Beauty

Cassie and I got to watch lots of birds today on our rainy hike. We didn't see any wolves or wolverines or bears so that made me happy. They're all supposed to be roaming the area according to the rampant stories on Facebook so we try to be aware.

We saw some trumpeter swans that were pretty impressive. Since I'm not a birder, they could have been any large, white bird with a funky call, but I'm going to put my money on trumpeter swans. 

And then we saw a bazillion Canada geese. 

For a moment, I thought how beautiful they were and then I remembered how foul they are. Seeing them fly off with such grace was breathtaking; thinking about the enormous amount of poop they leave behind is nasty. 

We despised the creatures back in St. Ignace. I taught Sophie to yell, "Go back to Canada" when we'd come across a gaggle at the playground. Unfortunately, one time, there was a crew of tourists from Ontario who might have been offended. 

Anyway, I stopped thinking about birds after five minutes. That's my attention span for them and I started thinking about beauty and foulness. 

Hannah and I watched The King's Speech the other night. It's a beautiful movie with Harvey Weinstein's name all over it. 

Harvey Weinstein is accused of doing horrific things to many women. He's left a stinky mess in this world and ruined countless lives. He's also created works of great beauty.

Does the beauty and value of art depend on the character of the artist? 

Hannah and I spent some time talking about that after the movie. If we suddenly realized that Hitler painted beautiful pieces under a pseudonym would we take the paintings out of museums and destroy them?

I don't know the answer. It really bothers me. I struggle because most of the folks we tend to label as pure are often boring artists and besides who gets to make the lines of who is pure enough. 

But I also don't want someone who is destructive to profit from and influence generations to come.

Can something beautiful and valued come out of something foul? 

This might seem like a silly philosophical query, but I think in this day where we are seeking to find and speak truth about abuse of power, we need to have some sense of how much of a person's influence do we erase. 

It is also about keeping people human. When I encounter someone, I try to see what is beautiful about them. I don't mean I'm only looking for nice pecs or pretty eyes; I look for what is delightful and of value in them. (Unless it's Hugh Jackman, then I am only thinking about his physical aesthetics). 

Beauty might be corrupted and hidden, but finding that spark of delight helps me keep them human and I do believe that's how we preserve our own and their humanity. 

Stained Skirts

I forget I'm female sometimes. 

It's one of the many things that define me, but I don't think of it as a primary aspect of who I am. 

My relationships and vocation are my primary definers and my female parts are down on the list.

Until I pull out two different skirts for Sunday and realize they both are stained with breast milk. 

It was disturbing and delightful. 


The disturbing part is the fact that for the last eleven years I've been pulling these skirts out, looking at them, neglecting to take them to the dry cleaners, and hanging them back into the closet. I don't even know where the dry cleaners is. 

Delightful because all the memories of trying to nurse in the sacristy (fancy name for the room that holds worship supplies) right before worship or having my kid cry in the middle of worship so my milk lets down. I once shot milk across the room when my kid got distracted while eating. Nobody talks about all the crazy things your body does while nursing and I'm thankful for the patience of my first congregations who got to learn about bodies with me. 

I'm also thankful that we all got to experience a glimpse of shalom like in Isaiah 66, "and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you." Female bodies are a witness to how God works in this world even if they are revealing of the messier side of God.

The other day I got to sit through listening to a couple of white, hetero, male church leaders discuss female ordination. Even before the stained skirts, this was a reminder of my vagina and how some continue to think it makes me unfit for ministry. 

I don't engage these discussions; I just sit there practicing Kegels and trying not to scream or throw things. Engaging this debate is like arguing that rotary phones should replace the telegraph. Even though I love rotary phones, they are so last century. 

I gave up trying to prove my worth and calling a long time ago. I actually buy into the whole baptismal promises and moving of the Holy Spirit stuff. Now I strive for faithfulness in my relationships and vocation. That's much more the heart of who I am.

Devil's Club

I've got devil's club in my ass. 

Come on dad, it's slightly ironic for a pastor to have devil's club festering in her booty. Sorry I said "ass".

It's not overly pleasant, but could be worse. In case you are unfamiliar with this amazing plant, it is huge and covered with poky things that embed in your skin and fester. 

I don't mind them much. They're better than poison ivy. You will never accidentally wipe with a devil's club leaf.

But, if you are making your way down a hillside filled with devil's club and your dog runs into you, then you might end up sitting on a plant. Luckily I have reflexes like a cat, especially when pain is involved.

So now I'm laughing about the paradox of a pastor and festering devil's club. 

Even before my fabulous hike into the devil's club laden wilderness, I was excited today because the Juneau Empire highlighted a quote by Soren Kierkegaard. What a tremendous way to start a day (it would have only been better if someone had brought me coffee in bed). 

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

I love Kierkegaard. He was willing to stand up to the established church and preach the leap of faith instead of the adoration of virtue. He proclaimed the honest awareness of oneself instead of hiding behind a facade of righteousness.

And tonight I get to teach a class on sin. Love it! 

Especially since we'll spend time with another of Kierkegaard's quotes, "But too often it has been overlooked that the opposite of sin is not virtue. . . No, the opposite of sin is faith"

One's confrontation with one's own self reveals our disconnect, our sin, and leads to the leap of faith, the trust fall into the arms of grace. 

It's kind of like the first three steps in recovery that I'm paraphrasing for my theological motives: 
we're powerless over our sin, 
we believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to wholeness (sanity), 
and we made the leap of faith (decision to turn our lives over). 

I don't escape festering devil's club (metaphorically here) by being a better behaved person; I escape the festering by leaping into the arms of grace. 

Dingleberry

I had to pull out the snowshoes today. It's been a long time, but it was that kind of day where skiing or post holing did not look ideal. There are times I look at places that get to hibernate on snow days with envy. We don't believe in snow days. Once you clear away the two foot berm at the end of your driveway, the world is yours to conquer.

So Cassie and I are doing our Monday hike when I start thinking about dingleberries*. It's impossible to avoid thinking about dingleberries when she has huge snow balls hanging from her butt hair. It's really distracting, but if she walks behind me then she steps on my snowshoes and I end up face planting. After three times, I made her go first.

And thinking about dingleberries made me think about our recent church council retreat. They aren't dingleberries, but one of the Apples to Apples cards had that word so we spent some time talking and laughing. My grandma used to call me dingleberry as a pet name; I'm not quite sure she knew the double meaning. Or maybe she did.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that talking about butt hair does not appear appropriate at council retreats, but the laughter and later the openness to truly dig into sensitive discussions seemed holy.

Here's my struggle in the current tension of hateful rhetoric and extreme correctness: 
How do we make safe places that aren't sterile places?

How do we make places where we don't sanitize and censor everything to the point that folks are afraid to speak while at the same time making a space where folks don't need to feel anxious that they will be emotionally or physically devalued?

We've done a crappy job protecting vulnerable folks in the church so it is probably a good idea to err on the side of sensitivity for a while, but I also know avoiding difficult conversations or laughter is not edifying for anyone.

Family systems' theory tells us that we create intimacy through play and conflict.  You need those vulnerable encounters of disagreement and delight. Sterilizing our encounters doesn't make our relationships safer, it makes them null and shallow. We never get to be intimate when we are engulfed with protective gear.

I don't know the answer, I think it has something to do with trusting each other, putting systems into place so if someone doesn't feel safe they can speak up, and respecting criticism when you've hurt someone.

I'm pretty sure safe places don't involve comparing each other to Hitler or making death threats. Those seem like obvious red flags that you are not in a safe place, but I'm amazed how many Facebook threads end there.

We also need to be aware of those more subtle moments when we feel defensive or controlling. Whenever we try to justify ourselves or control others that leans more towards sterility than safety. 

If you feel the need to expunge everything that disagrees with you or keep all conversations innocuous, then don't expect life to thrive in that sterile environment. 

You can't be sensitive to all people at all times (or at least I can't), but you can be in healthy and safe relationships where you trust, hold each other accountable, confess and forgive. That's a more faithful witness than avoiding discussion of dingleberries.


*According to Webster Dictionary a dingleberry is "a particle of fecal matter attached to the anal hair of an animal." 

Murder

A woman walks by a murder, but doesn't call the police. What happened?

Welcome to my world of minute mysteries. I've filled hundreds of hours hiking with a whole myriad of mysteries that make us think differently to solve them. The only way I've gotten some folks to keep moving up Thunder Mountain is to fill the time with these puzzles. And bribe them with clues if they get to the next stopping point.

There's a cabin on the side of a mountain with two people dead inside. What happened?

A car stops in front of a hotel and someone cries, "That's it. I'm broke." What happened?

Romeo and Juliet are dead on the floor of a locked apartment with glass and water all around. What happened?

You can only figure out the answer by stepping out of the expected assumptions and expanding the way you think about words and situations.

It's a murder of crows.
The cabin is the cabin of an airplane.
The car is a game piece in Monopoly.
Romeo and Juliet are fish.

I'll never hike with you now that I've given you the answers. 

But I do think it is a valuable skill not only to persevere on long hikes, but to think about challenges with vast possibilities instead of static sides. I'm not a huge either/or thinker. 

This is some of what I was thinking on my hike today as the murder flew over my head while I was processing and grieving another violation of sacred space. That's what a shooting in a school feels like. It's not the numbers. Every day 93 people die from gun violence*. The violation of schools, churches, shopping centers are soft targets where folks should feel safe (I also think relationships, homes, and streets where most violence happens should also be safe).

I let myself grieve because I don't want to become immune to such horror, but I'm weary of thinking there are sides when we talk about violence and the deadly boost guns give to our sinfulness. 

Actually, reading quantum physics has made me rethink whether anything has sides, let alone complex issues in a broken world. 

I'm a systems thinker so I'm ready to set some goals and figure out creative ways to get there. I'm pretty sure that neither blogging nor Facebook are good places to define those goals, but I do think communities like churches, city hall meetings, and service clubs can be those places. 

Maybe we all need to go on a strenuous hike together and let our brains do some lateral thinking while we do the tough work of figuring out ways to keep our gravitation towards violence less lethal. 

* The Brady Center averaged the most recent five years of complete data from death certificates (2011-2015) and estimates of emergency room admissions (2010-2014) available via CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/. Data retrieved 1.3.17 and 4.29.16 respectively. Numbers may not sum to 100% because of rounding of CDC averages.

Rings and Birds

Twenty-two years ago around this day my beloved asked for my hand in marriage.

I had no idea what the heck he was doing. 

We went hiking and for some reason I was strangely fascinated by a bird thingy. I don't even remember what it was other than I tend to randomly get drawn into caring about birds until I don't. It's just like shiny things, manhole covers, and pretty much anything else that suddenly catches my attention. 

I walked away from one of those moments with a stranger giving me a CD of 100 different bird calls found in Ohio. Unfortunately on our trip to Pennsylvania, it was the only CD in the car so we listened to them all and realized they weren't very interesting. (Except for Hannah, who thought they were fabulous).

My beloved began to sweat as I became fascinated by birds until he finally got me to the perfect spot where he sang a song, got down on one knee and placed the $6 abalone ring on my finger. That was how I knew he loves and knows me. I am not to be trusted with jewelry and I'm kind of a cheapskate. 

I've been through four wedding rings and now I just keep #3 taped to the sound machine next to my bed (I found it in the potato bed a year after I lost it). There are things I don't do well in life and accessorize is definitely one of them. 

This week has me thinking about life, love and the pursuit of happiness. It all kind of happens in the midst of distractions. The sacred ends up woven into the ordinary moments. One minute you're commenting on the mating habits of cardinals and the next you're beloved is proposing. 

It's not all happy stuff either. Death gets mushed in there with life, love and happiness right in the middle of shiny things and manhole covers. 

My beloved is making me triple ginger, coffee, molasses, and lemon cake right now. That makes me really happy. 

And I suppose that's my point. 

I try to be present to delight in what's around me now, and I try to be prepared for kairos moments. A kairos moment is a cool name for time (like proposals, birth, death, gingerbread cake) when we get pulled out of the present and thrown into profound life altering experiences where choices and character are revealed. 

Be grounded in the present, but prepared for the sacred. 
Watch the birds, but don't miss the guy on his knee.

Kale Chips

Sophia is taking a trip to Italy this summer so I made all my children watch A Room with a View. I didn't make my beloved watch it because he would fall asleep.

It's a movie about a young woman traveling to Italy and finding her passion and courage (the young woman is Helena Bonham Carter aka Bellatrix so that's fun).

Anyway, as we were having dinner and I was telling them about the movie, I mentioned that there were several penises in it. 

Unfortunately, I made this statement as I was placing the kale chips upon the table.

All of my children looked aghast. 

Finally, one of them said, "In the kale chips?" 

Welcome to dinner at the Stage-Harvey's where we not only talk about penises, but my children live with a little fear that I might put something that outlandish in a meal. There have been some strange meals my family has struggled through and some that were surprisingly yummy - I like to keep them on their toes.

There are penises in the movie and there'll be lots on the statues in Italy so it seemed like good preparation. The swimming hole scene is still one of my top ten favorite movie scenes.

Our little misunderstanding made me pause and think about how easy miscommunication is. Maybe it always has been, but the level of communication we do without body language seems like it is way easier now to get the wrong message.

There also seems to be a whole host of trigger phrases. . . climate change, fake news, women's rights, mass shooting, terrorism, abortion, guns, immigrants, undocumented workers . . .

Words and phrases are loaded into our heads packed with emotion and meaning depending on whom we hang out with, our experiences and where we get our news. It makes serious engagement of any issue nearly impossible because assumptions and emotional reactions get triggered before any critical thinking can occur.

Take for instance the word chicken. 

I don't think it has any political implications so it's remotely safe as an example. When you hear the word chicken, you probably think of someone who is afraid and running away; when I hear the word chicken I think of beloved creatures who holler at me as soon as I open the door to carry them across the snow so they can peck under the trampoline. Maybe I think beloved and spoiled creatures.

See. No wonder it's so easy to miscommunicate. 

I'm working on being a little clearer in my communication so I don't scar my children any further, but also offering a bit more grace when I engage in conversation, asking for more stories (especially if they involve chickens), and assuming less. It seems like a faithful way to navigate the time in which we live.