Tidying Up the Green Spaces

There is a long shoot of grass that likes to grow where the cement of my front steps meets the cement of my front walk.

I love that I live in a lush place with a wide variety of green and growing things. All the greens flourish here in Portland: light and dark, deep and bright, bold and even the shy, pale shades. When you fly over this place in the spring or summer, it’s breathtaking to see the variations out the window.

But sometimes the green grows where I don’t want it to grow.

Moss grows along my front walk all winter, spreading mush along firm concrete. The grasses spring up from the tiniest bits of dirt in sidewalks. Unidentified ground cover gushes over the rock beds lining the back of my house and spills onto my patio. I would prefer if the grass (ha! more like weeds) stayed grass and the cement stayed cement, but the two insist on mixing.

One of my favorite spring rituals is getting a shovel from my garage and jamming metal against rock again and again to clear out those spaces. I can pull the grass casually, sure, or dig at the bits of dried moss with my pointy shoes after it dries later in the summer, but really I need to put in my time shoveling. I need to slice under the moss like a surgeon would with skin and discard the strips of green. I need to get on my hands and knees with a small trowel, and root out the insistent grasses. Those cracks collect dirt and then things grow and I have to dig them out.

This is the relationship between the green things and the cement and me.

My shovel makes an awful, clanging, scraping sound on the sidewalk. It probably infuriates my neighbors as the sound bounces off the houses around me, but I don’t mind.  I like the brilliant ring of the metal and cement. I want to be a good neighbor, but I want to be a woman who isn’t afraid of making noise in the process of cleaning things out. 

It’s easy to be loud online. It’s easy to be quiet. Sometimes I am both of those things for very noble or mundane reasons. Sometimes I am neither.

I’m trying to take it easy in the month of May. Since blogging isn’t my job, I have the luxury of not needing to post every day (or like, week. oops). I’m really more of a writer than a blogger anyway, if I’m allowed to distinguish the two. For me that means being okay with being a slow writer. It means remembering to fill myself up with words or let them play out in offline spaces, not just expend all of my energy on everything all at once.  And sleep. I do my best work when I’m sleeping, I think.

April was a busy month of travel, visiting far off family and friends, a full work schedule, guest posts, a seminary application (oh yeah, I’m starting seminary in the fall. no bigs), a conference paper to write and deliver, and more traveling. It was a month of ignoring the things shooting up and creeping out of their space, because I was jumping over it all anyway, racing to the next bit of adventure. I didn’t get much sleep.

May is for restoring and cleaning up the lines again. It’s the month of scraping off the internal moss that has crept into my heart.  I’m doing some spiritual work, housework, social playing, self care, and work work. I love the rush of being busy, and every bit of opportunity and challenge in April was incredible. But it is time to rest, because frantic is not a pace that works in my life for very long. I get snarly and unkempt.

It's hard to set boundaries on people or activities or personal growth. I know I could stay up every night til midnight and produce some decent content for this blog, but I also know that it wouldn't be worth the cost. I know I could keep up that April pace of seeing people, scheduling them in, and answering emails. But why? Which of you by doing everything all the time can add one minute to your life? Setting boundaries is exhausting, but it's not nearly as exhausting as not holding them

I’ll have some good things to talk about soon, like Modesty, evolution, distracted shopping, the Sacred Friendships conference, integrity, and flirting. If you subscribe and follow my Facebook page, you won’t miss any of it, I promise.

Until then, I’m going to do a bit of work outdoors and tidy up some other areas of my life. Those grasses are getting ridiculous. I’ve got some shoveling to do.

Right after I finish this next episode of The Mindy Project.

Transit Lounge: Week with Walter

I'm guest posting for my friend Kelley Nikondeha today! Kelley writes about faith, parenting, and books in a way that consistently makes me sit up straighter. She hosts #transitlounge, an online book club in the best and loosest sense. I'm thrilled that she invited me to her blog to discuss Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination. If you're a writer, artist, leader, or person of faith, I would absolutely encourage you to read this book. There's still time to join in the discussion!

Sometimes, on those rare days when spiritual practice turns into spiritual presence, I sense that God is with me.

And on those even rarer occasions when we linger together, it’s in the meadow from Twilight.

Yeah. For real. Twilight.

I know.

Of course there’s a romantic meadow in Twilight. Who hasn’t imagined lying in a field of flowers with their Love, unhindered by the reality of uneven ground and biting insects. Who hasn’t dreamed up a beautiful place, secluded by towering pine trees, to shelter and reconnect with wonder. I understand why Stephenie Meyer wrote her characters into that idyllic scene. It’s laughably terrible, but I understand it.

What I didn’t understand for a long time is why God meets me there. I don’t have weird romantic vampire fantasies about Jesus, but we still end up in that meadow.  It’s ridiculous.

It wasn’t always like this. My faith used to make a lot more sense.

Read the rest on Kelley Nikondeha: doing theology in transit.

I'm Single, But I'm Still a Whole Person

When some people write about singleness, it sounds like they're codependent on an imaginary person. I read stories of longing and waiting and tears and I just don't relate. I hear tales of emptiness though hope holds steady, or resolution despite hope-on-the-rocks, and I raise my eyebrows.  I don't doubt that these words matter and are true, true, true for people.

But I don't get it. Maybe I am a sociopath, but I just don't get it.

I don't feel like half a person because I'm single. I only feel like that when my society, my Church, or groups of people who cannot see beyond their own coupled lives, push that half-hearted position on me. I only experience that when I read another Christian book about marriage that talks it up in glorious grandeur for two hundred pages, then adds "but being single is better because, as the Apostle Paul says, you can do more ministry as a single person!" I only feel like a footnote when people make my life a theological footnote.

When I wake up in the morning, stretch luxuriously, rummage through the open and still unpacked suitcase on my floor from my trip last week, and put on the clothes I find there, I'm not doing anything differently than I would if I were married. I wouldn't stop doing those things if I were partnered up. I wouldn't be anyone different. I'd be Emily, through and through. I would still spend hours planning outfits for a trip and when I came home, I would leave my suitcase out, open, as a monument to my adventures. Okay, and my laziness.

More than people asking me why I'm not married, I am tired of the assumption that I am not a whole person. I'm tired of people saying, "Oh, it will happen to you someday, and you will meet your other half and you'll understand." I don't believe in magical solutions to anything or from anyone. Not even from God. Not even Jesus shows up to fix everything about my life; He sent me the odd, mysterious, whispering Spirit. I have to do the so-much-work of listening to Spirit. I have to practice at it. That Spirit invites me into my life, this wild mysterious wonder, where things grow out of other things breaking down into dirt.

I would love to meet a match. That sounds like fun, in the same way that having deep, ridiculous inside jokes with my best friends are fun. It sounds good and hard in the right ways, like a run that exhausts but stretches your muscles so you can run a little longer next time. I like the idea of being partnered. But my best dating has happened at times when I am most sure that a spouse would not fix my life. And not because when I got it together, finally, my life happened, so don't even start down that train. It's like that because relating to myself and other people in healthier ways leads me to relate to myself and other people in healthier ways. I didn't meet a magical man once I did X or Y. I enjoyed all people more when I started being more fully me.

I'm not counting on a marriage to fix all the aches I already have. Those are mine. I'm not betting on any one person to be all the balm I need after my reckless tearing around this world. That's why we have the whole Church to rise up together and proclaim that God is King and we live out this shocking new Kingdom.

So, when I read stories of men and women who are living in a state of pining, I have a hard time relating. I believe them and I think it's perfectly fine that other people are different than me. But like, let's be real. Having a boyfriend has never made my life that drastically different or better. I still have to get up and put on pants (ugh) and go to work and learn how to be a decent human and write out my healing. I still have doubts and victories, frustrations and blessings. I am still a whole human, even when I am in love. I am still a whole human, even though I am currently single. I would still be a whole human if I were married.

Besides, I am twenty-seven now, and I'm too old for illusions about marriage.

I've seen my closest friends be married for 1, 2, 5, 8, 13 years. I've watched them walk through miscarriages, losing parents, changing careers, taking in family members, church splits, buying houses, confronting abuse, losing jobs, and parenting tiny humans who are growing up much too quickly. I've seen some of my friends' marriages' end. I've seen some of my friends' marriages be very very good and very very difficult, sometimes at the same time. I've seen the kind of joy and peace and partnership that is good because it is joy and peace and partnership, not because it's some sort of super magic called marriage.

The details of my partnered friends' lives may be slightly different, but their lives are very much parallel to mine. They still deal with self-doubt, choices, and seeing the glory in their eyes in the mirror. They have good seasons and bad, close times and detached days, intense stretches of turbulence and placid waters. The inside stuff of our lives is the same, whether we're married or dating or single. 

I think I can say all that with the hope of not belittling anyone's relationship experience. I think I can say this most of all to me:

This is your life. Stop waiting to live it until things are all under your control. Want, but do not stop wanting for ten thousand other good things besides a good marriage. Dig your strong fingers down deeply into the dirt until they are buried and then twist your wrists gently and lift up your wide handfuls of rich earth. This is your whole life.

[this is a section of my notes for the Sacred Friendships Gathering in Chicago this week. i'm sharing my story on Friday and Saturday. you can find more info here if you'd like to get a seat at the last minute. i would love to see you there. if you can't attend, be sure to follow #boldboundaries on twitter for all sorts of pithy quotes & wild antics.]

---

Registered Runaway: Letter to LGBT Christians

Hi Friend,

I feel compelled to start with an apology, because I know the power of someone taking on the words that I need to hear and writing them out for me. I have felt the whispers of grace that come in the form of someone seeing me and offering support. I know the energy that rises when someone standing next to me grabs my hand and says “I’m sorry,” even when it wasn’t their fault.

What happened to you may not be my fault directly, but it is corporately. It is my fault in part because I participate in and benefit from the culture that has kept you down.

I’m sorry.

Click Here to Read the rest!

[this post is part of the Love Letter Series by my friend Registered Runaway]

Grief and Resolutions

Trigger Warning: discussion of abuse.

I’m shaking so badly I can barely type.

There’s a compostable container of chicken pad thai slowly cooling next to me on the table. I live in Portland and every container is compostable. I called in the order when I knew that I had passed the point of being able to make food on my own, but needing to eat immediately. I drove the half mile to the restaurant crying, and as I parked my car, the sky dumped the kind of brief, pounding rain that only spring brings. I didn’t even have the energy to draw a personified parable for the weather; I ran inside and picked up my food.

I’m taking giant, tasteless bites in between typing these sentences, hoping that the protein and carbs will fuel my brain to say what I actually think, because it has been a long time coming.

My best friend called me today and finally spoke the words I’d guessed in bits and pieces over the past few years. My friend named the big words, ugly words, and talked about timelines and acts and the people who did them and the people who knew about them and did nothing.

My friend talked about peeling off another layer of the onion of the healing process (healing’s not a parfait; parfaits are too delicious), and being at the part of the story where you stop letting the darkness rule.

We talked about the Light together.

And of course I was very calm in the moment, because that is what I do when I am faced with truth that is so despicable I cannot even comprehend it.

There is much grief in the Light. There are moments where there are flickers of electricity in the wires of the systems, or even a momentary glimpse from a lantern, and I feel capable of handling that grief.

But then all of the stadium lights come on and there are no more shadows in the arena and you can see the children being torn apart by lions.

Lions are devouring children. This is what abuse looks like. This is what I see when I see abuse. Lions are eating children while the crowds of Good Christians and Good Families look on.

Small precious vulnerable children are offered to the lions because adults cannot handle their own grief or the consequences that their sexual ethics have invited abuse. Families and churches are protecting the lions. The grief that comes with seeing that reality is so overwhelming I do not know how anyone gets up any day of the week. I know that I want to sleep all this week. My stomach hurts, but I do not know if it is from all the slippery pad thai I have just piled into my frantic mouth or if it from the Light of truth.

I have heard that bright Lights can induce nausea.

Ugly is too weak of a modifier for the stories I have heard today. They are Evil and nothing less, and I am pulling out all of my strong words and even they seem too weak. The truth is not ugly, it is

(I’ve got nothing).

I am reminded, through my tears, that this act of grief for and with my friend is not one of mere sadness. It is an act of prophecy.

Walter Brueggemann presents this understanding in The Prophetic Imagination, which some of us are reading this month for #transitlounge. In the third chapter, he talks about grief – specifically tears – as a radical act of hope. In our tears, we are declaring that something is so wrong that it cannot be covered up by the numbness of a sedated culture. Tears are an act of formal complaint against society and to a living, free God. Brueggemann writes, “We know from our own pain and hurt and loneliness that tears break barriers like no harshness or anger. Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other solidarity remains.” Sometimes there is nothing you can or should do but cry. I have been crying all day.

Then there is a time to act.

One of my strengths is that I see patterns everywhere.  I cannot hear stories like my friend’s without acknowledging that this is not an isolated or individual occurrence. I have learned too much in the past few years of exploring my own demolition and rebuilding of beliefs. I have learned too much about the patterns that other people have identified, and now I see them, too. And in patterns, I see responsibility.

Abuse can hide in plain sight, in otherwise “model” families, and in organizations where much good is happening. But it also does not happen without social encouragement and we cannot end abuse until we are willing to look critically at our culture. We cannot end abuse until we engage the systems and beliefs that help perpetuate it.

We have to reexamine our own behavior. We cannot see individual acts of evil without acknowledging that certain evils are systemic. We cannot pass on the darkness; we have to confront the system with all the Lights we have. We have to act.

I am sitting at my kitchen table, staring out the window at a bright spot in the sky. The spring clouds are moving so fast that the rainstorm of an hour ago is making way for a spot of blue. My own tears have stopped for the moment, though I’m sure they’ll be back. And I have no interest in another bite of this pad thai. But I do have some ideas for what to do next.

I am making three resolutions because of the Light my friend shared today:

1. I commit to being a mandatory reporter. I want to learn to recognize the signs of abuse and how to report them. I will not put the needs of the organization or powerful individual to remain attractive, in control, or in a good standing above the powerless individual or potential victim if I suspect any abuse. I will report or confront as necessary, knowing that abuse is best investigated by those with far more training than I have. I will risk being wrong to protect the vulnerable. I will make the call to call in the authorities.

2. I commit to being a safe person. I know that the first person someone tells about their abuse, whether it is past or ongoing, has a powerful impact on recovery. I know that while listening is shocking, difficult, and invites my own grief, it is nothing compared to the risk of speaking up. Being brushed off, ignored, or poorly questioned can be devastating to the person revealing abuse. It often perpetuates abuse or keeps the shame cycle functioning. With that understanding, I will learn about resources available and I will offer my resources, to the best of my ability, to support the light getting in and the healing to happen. I will listen to the requests of the abused person and believe them, and prioritize their needs as a victim of abuse over my own as a knower of abuse. I know that sometimes, believing and validating a person’s story of abuse is a primary and radical act. I will commit to whatever response the survivor of abuse requests, as long as it includes my responsibility as a mandatory reporter.

3. I will keep speaking up about the damaging ways we discuss sexuality in Christian culture. A dysfunctional, shaming, suppressing view of human sexuality leads to behavior that is dysfunctional, shame-fueled, and abusive. We cannot pretend that there is no connection between these two things. If we are to change this system, we have to actually change the system. We need to listen, study, and do the work. We need to have better conversations for all people of all ages. We need to identify where we’re doing it poorly and be willing to change course, even if it’s at the expense of our own power or platform. I will keep exploring, correcting, and sharing. I will be a piece of change.

Those are the first things that come to mind, but I need your help building on them. I need to know the names of organizations or individuals that are talking about individual and institutional abuse. I need education. I need to know what religious or secular resources you have to share.

I need to know what resolutions you have made for yourself or what your church is doing to confront abuse or what books or blogs you have read that would help me in my own commitments. Please share what you can in the comments. If you are an abuse survivor and I've reflected your experience poorly here, or if you have any form of non-traditional viewpoint to share, please know that I will try to listen and edit this piece as best I can. I may make mistakes, but I want to learn and I am willing to change. I have obtained permission to share this story as I have shared it, but I acknowledge that it will not reflect all stories.

I need your tears and I need your hope.

(Please, also, light candles for my friend, regardless of your faith. This story is not unique, but it is close to me and I know this person and this family needs your prayers for diligence, healing, and hope. They need courage to confront this abuse radically and take drastic measures.)