Christology

I find it strange that I haven't posted anything on the blog lately given how much of my life has been spent writing. So here's a (small) portion of my Ordination Paper. These are my reflections on Jesus. Your thoughts??

I’ve heard that at some point in the ordination examination process I’ll be asked whether or not Jesus is my Lord and Savior. I’d like to answer that now so we can discuss other things later. While this question can often inspire the greatest internal revolt possible within my gut when asked by strangers, I must confess it’s a good question to address in this space. The question of Jesus’ lordship is foremost a question of power. Power is always constructed, in context, in relation and what is considered power/full changes over and through time. Hence, any honest discussion of power will include information about particular social relations formed by ideology, culture, and history. “Lord” became a signifier of and title for Roman emperors as Pax Romana extended its power geographically and politically up to and after the 1st century CE. These lords were objects of the “emperor cult:” they were worshipped and venerated as saviors who would heal, transform and restore the conditions of the people worshipping them. The basic notion informing this veneration is that political power is supreme power, the most efficacious power, the power upon which lives could be changed/saved. This notion of lordship rests on the assumption that any power at all is power over something else. The logic of this lordship sets up paradigms of sovereignty and dependency and perhaps what’s most destructive is that it requires people to surrender their own power with one another to maintain a top down system of ‘salvation.’ This kind of power was responsible for Jesus’ death. However… Jesus flipped this power script completely. He so radically over-turned imperial power that people began using the title “Lord” in reference to him. This wasn’t just a syntax transfer; it was a taking back of language, a signifying practice of dissent and resistance. By calling Jesus “Lord,” his people were deconstructing the prevailing political power of empire and proposing a new and better form of power. They were, in essence, saying no to top-down, power-over strategies of control and yes to the power of mutual relation. Jesus’ power came in the form of solidarity and “self-emptying.” He flexed his power by inviting his friends to journey with him, by feeding people, teaching compassion and forgiveness, healing hemorrhaging/out-cast women and smelly/dead men. He told silly stories and liked to party at a table full of rebels and radicals. He found his power in making old scriptures relevant to new circumstances. He found his power in long periods of prayer and meditation in nature. His ministry was one of power because it was not a solo enterprise: Jesus was able to accomplish the aims of agape because of his disciples’ willingness to engage with him in acts of gracious hospitality, acts of challenge, acts of reverent worship. His was a power with, a power of relationship, a power of love and it was in “diametrical opposition to the power of the emperor.” I revere and worship the embodiment of power made known in Jesus of Nazareth. Certainly any saving power I’ve known in my own life has taken the form of service, relationship and love. Would I call Jesus my Lord? Yes: if it meant saying no to military power, patriarchal power, white power, or economic power as the driver of my life. I must say though, the imperial connotations of the word “Lord” make it difficult for me to pronounce in any casual way, especially given my country of origin and its current strategies of foreign policy. “Savior” is a bit easier (though not effortless), especially as I understand it related to sin. Jesus saves me from “a life of aimlessness” by providing me with spiritual clues to the great ontological question how shall I live? There’s a different question I like much better than the “lord and savior” question, a question that’s more important to me. It’s what John Caputo calls the “question of the unhinged” and it descends from St. Augustine: What do I love when I love my God?

Chaos & New Things

"There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen that you haven't seen before, are always regions which are at the edge of chaos. They are regions where cloudiness and clearness, order and disorder, interlace each other. If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart. It's these ambiguous areas, where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, where the action is, if you like. And I think that reflects itself both in the development of life and in many, many human decisions." --John Polkinghorne

Happy Mother's Day Martha Lynn!

Pain, Healing and the Spiritual Nature of Exercise & Avoidance

I'm still "In Pain's Classroom" and I've learned more about healing through the physical therapy process. I want to share some of these lessons and connect it to the courageous work the vets are doing in Menlo Park.

When I first injured my back, I wanted to avoid all pain because the intensity of the initial injury hurt so ridiculously bad. Any position that caused the slightest shock to my spine or discomfort in the lower back region was to be avoided all together. I couldn't take any more physical suffering; I'd hit my limit. I had been hurt enough and by God, there would be no more of that. For the next month or so I ritualized my life attached to the goal of pain avoidance. I made a discipline of stillness and holding my breath. I mentally recorded every possible and impossible posture and made decisions about where I could go and what I could do in accordance.

And then avoidance stopped working.

The positions that saved me from the primordial pain gave way to new aches and disfigurations. The muscles overcompensating began to cramp and swell. I was tired all the time from holding myself in unnatural positions. I couldn't stop taking the muscle relaxers because something hurt all the time. The muscle relaxers made me tired. The tiredness annoyed me. Vicious, stupid cycle. (I'm going somewhere spiritual with this...stay with me)

So I went to physical therapy. I opened to the idea that someone might have a better way and plan for my healing. This gentle, beautiful soul retrieved me from the waiting room. His degrees from Santa Clara University hung on the wall next to pictures of his baseball playing sons ages 4 and 7. He stood at 5'2, 2 inches shorter than me; he was quiet and methodical, asking questions about how it all happened, what hurts now, what I wanted to gain from PT, etc. He had me lay down on the table. He showed me a 20 minute regimen of stretching and strengthening techniques. "Do it everyday" he said with soft assertion. "Okay" i said, and then added "anything to relieve the pain." I left his office and noticed, when walking to my car, that my back hurt worse after doing that 20 minute practice session than it did when I walked into Kaiser. Damn. But the next day I felt worlds better.

Did I say "anything to relieve the pain"?

For the last 3 weeks I've been trying to stick to the routine. Truth be told: I can't stand holding those poses or the immediate physical sensations that follow. It hurts like hell. Some days I flat refuse to do them. Here's the kicker: the day after the day I chose not to do my PT, I pay a big price for my negligence. If I refuse to do my strengthening and stretching not only do I lose healing momentum but my primordial injury pain rears its ugly head.

Now begins the sermon...

I work at the National Center for PTSD. Every week I hear stories of primordial injuries and the aftermath. When people first experience a traumatic event life changes its ritual structure. Whatever ritual structure folks pick up, whether its pain avoidance, controlled pain exposure, or something else, there's a way in which the event drastically alters perception/behavior/relations/etc. Some people develop PTS, some don't. Those who do often find that what enabled them to move in the wake of trauma stops working. For instance many folks drink in order to decrease PTS symptoms but eventually self-medication turns into alcohol-dependence regardless of symptomology. Vexing and perplexing cycles. It's hard, once you've been injured or experienced trauma, to admit that your own coping mechanisms have turned against you. In fact, every time we get a new patient I'm astounded by the courage it takes for them to admit they need help. In essence, they are admitting someone else might have a better way and plan for their healing.

And it hurts worse before it gets better. In order to heal (which is a life long process) one has to drop coping mechanisms that have held life together and pick up new behaviors/actions heretofore unexplored. Risk. It takes risk. And it takes daily practice. Name your feelings instead of repressing them. Communication and socialization instead of isolation. Pray and meditate instead of engaging adrenalin-enhancing behaviors. "Do it everyday" we say with soft assertion. Those who do find reward. Those who don't usually feel relief in the moment and find drastic consequences in the near future.

Before this 3rd unit of CPE I knew little about the spiritual nature of avoidance. Avoidance of the good, even when it feels comfortable, leaves one wide open to the prolonging of pain. Exercising the good, even when it hurts a little, invests in a future of healing. Do it everyday and perhaps more importantly, make sure you have friends that praise your persistence.

Something does the immaterial equivalent
of sad laughter when mortals interpret things
coincidental instead of recyclical,
and label them new and troubling
instead of old and patiently persistent.
It comes around, comes close
time and time again, often with a different face,
whatever this "it" is for you,
waiting until you're ready,
collecting until you're empty,
desiring your participation in a healing need
that began before your birth,
hoping for your seed of willingness
that will bear fruit long after you have gone.
You can pretend, for moments or years,
in obsessive and catatonic states, that it has left you
but the aggressive whisper never fades to silence.
For you to arise and to awaken, her raison d'etre;
to receive and respond righteously, yours.
If transcendence makes a come back,
we will have realized the importance of honoring history
by giving back generously to the future.

History Lessons

I’ve been thinking lately that history might be the most undervalued discipline of all academic fields and all studies of the mind variety. With a tendency toward masochism, I must admit that I’m quick to beat myself up, or have others beat me up, about things I haven’t done well. Paying attention to history lessons in high school is almost top of that “reasons for thinking I’m a jack ass” list. I’ve been mourning the loss of “World History,” “American History,” and the far-stretched, yet disciplinary included off-spring of the two: “Government and Economics” ever since I stepped out of Academe and into the world of not-so-compartmentalized realities.

Back in high school I did what I needed to do to get Bs and Cs. Occasionally, when the teacher was good I’d memorize a whole bunch of names, dates and other corollary facts but as Freire reminds, that’s not learning, that’s a banking/depository system. Besides, even if I had learned of our world’s contingencies in an authentic way, I was so high during most of my adolescence that any quality information picked up probably would have melted like the snow of Mt. Baldy come first day of Spring. To the point: I’ve been kicking myself about this negligence for years especially when I get the chance to study the history of something in particular (right now: Anabaptist schisms) and realize how dope it would be to know more particulars and less generalities.

But lately there’s been a shift. I’m not so quick to kick myself. What if one only recognizes the brilliance of studying history at large when one has accumulated a personal history of one’s own? Yes, this is a Gestalt theory.

Do you agree with me? Historians in particular: what do you think of this proposal??

It’s hardly possible to consider your life your own when you’re still being mandated to live within the domestic confines of the family and participate in the educational system as a child/adolescent. It isn’t until you’re given a relative degree of freedom to make choices that you begin to understand the contingencies of yesterday and tomorrow, understand how the simplest choice can result in the most complex consequence. And when that realization hits—and let me speak personally here—I begin to look at all present moments with new curiosities for what’s been before and what’s being made possible herein. As I come to know the power of the past upon my present, a present that is not my own, for sure, but one I perceive as such, I desire—deeply—to know more about the histories of my lovers, associates, aggravates, their lands and former “Lords,” the social and political ticking-bombs of their revolutionaries and the prayers their people most fervently prayed.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, maybe I was off getting high in the parking lot because I was trying to break out of the confines and mandates that blocked me from loving the very class I most appropriately loathed given my stage of development. Maybe they should save history classes for people in their late twenties or early thirties, a time when most of us have fucked up our lives enough by running from the past that we now comprehend the value of studying it.

Like most white people of euro/american descent, I was raised on a systemic estrangement from history that often (when I’m not being set straight by people loving enough to call me on it) results in non-accidental amnesia. This amnesia seduces one into all kinds of isms but particularly colonizer type dominance/arrogance and racism. If I learn the history of my people, I must face up to those racialized and border-line dependent acts of arrogance, oppression and violence. And if I'm a human being, I'll let that history make an impression on my heart and hopefully I'll be less likely to perpetuate racism and arrogance myself. On a more global scale, one sees this type of forgetfulness in the similarities of the invasion and occupation of Vietnam in the 60’s and the current U.S. imperial/violent occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Did we not learn or are we just pretending not to remember?

This kind of amnesia can also, unfortunately, lead to all kinds of bewilderment and self-judgment about things that appear ‘out of nowhere,’ things that have been around in the ancestral struggle for years and years but no one was willing to talk about. After hearing for decades that my maternal grandmother was a rather pathetic and depressed woman, I recently found out she had four miscarriages and two rounds of electroshock therapy (think: Changeling) before her first child was born and then gave birth to four daughters in 7 ½ years, one of whom was paranoid schizophrenic (in the 1950’s fundamentalist christian Midwest also known as “possessed by the Devil”). I’m sure they used the word “hysteria” to describe my grandma’s ‘condition:’ I’m amazed and proud she made it to her 80’s with all that suffering. Further, I think my mom is a warrior, a straight up saint, given the circumstances of her upbringing. As I struggle to maintain balance between healthy empathy and total despair in the face of the world’s pain, it’s good to know I’m not the first woman in my family to find that balance challenging and I won’t be the last to push through. Learning the history validates the difficulty and gives substance to hope.

And on that happy note: you can believe I'll be taking history courses at my local community college for the rest of my life. I owe it to the world.

Shalom,
Ejoye

Matthew 15:18

Become
more careful now
certainty
as you call out to a place "home"
profess a body "love"
a lucky twig snap "God"
or scream "hell" in days of vexing obstruction
for in the carving of language, the cut never comes clean unto itself again
and there is little one can do
in the way of cemeteries
for a thought made hyper-real in word.
No, very little indeed.

Question for You

What's the most courageous act you've witnessed in your life?

Front Row in Pain's Classroom

Greetings people. I've been bed-bound for the last 5 days, completely incapable of lifting the toilet seat, preparing lunch, or washing my hair. Talk about revelation. When kickboxing was over Monday night I noticed my legs tingling when I'd shift gears on my drive home. I went so far as opening my driver side door once I arrived but when I put one foot onto the black concrete, my back locked up on me. Despite being on heavy duty drugs right now, I'm writing because I don't want to forget what I've learned between Monday night and this moment.

Many of you know that pain is something I've been theoretically fascinated by/with for some time. My final paper in Hermeneutics with Dr. Marion Grau had to do with reading and interpreting pain. I read about emotional and physical pain on a regular basis, and I like to ask people currently experiencing pain about their world-view. I've always had this hunch that pain and pleasure--sensory data on the radical periphery for most of us--reveal something fundamental and primary about the human subject in particular and the world in general. This recent collision with pain of my own has me thinking even more deeply about the topic. In a nutshell: I'm allowing the discomfort and all its accompanying factors to teach me.

There is something distinctly separate between a) the human body and b) the thing that interprets the sensations/experience of the body though they originate from the same source. They do not always correspond, nor carry out the wish of the other. Everything I experienced on Monday night was of my own doing. I pushed it too hard in my kickboxing class. As a result my back spasmed and locked up for consequent days. Something watched this sequence of events and interpreted it as "wrong" and "needing correction." I can say with sheer honesty if someone had a gun up to my head on Monday night when my first spasm hit, I would have asked that person to pull the trigger as a way out of my back pain. No bullshit; it was that bad. It feels like an internal war--and I don't make small of the word "war" for any occasion. It's a war where one part of the self turns violently inward while the other part tries desperately to heal the violence being done inside. When I first tried to go to the bathroom on my own I instantly spasmed for 30 seconds and I swore that time I was going to relax into it instead of screaming (like I'd done the prior 10x). Without realizing it, I screamed, though I caught myself doing it and stopped. It didn't make much of a difference in my pain level to be honest, but I did prove to myself that I could mindful in the midst of acute pain. What is that part of the mind/body/self that can operate independently of or codependently with painful sensory phenomena in the mind/body/self?

One other thing I'm developing during this time of woundedness is a sense of how difficult, humiliating and HUMAN-izing it can be to constantly ask for help. The first two days I had to pee standing up and often things wouldn't go as I planned and I'd find myself needing someone to take a washcloth with water and soap to my urine-covered legs. Not sexy. On Tuesday my friend LeAnn had to take at least an hour and a half out of her work day to get my medications from Kaiser and to heat up a bowl of noodles so I didn't get sick taking meds on an empty stomach. Not dope. The list could go on forever: water bottle filling, changing clothes, applying deodorant, restacking pillows between my knees, bringing food and preparing food, putting reading material by the bed-side, clearing potential trip-up factors from the floor, etc. Experiencing this level of powerlessness re-minds me: we belong to each other. That's the lesson. This is what the periphery has shown me in great detail.

Whoever came up with the notion of rampant individualism as the key to freedom never experienced temporary or chronic paralysis. The ONLY reason I'm not starved, unshowered, completely immobilized and covered in my own shit right now is because there are loving people in my life who consider it their responsibility to care for me in tangible, concrete ways. I hope I never forget their kindness or how fucking hard this experience has been. If I can carry the wisdom of this time forward, I will be a better Chaplain, lover, and friend. May it be so.

Most special thanks to James and LeAnn.

6th Anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq

Did you know that half the people killed in the U.S. waged war in Iraq are civilians?



Not in my name. I hope not in yours either. Resist family, resist.