An Open Letter to the "Non-Believers" Who Aren't Really Non-Believers (in-case you didn't catch that with the quotation marks).

Dear Athiests:

You have no idea, or perhaps thousands of ideas, like me, about that thing we disagree on.
Or do we disagree with each other or within or about or because of it?
I often admire your faith, a faith rather silly and easy at times and other times drastically complex and profound. As consumed as we are in the same question with divergent answers, our processes of thought mirror one another. While the middle ground folks, namely moderate agnostics, claim their neutrality, we carry the books and banners of belief. Funny though, you assert what G*d is and choose not to believe, while we assert what G*d is not and choose to believe. Yours is the more rational choice of course: to create G*d in the image of all you know and to know it's bullshit (read: not worship worthy). I wish I was more capable, as you are, of knowing when I'm standing in mystery and when I'm standing in idolatry of the imagination. Unfortunately the difference is not always clear to me and further, I am not sure my brain is all there is (which is also the beef I have with religious fundamentalists who claim to know what G*d is by placing all faith in their ability to fully grasp mediated revelation).
What I have learned in the last two years is that some people need the idea of G*d just to survive. Though you softly critique this survival mechanism as 'weak' or 'crutch-like,' I beg to differ. A distinction must be drawn somewhere between religious belief as that which helps us keep keepin on and that which stifles our ability to engage critically with the realities of our lives in community on this planet. Simple stupid answers to serious suffering, phrases like "god has a plan" or "he never gives you something you cannot handle" are bad theology. In these cases we have the very god you reference and astutely cast out of consideration. I join the iconoclastic activity you take up in the face of this theological insufficiency. However, when someone (or some group) is facing horrific life circumstances and finds an outlet for their pain in prayer, song and communal ritual whereby they feel the strength necessary to keep breathing, iconoclastic activity strikes me inhumane and cruel. Further, don't we all have our 'thing' we need just to get by? Many of you critiquing the G*d of religion are quite content bowing down to the survival potential in substances of the temporary mind-numbing nature. So let's be honest: it's not so much who we make G*d out to be, or who G*d really is, but what we do (or don't do) to and with others with/out of these beliefs systems. If you want to be an athiest, fine by me. Just follow in the footsteps of Wade Meyer if that's the case because he's got it right.

Feel me?
Ejoye

In the Adult Sand Box: Who's Pushing Us Now?

Just across the fire place and
generational divide sits a
white haired Indy 500 watching immigrant Italian
flanked by his chicken preparing wife whose
dressed in black and white linen, in the kitchen.

Today, after reading (rather poor) exegesis
on the book of Jonah by a Mennonite pastor
from Canada, I decided to go buy my own Bible
but I couldn’t find anything pocket size or
outside of the KJV genre (which Wade likes these days, but
I’m still suspect).

Last night, just across the country and
telephone line my soul mother
Maria reached her magic-wand fingers
into my desperately needy ears
and cleared the cobwebs of overly-cautious
pre-cancellation ideas away by saying
“swinging from deep disgust to complete
desire for union is what intimacy is.”

I peel potatoes for the black and white linen wearing
womyn in the kitchen after exiting the couch where
the recently purchased medium sized NIV sits turned to
the book of Jonah which took me by surprise
not by the whale
nor the unanticipated repentance and pardon of Nineveh,
but the untouched vine.
“It sprang up overnight and died overnight” saith the Lord.

Remember back in the sandbox
when those first few pushes between the shoulders
quickly propelled us to the highest of heights, both backwards and forwards?
Remember when those highest of heights, both backwards and forwards
were the moments we lived for, not the moments we froze in?
Our prayer then: please don’t let it stop.
Our prayer now: please make it stop.

Mario Andretti flips his car in the rain.
Lincoln calls from Dodger Stadium; they’re down 0-1 in the 8th.
The chicken in the kitchen smells soul-full.
These things sprang up overnight and will die overnight.
Such a swing set is this: this is what intimacy is.

Facks

This is the busiest time of my life.
I love lincoln.
Safehouse womyn keep me alive and kickin.
Getting and staying sober was and is the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done.
Degrees of separation are an illusion.
Candle light heals.
Tears are miracles on cheeks.

Today's Work

Here's what I've got today.
The work of spirituality (for me currently) is realizing how much i need to listen, how little i have or know or can do without the totality of existence.
HUMILITY.

What are you working on today?

Dreams, History, Middler, Fear & Clouds

I had a dream last night...
Round 1: Preaching with a manuscript. Total success.
Round 2: Preaching without notes. Total failure.

I think it's funny how our conscious and unconscious play with each other. Am I so inundated with seminary life that I actually dream about preaching? My preaching class was over 2 months ago! Eff...never underestimate the layers of affect our environments carve into us.

I'm currently writing a history paper on the relationship between christianity and empire from the church's conception to contemporary times. There's just a little bit of research included. As I see the braided relationship between imperialism and religion surface in the annals of christianity, I can't help but wonder what my dreams will be in a month from now.

What we choose to expose ourselves to matters--really really matters! I feel deeply penetrated by the information in front of me. I feel it restructuring my knowledge base, synthesizing itself with already held concepts, moving into opinions, ad infinitum. The intellectual enterprise--both external and internal (if one can draw such a dichotomy)--is fascinating!

The subjects of scholarship can impact a scholar in ways totally unbeknownst by her. And yet, we are free in the choosing. We had the option to choose the topic for this paper. Clearly my worries (and outright fright) about american imperialism colored my choice in this instance. And yet I am seeing strands of economics, nationalism and religion within empire in new ways. I chose what would form me and yet am being formed in ways I could not predict. (Perhaps a polemic on the relationship between control, freedom and choice.) Funny how a look back can shed such illumination on the present. I love history--albeit always a myth, no matter how objective the historian purports to be.

On another note: It is my spring break this week. I will be spending most of my time writing this history paper along with creating my middler paper. I say "creating" because this is no ordinary expository assignment. Any PSR peep will understand me. For the rest of you: the middler is a mid-seminary assessment process that includes getting 2 faculty (Benny Liew and Randi Walker), 2 student colleagues (Wade Meyer and Courtney Brooke), a denomination representative (Jane Quandt), my internship supervisors (Debra Salan and the honorable Glenda Hope!), and my on-campus supervisor (Marjorie Wilkes) all together in the same room to read, reflect on and evaluate a 15-20 page paper I have prepared that covers everything I should have learned in seminary by now. In essence, it's an event that helps the student discern what she knows, what she doesn't, and how to go about further academic preparation for what she desires in her future.

Courntey was generous in pointing out how reliant I am on the middler to decide my future for me. (She's always generous in her "calling out"--the sign of a true blue friend. This is also something Wade is capable of doing; hence the selection of these two as my student colleagues in the process.) I keep saying to people "I'll know a lot more when the middler is over this spring" hoping my own cluelessness won't be sniffed by the inquisitive. The truth is, I really want to stay in school but don't feel smart enough and worry about the accumulation of yet more student debt. They say fear should never be a decider, but they also say to avoid debt like the plague. "They" say a lot of shit. I also feel drawn to social work, certain kinds of ministry (like Glenda Hope's kind of ministry) and greater training in Tai Chi Chuan.

The world feels like a spring of unending possibilities to me--my own fear the only non-nourishing factor. There's something scary and daunting about choosing one career path over another, especially when feelings of self-doubt and reluctance to decide (anything) are personal norms. I tend to forget that most people have 4-7 career changes within a lifetime. Something about that does not appeal to me. Perhaps having watched a father dabble with vocation and grad school for 10 years (right before he died!) while my mom suffered the economic consequences is underlying my fear here. I want to do the right thing, but don't know what it is.

In the present moment, the "right thing" is to keep researching the byzantine empire for my history paper.
And so I shall.

Gladness in the mist of clouds...
Peace,
Ejoye

Lest we ever take life too seriously....

Untitled

There is an ache inside me
so deep so entrenched so needy
for real.
I do not know where it began
or when it will end;
I suspect somewhere and somewhen
between self-neglect and my uterus.

It whispers to me via memory
and screams through physical pain.

I shutter to listen
but know i must
to repair for all those years
i did not.

My prayer is that just by simply listening
I will get the message:
Yes, I'm here and ready to heal you.

Guilt

I had to do 2 things this week that involved trusting my own gut. Both times I walked away feeling like I had done the right thing. However, my head relentlessly criticizes every little action I undertake no matter how 'right' or 'wrong' I am.

The first instance involved taking a public stance on the American occupation of Iraq. Now anyone who knows me is quite aware of where I stand on that blasphemy. It wasn't so much about whether or not to speak that truth, but whether or not to do it in a chapel service at my school. A lot of folks (even progressives!) think religion and politics are so divorced from one another that we should drop our ideology at the door. Um, no. There's a difference between breaching the seperation of church and state and bringing your whole self into a house of worship. I come from a prophetic tradition. Prophecy is nothing if it isn't a challenge to the structures that dominate and exploit people and eco-systems. The minute my faith community tells me to stop talking "politics," is the minute they've lost the faith. There's something to be said for the 'feel good' sunday morning thing. Don't get me wrong, folks need to be comforted and tended to by pastors. But if a church community in America cannot listen to the realities of its participation in global imperial conditions, then it has lost its prophetic edge. And I cannot get with that. All this to say: I knew speaking in chapel was the right thing. But my oh my did I beat myself up for days after I opened my mouth.

The second issue I cannot speak about with such detailed description. In a nutshell, I had to divulge some information to a doctor for the physical well being of one of my clients. Permission was not given to me to divulge that information, but I did it anyways because it was literally a matter of life and death. I could not have slept that night in good conscience if I had made any other decision, and yet to this very minute I crucify myself for not being 'more sensitive' to the feelings of my client.

Perhaps this second guessing is about (the pains of) learning to negotiate in the midst of life's ambiguity and complexities. I didn't always have the best models of how to decide between right and wrong as a kid. Decisions should have been made for me that weren't and vice versa. Regardless, I am now an adult womyn and part of living into that reality is learning what to do in the midst of uncertainty. Perhaps the critical voices won't always be so loud. What ultimately helps me to accept myself--loud voices and all--is to hear my most intelligent, competent, beautiful and thriving friends admit they, too, struggle with decisions and intuitions and self-inflicted guilt.

So I'm putting myself out here, to let you all know--no matter how 'put together' i seem on any given day, I'm just one shore-bound boat floundering in the sea, trying desperately to keep my eye on the light house.

Ejoye
P.S. Hope you all are gearing up for the weekend of activism! Justin Hermann Plaza on Sunday at Noon. Chant down babylon!

The Lady at Mr. Pickles

Two blocks away from where I work
there's a sandwich shop called "Mr. Pickles."
I go there once a month and order the #20:
a chicken breast with honey mustard, avadado and pepper jack
on a sweet roll. Yum.
The woman who serves me laughs at everything.
Just giggles and wiggles at Mr. Pickles.
She is the thing I love to encounter--
an unsolicited joy in an unexpected place.
I leave her and wonder what enables such joy
to reproduce itself each day.
Restored and rejuvenated by her silly generosity,
I know just two blocks away from where I work,
the work of something grander takes place and
I am It's humble customer.

In Absentia

Hey everybody. Happy 1^st day of March.

Spiritual Ramble: I sat in class with a PSR colleague from Korea yesterday who reminded me that the power of being is equal (if not superior) to the power of doing. Henceforth, today I’m trying to be with people with all my attention and honesty. It feels like the work of justice, the work of the spirit. I’m digging it.

Political Ramble: Today I went to the Federal Building in San Francisco. I stood in solidarity with people doing civil disobedience in response to the atrocities in Iraq. I was happy to be there, but saddened by something. Almost every political resistance activity I’ve participated in has been attended by old-skool civil rights activists: over 50, white, middle/upper class. Today was no exception. Maybe their methods are ineffective and folks don’t want to join because it’s not worth their time to lay on the ground, get arrested, get released and go home; but hey--at least their doing something. These old guard activists showing up will be gone within 20 years. Then who is going to take up non-violent resistance? Where is my generation? Are we not interested, not organized, too distracted, too stoned? I agree the time for singing “Blowin in the Wind” while holding banners and waiving peace signs is over. But never before has the spirit of dissent been more needed. I wonder how bad things need to get before we wake up, stand up and begin to throw down.

Any thoughts?

Blessings to you...