vis and sometimeswithin the power structures impacting them. Even when the corrupt power ofwhite-supremacist capitalism tried to stifle the spirit of the Hip Hop movementby turning it into a commodity, Hip Hop went underground and continued speakingtruth (to power and about power) in the hope of liberation. The resurrective,resilient Spirit of Hip Hop is nothing short of divinity. Underground Hip Hopis, by all means, the prophetic movement that is alive and well in our culturetoday.

If you don’t believe me, check out any of these contemporarytexts and try not to make (historically accurate) parallels with the biblicalprophetic tradition:

Hanifah Walida’s “Do You Mind” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HPPlYN0BwI

Head Roc’s “Christopher Columbus” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sru9_pmKjGc

Blue Scholars “Burnt Offering” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_LEM0cCJDk

Brother Ali “Uncle Sam Goddamn” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO18F4aKGzQ

Conclusion and Implications

A person who is trying to trying to take seriously 1)justice in the world and 2) truth-full spirituality will find a home in Hip Hop.Hip Hop is where the Spirit of the Living God is moving in the hope ofliberation today. Prophets not onlyspeak truth to power and speak to themasses about power, but in theirspeaking they embody the power of the Living God, the power of liberation. Letthose with ears, hear Hip Hop.

On the Suppression of Anger

2011-01-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

Seeds of Liberation and Small Groups

2011-01-24T05:54:00.000-08:00

I've begun doing quite a bit of small group facilitation as of late. It's taken a while to get to this place. One must establish relationships and build rapport in the faith community before leadership is granted. Authority doesn't accumulate over night and if it does, whatever it is that's accumulated isn't authority. In my line of work, any kind of instant access to people probably has to do with their projections about G-d or the (suspect) charisma of the leader. Neither strikes me as healthy. So here I am, (on Feb 8th, it'll officially be my 'first day in the office' anniversary) a year into this ministry gig and I'm finally getting some traction. By traction, I mean the following: access to people's true feelings (especially those they're afraid to admit, which are often the most important feelings of all), insight into the communal dynamics that so often mystified me when I first arrived, space to direct the flow of conversation, openness to my ideas/experience/opinions/etc. These forms of traction, these spacious places enable real ministry to happen, beyond the caddy bullshit of surface churchy-churchness. These forms of traction allow me to do the work I feel fashioned (by G-d Most High) to do. Naturally, I'm thrilled. Glory. Hallelujah. And, did I mention that it's been a long time coming?

So I'm doing small group facilitation, now. A lot. And as I suspected, it's the place where the most dynamism and transformation are taking place. One-on-one pastoral care is important, but there's nothing that can foster healing and massage resilience in the human soul like small groups. The spiritual "effectiveness" (blegh, capitalist language--what else could I use?) of small groups became most apparent to me during my time in recovery. Something unbelievable happens when people are free to talk about their experience surrounded by others who know their own salvation depends on 'hearing others into speech' (Nelle Morton). That unbelievability heightens when the people speaking and hearing are folks whose experience has been denied, negated or silenced by the dominant culture. Getting Vietnam veterans together taught me this. Getting women in the church together taught me this. Getting queer people together anywhere taught me this. Incredible wedges of freedom, affirmation and support get carved when persons-made-invisible have the opportunity to articulate their truth.

What's perhaps overlooked, but in this pastor's estimation the *most* valued part of small groups, is that people begin to make connections between their own oppression/suffering and the systems perpetuating that suffering. For instance, over time the courage of people's sharing--if the group has members willing to be authentic and vulnerable which is always a variable--will take on heights unthinkable in the first couple of sessions. As courage rises in the room, the bar is set high for people's sharing in general. People get real, stories begin to emerge and inevitably some of the same stories get heard again and again from different sources. Example: early on in my experience with women's meetings in Alcoholics Anonymous I realized that more than half of the women suffering from addiction had been subject to some kind of sexual assault. Women using a numbing agent in order to handle the scripted violence upon their bodies--is that addiction or coping? You tell me. Example: as I sat with the vets on the dialysis unit at the VA it began to emerge that all of them had at least one son or daughter that was estranged from them. Coincidence that all of them had a disorder of the blood? I think not. Example: almost every person who attends my grief group talks about feeling 'selfish' or 'wrong' when they grieve. These are people who have lost significantly close loved ones: spouses, mothers, sisters, daughters. Is the punishing self-consciousness about emoting grief about these individuals or is it about a society that aggressively and consistently requires people to deny their pain (in order to maintain the status quo)? Almost all of the white/middle-upper class adolescent and young adult women I do pastoral care with admit self-injurious behaviors, particularly cutting and eating disorders. Is that isolated incidents of life mismanagement or are we willing to confront the fascism/s in our society that force women to exert (the little) control (the do have) even if that control has to be exercised in ways that cause harm?

If a small group is facilitated well, these kinds of connections can be made. When these connections are made it can completely re-orient a person's world. Instead of blaming one's self or thinking there is something inherently wrong/mistaken/guilty/impure in the self and getting stuck in the stuff of numbing/avoidance, we can build relationships based on the truth and begin plotting together the destruction of all-things-oppressive. Here's the formula...

telling a truth that's often silenced (courage and freedom)
being heard (compassion and healing)
making connections between individual experience & systems (restoration and reorientation)
communing & plotting in those connections (fellowship and liberation)

This strikes me as the *real* stuff of faith, the stuff that all faith communities should be about but often are not because they're too afraid of the implications that emerge when multiple voices are encouraged to unapologetically truth-tell. Institutions and ideologies are especially at risk when multiple voices erupt. Monolithic communities and half-assed explanations of why things are the way they are are especially at risk when multiple voices erupt. People and countries in (unbalanced positions of) power are totally at risk when multiple voices erupt. This is the promise of liberation for the oppressed/marginalized and the seed of doom for those who gain their access/privilege/power on the backs of others. Small groups are the soil for liberation movements.

As a service provider within one of the most patriarchal, simultaneously homophobic & homosocial, historically oppressive and dishonest institutions in the course of world developments, I employ small group facilitation as an act of resistance. I plant a seed of liberation from within, praying that with G-d's help and the willingness of marginalized and fiercely courageous people on the inside (there are more than you'd think!), we might confess, repent and liberate our tradition. In this lifetime? No. Enough to make all of Christianity a wholesome place for all? No. But for us and those we love and those we work with and those we encounter on the rugged road? Maybe.

And in this employment of resistance, I am made humble. Let me be specific.

There is no denying that I am suspicious of all religion, all institutions and that the water of my devotional life is often troubled by the hypocrisy and hate espoused by people who claim Jesus' name. I wish I was one of the people who could find a modicum of peace despite knowing my religion is used for ill, but I cannot. I simply cannot. I don't say this out of pride. Trust me: it causes great great great disturbance in my life. Part of this restlessness comes from being a clergy kid. Part of it comes from being young, queer, tattooed and female in a position that's often occupied by old, straight, clean-cut dudes. Point being: I'm restless and suspicious. So...often I err on the side of being overly critical of Christianity, overly critical of other clergy, overly critical of theology that serves deathly culture/s. But in the work of small groups, I'm often challenged to move beyond this one (narrow and narrowing) way of seeing my religion. When people's experience gets shared, there is no denying that the Church has been used for both good and ill, nor do those uses somehow cancel each other out. Stories of survival often include the faith community mobilizing in the hour of need. Stories of resilience prove the pivotal role faith/spirituality have played in make-or-break moments for tons of people. Pastors and sermons have saved lives, families and communities on the brink of destruction. Privileged parishioners have challenged oppressive systems and made incredible gains for marginalized communities, often to their own detriment and exclusion. This is all true. As true as the stuff of death-dealing and corruption.

So "you shall know the truth and truth shall make you free," right? In the best of small groups, a plethora of truths erupt through courageous multiple voices willing to unflinchingly pursue the spirit of life. The facilitator, if she is wise enough to witness the truth/s emerging, will experience liberation too even if it means arriving at new conclusions that disturb and disassemble the truth of her life (thus far). There's incredible freedom in that. I am being made free in this work, in this place, in these times.

It's been a long time comin.

Come to Koinonia

2011-01-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

A Pastor Learns about Listening

2011-01-11T09:59:00.000-08:00

I've had three experiences in the last 24 hours that have re-oriented my spiritual attention to the power of listening. I must write about these experiences because i don't want to forget them. I don't want to forget the dangers of not listening or the possibilities for transformation present when we offer ourselves an ear (or two). I mostly don't want to forget because of the work I do. Pastoral ministry affords me the unique opportunity to listen deeply and while I'd like to think I take up that opportunity whenever its presented, the truth is I'm often way too quick to speech. Part of that is because of the expectations placed on pastors, namely that we have some 'word' to comfort, calm, and/or challenge up our sleeve at all times. We don't. But the expectations are real and people defer to our power all the time, silencing themselves in favor of 'hearing' us. It can be a seductive dynamic, one where the deferred-to-person/pastor becomes enamored with her own voice and thereby forgets to listen first, or listen long enough, or listen deeply enough. God has given me 3 experiences to place into the archives of my heart today and I write to remember the lessons therein.

Experience #1
My friend David Judah Oliver is a spoken word poet from the Inland Empire of Southern California. We met a long time ago and mostly keep up with one another through facebook. I am a fan of his language and ideas that mostly manifest in artistic form though Judah is prophetic in nature. We are Christians of a different kind, but agree through and through that Jesus' main message was/is about the stuff of social justice. Yesterday when the world was processing the still fresh Arizona atrocity, Judah updated his facebook with this: "They call this an act of terror, but I bet we aren't about to start our war on "White Domestic Terror." Excellent piece of social commentary. Pretty quickly thereafter a white man (who I've never met), a friend of Judah's, began asking questions about why Judah was shining a light on whiteness, in particular. I entered the conversation (if you can call status-update-debating a converation) and talked about the hypocrisy of white-on-white violence not being taken as emblematic of all white people and I lifted up the legacies of white violence in the united states. This guy, Mike, instantly starts being defensive and universalizing how all people suffer from power distortions and tendencies toward violence, accusing Judah and myself of targeting white people unfairly. When Judah answered him from the perspective of a black male living in America, Mike continued to discount Judah's word, even belittling the importance of the conversation by saying "it's been a while since I've had a healthy debate"--as if the stuff of white violence is something to get one's intellectual rocks off about. Talk about distancing and personal avoidance. Brilliantly, one of Judah's friends wrote in and said "this conversation is an example of white terror." Touche.

Now I understand that facebook is an amorphous matrix of soundbyte communication and what's possible, in terms of meaningful dialogue and exchange, is limited on a social networking site. That aside, just encountering the inability of Mike to set his ideas about the world aside and trust someone else's perception of their OWN experience...well, it was the height of psychological violence to me. Even though I participated and tried to impart a different view of history (from a white perspective, thereby negating a monolithic, eurocentric perspective), I felt like I was witnessing something profoundly sick and twisted. I could barely fall asleep last night it was so disturbing to me. And then this morning I woke up and another white man (this guy also named Mike), had taken issue with Judah's comments by invoking Christ's name, doing the typical white protestant "we are all equal in God's kingdom" dance. Judah of course handled him brilliantly by confronting Mike #2 about the fairy-taleism of peace without justice. But I'm not able to put down my discomfort with white people invoking universal truisms (and even in my savior's name!), as a means of denying the reality of experiences different than their own. Not listening, example #1

Experience #2
I've been thinking about having a baby for a while. I've decided that I'd like to be actively pursuing pregnancy (through artificial insemination) by the time I turn 30. Naturally, I've tried to get prepared for this process by seeking ob/gyn consultation and care here in Michigan. Six months ago I was told (by the ob/gyn recommended by the Kalamazoo Gay and Lesbian Resource Center) that I couldn't be given a referral to a fertility clinic at my personal request because I wasn't married to a man. Explicit meaning: patriarchy, heterosexism and homophobia are alive and at work. Again, my own religion is being invoked in the business of inequality: evangelical theology is under-girding the medical philosophy employed by the Methodist health care system I belong to. But the irony is that the PA I see for my ob/gyn care is a lesbian! I want to give her the benefit of the doubt because she's one of my own and seems to understand the injustice, but honestly even she gives me less than competent care. She walks into the room ready to roll and doesn't listen to why I'm there or what I need. Today I blew up and told her to stop talking over me because I couldn't get a word in. Eventually I started crying and yelling because I wasn't being heard. It was embarrassing and I immediately felt ashamed, though i did eventually get her to put her medical chart down and to give me space to talk. We talked about what was necessary for me to proceed with my pregnancy plan, but before she left the room she had to get her digs in. "You can't come in here swinging." "Don't shit where you live." "I'm one of the good ones here on your side but the people in the hallway wouldn't know that because of how you're yelling." All of these statements were aimed at putting me in my place, enforcing the silent (yet oppressive and deadly) contract we white people seem to have about not upsetting the status quo, about respecting professionals in power no matter what, about not getting too emotional because it lacks self-control. Here she is shaming me about yelling and crying instead of examining her own bed-side manners. Had she done the latter, she might realize that adults generally don't scream and cry when they feel heard. Not listening, example #2

Experience #3
This morning I worked out at the YMCA with my dear friend Karen. Karen is someone I love deeply, a woman with brains, grit, wit and the wisdom of having lived as a woman in leadership for 30+ years. Our relationship contains many elements, but the stuff of mothering/mentoring is quite alive between us. I trust her and rely on her feedback to shape my professional development. But she also doesn't treat me like a child, which has enabled us to foster profound respect and mutuality. Most of the time. Today, I found myself dominating the conversation. I got on a roll about almost every topic she brought up. By the end of our time on the treadmill, I realized I'd taken up about 70% of the talk time. Whack. With ten minutes left and my tail between my legs, I asked her a probing question about something she'd brought up earlier. Of course that probing question led to the most meaningful exchange we'd had all morning. But right now I'm wondering what would have happened earlier if I had left my opinions at the door. I sit here wondering what would have happened if we could have explored that particular topic for 40 minutes instead of 10 minutes. How much connection did I miss because I wanted to pontificate? How much more of Karen could I have learned about if I probed her understandings instead of verbalizing my own? This isn't the first time I've had to pause around this issue. Just two weeks ago one of my good friends brought to attention that when working together she often experiences me as one who doesn't listen.

Just when I get self-righteous at "the world" about not listening, I go and blow my own intentions. No one is immune, I suppose. Yes, I too, am on the path. Not listening, example #3.

Moral of the story...
Experience #'s 1 & 2 showed me the deep need we have in this culture for profound listening, and not just any listening, but listening by non-target group people that trust the self-articulated experiences of target populations. Experience #3 showed me that no matter how well I think I understand issues of justice and injustice, power and inequality, needs and solutions, I better approach the articulation and implementation of that understanding with humility.

Here's the implication of what I've learned: today I will try to give my whole ear to every person I encounter, including myself.. And hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow willing to do the same. If not, I have these words to remind me.

Lessons and parallelisms: Weight Lifting and White Anti-Racist Activism

2010-11-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

--It'll hurt at first. Keep doing it.
--The more you do it, the stronger you'll get. You can get stronger than you ever imagine. At some point, you'll question how you ever lived without it because it brings such satisfaction. Discipline and repetition are key. Don't EVER give up.
--You'll sweat and get messy. Sometimes it'll smell bad and look hideous. Soon, that won't matter because it feels so right and the results are undeniable.
--There's an important place you must find: it's the place between over-exertion (that leads to injury) and laziness (letting yourself off the hook). Once you find that place, stay there. But only stay there until your ability to exert increases. Then step it up.
--You'll get sore. That's right when you're about to make a leap into new dimensions of strength. Pay attention to the pain, but don't let it stop you. When experiencing soreness, call upon your own strength or the strength of God. It helps, seriously.

--If you constantly try to mimic other people's muscle-building regimens and routines, you'll never figure out the approach that works for you. Listen to your body and take some risks! You'll stumble into a specific way of doing things eventually. This process of listening, risking and stumbling is the only way you'll discover a sustainable routine. You and those you love deserve sustainability.

--Your muscles get stronger because tissue/fibers break-down and build back up. Allow both.

--As your muscles get stronger: cardio endurance capacity increases. It takes a while, but when it happens, it's AWESOME. You'll run harder and faster than ever.

--Work out partners will save your life, particularly those who don't have huge muscles yet and keep it real about how hard it is.

--Work out partners who know how to crack the right joke when you're muscling through that last *almost impossible* set are priceless. Have at least three of those on-call.

--When in doubt, consult the professionals who have years of experience working with the equipment and know all those special "insider" tricks.

--Distraction helps sometimes. Other times it gets in the way. Figure out the difference and cultivate healthy distractions.

--You will fall off the routine and feel like shit. Forgive yourself and start again without making a big deal about it. The only good thing about "off-time" is that you realize how necessary and good it is when sticking with the program.

--Those who are choosing not to engage will despise your strength and look at your effort with suspicion. Invite them to walk with you. They'll see how good it feels to move.

--If you really push yourself in public, people will stare at you, especially if you're working hard enough to make noise. You will feel silly and awkward. Get over it.

--Music makes everything a little bit easier.
--Literature helps too.
--Drink lots of water. Get as much rest as you need. No one can sustain a good routine without the proper nutrients.
--Core strength (stomach muscles) is/are the hardest to develop. They are the key.

Mel Speaks: Invisibility/Hypervisibility

2010-10-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

A brave soul telling truth in an often times cruel world.
All love to my courageous companion Melvin Antoine.

Systems and Suicides

2010-10-19T03:20:00.000-07:00

An article for the Battle Creek Enquirer

By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

Flipping through these pages, you’ve probably figured out by now that the topic of this month’s Body, Mind and Spirit section of the Enquirer is depression. Suicide is the ultimate (and final) act of depression. Therefore, when exploring this topic it would be avoidant and down-right unethical not to focus attention on the recent suicides of Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Justin Aaberg and Tyler Clementi.

Anyone paying attention to the media in the last month has heard these names. Anyone paying attention has also heard these suicides talked about in terms of gay identity and bullying (which in these cases seems like a dangerously watered-down term; how about “hate-criming”?). Gay kids have been killing themselves for a long time. This is nothing new. I do not know exactly what shifted in our culture to make the national attention of gay suicides possible, but the visibility of these heart-breaking episodes affords us a critical opportunity—as a culture—to rethink and rework ourselves.

Before going any further, I want to answer an important question I assume some readers might be asking: why is an ordained Christian minister using her space in the spirituality section of the B.C. Enquirer to address these issues? Depression is a spiritual issue. Suicide is a spiritual issue. Premature and unnecessary death of children anywhere is a spiritual issue. Further, there is no institution guiltier of propagating homophobic and gender-based violence in this society than Christianity. Columnist Dan Savage recently said of the gay teen suicides: “The Church has blood on its hands.” He’s right. This is one Christian minister’s attempt to acknowledge, repent from and subvert spiritual abuse being carried out in the name of Jesus. There is nothing, not one single thing, about these suicides that isn’t spiritual.

Continued focus on supposed “isolated incidents” of aggressive teen-age behavior in response to homosexuality might be preventing our society from having a harder conversation, a conversation that implicates all of us. I believe social outrage and horror over issues of non-heterosexuality have little to do with who is having sex with who and everything to do with the fear of having gender roles thrown into question.

Most human beings have, at least once or twice (if not thousands of times) experienced the limits of gender in ways that have profoundly impacted them. Perhaps you were the girl who could throw a football and immediately got labeled a “tom boy.” Perhaps you were the boy who experienced feelings of sadness about cruelty as a kid and got called a “sissy” as a result. Perhaps you are the person whose daily life, whose very body is neglected every single day because it somehow does not conform to this simplistic boy-girl system. Or on the flip side: maybe you are the high feminine woman, recognizable and envied, yet only acknowledged when you’re playing the part of a beauty queen. Maybe you are the football-playing young man, familiar and popular, yet dismissed time and time again because people assume you lack intelligence or compassion. Even those whose gender presentation matches social norms on the surface can experience deeply harmful expectations internally and externally.

Given that many of us have experienced gender-based oppression at some point, it is surprising that we as a society are so slow to question why things are the way they are. And yet, for many of us questioning gender-based reality is like questioning the air we breathe. We human beings are gender-branded from the get go: “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” accompany almost every infant into the world. This branding is of course done in conjunction with the observation of an infant’s genitalia. What’s striking is not that we identify babies based on body parts—although why certain body parts have been recognized as the markers of identity still boggles the mind. What’s striking is the meaning we ascribe to body parts, meaning that is arbitrarily assigned and yet upheld as factual and beyond question.

You know about these meanings, right? They are not just about male/female, but about how we dress, what jobs we ‘should’ do and who we are allowed to love. You know, meanings like women are supposed to be feminine and sexually orient towards men while men are supposed to be masculine and sexually orient towards women. That is what Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Justin Aaberg and Tyler Clementi did not do. They did not uphold the traditional notions of what it means to be a man. And when they did not abide by those unwritten, yet daily enforced rules, they paid the ultimate and final price. (One wonders what is so deeply threatening about men loving each other) They did not pay that price because they were different, but because our framework of what’s natural makes this world unsafe for those who do not conform to or confirm the accuracy of that framework. Therefore, their deaths belong to all of us.

A world without them must confront the facts: either what’s “natural” isn’t or we must go on accepting conditions that drive young people to kill themselves. I for one pray to God that we will forsake the latter.

Rage Today

2010-10-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

No one is born inherently inferior to anyone else.

God is doper than that.

No one chooses what they are born into:

not poverty not privilege.

Social conditions create
vastly different vulnerabilities

for communities and individuals.

Therefore...

Until justice is actualized

and no one comes into this world

more vulnerable than anyone else

for reasons they did not choose,

I don't want to hear anything

about safety, comfort or security

from those who already have it.

The end.

Cancer's Spiritual Classroom

2010-09-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

Cancer’s Spiritual Classroom
*For the Battle Creek Enquirer*
By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

Many of us have heard the popular aphorism “there are no atheists in fox holes.” Driving this catchy phrase is the proposition that facing death will cause anyone to seek God.

It’s not true.

People deal with impending death in diverse ways. Some people do, in fact, become religious, finding comfort in the ability to call upon a benevolent higher power in times of uncertainty. Other people become adamantly opposed to the notion of God, finding their life circumstance unfair and inconsistent with what they have been taught about God’s goodness. Some people assume they’ll figure it out when they cross over and don’t spend much time dwelling on the God-question while they’re still alive on earth. This diversity of experience troubles the water of simplistic spirituality, making it difficult for popular aphorisms or sound-byte answers to be ethically offered unto those who are dying.

Faith can be an incredible sustaining force for those who are facing the finality of their bodies (which is all of us in different time frames!). But not all faiths are created equal. Contemporary research shows that if people think God is the source of their pain and that God intentionally wills their suffering, they are more likely to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety. During my clinical training as a hospital chaplain my supervisor always reminded me: “it’s not about religion or no religion, faith or doubt; it’s about how those things impact the person’s life.”

Seven months ago when I moved to Battle Creek to join the pastoral staff at First Congregational Church I met Sue. She was helping me move some furniture into my new place and mentioned that she’d lost her mom to breast cancer twenty years prior and just three years ago she’d gotten her own diagnosis of gall-bladder cancer (at the age of 50). She also informed me she’d be starting another round of chemo therapy soon. “I’m doing really well but I know there will come a time when the other shoe drops.” It was quiet for a long time. Before she left that evening I offered to meet with her regularly for spiritual care. She agreed and we’ve been getting together every other Wednesday for 7 months now to do crafts. Most of the time we sit in silence working on our individual pieces of art. Sometimes we talk about what’s going on at church and at home; other times we talk about politics and current events. You’d be surprised how often we talk about Lady GaGa!

Sue Nielson & Ejoye (July 21st 2010)

My favorite Wednesdays are the ones when Sue talks about what she’s learning in her walk with cancer, how this time in her life has deepened her spirituality. She recently shared a piece of writing with me that says “A lot of people ask me how I can be so strong. The absolute biggest part of it is my faith in God.” Contrary to popular quips, faith in God is not always a crutch. In Sue’s case, it is an incredible motivating force, a force that enables her to face the grueling regimens of chemo therapy with courage, a force that enables her to keep finding joy with her husband and friends, a force that keeps her seeking the most of what each day has to offer. I would do anything to relieve Sue’s suffering. I would. But as a pastor I would also do anything to help cancer-free people learn the lessons that Sue is teaching me every Wednesday. For instance the other day she came into my office and said “There’s something this disease does to you; it makes you live in the moment. You don’t know what your future is going to be so you take advantage of every moment you have.”

Fox holes do different things to different people. Perhaps our focus should be less on belief or religious identity in such times, and more on whether or not people are taking advantage of every precious moment they’ve got left. In fact, that’s something we could all give some more focus. Thanks, Sue.

Frost & Ryberg

2010-09-12T03:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, so you know how that Frost poem talks about the road less traveled by making all the difference? With all due respect to one of the finest American poets of all time, I think that poem reflects the 'values' of rugged individualism at the heart of white-male escapist psuedo-spirituality. So I'd like to propose something Other (hee hee, pun). For me, colleagues make all the difference. And I have a new one. His name is Thomas Ryberg. This is his precious mug by the candle light next to yours truly. He makes music and makes sacred the materiality around him, no matter the form. He's been lighting up my life and the folks at Battle Creek this summer. I'm grateful. I'm hopeful for continued collaboration on these winding roads, those we choose and those we don't. May it be so.

Side Light

2010-09-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

I have learned to wait

patiently

for the side light,

the one close to the ground,

the one you might miss if you

don't watch your step.

The side light,

not the beam thrust down-from-heaven

--i have yet to experience one of those--

no,

the unassuming gesture of illumination

that pierces on the slant

and originates unexpectedly

from a source that's been there all along,

a source you cannot see, but know, yes know

somehow.

The side light,

on an axis that neither shocks nor mistakes you,

but in a horizontal kind of way

makes a leveling miracle of proportion.

7 months in...my pastoral reflections

2010-09-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

Greetings, my people.

I try hard not to make my blog about the stuff of ministry, because Lord knows I have to do enough religious/spiritual writing in my professional capacity. I've wanted to keep my blog a place for personal reflection, a place where it isn't necessary to connect all experiences "back" to the symbols and traditions and narratives and liturgical frames of Christianity. The line between personal and professional reflection isn't drawn hard and fast, but i do think the integrity of content and context is important for every writer to consider, particularly one who plays a public leadership role. I may not always appear to "honor" the line--in fact, I think it's often a prophetic act to blur that line--but you can be sure I'm always keeping an eye on it. Having said all that, I'd like to take this blogging moment as an opportunity to reflect on my 7 months in parish ministry thus far. A couple statements that feel a bit random but altogether true.

--it's all people and relationships. make and break.
--funerals manufacture a tenderness in me that I always find surprising.
--i take this work seriously, more seriously than anything else i've ever done.
--it breaks my heart way too often.
--it stuns me into reverent joy equally as often.
--the mainline church has absolutely no idea what it wants to be about these days, and quite frankly, that makes working inside of it quite frustrating.
--i've never been more convinced that the concept of "scripture" needs deconstruction. people are in psychological and spiritual prisons behind that concept and there's no one to blame more vehemently than spineless clergy who refuse to keep it real about systems of power.
--i love the sanctuary of my church. space and beauty matter, seriously.
--i love building my life around liturgy.
--i love working with Tom Ott.
--flowing from the prior affirmation: i cannot imagine being able to minister outside of a collaborative colleague relationship.
--music is more important than preaching.
--lots of people are terrified of the Holy Spirit, a fear that--in my humble opinion--has its root in body hatred, white supremacy and patriarchy.
--the edge between fakery and sincerity in worship is razor sharp, and the smell of the former makes me want to run from the room.
--my appreciation for self-reflective, flexible persons grows with each passing day, particularly when planning worship.
--gossip is ugly and those who are most corrupt in their personal lives seem to be the ones most prone to talk smack about others. there's a difference between evaluation and destruction; most folks seem to get the difference and I am most afraid of those few who do not.
--the pastor role is increasing my awareness of the value of patience.
--i wish the older generation of womyn in my congregation knew how to connect with me in ways other than commenting on my hair, shoes and outfits.
--paying attention and present moment awareness are the keys to the kingdom.
--sermon writing is like being a mad scientist and experimenting on yourself first.
--the pulpit is the most vulnerable place i've ever stood.
--sometimes i think the work of ministry is about the work of managing anxiety--my own and the anxiety belonging to those around me.
--the church'd be better off with more Jesus and less God, more incarnation, less abstraction. (that's nothing new for me, but this work has confirmed it...theologians you'll know what i mean by this)

Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sure more will come to me and i'll update. Peace!

Healing & Prayer

2010-08-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Phallacy of misplaced concreteness according to Alfred North Whitehead: "mistaking the abstract for the real."

People ask me for healing prayers.
"I want God to heal me"
"I want God to heal my mother"
"Please, Pastor, pray for healing."

Healing, of course, meaning different things to different people, I seek understanding first, but mostly want to tell them a story of a time when...

Week after week
in the midst of my most troubled circumstance
and greatest physical paralysis
you traveled over the bridge
took off your sweatshirt
crawled into bed with me
put your elbows around my ears
looked me deeply in the eyes
and began
...
touched me so swift, so sovereign
that i forgot my pain
reached inside so beautifully
that i remembered why giving up on life
was not an option
made love to me so mercifully
that hope rebirthed again and again.

That's the story I long to tell when they request prayers for healing. I want them to know about you and that thing you did to keep me alive. I want them to know they can do it too, "it" being the stuff of healing that happens when we offer ourselves fully into the receptive places of concrete need. Less prayer. More offering. You taught me that.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2010-08-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

Battle Creek Enquirer

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

Years ago the mega office supply store Staples put out a commercial that has continued to loop on major network television each fall. Some of you might remember this comedic attempt to lure in back-to-school shoppers. An anonymous dad frolicks down the aisle, pushing a shopping cart packed with folders, paper, pencils, rulers and glue. He hops around with jubilee, pulling items off the shelf while the pop-culture Christmas tune “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” plays in the background. Behind the gleeful father follows a pair of siblings shuffling their feet and shoulders slumped, the sadness of summer’s end written all over their bodies.

Good advertising always includes elements that will hook the viewing audience. One way to hook the viewing audience is to include media content that sparks widespread cultural recognition. Staples did a brilliant job of hooking the culture with their back-to-school advertisement because they managed to capture two things almost any family can recognize at summer’s end: 1) parent relief & 2) kid woe. Most parents welcome the routine that a return to school enforces upon the family calendar. Most kids lament the freedom of summer that a return to school inevitably shuts down. Staples got it on both fronts.

Contrary to Western notions of time, human beings live cyclic lives. Even though the U.S. calendar year begins on January 1st, for many people the year begins in late August or early September with the school cycle. The return to school marks a major transition in our culture. It is a transition from cycles of rest to a period of intense productivity. It is a transition from cycles of free play to a period of expectation-filled comings and goings. We go from slowing down, letting loose and chilling out to beginning again, setting in, and getting down to business. When our kids go back to school, they embody a cycle that’s been happening for a long time: cultural investment in education. There is no investment more important to our future.

While this investment cannot be undervalued or underplayed, the return to school can also stress people out. Hustle sets in. Getting kids out of beds and properly bathed, getting breakfast on the table and lunches packed, getting backpacks ready and navigating the school morning traffic build-up—well, let’s just say it’s a miracle that we continue to participate in this cycle year after year given the amount of energy it requires. Yes, it’s a miracle. Investing in education takes a million efforts, big and small, year after year. And it isn’t easy!

As a pastor, I know that the biggest spiritual challenges often come up in times of crisis, but also in the stuff of everyday life. As the school year picks up, with all the miracles and challenges it brings, a cycle gets concretized through those million little efforts, big and small, that we often go about doing without a second thought. But perhaps some ritualized mindfulness might help us hang on to some of summer’s peace throughout the school year. Ritualized mindfulness need not be anything spiritually gargantuan. Ritualized mindfulness can be simple. You could light a candle in acknowledgment of the sacred before waking the kids. Your family could observe a moment of silence together before eating breakfast. You could count blessings in the shower. When stuck in a traffic jam, you could practice deep breathing. The possibilities are endless! The point is that even during the most wonderful time of the year—the time when we as a society reaffirm our investment in education—there can be incredible stress. Introducing a ritual of mindfulness into your routine could produce lasting peace.

So why not try a New Years Resolution in September?

Temple Bodies

2010-08-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

Intro
I decided to create a survey on Facebook in order to help my sermon along. I asked people to say in a word, sentence or paragraph what it means to glorify God in the body. Here are some answers I got.

LeAnn: yoga, eating healthy, listening to music and moving...
Elizabeth: Loving other bodies.
Haley Macon: Loving and appreciating your own body and all of the wonderful things it can do. Speaking in a loving fashion about it and encouraging others to do the same. It's kind of a "screw you!" to God to be complaining about the size of one's hips when God has given you so many other physical blessing. Joyful movement.
Jeffrey: when we pray, opening our eyes instead of closing them. we start with seeing each others bodies and saying the words of the sacred and seeing the sacred on each others bodies.
Audrey: feed the hungry, heal the sick, sight for the blind, liberty for captives.... needs of real bodies being at the core of spirituality, not just as metaphors or abstractions or ideals for a kingdom down the road some day
Dominique: Dance!
Benita: Connection!
Erin: It means respecting and loving your body (and others) as part of creation, expressing oneself (or one's community's self) with the gifts one is blessed with, and finally, trying to recognize God in every thing.
Wade: to exult our need for loving touch, and to offer it as a gift to others to receive on their terms, to love and respect the limits we set for ourselves, to use our bodies to heal pain (inflicted by other peoples' bodies, by their words, by their religion, by our own shame, etc)
Mike: to appreciate—rather than run away from—the instability of my body.
Jes: -Knowing where our food comes from and responsibly, joyfully, and thankfully indulging in our share while making sure we share. Redeeming appropriate touches in society. on the shoulder, a hand held, a cheek kissed in ways that are mutually honoring.

Who knew facebook could be so enlightening? Let us pray.

Temple Bodies
By Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy
August 1st 2010

I took a class in seminary entitled “Theologies of the Body.” It was taught by Professor Mayra Rivera Rivera, a brilliant and beautiful Puerto Rican theologian who often taught as much through her presence as she did in lecture. Professor Rivera had celebrity status with me. When she called on me in class, my heart would race and all of sudden I’d get tongue twisted, incapable of formulating those brainy answers she so obviously deserved. I wanted to be her prize pupil, her one and only! So you can imagine what horror I felt when I sat down to write my final paper for this class, Theologies of the Body, and experienced the worse case of writer’s block I’ve ever experienced in my God-blessed life. I was going to write a treatise on incarnational theology. I was going to define what it meant to experience one’s body as source and signification of God. I was going to make Mayra, the infamous and fabulous, Mayra Rivera Rivera proud and I was going to leave seminary on a cloud because my magnum opus on the body was going to rock her professorial world!

AND I GOT NOTHIN.

I sat down to write 2 weeks in advance, having already consolidated all my book chapters and articles for reference. And every single day I would write a couple words and erase. A couple sentences and erase. A page, erase. It got down to the wire. I had one day to write 12 pages and I had two paragraphs at best. With my tail firmly tucked between my legs and all of my ego succinctly sucked from my soul, I called and asked for an extension, which Professor Rivera easily granted. To make a long story even longer, I’ll tell you that I struggled through the extension and eventually turned in the worst piece of garbage in my entire graduate school career. I got a B in the class and I’ve never quite gotten over it. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me; I never had issues coming up with content and particularly not about a subject that I cared so much about.

I ran into Professor Rivera in a coffee shop that following summer. After expressing my sincere apologies for my failed final paper, she suggested that I go read the opening remarks of a book called “Bodies that Matter” by Judith Butler. She said reading that passage might put some of my writer’s block into a broader perspective. So I immediately went home, desparately craving anything that would diminish my feelings of dim-witedness. I found the book on my shelf and found out that one of the world’s leading scholars in rhetoric also had problems trying to write about the body. Here’s what Judith Butler says:

“I began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains. I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves but this movement beyond their own boundaries (…) appeared to be quite central to what bodies are. I kept losing track of the subject. I proved resistant to discipline. Inevitably, I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand."

Judith Butler is right. And my writer’s block, though it was so so wrong, was right. The body is not an easy thing to write about or to talk about (or to preach about, so be gentle with me, ok?) because bodies are always changing, both in physical ways and in the ways we conceive of and understand them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, Church. I’m convinced that there is no one definition of the body. I think, ultimately, we get to decide how we define our bodies. Many brave and faithful folks have fought and died for people’s inherent right to define their bodies for themselves. The freedom to self-define and self-determine are critical for any humane enterprise: be it government, religion, the family or the individual. AND this freedom ushers in a plethora of definitions and determinations. So it is with the body. For some the body is a vehicle: it takes us from place to place. For others the body is a stage: it’s blank space for expression and the drama of life to unfold. For some the body is tool: we labor and toil and work with it. Others, the body is a canvas: we curate, decorate and adorn it.

Do any of these definitions work for you? If not, what definition does?

If we don’t come to a working-definition of the body then we allow forces outside of us to define what our bodies will be and do, and what value our bodies have and for whom. Ask any woman, person of color, differently abled person or lgbt person the dangers of allowing outside forces to define one’s bodily worth. This is life and death stuff—both in terms of skin and breath and heart-beat, but also life and death when it comes to the human spirit’s connection to God.

As Christians, we inherit biblical definitions of the body. Note I say definitions, plural. Our text isn’t even consistent about the meaning and function of the flesh. So, as Christians it’s part of our obligation to our ancestors and future children of our faith to decide which of these biblical definitions remains faithful to our people and God throughout the ages. I think Paul gives us some helpful tools for definitions and determinations today.

He says right here in First Corinthians: 1) the body is for God; 2) The individual body is one member of the corporate Body of Christ. 3) The body is…here’s the kicker…the temple of the Holy Spirit. The temple of the Holy Spirit. The temple.

When Paul talks Temple, Paul is talking the language of first century Jews and Gentiles. The church in Corinth was comprised of both, and both groups Jews and Gentiles—knew religious life as temple life. Greek Gods and the Roman Imperial Court had temples constructed in their honor where pagans and citizens went to pay homage. Pagans build altars in these temples and festivals happened around them to commemorate important days in Greco-Roman life. The role of the temple in Israel’s life is no short story, but one filled with hope and heart-ache, a story that continues in Jerusalem today. The temple served as the centralized place for worship, the place where Torah was read aloud and sacrifices were made to YHWH by the high priest.

As a person trying to convert Jews and Gentiles to this new sect of Jesus-followers, Paul uses brilliant rhetoric by picking up on the dominant religious imagery of both parties. One of the things I’m learning as a pastor still wet-behind-the-ears (to directly quote Tom Ott) is that people listen a whole lot better when you use their language and their dominant symbol systems. So here’s Paul using the language and symbols of both Gentiles and Jews, essentially saying: you know that place you go to see God and hear God and feel God and taste God and smell God and pray to God and sacrifice for God and sing for God and dance for God…and you know how that place is special because your people have been going there for years and years…well that place isn’t the ONLY place. God needs no walls, needs no incense or childcare or hymnals or bulletins or cantors or instruments. God is in this place. And most importantly between this place and this place.

You are temple bodies, brethren. You are temple bodies, sisters. You are temple bodies, mothers and fathers and children and grandparents. You are temple bodies, says Paul. And because you are temple bodies, God goes with you all/ways, everywhere, all the time. And God’s presence is particularly strong when two or three gather together because there’s more square footage for God’s presence when you’ve got two and three temples together, right?

Temple bodies, meant to glorify God.

I must confess this is one of those theological paradigms that sounds great in theory. I love this passage from Corinthians, and you know what Church: I believe it. I believe the Holy Spirit is right here and between my body and your body. And I believe it is my duty as a follower of Christ and pastor of a people to glorify God with my body. But I don’t always live like I believe.

You know what a temple is? A temple is a place where we show up to receive the living Word of God. That’s what we do here. We show up and listen for God. So if I take my body for a temple, then I do what I would do in any sanctuary except I do it in my skin. I show up everyday and pay attention. It means that I wait and listen for God’s revelation. And if I’m really being faithful, it means that when God reveals God’s Word in my body, I act on it.

Defining the body as a temple means something about how I live. It means that I eat when my body is hungry. It means that I drink when I am thirsty and sleep when I am tired and dance when I am moved and caress when I am in love and exercise when I am energized.

And if we, as a community, define all bodies as temples that also means something about how we live. It means that we listen and respond to bodies that are hungry, bodies that are raped, bodies that are discriminated against, bodies that are incarcerated or tortured, bodies in chronic pain from inhumane working conditions and poor health care. On a less drastic scale, it means that we hold our brethren’s hand in worship if we know he lost his wife this year. It means that we hug the children of this community at every stage of development, helping them feel a sense of safety as they grow. It means we feed each other healthy food and encourage each other to push it through that last 10 minutes on the treadmill. It means that we speak truth to each other about not desecrating the temple with toxic substances or toxic attitudes. It means admiring our glamorous architecture--God’s good handy work at work in our flesh--from the outside and entering the depths of the internal sanctuary with one’s whole mind, heart, soul and strength. It means constantly keeping each other in check about the fine line between worship and idolatry, between being beautiful for God’s sake and glorifying one’s self in vanity. It means remembering that our bodies are not in and of themselves God, but members of the corporate body of Christ that lives and moves and has being for God. It means reveling in the unfolding mystery of every living being on earth, and searching every face for the glory of God, including your own.

Let the people say amen.

Prejudice Makes You Crazy, Study Finds - COLORLINES

2010-08-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

Prejudice Makes You Crazy, Study Finds - COLORLINES

Update

2010-08-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

I've thought about writing an "I moved to Michigan" entry for the last 6 months. You know: the blog post where I tell you why I moved here and what it's like. But I cannot. Not yet, anyways. Some things are only revealed in hindsight. Truth is, most days I have no idea what I'm doing here.

So here's what I want to say, instead: I miss California like a person misses air while flailing underwater. Yeah, it's like that. Sure, I miss the water and the land. But what I really miss--miss so hard that sometimes I have to distract myself for fear of heart-collapse--are the rituals of relationship that made California my home. Like trotting around Lake Merritt with Mike. Drinking coffee and farmers marketing on Lake Shore with Joy. Collaging with Alicia. Alameda sidewalk anywhere with Mama Marjorie. Laughing over yummy food--particularly at the Mixing Bowl on Telegraph--with Wade. I could go on and on.

Has me thinking.

This week we begin a series in our congregation about (infa)structural shifting. We are going to be focusing our worship and study on what happens when mass transition sets in, both for communities and instutions. Remember how I said "most days I have no idea what I'm doing here"? Well, it seems that a few our my religious ancestors felt similar stuff when in captivity or exile or bondage. (Not that I'm in any of those things, but I certainly feel like a stranger in a strange land which has biblical precedent). Last week Tom Ott (my colleague and homey) said "every time the Israelites found themselves in transition or crisis they would recite their history." So this emphasis on recalling history feels both professionally and personally profound to me, at the moment.

When I recall history, I know nothing of home or consistent revelation. I know love in and through people. I know the words and deeds of those who have kept me alive (more than once or twice). They are my home. They are my life. And that's what I miss.

Formal Introduction

2010-08-09T15:58:00.001-07:00

Dear Know Noise Peeps:
This is my babe, Melvin Antoine Whitehead.
Special delivery, straight from the Most High.
Just wanted to introduce you to the best thing that's happened in my life in a long long long time.

Here's to JOY(e)!

Why I Can't Sabbath These Days

2010-07-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

When I slow down

these surges of memory bolt through me like lightning.

Images of your face, frozen for less than a second

touch down, causing cracks in this seemingly solid surface

reminding me of your power

which never ceased to arrive unexpectedly out of thin air

and never failed in shock value.

Ironic given the softness of your comings and goings.

Throwing myself back into hustle

seems the only viable option

in the field of this impossible electricity.

Hoops for Hope

2010-06-22T04:45:00.001-07:00

Hey Everyone,
Good stuff going on at my church. Check it.

Peace!

What Might Have Been Lost

2010-06-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

after years of casual on and off again rotations
both on the dancefloor and in the bedroom
we decided to commit

for a while

it was a critical juncture:
your financial meltdowns necessitated my compassion
my back injury necessitated your touch

one morning you cried under my covers
and then we stood kissing for twenty six bars of a song by bon iver
while the sounds of rotating wheels foreshadowed everything to come

I tried to suck every single sadness out from your stomach
and everything kept going
hard and deep, deep and hard
as it always was with us
to no end, on either end

now: I live far away and you aren't speaking to me
twenty six bars of a bon iver song echo from my speakers
and I'm stuck wondering how it is
you believe that I could ever stop loving you

The Installing Preacher

2010-05-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

So here's what his bio can tell you: Zachary Moon is originally from Berkeley California. He was raised in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and recently completed a Master of Divinity at Chicago Theological Seminary. Next week he will move to Atlanta to begin a year long residency in spiritual care at the VA. Zac is a chaplain, itinerant preacher and teacher. He has led workshops around the country on topics of the Bible, transformative theology, and community organizing.Here's what i can tell you: Zachary Moon moves mountains and casts out demons. He is full of spirit and truth. He is my friend. He walks in the footsteps of Jesus, the Nazarene. Jesus, the rebelious and righteous. Jesus, the beloved. So, church, it is with the highest amount of gratitude that I bring to you my beloved, Zac Moon, with whom my soul is always well pleased.

Alicia

2010-05-18T05:10:00.000-07:00

Footsteps accumulate around sacred waters
when nearness enables communion.
Our conversations are never the same and always the same
sex, death, body, G-d/s, moms, fear, faith, falling, planet, person/s, pregnancy, power, classrooms.

Gentle soul: i never get enough of you.

Especially now when time zones and zip codes place barracades.
Especially now. To bridge the gap: you send me gifts,
mostly poems, always mind-blowing
in their secret knowing of : who you are, who i am and the holy intersectionals.
Your gifts delight me
but in the gifts i keep feeling this invitation to imagine

what life might have been like
if i hadn't been drinking myself into oblivion
and you hadn't met your future husband
while we were occupying the same (ridiculous) territory
completely unaware of one another
many many years ago.

Ordination Sermon

2010-05-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

Sermon: “Righteous Transgressors”

The Ordination of Emily Joye McGaughy

First Congregational Church of Riverside

March 27, 2010 – 2:00 p.m.

Psalm 42:7-8 and Ephesians 4:1-16

I’d like to begin by thanking Pastor Jane Quandt and the good people of First Riverside for welcoming all of us – Emily Joye’s extended community – with such warmth and hospitality. What a blessing it is for all of us to share in this blessed day with all of you!

I also want to thank and acknowledge Pastor Tom Ott. Tom, it means so much that you came all this way to be with Emily and her California folks on her ordination day. And while I’m at it, may I also say… “You lucky so-and-so’s in Battle Creek…! I’m sure you already know this, but you all have gotten one of California’s finest – and I know that she’s gotten one of Michigan’s finest, as well.”

And finally, I just want to say to Marty Tamburrano…: Marty, you have raised one heck of a daughter, and on this day, not only are we celebrating Emily Joye and her ministry – what God is doing through her – but we are also lifting thanks and praise for you, for the superlative mothering that produces a superlative person and pastor like Emily Joye.

Emily Joye, honey, I’m gonna get to you in just a little while…, but before we go any further… let’s pray.

Holy One,

Great Beloved,

God of the Deepest Places and the Highest Places ~

We are gathered this day with joy in our hearts,

With praise and thanksgiving on our lips,

For the mighty, mighty good thing You have done

in calling Emily Joye McGaughy to ministry in Your church.

We thank You for the countless ways

Your grace is revealed,

Your compassion is revealed,

Your justice is revealed,

Through her life and her ministry.

We ask Your continued blessings on her,

on all those with whom she ministers,

and on all those for whom she cares in Your name.

We ask Your continued light on her path, Gracious God –

Guiding her, leading her, showing her the way.

We offer these thanks and ask these blessings in the name of Jesus,

our brother and our Christ.

Amen and Aché.

At some point early in our friendship – I can’t tell you exactly when because I’m at the age when women get … forgetful – but at some point early in our friendship, I learned two important things about Emily Joye McGaughy. First, I learned that she is a poet, that she is a lover and crafter of the profound and rhythmic word, both written and spoken. Second, I learned that she is an artist, a maker of collages to be specific – and there are probably quite a few of us gathered here today to whom she has gifted one or more of her beautiful collages. I also learned a third thing about Emily Joye, which is that she’s a smack-talkin’ Lakers fan, but I have graciously overlooked that one and only flaw in her character….

Now, poets are not respecters of punctuation and other boundaries of syntax and grammar. And collage artists (collagists… is that a word?) are, likewise, people who tend to blur the boundaries and color outside the lines. “Line?” they ask. “What’s a line?”

The feminist writer and intellectual, bell hooks, once wrote a book called Teaching to Transgress in praise of pedagogies that encourage young people to question authority and challenge convention and “transgress” against racial, sexual and class boundaries.

Within five minutes of meeting Emily Joye, I knew I was in the presence of a serious transgressor, and my heart…just … sang.

My heart sang because my leader, my Jesus, my hero – probably not the same one that George Bush once called his hero, but that’s a detour we are NOT going to take today – my Jesus was a transgressor. In violation of the religious rules and protocol of his time, he shared meals with so-called sinners, he touched people who were sick and lame and ritually “impure,” he engaged in face-to-face conversation with women who were not his wife or his mother – including a few women accused of prostitution or adultery. And he did all this, he did all this, in the name of Love. He did all this in the name of the One Whose mercy endureth forever, the One Whose grace and compassion never fail. He did all this in the name of God.

Emily Joye, I believe that God has called you to this day, to this ordination, because what the church needs, what the body of Christ desperately needs, are righteous transgressors – and you, my dear, dear friend and sister and daughter of my heart, are one righteous transgressor. Now, lest people think I’m calling you out of your name, or accusing you of something bad, let me clarify! In our time, a “transgression” has come to be regarded as a “sin” or a “violation,” but the Latin root of the word “transgress” simply means “to cross over.” To cross over.
Now, am I saying that you’re a rule-breaker? Well, yes, you are – praise God! – but that’s not all you are.

Am I saying that you’re a boundary-crosser? Yes, indeed, you are – praise God! – and I’ve watched you... with White folks and Black folks and Latino folks and Asian and Pacific Islander folks, and straight folks and gay folks and transgendered folks, and super-privileged folks and under-privileged folks, and on and on. A boundary crosser, most assuredly…, but that’s not all you are.

Psalm 42, the psalm from which Bill read to us just a little while ago, says: “Deep calls to deep…,” and to be a righteous transgressor, to be the kind of righteous transgressor that Jesus was, is to live from the deepest place in your soul. And that, Emily Joye, is who you are. That is what you do. Living from the deepest place in your soul, you passed up an internship with one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest churches and chose, instead, to serve at a safe house for women leaving prostitution – poor women, abused women, drug-addicted women. Living from the deepest place in your soul, you took your anti-war, peace-loving self to the V.A. Hospital in Palo Alto to serve injured veterans – severely injured veterans, brain-injured veterans, traumatized veterans. And we watched – all of us who love you – we watched you enter fully into the lives of those women and those veterans, walk with them and pray with them, suffer with them as they relapsed and rejoice with them as they recovered, become family with them. Some people’s ministries have a preposition problem, you know – they think that ministry is something you do to folks or for folks. Not your ministry, Emily Joye – your ministry is what you do with folks.

Your ministry is a daily re-affirmation of those words LeAnn read to us just a little while ago: “There is one body and one Spirit, and we are called to one hope by one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, who is above all and through all and in all.” A ministry of righteous transgression isn’t grounded in sympathy. It doesn’t say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It doesn’t even say, “I’m going to love my neighbor as if s/he were myself.” No, it does something even more radical than that. It says, “My neighbor is myself. That former prostitute is me. That returning veteran is me. That Iraqi woman, that Afghani child, that Haitian man, is me.” One hope, one faith, one body, one Spirit – that’s a ministry of righteous transgression. That’s what God is calling for, and that’s why God is calling you.

In just a little while, Jane and our dear sisters and brothers from the Southern California-Nevada Conference and all the rest of us will gather around and lay hands on you, and we will pray, and you will cross the threshold into the life of ordained ministry. You will cross yet another boundary. You will transgress, righteously.

We will not ordain you, because we don’t do that. The Holy Spirit does that. Deep has called to deep – God has called to the deepest place in you, and you have said yes, and what we do this day is affirm. What we do is add our yes.

And we affirm loudly and joyfully. We affirm, holding in our hearts those words that Joy Lynn read at the beginning of this service: “In the midst of a world marked by tragedy and beauty, there must be those who bear witness, who stand and lead, who speak honestly, who gather with the congregation, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly, heal and transform and bless.”

There must be religious witnesses, and there must be righteous transgressors, and you, Emily Joye McGaughy, are both.

Praise God. Hallelujah. Amen.

Conditions of Impossibility and Cultivating the Awake Life

2010-04-14T05:19:00.000-07:00

There are conditions
conditions of impossibility

that make people die before they die.

These conditions occur mostly on the margins

places where comfort has been forsaken for some by those with a lot.

Conditions of impossibility eclipse the awake life.
No one willingly opts for death before death.
People who originate in conditions of impossibility
must die a little in order to not die overall.
It's a coping strategy, in other words. And it's about survival.

But when people develop the habit of going away in order to stay alive,

they often cannot stop the habit once removed from the conditions of impossibility.

So they go away and die when they don't have to anymore.

Their loved ones cannot help but feel this leave taking happen

and if the conditions of impossibility no longer appear obvious,

the leave-taking makes little sense, forcing the loved one to make best guesses

about why death before death occurs in the bodies they love so much.

If you're a child and do not understand survival yet,

because your survival is being taken care of from the outside--which it should be when you're a child--all you feel in the leave-taking moment

is an internal cue that someone you love has gone far far away.

You can be clutching that person's body, screaming "Where'd you go?!" but physical presence is often a terrible indicator of one's whereabouts, and besides, you don't understand survival yet.

And because you're a child, naturally unindividuated and completely attached to the source of your own survival, when that person goes away, your source of life dies therefore causing death in you.

That becomes part of the early childhood experience that forms

one's sense of identity. Those you love die and you die, over and over.

So even when the conditions of impossibility no longer surround
the leave-taking person, their habituated leave-taking pattern
causes premature deaths in the one's they bring into the world.
Now once you're in the world,
if you're a good student and develop according to the laws
of your early relationships, you probably go around seeking the relationships

that die and die and die again, so that you can continue screaming "Where'd you go?!"

for the rest of your life--because good students figure out they're role in life
and take up their responsibilities accordingly.
So you see: it sets up this incredibly sad dynamic
where everyone is dying all the time in order to survive.

I want to tell you something:
for all the times you had to die and I was there, clutching your body screaming
"Where'd you go?!"...
I was not mad. I missed you. I never wanted you to go away.

I just wanted you to come back. I thought my rage would wake you up and cause you to return.

And I hated the world for how cruel it had been to you. So I raged on and on.

I want to tell you something else:

my education helped me discover the truth about conditions of impossibility

and once I learned about that, I started to rage against those conditions

with every breath and every opportunity.

People called me militant and angry and selfish,

but I just wanted my loved ones to come back to life.

I've been fighting against your death/s for a long time.

I've been embodying your rage and your desire and your grief for a long time.

In some ways, this has been my own way of dying before I die.

I vacate me in order to fight for you.

And I do it because I am loyal and I am protective, both characteristics that flow from love.

But I have not stopped the leave-taking cycle. And this morning I want to be free.

I don't want to fight. I don't want to take leave anymore. I don't want to keep dying.

I want to live the awake life.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T13:52:00.000-07:00

(Dedicated to Wade Meyer & Zachary Moon)

I cannot be a body

if you pretend like you don't have a body.

So for the life in us both,

please honor

our intentionally fashioned togetherness

by letting me kneel down

to touch and wash your flesh

which also happens to be mine

something i can only discover

if you allow me to kneel and touch and wash you

This is our birth

right before my death

Just let me

That is my prayer tonight. Maundy Thursday 2010.

Los Angeles, San Francisco/Oakland, Chicago

2010-03-12T11:53:00.000-08:00

big city, big city
an ode to you

breath to my lungs
juice to my blood flow

makin my skin crawl
and my eyelids bow before you

an ode.

you make me believe, you pulsing poet,
oh
such absurd things...

i see in you
such delightful dismissals of the proscriptive,
embrace of that musical stuff, that move or be blown back stuff

an ode to you.

because
my unapologetically bold baby
you display my deepest yearnings for Us

you lick the fork of the multitude, savoring every flavor
staring back with your tongue out, like: i dare you to shame me

i never will. i just look upon you with stretched desire that threatens to eclipse me.

you are so alive with the beat of this internally motivated swarm,
this swarm that hustles double time
and looks deeply once

i see you. i'm lookin back, deeply, this once

and so an ode

to you, to you
big bad bold city

oh you hurt me so wonderful
i love you. i do.

Addiction & Recovery in the Media

2010-02-27T05:51:00.001-08:00

   Something in me needs to "talk back" to all this media mess around Tiger Woods that continues to unfold. I read an article by a white straight man this morning who is promoting 12-step buddhist recovery for Tiger. You can read it here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darren-littlejohn/year-of-the-iron-tiger-se_b_477627.html
   Now: I'm all about recovery, but sex and drug and alcohol addiction don't just crop up b/c people feel like ruining their lives. Addiction is a symptom of our economic/social system that is based on material greed. The metanarrative about big bad black masculinity/sexuality and weakling white women conditions people into consumer (material and sexual) roles. When you're in a role, you're easier to control. And when you're in a role, it's easier to locate where you are and who you're with and why you're with them and what you might purchase or get addicted to. If you think addiction doesn't have systemic threads to it, just check out the location of liquor stores in neighborhoods all over the country. Check the concentration of fast food marketing to particular ethnic groups, or the proliferation of cosmetic surgery ads in places where women go looking for something, anything other than themselves for salvation. If you want to know how ridiculously "caught up" our media is with selling these stereo-types, just check out this cover of vanity fair:http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/01/annie-leibovitz-comments-on-tiger-woods-cover-photo.html
   Photographer Annie Leibovitz is quoted as saying: “Tiger is an intensely competitive athlete—and quite serious about his sport. I wanted to reveal that in these photos. And to show his incredible focus and dedication.” What a crock. We had never seen images of Tiger like this until the "scandal" broke. While he was playing a predominantly white sport, we were seeing him in polo shirts and khaki pants. Then when he steps outside of his marriage with a bunch of Paris Hilton look alikes (oh yes: white feminity is being framed through this story too), we see him lifting weights, shirt-less, with vertical bars in the background?? Leibovitz is obviously owned.
   So what i'm personally struggling with is the absolutely obvious need we have for recovery in this economic climate--ecologically, socially and spiritually--being talked about in terms of symptom alleviation. If we don't take the greed-based, material-focused, dog-eat-dog spirit out of our currency with one another, those symptoms will continue to pop up no matter how many individuals are admitting their powerlessness. So yeah, meetings and steps and service are important, but where's the discussion on and commitment to systemic, structural shifting??

Loving What Is: Family

2010-01-25T20:39:00.000-08:00

I want to write about the people I've been living with for the last month. When I worked at First Congregational Church of Riverside I got to know the Soares family because I taught Hannah's sunday school class and led the youth group Taylor participated in weekly. Sandra, their mom, often helped with youth events and so I got to know her (slightly) during my eight month interim ministry. That was in 2005, before seminary. They've gone through some monumental shifts and challenges as a family in the last five years but they've always kept in touch. During this winter, when I was going through monumental shifts and challenges of my own, Sandra offered me space in her home. So I've been living here, with them, with Hannah, Taylor and Sandra, in Riverside for the last month.

This is the first big chunk of time I've spent with teen-agers in a while. I spent much of my early 20's invovled in youth work, so when I went to Berkeley for graduate school, I intentionally put myself in adult-ministry situations in order to develop those skills. That choice has served me well. I wouldn't trade my time at SafeHouse or the Palo Alto VA for anything. But I must be real: my heart for ministry, my first love in the church were the youth and families at FCCR. And it's been a straight up, big fat blessing to reunite with them before moving to Michigan.

Living with the Soares family came about unexpectedly, graciously. I am grateful. I am also re-evaluating my thoughts/feelings on the trappings of the nuclear family. My relations with Hannah & Taylor in the last month gave a glimpse into the gifts of siblingity. We've had penetrative conversation, conversation about the meaning/s of life, the responsibilities that come with privilege, the struggles of being young in psycho-obsessed-drugged-up So Cal. But we've also just chilled out, chilled out to music, to books or net-surfing in the same room. I find myself desparately sad about leaving this accompaniment on Friday. I never had siblings growing up; it's pretty f-in rad. I'm sumthin crazy about Taylor & Hannah.

On Saturday, Sandra and I sat by the pool watching the sun go down together. I'd just seen the movie "Up in the Air." For some reason I came back home from the movie theater weepy, floundering in my skepticism about relationships and family in my future. I admitted to feeling "hard hearted" about romance and intimacy after the loss of James this year. We continued on in conversation about the risks of pain that come with loving. Sandra is an expert on the topic. I trust her. At one point she looked me dead in the eye and said: I wouldn't trade Taylor and Hannah for a hard heart.

Touche.

Missing Joy(e)x2

2010-01-11T18:07:00.000-08:00

All those times
we walked the lake
or the marina
or the city streets at night
and laughed about stupid stuff
going on at work
or cried about painful stuff
making mess in our relationships,

all those times

we grabbed coffee

and grabbed more coffee

or ran for dessert

when we'd hit the perfect coffee quotient,
all those times
we made fun of Berkeley hippies and
made fun of those people who made ridiculous announcements in church and
made fun of people who took their facebook seasonal art projects way too seriously and
made fun of each other for various things
like intensity or clumsiness,
all those times
we exchanged music mixes
or driving responsibilities
or sent each other little pick-me-ups in the mail

we were doing the things that i never thought twice about then
but think about all the time now.

2010-01-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

I've been traveling, gone from the places of usual,
transported central from the left.
These skies look the same, yet unleash foreign objects
that can determine the possibilities for an entire day.
This hotel room is the same as almost every hotel room
I've ever slept in, yet what I prepare for in this hotel room
might determine the possibilities for the rest of my life.

"All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on." Henry Ellis

This Wonderful Friend of Mine

2009-12-14T10:29:00.000-08:00

“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." --Christopher Robin to Pooh

Let Me Be Specific

2009-12-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

I gotta thank G-d.

and I gotta let you know exactly what I'm thanking, though I can never communicate exactly what it is that's turned rust to gold.

But I'm going to try because I gotta thank G-d.

There have been moments in the last five months when I didn't think I'd make it out alive, moments where I wept in the darkness of the coldnest night, clinging to some distant hope of any moment less physically painful. This back injury has taken me to the precipice of my faith in life and pushed me over the edge. There have been mornings when I woke up only to hate the idea of moving out of bed because I could feel the futility of motion and the death of the possibilities for the next 24 hours accompanying that restricted motion.
I held the phone to my ear, crying out, wailing, sighing--heard in my worst periods of struggle by faithful companions who would remind me: it's not always going to feel like this. They'd ask questions like: what color is the pain? does it have a message for you? And when I couldn't answer because the agony ripped my voice away, they'd just listen to the wimpering in silent devotion.

And then this morning, after receiving an injection of steriods three days ago, I woke up okay.

DO YOU HEAR ME?

I WOKE UP OKAY. MOBILE, PAINLESS, FREE. Today. Yes I did.

And I gotta thank my beloved. Hear me: I thank G-d.

I thank G-d for the chemicals in that shot. I thank G-d for my spine specialist and all the researchers, medical experts and makers of bio-medical technology that enabled that injection to be administered. I thank G-d for my friend Debra who took me to my appointment on time and let me cry--hard--when it hurt me and I didn't believe it was going to help. I thank G-d for every single person who prayed healing prayers for me. I don't care the words, the tradition or the outcome of those prayers. I'm grateful to G-d for people who give a shit enough to think of someone else's pain and to place their intention into the arms of something greater than themselves in order to be useful for the purposes of love. I thank G-d for my mother who told me she'd take care of me no matter what and payed my first month's insurance bill because I was unemployed. I am thankful to G-d that I even have health insurance. I thank G-d for the loving, gentle suggestions of mentors, friends and faith companions since the injury occurred in March: keep writing, keep walking, keep talking about it. I survived because of those suggestions. I survived because of that care. And I gotta thank G-d.

I am surviving. I gotta thank G-d. I hope you hear me.

The Plague Upon This House

2009-12-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Ultimate irony:
you water the plants, feed the birds and make the bed upon which both of you sleep
yet she remains parched, unfed, and restless
wishing a love between you, once alive and life-giving
might awaken again.

Hollow soul:
what has deadened you,
positioned your body in defense
and closed any possibilities for openness?

I witness
and find this poisonous ruptured relationship
a challenge to my pastoral stance.
What can I do to heal such cantankerous hostility?
How might I occupy the triangle without being torn apart by it?
What prayers might move against the tides threatening to drown her heart?

Link to Patheos Advent Series

2009-12-03T12:27:00.001-08:00

Here's the link to the Advent series I'm doing with Corbin & Tai Amri. Check it out. Comments welcomed there or here.

http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Advent-Intentionality.html

Waiting on the Christ of compassion to come...

Ejoye

Dying to Believe

2009-12-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

November 5th, 2008.

We gathered, about 12 all together, in a tiny living room
in a tiny apartment. We were on the second floor.
Below people began screaming, so we went to the windows.
My mom called. She was crying. East Coast got word first.
Then they--John Stewart and Steven Colbert--announced it.
You won.
My living room companions clapped. Some yelled.
Some jumped up and began running around. I just wept and wept. I couldn't believe it.
You won.

The acceptance speech put us all in check; you knew the work cut out for you
and didn't hesitate to tell us about it. Further humbled by your grace,
the spirit of reverence for responsibility took hold. For a moment we were silent.
The screaming below got louder and louder, so we hit the streets.
We passed around ideas of where to go: Jack London Square?
City Hall? 20 minutes later we joined other political wanderers
at the corner of Broadway & Grand, right outside Luka's Taproom.

All the colors and queers began drumming, dancing and sanctifying the intersection.
Oakland's finest were in full effect. No censoring or controlling the movement that night.
The people owned the pavement, for once. Police officers put up their barricades for us, for you.
They actually let us get rowdy. People wrapped themselves in American Flags and circled
the community. Black people held each other like tearful lovers reuniting after years apart.
The old long-haired white hippie left-overs from the 60's crowded together with candles.
Even the punk-rock bandits poured in offering shouts of joy.
You brought us all there, that corner in Oakland, on that day.
You won.

In the middle of the celebration I recalled the moment I turned the corner on you.
When John Legend sang at the National Democratic Convention, he used these words:
"I'm dying to believe that you're out there."
As a theologian I reflected upon the rhetoric of hope,
the possibilities for transformative political leadership,
a shift in my generation's attitude toward agency and change--all the things you stood for
and all things bigger than you.
We wanted justice.
We wanted diversity in leadership.
We wanted grass roots movement.

People worked tirelessly for you, dying to believe that what you offered might actually come true.
And it did: that night when you won. We danced our assess off and screamed our lungs
into scratchyness the next morning. On the corner of Broadway & Grand, we prayed
our gratitude for the "new thing" happening because of your willingness to lead us.

December 2nd, 2009
$1.08 trillion total funding for "both" (as if we're only occupying 2 countries) wars through fiscal 2010.
30,000 troops on their way to Afghanistan as of your declaration last night.
98,000 proposed U.S. troop level in Afghanistan in total.

I don't think you want this, deep down. Somebody must own you. I say institute the draft, right now.

This morning I saw the headlines--I was leading an Advent workshop last night
and couldn't hear your speech (how ironic)--and felt a gut-wrenching spiritual ache.
The ache of disillusionment.
The ache of wondering if we all got fooled into thinking it'd be different.
The ache of wondering if you got fooled into thinking you'd be different.
The ache of pondering how it feels to be a citizen today
given how it felt to be a citizen on the corner of Broadway & Grand on November 5th 2008.

I'm dying to believe that you're out there, that you are still the person I worked so hard to elect,
that you care about the working class, and people of color and you wouldn't sacrifice
your principles to put them on front lines for money or any other pimped out virtue.
I'm dying to believe that you're out there, that you think about Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani
children when you look into Malia and Sasha's eyes.
I'm dying to believe the hope we birthed wasn't a waste.

World AIDS Day

2009-12-01T07:52:00.001-08:00

2009-12-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

Hey all:

I wrote an article on my experience in CPE (clinical pastoral education) for the PSR (pacific school of religion) bulletin. If you want to check it out, hit the link below. I'd love to hear your comments on this site. Happy reading.

http://www.psr.edu/war-and-peace-my-year-clinical-pastoral-education

Yours in the struggle(s) for peace,

eJOYe

Loving Life The Way it is Right Now

2009-11-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

Friday was the last day I couldn't drive nor walk around the block more than once. Friday marked the difference between laying flat and being able to stand (somewhat) straight for more than three minutes. Friday my pain level went from a 9 to a 6 1/2--the qualitative distance between those levels for my body mirroring the quantitative distance between states like California and New York on a map. When you've got nothing, you get tremendously grateful for something even if that something would have felt pathetic before you lost everything. Back to Friday.

Makes sense that my spiritual director would usher in the period of transition, the transition from immobility to inches-given. We were supposed to have dinner in Oakland but there was no way I could drive up from Palo Alto, so we decided to talk on the phone. She's a magical human being, my spiritual director. Even so, it took me 30 minutes to get honest about the struggle, 30 minutes to admit my despair and absolute bewilderment. At first I hesitated. I didn't want to use the word "unemployment" because she used to be my boss. I didn't want to use the words "lack of faith" because she's also now my pastor. I didn't want to tell her how bad my back pain had been the last 4 days, how only 2 days ago I'd begged my physician for Morphine and when he refused to order the shot and told me to go to the ER (how can a person with level 9 pain drive themselves to the ER?), I'd asked G-d to give me death. I thought she'd be disappointed. She's the kind of person everyone works hard--i mean hard--to avoid disappointing because she's grace-filled, beautiful and dependable. Because she is these things, she asked the questions that coaxed me into honesty. She asked if I'd been writing. I said no. I couldn't write because I was too ashamed.

Then we began talking about the lives of pastors: what they do, not just how they work within the walls of a congregation. She talked about vocation being larger than employment, particularly in the ministry. Pastors are people who bring theological and ecclesiological reflection to all aspects of life, not just the life of a congregation where they are employed. We look at all struggle and victory, all brush-ups with grace and evil with several things in mind: 1) our people 2) our G-d & 3) the intersections between the two. I began talking about how this struggle with getting a job, with getting adequate health care, and dealing with chronic pain have given me a wider circle of compassion. I told her about my new found empathy for people who have to be on disability, people who spend too much time staring up at the ceiling because that's the only option they've got. I told her I would never, ever, in the future forsake the blessing of having a job. I told her I would never forsake another pain free day. She then asked if I would be willing to write during this time as a way of providing testimony, as a way of pastoring from the wilderness.

G-d knows I am not the only one in the wilderness right now. In fact, my wilderness looks like a nicely trimmed vineyard in comparison to some people's struggle these days. I may be moving back home, but at least I've got a financially stable family to welcome me back. I may be without steady employment, but I qualify for federal help that's enabling me to pay my bills. My skin color, education level, class privilege and body ability guarantee me a future within my denomination that, unfairly, many cannot claim. I may be leaving the Bay Area where countless friends and memories hold my heart, but at least I've made those connections and dwelled in that precious space at all. Amidst the struggle I am both grateful for what I have and committed to fighting against those things holding people in greater bondage than I can even comprehend. I will not allow this time of suffering to isolate or silence me. Thanks to Marjorie's suggestion, I will use this time to connect, to express, to fight, to hold on, and yes, to love G-d. Therefore, this blog space will serve as a key portal for these attempts to break open and to reach you.

There’s more…

On Saturday I actually survived the drive to the East Bay. I had the opportunity to write and direct the communion liturgy of Michelle Haris-Gloyer's Ordination service. I love Michelle. Working with her on any liturgical project feels like breathing sacred air: it just flows. We blended the traditional institution of the Lord's Supper with the language of 2 Cor 4. We relished in the patterns and poetic flow of those two texts in conversation. Michelle desired "multiple voices at the table" so we invited 8 servers to participate in the spoken word. The actual delivery wasn't perfect (well, im*h*o) because we only had a few practice runs, but the process of relationally engaging, envisioning, writing and rehearsing reminded me of why I want to do ministry. There's no greater joy(e) than experiencing the burst of novelty at the intersection of tradition and innovation. No greater love than worship. I may not be “in the church” but my heart is in this work, no doubt.

After the service I ran into Christina Hutchins who is pastor, poet, theologian, philosopher and all-around goodness. She's the person who throws out Koan sayings that knock you spiritually senseless one minute and then 20 minutes later comes up with an absolutely irreverent joke that makes you laugh so hard you almost pee. I adore her. Anyway: we hadn't seen each other in a while and she asked me how I was doing. I gave her the 1 minute version of "jobless, in pain and moving home to my mother's house." She looked me deep in the eyes and said "you could practice loving your life the way it is right now." In some ways I think she was taking me to the same core principle that Marjorie ushered me into on Friday night. Her words stayed with me for 3 days, read: they actually meant something.

Ever since I've been wondering about the practice of "loving life the way it is right now." What does it mean to actually do the work of loving something that feels so damn bad? This question, this meditation of sorts, has thrown me "back to the basics." Yes, it's letting the "test become testimony" (as Marjorie would say) and so yes, the loving is about expression and writing. But mostly: it's about paying attention. And I can only pay attention to the present moment because the future is a downhill-rolling-fear-filled-snow-ball phenomenon if there ever was one. I am looking and listening more deeply today than I ever have. And guess what?: the practice is saving me moment to moment.

I'm here to testify: the present moment contains the most G-d you'll ever find. Thank you Marjorie, Michelle, and Christina.

In the coming weeks and months I am going to practice gratitude in this blog space. The practice of gratitude is about intention, about paying particular (intentionally appreciative) attention to the present moment. The practice of gratitude is the practice of “loving life the way it is right now.” And, hey, it’s seasonally appropriate. My hope is that you will continue checking in and that you will share your gratitude (or anything else you want) in this space as well. I am particularly reliant upon this space to hold connections as I transition from the Bay back to Southern Cal. I want to keep loving your lives—just the way they are right now—too. Be in touch, beloved,

Advent

2009-11-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

(Hey all: I've started an Advent writing project with Tai Amri and Corbin. This is my first post. My boys will respond on a webzine called Patheos. I will post the link later and if you find interest in this material, check us out.)

Advent, the season that includes both religious holiday and secular consumeristic spin-outs, is a time of preparation. For Christians in particular, this is a time to halt, a time of pause, a period of waiting. But we do not wait for waiting's sake. We await the event of incarnation, a birthing of divinity and humanity in the world. We move collectively during this time of preparation, as a people, toward the promise of Christmas. Like any other liturgical season, Advent takes form in our lives through practice. We practice Advent. And again, like any other liturgical season, the practices of Advent take on drastically different forms given the Christian sect/denomination/community wherein they are being ritualized. For instance, while some Christians will pray, light candles and open miniature calendar doors each evening during Advent, other Christians will spend the bulk of Advent shopping for gifts, preparing meals and attending bi-weekly church services. It's all about context.

The diversity of Advent practice is made more complicated by the undeniably far-reaching reign of commercial industries capitalizing on this time in order to make a profit. We hear Jingle Bells set to Best Buy's advertisements, see GAP models adorning cute little santa hats in order to sell ordinary blue jeans, and find Christmas Blend coffee stocked heavily on the shelves at any local Starbucks. With equal force, those finding the man of Nazareth missing from this holiday extravaganza, step in the streets with their "No Christmas without Christ" signs or "Jesus is the reason for the season" buttons. All of these things—pious prayer, corporate cash-ins and religious resistance to consumerism--are about the practice of Advent. There’s a spectrum here and quite honestly during my 28 years of Christianity I’ve probably gone to the extreme on both sides. Today, after seminary training and years of work in the field of ministry, I find myself somewhere between unconscious consumerism and self-righteous blasting of all-things-Capitalist. I find myself practicing the “middle way.”

There's meaning to be found in buying just the right gift for just the right someone, even if you find that gift at Best Buy. There's value to be found in lining up and resisting the forces of classism, homeless and hunger in our city streets--and doing that resisting in the name of Christ precisely because Jesus came into this world through a homeless, unwed, pregnant, teen-age girl. Reverence for life and reverence for the liberation made known in Jesus can increase with every candle lighting, every sung version of "Oh Holy Night." However, there’s the danger of “going through the (Advent) motions” just to get through the holidays. This is the danger of meaningless habituation that accompanies any ritualistic activity. We can pick gifts off the shelf without thinking much about the person receiving them or where those gifts were made and under what conditions. We can prepare a Christmas meal for our extended friends and family because we’re supposed to, not because we actually want to. We can go about the obligatory, business as usual practices "we've done every year," or we can go about the work of checking our intentions. Perhaps the most faithful discipline we can engage as we approach the season of Advent in 2009 is the practice of Advent intentionality.

As a progressive Protestant I’ve seen the shortfalls of “thinking” about religion—my people are notorious for thinking themselves right out of holy living--and so I am not advocating a more heady way of approaching Advent. Instead I’d like us to consider that we’ve always practiced Advent and there’s something to be discovered in revisiting those practices with the lessons of faith we’ve learned in the last year. Certainly this will lead us to change some practices and to hold onto others with greater appreciation.

Seeing the Doc. Seeing the MRI. Seeing the future

2009-11-09T19:35:00.000-08:00

To put words

when he sheepishly avoided my mother's question about long term prognosis

To put words

to the color chaos--where white should have totalized, no, greyish black moss

To put words

where potrusions illustrate this screaming, aching, knifing, killing, pain that's been and been and been

I cannot.

The River

2009-11-07T21:43:00.000-08:00

"It's grief. They want you to have some normal response to grief, you know, so they don't have to watch. But it's mine."
--Henry Carter portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the movie Shrink.

Three days ago…

While walking next to my girl Maritza through the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco on Dia de los Muertos, I realized something profound was happening. Painted skeleton faces. Candle luminaries all around. Packed crowds full of mourning, carnivalesque pilgrims communing with their dead. Skull and bones etched upon elaborate altars made from scratch. They call the march a "processional." Here the boundaries of life/death, religion/secular, sadness/celebration, here they go blurry. Here the isolation of grief meets its eclipse. I turned to her and said "Pretty prophetic for a culture that doesn't want anything to do with grief."

We don't grieve because we refuse to face the unnecessary damage we accumulate through unnecessary war, unnecessary violence (read: racism, sexism, neo/colonialism, heterosexism), unnecessary consumption/production practices, unnecessary distancing, unnecessary silencing. Our refusal multiplies the contents of grief. So we accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and the buried dead, the relational deaths, the sorrows of significant and untended loss—they whisper, call out, scream and haunt. They haunt, hoping we will wade in the water, hoping we take seriously the things we have loved, hoping we will not turn away.

Maritza nodded. She knows a lot about death and dying and grief--and about the murderous silence often accompanying them. She works for/in the Latino/a community, in the field of AIDS prevention and outreach. She lost her brother. She knows. She uses the language of "crossing-over" and while that language is foreign to me, it communicates so honestly the trespass, the back-flipping liminal space that momentarily exists when what's lost comes alive again in memory. This is the real stuff of resurrection. Christians should make this street their classroom and put down their pathetic theories of heaven. She bends down and gazes into the altar constructed for Cesar Chavez. She takes pictures and lingers. His work is her work. And I witness her witness, his resurrection inside her wide-open heart. And this: my gaze upon her adoration, this is the work of mourning together, the hard, sometimes almost impossible work of staring at and seeing loss without trying to strangle it, or put a wall up in front of it, or shooting someone because you refuse to feel it. This is the radical and creative motion necessary for the ash to penetrate the earth while giving permission to its surrounding soil: yes, let something new bud here.

If we create space for each other, if we allow our companions the dignity of grief, without attempts to control or fix or minimize, we might possibly end the ceaseless marches to war. We might instead, begin floating in a river that changes its pace, follows no predetermined direction and therefore promises no security, and sometimes gets colder than we can tolerate. But the river, the river will deliver us.

Welcome to the World Little Ones

2009-11-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

For Isabella, Gabriel & Alex, Clementine, Elanora (and some still on the way...)

My friends are having babies. Many many babies.
And what is there to do but become enamored with
the possibilities born of our world
when wonder and grace filled people
make the radical decision to multiply?

It's radical. It is because our world quickly crashes
any naive eschatology promising safety,
painlessness or gauranteed success
for any child. Any child.

Here they are anyway, their mere existence a testament of hope
reaching from the guts of sperm donors, mommy bears
and delivery dancing dads.

My soul stands up, claps, and refuses to sit down
even when the ovation has grown long and others have begun to subtly
gesture their tired and time-bound allegiance.
Keep standing, I say! This is the stuff of true celebration, of worship.

And if we are not indoctrinated into new types of responsibility
by the mere announcement of pregnancy,
then shame upon shame,
for these are the holy whispers of futures untouched,
members of a new order,
a new order that altars our world and
asks of us new symbols, gestures and language, asking:
what do you, dear pilgrim, bring to this table?

They have come from bellies over-swollen and
ribcages close to collapse, from mothering giants overwhelmed with discomfort.
They have come impossibly, through pain and tearing and sleepless nights
to awaken the dead and sluggish from their slumber,
to announce the myriad of miracles in flight,
still searching for open hearts to occupy.

Welcome. Welcome.

Grief

2009-10-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

This is long overdue. Thank you for waiting. The classroom you extend requires the utmost of presence.
The reading, writing, and interpretation listed on the syllabus are not optional.
There is no graduation, just continuation.

See then why it took me so long to take my seat.
Oh that I had learned your lessons earlier
and avoided the ice castle constructs blocking me from genuine freedom.
I did not know your liberty because I was too afraid to surrender.
Forgive me.

You promised to set us apart, to help us stand up, to redeem our unbelief.
But I did not hear, too consumed with fix-it faucets slowly leaking the lies
of cheap repair, too consumed with the mythical protection of hard-heartedness.

Worn thin, out of ideas, I could no longer deny your power or invitation.
There came a moment when “do or die” went from slogan to maxim,
from sure I guess to unequivocal yes. I broke. You seduced. I came.You delivered.

I should have known.

When I was wrecked with nothing left you unraveled
with my slightest consent and made new the deadliest spot within.
I was surprised. Some days I forget only to return again on my knees.
You are generous.

I should have known tears would be the solution,
wordless exhaustion and admittance of despair my redemptive hope.

I have not received a grade, rather a summons
to participate in the most revolutionary of movements,
one that re-members me over and over again
in the faces of suffering, in the dust surrounding bodies torn apart
from rape, war, and neglect.
Sustained in this world without end.
Amen.

Monja Blanca by Clive James

2009-10-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Ejoye's note: I read this in the New Yorker a while back. The last two stanzas read like apophatic theology and I have given "bold" to my favorite lines. Herald the dope. Peace and power my people.

The wild White Nun, rarest and loveliest

Of all her kind, takes form in the green shade

Deep in the forest. Streams of filtered light

Are tapped, distilled, and lavishly expressed

As petals. Her sweet hunger is displayed

By the labellum, set for bees in flight

To land on. In her well, the viscin gleams:

Mesmeric nectar, sticky stuff of dreams.

This orchid’s sexual commerce is confined

To flowers of her own class, and nothing less.

And yet for humans she sends so sublime

A sensual signal that it melts the mind.

The hunters brave a poisoned wilderness

To capture just a few blooms at a time,

And even they, least sensitive of men,

Will stand to look, and sigh, and look again,

Dying of love for what does not love them.

Transported to the world, her wiles inspire

The same frustration in rich connoisseurs

Who pay the price for nourishing the stem

To keep the bloom fresh, as if their desire

To live forever lived again through hers:

But in a day she fades, though every fold

Be duplicated in fine shades of gold.

Only where she was born, and only for

One creature, will she give up everything

Simply because she is adored; and he

Must sacrifice himself. The Minotaur,

Ugly, exhausted, has no gifts to bring

Except his grief. She opens utterly

To show how she can match his tears of pain.

He drinks her in, and she him, like the rain.

He sees her, then, at her most beautiful,

And he would say so, could she give him speech:

But he must end his life there, near his prize,

Having been chosen, half man and half bull,

To find the heaven that we never reach

Though seeking it forever. Nothing buys

Or keeps a revelation that was meant

For eyes not ours and once seen is soon spent:

For all our sakes she should be left alone,

Guarded by legends of how men went mad

Merely from tasting her, of monsters who

Died from her kiss. May this forbidden zone

Be drawn for all time. If she ever had

A hope to live, it lies in what we do

To curb the longing she arouses. Let

Her be. We are not ready for her yet,

Because we have a mind to make her ours,

And she belongs to nobody’s idea

Of the sublime but hers. But that we know,

Or would, if it were not among her powers

Always across the miles to bring us near

To where she thrives on shadows. By her glow

We measure darkness; by her splendor, all

That is to come, or gone beyond recall.

Love: Something Else & Mechanism

2009-10-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Forgive the streamy-ness of consciousness here.

Everyone says the word
but it becomes more and more apparent
that we're talking about something else
when we utter it in phrases mocked
by its over-usage elsewhere.
Talk about needed translators. This is serious.
You can bet at least 30 million people let it
go from their lips this second. At least.
Right now
someone is confessing it instead of joy
another it instead of silence
another it instead of lust
and sadly another it instead of sheer wonder.

I had a professor once who said
the problem with the English language,
and hence the whole population of persons who
organize their lives with the English language,
is that we only have one word for it,
therefore we cannot distinguish
appreciation from gut-wrenching connection,
nor biological impulse from that which is breath-taking to behold.
I’m taking this further.
When talking about its presence in relational configurations,
some are describing ownership contracts,
others conflating home, culture and comfort with power and privilege,
still others speaking to an arbitrarily constructed equation based
on the necessity of gendered halfs.

For instance, Anna and I went to this poetry workshop facilitated by
Christina about 3 years ago where we did language games of word association in order to promote the splaying forth of poetry. When Christina called out “love” I wrote down the name of my mate of the time. Anna wrote “tomatoes.”
Let me tell you: Anna’s answer stood alone
in honesty/meaning/attachment-clarity and creativity,
but I thought she was so very silly at the time.

Talk about a language problem. This is serious.
Talk about stunted relational maturity. This is so fucking serious.

So here are my people
limited in speaking what's given
limited in our capacities to build below and beyond this narrow concept
which actually might be, in its multiplicitous variations,
the most vital concept on Earth, at least near that of G-d,
while also attempting to out-source democracy. Mercy.

And so I think we're talking about something else
when we talk about love of country. Is it duty? I suspect that
after listening to the stories of soldiers and impulses
of aspiring politicians.
What is more, when we talk about loving neighbor, we are talking
specifically about responsibility. I've learned that after paying
attention to the texts that get quoted when people are asking
for charity or compassionate attention. We don't love someone
who is hungry on the street, but we love something enough
to practice responsibility in the moment we bend down to give
the leftovers in our hands. I think we love the utopian promise born
of responsibility, or the distraction acts of charity provide in
the face of debilitating suffering, or perhaps we love the people who tricked us into believing that caring for an innocent stranger
actually matters. How about those conversations about loving to witness the flourishing of all people? Perhaps you mean justice.
At least, I mean justice when I'm talking about love,
at least half the time. The other half I'm busy conflating it
with this incredible mystery I cannot describe but
keep aiming for with my poetry, theology, dancing and sex life.

Perhaps we all keep aiming for this incredible mystery
with our worn out, shallow language and
in spite of our knowledge that the aim and language will never
deliver us or set us free or give us security
there's some mechanism that won't allow us to quit trying.

What is that mechanism?

There's this YouTube Derrida video, yes I posted
it here before, that I remember now. The person behind
the camera asks the philosopher to speak on "love."
He says,"I have nothing to say about love in general,"
demanding that she pose a question.

That is the mechanism.

And the Award for Most Spacious Goes to...

2009-10-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

I would like to write a poem
entitled "The Space in James."
When my readers were done
with the last line they'd know
I was describing G-d.

New Link to (and for) the Left

2009-10-22T08:12:00.001-07:00

To all of you interested in peace and pastoral care, check it check it.

http://globalministries.org/mee/from-war-to-peace/the-war-and-pastoral-care.html#

Power to the peaceful,

Ejoye

My (creative) response to a ranting and raving (liberal) lunatic

2009-10-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

From My Morning Devotional Time

2009-10-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

From Barbra Brown Taylor's chapter "The Practice of Encountering Others" in An Altar in the World

"What we have most in common is not religion but humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get--in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing--which is where God's Beloved has promised to show up. Paradoxically, the point is not to see him.The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute , who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead."

Unemployment/Sharing/You

2009-10-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today I received a phone call from a search committee informing me that my candidacy with them was through, that they'd chosen someone else and that they wished me the best. I want to reflect upon what it's like to work in a field where many people use the terminology of "call" in the discourse on jobs, employment and the future. I also want to reflect upon what it's like to hear "no thanks" when you've offered to surrender (most) of your life to serving a community. Further, I'd like to reflect on the general job market and what it means that a privileged white person with tons of education (and credentials) cannot find work right now. However, I'll leave those blogs for another day...

G-d I have so much to say right now and no one/everyone to hear me.

(Read: this is the blog of an unemployed minister)

This blogging thing can change in its author's imagination daily. Sometimes an outlet for poetry. Sometimes an experiment in reaching out. Other days I come here to distract myself. It's true. It can go from journal to community organizing portal within a matter of hours. We share it, don't we? But not in the way we share coffee in hand-crafted mugs. Not in the way we share live music, food, sex or worship.

I've been out of work since August. Perhaps the thing I miss most about working is sharing. And so I keep coming here and going to Facebook trying to share. I want to share resources, thoughts, reactions, questions. Essentially this discipline of sharing is similar to the practice of ministry. But here there's no bread and wine, no hand-holding in prayer, no facial gestures that cue my religious heart instantaneously. I miss the interdiction, the interpenetrating realities of intimacy, the internalizing of Word, the feedback loops between bodies (not screens). When I come to this blog or hit up facebook, I'm looking for You. But I don't find You here--at least not the full You. And so that's why I'm not giving up on the field of ministry though I've got every reason in the world to walk away. I find the Source of my life in the feedback loops between bodies and institutions, the Source I'm hoping to serve and rely on until I take my last breath. I cannot find, serve, nor rely upon this Source from behind this computer. It provides me distance, some security and valuable open spaces but the lack of You (here, now) forces me back to the application process, back to the employment listings, back to the search and call madness that often leaves me feeling rejected and weary. I am back to these things, because dear You, I simply cannot live without You (here, now).

Do you understand?

Smoke & Ashes instead of Dust & Ashes (because Tracy is hotter than Job)

2009-10-14T08:33:00.001-07:00

I don't know why some music resonates deeply at various "turning points" in life, but this one sure is looping through my head and (red hot) heart right now.

Returning Home & Lasting Friendship

2009-10-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

There are many things about "returning home" that can erk, disturb, make uncomfortable, etc. Running into people who remember you and can only relate to you as a teenager ranks high on my list of "situations I'd rather avoid." There's also the unfortunate occasion when you find yourself unconsciously regressing into that teenage space because of external stimuli: your parent's house, passing by the street where your first crush lived, etc. Some of these "returning home" experiences foster a sense of gratitude for the development and maturity achieved between "then" and now. And some of them just cause quick-think-about-something-else reactions. But for all the headache of heading home, there's one thing that stands alone as a corrective of regret and producer of thankfulness--a thing that makes you look in the present upon the past with fondness and appreciation. I just got back from having brunch with my friend ABC. We've known each other since Mrs. Brockway's 7th grade history class at El Roble. After sharing stories about what's been up for the last year (or so), we settled into our most familiar and sacred place--laughter. I cannot articulate in words how valuable her friendship is to/for me, how much my reverence for relationships that provoke laughter has grown as I've aged, and what it means to be part of something that lasts and lasts and lasts. Money can't buy everything of value my people. And only love sustains the things of true worth. I hope the seeds of relationship I plant today will become even half as fertile as the ones I planted with Adian back in 1993. (Can you tell from the picture how absolutely ridiculous we were, and therefore why we always had so many things to laugh about??)

That's my Word for today. Thanks be to G-d...Ejoye

Change & The Cancer Journals

2009-10-08T13:00:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I know I'm posting a ton of mommy stuff, but for everything there's a season, right? Having said that: let it be known that while it's the season of momma domestically, it's the season of alchemy personally.

So many changes, I don't even know where to begin.

The loss of my 2 year love affair, which isn't really lost but still losing itself in an exciting and terrifying way? The loss of my chaplaincy position at the VA, which came as an expected continuation of a pattern already begun but turned into a brick wall before I could protest publicly? The loss of my mobility due to this back injury, which has forced me into a slower pace than I'd ever willingly choose (the slowness giving gifts I could never anticipate)? Yes, I could start there. Or I could start with the poets I've been reading: C.K. Williams, Adriene Rich (again), and Yusef Komanyaaka. Or I could start with the musicians currently on rotate: "New Beginnings" by Tracy Chapman, MGMT, and Bon Iver's "For Emma, forever ago" (thanks to Courtney Brooke--who got married, wow).

But what I really want to say is this: I purchased Audre Lorde's "Cancer Journals" after posting about it the other day. I'm halfway through her writing and cannot believe the depth of my connection to and yearning for this text. Jesus. Much like my reaction to finding Molly Bolt, I feel outraged that it's taken me 28 years to find Lorde wrestling with body pain and the maxims of healing. What if my reading of the "Cancer Journals" got as much social/political/relational reward and reinforcement as my reading of the New Testament? or To Kill a Mockingbird? Whatever, I hate to harp on the negative when my engagement with a resource is producing such novelty, beauty, and eroticism. But I just had to harp for a second. Please read this text if you haven't. The reflections on prosthesis and power brought me right back to Betcher's work in "Spirit and the Politics of Disablement" (another must read). We have got to stop the war on people's natural bodies under the invisible forces of racist/sexist/ablist/heterosexist capitalism. We have got to encourage the flourishing of the multiple, and let me just say, there's nothing more powerful than a black-dyke-breast-cancer-surviving-poet talking about her experience with a mastectomy to confirm this fact. Survival is beautiful. Testimony is beautiful. I give glory to my Creator for the witness of Audre Lorde and how it's pushing me today, into the place of appreciation for all that's lost, saved, and moved by love.

Mom's Birthday Blessing

2009-10-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

For Your Birthday
By John O'Donohue (taken from "To Bless the Space Between Us")

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
the blueprint of your life
would begin to glow on earth,
illuminating all the faces and voices
that would arrive to invite
your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,
who loved you before you were,
and trusted to call you here
with no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you
into becoming who you were meant to be,
blessed be those who have crossed your life
with dark gifts of hurt and loss
that have helped to school your mind
in the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,
blessed be those who looked for you
and found you, their kind hands
urgent to open a blue window
in the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
your health, eyes to behold the world,
thoughts to countenance the unknown,
memory to harvest vanished days,
your heart to feel the world's waves,
your breath to breathe the nourishment
of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,
may you open the gift of solitude
in order to receive your soul;
enter the generosity of silence
to hear your hidden heart;
know the serenity of stillness
to be enfolded anew
by the miracle of your being.

***This is the birthday blessing I offered at my mom's 60th Birthday celebration last night.

Happy Birthday Mom Tuesday Poem

2009-10-06T10:24:00.001-07:00

"Making a decision to have a child–it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

3 : 6 (excerpt)
Alta

one hesitates to bring a child into this world without fixing
it up a little. paint a special room. stop sexism. learn how
to love. vow to do it better than it was done when you were
a baby. vow to make, if necessary, new mistakes. vow to be
awake for the birth. to believe in joy(e) even in the midst of
unbearable pain

Pain & Creativity

2009-10-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Anticipating a constructed myth of apocalyptic content to emerge from this event, this event somehow external and internal simultaneously,
i hear the words of Maria "invite it in; have a relationship with it."
i hear the words of Barbra Brown Taylor "if you're willing to stay awake, this too will become an altar"
i remember that Audre Lorde wrote "Cancer Journals" when she got sick and though I've never read them, I trust her because of everything else she's written, and I trust that someone of her brilliance knew exactly what she was doing when taking up the creative task in response to the potential silencing of misery and physical pain.
i remember listening to David Sturdevant talking about nationalism, as a veteran of the Vietnam era, talking about the pain of citizenship in these times, talking about how his music saved him then and it saves him now, before playing "America the Beautiful" on his harmonica and breaking my politically pouty heart out of its dangerously protective shell.

i recall their words, their teachings, their works of suffering transformed, and I come here, to this place, this space, to write...

because today

i could only walk around my block twice
and envisioned myself looking like an old woman
trapped inside this 28 year old body
that struggles to put one foot in front of the other
when i used to kickbox and dance in nightclubs
for hours on end. i used to envision myself
a fierce warrior, an ecstatic worshipper in those places
and today an apocalyptic narrative began forming
where I envisioned myself walking slowly and painfully for the rest of my life,
stuck in this pain-killer enduced ghost-likeness forever, unable to get past
the numbing sensation that reaches into my hips and
only breaks when shooting pains erupt in my ankles, unable to get past
the numbing sensation that pervades unexpected things like
emotions, sex drive and appetite.

so i come to confess my fear
to call upon the giants of art and recovery
and inspired by their witness of power, i come
to label my injury and its 6 month subsequent reign as a producer of both:
pain and poetry,
loss and creativity
death and fertility.
i come to reclaim the parts of this event which remain
possible and productive,
allowing pain the attention its due and healing the right she deserves.

2009-10-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

(Hey Peeps: All week long I'm celebrating my mom who is turning 60! Therefore, all poems this week will be about mothering, daughtering, love of family, the feminine and aging with grace. Here's to the womyn who gave me life and who lives so courageously. Here's hope for "new freedoms born of detachment." Here's poetry for momma. Love and respect, Ejoye)

"Gestalt at Sixty" by May Sarton

I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweeter grace--
Learning to let go.

I am not ready to die,
But as I approach sixty
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where tides replace time,
Where my world will open to a far horizon
Over the floating, never-still flux and change.
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden grasses
And blue waters....

Titles by Leonard Cohen

2009-10-03T11:16:00.001-07:00

I had the title Poet
and maybe I was one
for a while
Also the title Singer
was kindly accorded me
even though
I could barely carry a tune
For many years
I was known as a Monk
I shaved my head and wore robes
and got up very early
I hated everyone
but I acted generously
and no one found me out
My reputation
as a Ladies' Man was a joke
It caused me to laugh bitterly
through the ten thousand nights
I spent alone
From a third-storey window
above the Parc du Portugal
I've watched the snow
come down all day
As usual
there's no one here
There never is
Mercifully
the inner conversation
is cancelled
by the white noise of winter
"I am neither the mind,
The intellect,
nor the silent voice within..."
is also cancelled
and now Gentle Reader
in what name
in whose name
do you come
to idle with me
in these luxurious
and dwindling realms of Aimless Privacy?

Ejoye's commentary: I don't know why, but I've been obsessed with this poem for at least 6 months. I've probably read it over 100 times. I keep coming back to it like I used to go back to scripture thinking I hadn't quite "gotten it yet" (as if we ever "get" scripture...or poetry...or ourselves...or each other). The last 7 lines never cease to amaze or implicate.

I LOVE poetry. This is worship and gift.

The Logos Still Unfolding

2009-10-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

Meeting Molly Bolt at Age 28

2009-09-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Due to the glorious fact that James gave me a large number of his books before moving to Portland, I have more critical race theory and GLBTQ resources in my library. Praise be to G-d. One of the books that he gave to me is "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown. I just finished reading it, cover to cover, in less than 24 hours. Yes, I am unemployed and have more time to read than usual. However, it's good enough for the average employed person to do some necessary task re-assigning in order to plow through the pages with ferocity. I could go into all kinds of author crediting and content acclaiming but I figure that most folks who check in with my blog have already read "Rubyfruit Jungle" and therefore already know the noise that need be known. Instead I'd like to profess how deeply sad I am that it took 28 years for this book to find my hands, eyes, mind and heart. All these years my skepticism of gender conformity and the tyranny of monogamy have been met with shaming response. I cannot imagine how different my life would be today if Molly Bolt had been the protagonist par excellance of my life instead of Juliet Capulet or Huck Finn.