Flakes falling
through gray dusk
on the verge of
indistinguishable.
Thoughts drifting,
weighing down,
layer upon layer,
incumbering.
Darkness falls
through snow-fill air,
overcome by
introspection.
Edges previously clear
mounding over,
accumulation
increasing.
Time passes
and now
everything
looks the same.
I’d learned to live
outside myself,
only truths
from other sources.
Misfit
ill-equipped,
bending backward,
sinking
from the weight.
Years-long excavation
revealed
different paths
to wholeness,
invisible
when there was
no room
for me.
Most days,
busy with tasks
that fill time,
I’m mostly steady,
mostly sure,
mostly undaunted
by unknowns.
There are,
however,
days,
busy with tasks
that fill time,
I’m mostly unsteady,
mostly unsure,
mostly daunted
by unknowns.
The wholeness,
healing,
seems all too distant on the horizon,
nearly unattainable.
The progress too slow,
mistakes and misspeaks and missteps
accumulate.
Would I go back
if I could,
to live outside myself,
before I saw my truths?
No.
There is no unseeing,
no going back,
only coming back around
with clearer eyes.
People should not be excluded
for things that are not their fault,
especially kids
who had nothing to do with adult actions
and need their community.
It’s wrong to shut them out.
I said these things,
more or less,
to the church elder
in the church office
after church.
I tried to say it
meek and deferential
like a Good Christian Girl,
but below the surface I was
fire, righteous rage, teenage defiance,
and trembling with church-instilled fear.
I tried to be the Good Christian Girl
for a very long time.
I went away,
returned,
and tried on
Good Christian Wife,
Good Christian Mother,
Good Christian Woman,
too.
But I am a terrible actress
with no poker face,
and an insistence on a much more spacious God.
I wonder if he had any idea what I’d learn, that elder,
that kind-hearted man turned instrument of patriarchy by church teachings,
when he said to my face that it was not my place,
but then changed his mind behind closed doors
with other men.
I wonder if he knew I’d look back on that day
and realize that any church that knows a
teenage girl is right,
but can’t say it to her face,
is no place for her.
I was supposed to learn my place,
but instead I became a cautionary tale
in that kind of church,
the wild woman in the wilderness of faith
with scary ideas
like there is enough for everyone
and God is not a man,
out here in an ever-widening circle of who’s included.
Ill-fitting facades,
abandoned on shore,
swimming naked in the waters,
Spirit brooding over,
waiting for what God will speak into existence next.
I wrestle with this God,
translated
into male words,
interpreted as male.
Half of everyone
excluded,
while everyone pretends
it had to be this way
until everyone believes
it’s always been this way.
Better to teach people to worship a god
made in man’s image
so men in charge can have their way.
Here I am,
not a man
so not like God,
unable to find myself
anywhere other than
on the outside.
I lie awake
on nights I can’t pretend
I don’t care
and think about not belonging.
A few nights ago I slipped out of bed
and pulled back the curtains
to see the winter night and full-moon light.
I stood there
in my not-man body,
cold air raising goosebumps on bare legs,
and leaned my head against the window glass,
looking up
to see the Wolf Moon
in a veil of clouds.
I always marvel at the moon,
her waxing, waning,
rhythmic revelation,
dancing with oceans
from afar.
That night, watching silvery reflections of a star
blending light and shadow
across a frosty landscape,
I think moonlight knows
the truest words for God.
For months now, I’ve felt ill at ease reading the morning office. I had a sense of why—mainly the overtly male language for God—but not clarity. So I continued, as I have for years, all the while noticing and honoring the discomfort. This week, clarity came in the form of questions: “Is there space for me here? Is there room for my becoming, when everything is father and he and him and lord?”
Meanwhile, I’d taken on the practice of praying hand-over-sternum, to remind me that the Divine is within, part of me.
This morning, while silently praying the confession and also practicing my reminder of the Divine within, the word “we” became “I” and “you” became “us” and suddenly I sense there may be space for me after all.
This is what I love about liturgy. It gives us a reservoir within which we can wrestle and flounder and question, all while being held and buoyed and never alone.
Here is how it sounded this morning:
Most merciful God,
I confess that I have sinned against us
in thought, word, and deed,
by what I have done,
and by what I have left undone.
I have not loved us with my whole heart;
I have not loved my neighbors as myself.
I am truly sorry and I humbly repent.
For the sake of our Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on me and forgive me;
that I may delight in our will,
and walk in our ways,
to the glory of your Name.
Amen.
We’re not absolved
just because we’re
not on the side
of the ones we see as
worst.
Lulled into the
laziness
of giving allegiance
willy-nilly,
based on label,
assigning morality
by default
instead of seeing
morality
is not innate,
invariable,
indelible,
in each
person.
The rightness
or wrongness of an action
depends on many factors,
but a wrong is not
magically a right
when committed by
one of ours.
What may seem like a tree
we want to stand in the shade of,
tend, and nurture,
could be a danger,
bearing
poison fruit.
And so.
It is on each of us
to consider
our alliances,
to evaluate
words and actions,
to look around at
those attracted to
align with us
as we follow.
If the fruit is
often rotten,
sometimes poison,
spreading more harm
than good,
we ourselves
will eventually succumb.
Better to withdraw allegiance,
dancing alone in the wilderness
if necessary,
than stay planted,
growing roots,
in an orchard of
poison fruit.
I see myself divided, dividing.
Ruptured, unleashing a torrent,
thoughts cascading one over another
at images I abhor.
Flooded,
current ever outward,
all reaction,
counteraction,
oppositional,
all or nothing,
with or against,
how could you,
dueling calls for unity or division,
backlash into the void.
Visceral,
swirling
chaos,
overtaking.
Nearly
carried away,
then clarity.
Take a long breath
and dive deep.
Remember.
I can roll back
the tide of my own chaos,
the crashing wave after wave
clamoring noise in every second.
I can stem
the barrage of endless opinions
from ego unchecked.
I can gather in the deluge
of outward-flooding emotions
into a reservoir
of my own making.
I can calm them,
sitting in stillness,
allowing silence to flow in.
I can see where
light and shadow
within me co-mingle,
hear each other out,
acknowledge my own inconsistencies,
what troubles me about my own beliefs,
how far I am from the standards
I apply to others.
And I can hold these contradictions
gently
until the clashing parts become
letting go,
letting go,
letting go.
Myself distilled
to deepest truths
until all of it is loved,
is love.
Finally,
reservoir to the brim,
flowing over
creating tide pools of compassion,
invitations
for others to look deep
and see that they,
too,
are love.
And in the
depths it’s clear
true unity
begins
within my own
united heart.
What is the truest,
most beautiful truth you
know for yourself
right now?
Not the “truth,”
external,
imposed,
from out there.
No.
I want to know
the deep, quiet beauty
that is so lovely it seems
impossible,
the truth that whispers
in those quiet moments when
there is no droning
of pundits
or parroters
or pontificators.
The truth that glimmers,
otherworldly,
resplendent,
abundant,
beckoning
from the realest
part of you.
The one that is
so warm,
so healing,
if it spilled over
it could change
the world.
When you glimpse it
again
and sit silent,
remembering,
let it tease the threads
of your imagination
long enough to
coax it into knowing
less ephemeral.
Let its
golden radience
permeate
your awareness
and then nurture it,
returning to the silence,
whenever it feels dim.
You need this now,
your deepest truth,
when external “truth” is
pulled taut between
two extremes
and one is clamoring
even more violently
for your allegiance.
You need
the touchstone
of the beauty of
your inner mooring
to untangle the lies,
to see clearly,
to set us all free.
I want to be a whole person.
I said this while sitting on my
therapist’s couch
one clear, autumn day.
I couldn’t explain to her
exactly what I meant,
only this was the
truest
expression of my
insides
in words.
That was several years ago.
I haven’t seen her in a long time.
What is my truest expression now?
I’m certain it still has to do with wholeness.
We are taught we can
divide our way to wholeness.
Sheer off the undesirable parts of ourselves,
the ones that cause discomfort with their
messy, messy truth.
Divide ourselves from others who don’t
look like us
or think like us
or fall in line like we were taught.
Divide, segregate, deny, shun.
And if we do, if we listen to the external,
self-appointed authorities
out there,
we will possibly,
one day,
attain the ideal.
The ideal what?
The ideal
cookie-cutter,
uniform vision
of success,
spiritual or otherwise,
as they define it.
Then we will be wholesome,
acceptable,
holy in their eyes.
All that’s required is to ignore
that still,
small,
voice,
deep within,
whispering:
wholeness
can’t be found out there,
can’t be defined by them.
You cannot divide your way to wholeness.
Turn and listen to that voice.
Gather up the discarded petals
you dutifully left trailing
behind you as they watched.
Push through the double-dividing doors
and run,
hair-in-the-wind,
into the meadow of your own
knowing,
arms wide-stretched,
heart echoing:
You already know,
you already are.
Masculine.
Feminine.
Words now defined as opposites,
created prior to words
as harmony
among and within.
Interior balance of energy,
each tantamount
to the other,
wholeness
incarnate.
Diverse,
yet coequal,
until
property,
commodity,
misogyny,
took hold.
Multiple expressions
of the feminine
suppressed,
confined,
subdued,
relegated to certain tasks
and certain people.
God, divided.
We can call God
Father,
and he,
and him,
and Lord,
and warrior,
but not
Mother,
and she,
and her,
or even corresponding words
that don’t exist
because the default
is always
man.
I want the feminine side of God
in all her forms.
Not to
objectify God by
claiming God a woman,
the way women
are objectified,
claimed
as God’s gift.
I want the wholeness,
the fullness,
the perfect entirety—
without exclusion—
of my own being.
And God’s.
And yours.
I want
symmetry
and reciprocity.
The function and the beauty.
The light and the shadow.
The aspiration and the groundedness.
The logic and the mystery.
As it was.
As it could be.
If we didn’t split it all
in two.
The Forest and the Trees 