The Elusive Inclusive Religious Community

We were more than halfway done with the 7 hour stretch from far eastern Washington back to our hometown. It had been a whirlwind 24 hours moving Boof’s grandma into a more extensive level of assisted living. Two adults, a toddler, and a dog, had made the trip last minute, and now were were sitting in a nostalgic Mexican restaurant in my college town.

It was 3pm and in came several different groups, all dressed up. Skirts, dresses, ties and suits for the men. Even the children were dressed nicely, which made me eyeball Potamus in his dirty Spiderman t-shirt and monster truck rainboots. Sunday. Church. Yeah.

I lived in that small town. My life revolved around Sunday service and Tuesday night college ministry and Wednesday night volunteer for junior high youth group. I led Bible Study on Thursday nights (and sometimes Monday nights), and went to Mass with friends when I could squeeze it in. When I lived in the dorms I did a nightly prayer night with other people in my hall, and I regularly went on weekend retreats and mission trips. It was like brushing my teeth, going to class, or getting something to eat at the dining hall. A rhythm of life.

The experience of sitting next to a table full of small town church goers sparked a long conversation the rest of the two hour drive home. We feel so torn, both of us on how to proceed in the spiritual community. It’s not the first time we’ve had this conversation, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But we’re stuck in this place of not knowing, not deciding, and not knowing what to do about it. Do we go to the church we feel sort of connected to, but the average age is 75? Do we go to the church down the road where Boof grew up and there’s a thriving Sunday school, but fundamentally in a theology that I don’t agree with? Do we find somewhere else? Do we not do anything?

What I came away from the conversation, was an ability to articulate my desire to not send Potamus to a Sunday school that teaches things I don’t agree with. Boof said that his parents chose that church because it had a children’s ministry, even if they didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with it. And my pushback was…WHY? Why am I, as a mom, who makes many other sacrifices, going to sacrifice the next 10/15/20 years going weekly to a religious service with people that I don’t fundamentally feel accepted by or agree with? Do MY needs as a person not matter as much as the theoretical ‘needs’ of my child? AND, do I send my child to a place where he will make friends and form relationships on a principle or set of beliefs that I fundamentally don’t believe in anymore?

It’s food for thought, for sure. Because Boof has less angst, and certainly less of a ‘bad experience’ from growing up religious, he sees that it will be a fun place for him to get to have some stories and make friends. But my argument is that he can have friends and hear stories at our house, or daycare, or a different church, or different club activity, or different religious institution altogether. I don’t think that my needs as woman/wife/mom should be shoved under the rug to fit a 1950’s ideal of an every week Sunday experience.

And yet, I feel torn, because I want to believe in something. I want Potamus to believe in something. I miss the routine and the community and the fitting in I felt when I was in college, when I was apart of that faith routine. I miss believing in something that felt right and good and connected me to others. I read articles and see that there are other people writing about being young parents with children who want a community where questions are valued and their kids can be themselves and they can be themselves, but then I go to church and don’t find that these places actually exist (except, like I mentioned at the beginning, in congregations with quite older members). Why is this such a frustration?!

Ten Thousand Angels

…the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”

16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

17 “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered.

18 “Bring them here to me,” he said. 19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. 20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. Mathew 14: 15-21

 

I’m overwhelmed. This morning as I was scrolling through Twitter, I cam across a tweet stating that last week 10,000 sponsorships were dropped at World Vision.

Wait, let me stop using shiny language: 10,000 kids weren’t going to get their next meal, or school day’s education, or clean water because  evangelical “Christians” didn’t like a policy change. Ten thousand. Let that sink in for a second. A news story goes out, and in less than 48 hours is reversed, because 10,000 kids weren’t going to get fed. As a former-evangelical-Christian I want to ask…where was the prayer? I mean, I grew up praying over almost every decision (not quite like “God should I buy this prom dress?” but close), and so I want to fucking know:

WHY DIDN’T THOSE DUMBASSES FUCKING PRAY FOR FIVE MINUTES ABOUT WHETHER THEY SHOULD FEED A STARVING CHILD OR GO ON SOME POLITICAL POWER TRIP?

Whoa, sorry, got carried away there for a second.

But seriously.

In the passage above, Jesus is out, doing his thing and some people get hungry. You know what he does? He feeds them. 5,000 of them (just the men, clearly more with children and women). Last week the evangelical ‘disciples’ turned away TWICE AS MANY legitimately hungry children because of a political agenda. Jesus didn’t ask questions, he just fed them. The disciples wanted the families to buy their own damn dinner, but Jesus didn’t turn them away, and somehow multiplied a small amount of food into enough to feed all of them.

I’m angry.

Part of me feels relief that I no longer subscribe to evangelicalism, that I’m one of the ones who has left (escaped?). But another part of me is sad that the reason I don’t is because of how shittily their doing this whole Christlike thing. Because there was a time, and I miss it greatly, where I sat in the pews with good people and felt love and peace and a longing to follow and belong forever. I’m not in that place anymore, but have resonated with blogs like this on those who stay in the church.

I hope those children got their sponsorships back, and that they didn’t go hungry. I hope those people who pulled their sponsorships can face themselves in the mirror each morning.  I hope that I can figure out how to be more than just angry about this whole mess.

 

 

Blue Like Jazz

In college I was assigned the book Blue Like Jazz: Non-religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality for an internship that I was doing at my local church. This book was life-changing on so many levels. The way that Don wrote about his ever shifting views of faith and religion and relating to religous people was exactly what I needed during that time of my life. It felt so real, expressing so many things that I had felt, but hadn’t been able to put into words. Characters said things like:

“And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me. But it wasn’t like that with Jesus.”

And that was radical and true and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy in this whole trying to relate to God and The Church and Christians and the fucked-upness of so much of my fundamentalist brainwashing that took place as a child/teenager.

And it wasn’t just about the topic of spirituality, it was the way in which Don wrote about his life, weaving childhood stories in with random musings, current happenings, and future speculations. I heard, a few years after the book was popular, that some people who had loved the book were suddenly very angry with Don because they learned that his “memoir” wasn’t 100% fact, that he had, in fact, taken some creative license with his storytelling. But that made it all the more beautiful to me. That there can be truth in a story even if it’s not 100% historically accurate (which, coincidentally, is how I now view The Bible). Don’s way of writing truth, without it being historically dry facts was life-giving and has, to this day, still influenced my own writing style (at least, in my mind it has). Like, it made this whole concept of blogging for the world okay.

 

So, when I saw, on Netflix, that Blue Like Jazz had been made into an indie movie I jumped at the chance to watch it. I was really curious about how they would translate random life stories and musings into a cohesive plotline. I was excited to see the characters (Don, and Penny, and Tony the Beat Poet) all on screen. While some people go into movies with a critical eye, trying to always compare the book version to the movie, I mostly went in as a curious individual, wanting to feel connected to something larger. I haven’t read the book since 2004, so I have mostly forgotten the actual words, and am left with how the book made me feel. I guess I wanted to feel something, and so I picked this movie.

And, sadly, I was disappointed. You knew that was coming, right? I know it was a hard storyline to make into a movie, though I think there were things that could have been added, and things that could have been left out, that would have made it better. I almost think titling it Blue Like Jazz made this pressure for it to live up to a bestselling book, and this pressure for it to follow a storyline from the book, rather than trying to get to the essence of the feeling or big takeaways that people felt from reading the book. I think it got close, a couple of times, but didn’t do it justice.

For example, the character of Penny becomes a Christian in the book, and is really transformational to a lot of people simply because they see her being a loving, kind, compassionate person. She loves God and people see it. In the movie Penny’s character is good and compassionate, but there’s something about her delivery that seems like she’s just trying to be a good person, and while it’s nice, it’s not inspirational. It almost comes off as a little goody-two-shoes, which was not how the character was in the book. I think they tried in the movie, but I think it didn’t quite measure up. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t inspiring.

There were other aspects, like trying to make Don’s family life more chaotic than it appeared in the book, or focusing on other, in my opinion, more trivial details, which made me think…if Donald Miller had simply set out to create a film on non-religous thoughts on Christians spirituality (the subtitle to his book), what would it have looked like? Even if nothing but the theme had been the same, would the film have done something more for my heart?

After watching the film I started reading the book again. It read like an old friend, and I found myself laughing and nodding in parts. But I also noticed that time had done something strange to my memory. Maybe it’s because I’m in a different place, now, but I didn’t find myself as moved by it as before. I’m hoping it means that the words have just sunk into my soul and aren’t life-changing radical as before, but I’m mostly worried that I’m jaded and cynical and curmudgeony. I stopped halfway and wonder, maybe it’s better if I just leave the memory in the past? It also made me wonder…what am I searching for, longing for, that isn’t being filled by re-visiting old spiritual favorites or new indie films on the same topics? What am I looking for?

Voter Registration

I missed my first election by aproximately 1 month (dang you December birthday!). I remember filling out all the paperwork in my US Government Class in high school. It was a requirement for all of us to register to vote, and we spent the course of the semester researching the election and having debates on different issues. I was bored. It’s not that I didn’t care about stuff, it all just seemed so BIG, so confusing and convoluted and that everything was full of half-truths and 3/4 lies. In some ways, I was very glad that I wasn’t able to vote yet. It gave me pause and a 4 year excuse.

I was in college when the next election came around. Bush was in office and the choice was to re-elect him or elect John Kerry. It’s then when I found out that my Government teacher hadn’t actually turned in all of our voter registrations. Therefore, I was NOT registered to vote. Not really wanting Bush to stay in office, but still being a part of the conservative Christian church and not yet being able to fully articulate my differing spiritual AND political beliefs, I felt that I escaped the election unscathed, being able to walk the line of Bush-Bashing with my hippie friends and deferring to the president with my Christian Righters. Best of both worlds, no? Plus, Kerry looked like a basset hound, I couldn’t very well get the motivation to vote for that guy, right?

In my heart I voted for Obama.

Once again an election came…and went…but this time I pretended to be more political. I even went so far as to tell people I voted for Obama. I justified it in my mind by the belief that 1) I live in a liberal city and state where the electoral vote goes toward Democrat candidates, 2)if I voted for someone other than Obama, it likely wouldn’t have mattered;  therefore, my city, and my state voted for Obama, which kindasortameansthativotedforhimtoo, right?

Apparently, it’s all about the presidents.

And then, this year hit. And I was just as apathetic about the whole thing again. I loathe the commercials, the lies, and the overly slick hairdos. . . But that conversation with my dad, about democrats being evil, really got to me. While I have now processed the emotions, it certainly sparked an initial feeling in me that went something along the lines of ‘well, maybe I should vote, simply to cancel out my father’s vote.”

Thankfully I have grown a little since that incident, but Boof looked at me with raised eyebrows when I told him that I finally took the plunge and registered. His line, “I asked you if you were, since I know you’re passionate about things like gay marriage.” And truthfully, it’s something that I’ve been missing…there is SO much focus on the presidential election, for which I feel like I have very little control thanks to the electoral college…but these local things…these things I just might be able to influence.

Of course, I still have a few weeks to change my mind about actually putting in black/white my beliefs on things…but at this point, my beliefs and passions for equality are driving me toward the voting box (which, in King County is my mailbox).

What motivates you to vote?

Still: A Disappointed Review

Lauren Winner is one of my dashboard saints. She is in the list of writers and spiritual seekers who influence my own journey. When I was in college I voraciously read her two books “Girl Meets God,” and “Mudhouse Sabbath.” I loved them. Simply loved them. I tried out her “Real Sex” book, and found it less-than-applicable, so I put it down halfway. It’s been years since I’ve thought of her, but finding myself in this confusing spiritual place I decided to pull out a few of my saints and see what they were up to. Anne Lamott’s book isn’t out until November, and I’ve been making do with simply her facebook updates, so seeing that Lauren had published a new book, entitled “Still: Notes on a Mid Faith Crisis,” I knew that I HAD to read it.

I so identified with Lauren’s “character” in her first memoir, as I, too, was wrestling with my own shocking conversion story and jump into a spiritual practice and life that had energy and passion and wasn’t quite as conservative as the faith I grew up with (though there were PLENTY of fundamentalist tendencies I would later see). A mid Faith Crisis? Perhaps a good description of where I am, as it relates to my actions and feelings about church/God/religion/Christianity, etc.

Sadly, with a bursts of shiny quotes I can hang on to, my love of this book stopped at the preface. And in that, the most powerful part of the preface is a quote she uses by some other author:

When the Lord came into me,”  Buddy tells her, “it was such a good feeling. I thought, well I can do anything because of this feeling, but then there was all this stuff to do and to think about, and I don’t remember the feeling all that well.”

Yeah, that sums me up pretty well.

The rest of the book read like random thoughts, mixed with metaphor and some prose/poetry combination. While I resonated with the overall feeling of questions and stuckness of “staring against a blank wall.”

But the magic I felt during her first memoir was gone. The breathless reading and relating was gone. Perhaps its more of a testament to where we both feel we are, but I did leave, feeling rather disappointed.

Jesus Loves Me This I Know?

Boof’s sister is getting married on Sunday, and we have “hired” my parents to come over for the weekend to help care for Potamus. They are very exuburant in their love for Potamus, with my dad always saying things like “say hi grampy!” in this funny voice. I was on-call today and so while I was taking calls and doing paperwork, Potamus got a little fussy. In the only way she really knows how, my mom bounced him on the exercise ball and sang songs ranging from “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” to “Jesus Loves Me.”

For some reason, when she broke out in her rendition of “Jesus Loves Me,” I got internally annoyed. Like I wanted her to ASK if it was okay to sing a song about Jesus, and not just assume that I was okay with it. But that thought process felt squicky to me, especially since we attend a church (Boof is practically an ordained minister after all), and I am an ordained elder in my church (though we only attend about 3 times a year).

I thin I was triggered because I was raised, and left, the fundamentalist conservative Christian upbringing that my parents raised me in (and the version of Christianity that they still believe). When my mom sang that song I didn’t hear it as “Jesus loves you, even if you’re gay or democrat,” but as I was raised “Jesus loves you…but it’s conditional and you might go to hell if you screw up.” Yes, my father did actually tell me two weeks ago that the Republican platform was the most “christlike” and that democrats were evil. When I turned and said, “well, I guess this conversation is over since you just called me evil.” That’s not a message I want Potamus hearing. I don’t want Potamus to be taught religion or politics  from my parents. My insides feel very twisted as I even think about it. And yet, I want him to also authentically know his grandparents, in all of their imperfections. I want to feel okay about him learning to sing “Jesus Loves Me” from my parents, but I just…don’t…yet.

Boof and I have even talked about it…how we’re going to approach the religion/spirituality conversations someday.  What we’ll answer when the questions come from inquiring little minds. Boof is more relaxed about it, growing up in a very open, and yet clearly Christian environment. He’s just not that worried about how we’re going to handle the whole religion/spirituality conversations as Potamus grows up.

Are you going to raise your kids with religion? Is it the same or different from how you were raised? How do you handle family members with differing religous/spiritual beliefs?