Culture/society/politics

Cynics and Church People

February 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

I came across this post by Addie Zierman last week. There is a lot I can identify with in Zierman’s post, although its conclusion  – that if church people are loving and honest about their own darkness and doubts, maybe the departed cynics will “find our way home” – felt a little too neat and tidy to me. Maybe I’m just overly attached to that quote from J.R.R. Tolkien: “not all those who wander are lost.”

Still, there’s so much I loved in Zierman’s post, like this:

After all, there’s not much you can say to us that we haven’t already learned in some Sunday School classroom somewhere. We know the Bible stories. We heard them over and over, year after year until they became part of our blood, part of our bones.

We’ve heard a thousand sermons. We recited Scripture on Wednesday nights and earned shiny little jewels for plastic crowns. We know the “right answers.” We know the Ten Commandments and the Fruits of the Spirit and how to “lead someone to Christ” with five Bible verses and a three-minute testimony.

And this:

But this is not about a program. We will see right through that flyer you stick in our mailbox. We have been bait-and-switched before, and we’re suspicious. We were raised on a steady of [sic] diet of ads and commercials, after all – we know when you’re trying to sell us something.

But you should follow the link (here it is again) and read the whole thing, if this conversation interests you.

Lions and Tigers and Balaam’s . . . Oh My!

February 20, 2013 — 3 Comments

To follow up on this post, I went and read Life of Pi. (If you haven’t read the story or seen the movie and you plan to do so soon, you should skip reading this post for now. Spoilers to follow. You have been warned.)

The book has set me to pondering its main idea, “choosing the better story.”

Growing up fundamentalist, I learned that fantastical things were only allowed to be believed if they were written in the Bible – and then they must be believed as literally, historically, factually true. Santa, not true. Satan, true. Flying reindeer, lies. Talking donkey, historically accurate.

When I was nine, my mother read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to my brother and me at bedtime. I just couldn’t get it. I asked her, “did this really happen?” There was a wardrobe (of sorts) at the foot of my bed. I tried once or twice to walk through it, with no luck. I doubted that Narnia was real, and my mother affirmed my suspicions.

I asked her why she was reading us this story, then. Why is it important if it’s not real? I wanted to know. She told me that these Narnia books are good for the development of children’s imaginations.

Who needs an imagination, I wondered, when only true things matter?

Throughout my adult life, I have mostly preferred nonfiction reading to fiction. I’ve wanted to learn new information and understand other people’s views and ideas. I haven’t had much time for stories, because I’ve believed that they aren’t true.

The Life of Pi, however, has challenged these thoughts. Or struck a chord I already know but haven’t played enough.

In my college years, I read Jane Eyre, and the story somehow changed me, deepened and darkened the shallow pastel tones of my life. Recently, I reread it. I’ve been rewatching Doctor Who episodes; and although I’ve read the book and seen both the theater musical and the movie starring Liam Neeson, I went out and saw the latest Les Miserables movie.

When I reread or rewatch a story, I haven’t necessarily forgotten the plot line. It’s not that I don’t know what happens in the story. And yet it is that I don’t know what happens in the story. Beyond (or within?) the actions of the characters, the plot development, there is a whole reality – a whole life – that I can enter into, again and again. And each time (if it’s a good story), I will have lived a little more life, grown a little wiser, learned something true that nonfiction cannot convey.

So what is this “better story” stuff? Does “choosing the better story” take us back to that tiresome dichotomy of rejecting science for art, dropping reason in favor of faith?

It might feel that way from a superficial reading of Life of Pi. There was the “factually true” story and the “better story.” Reason and faith (or fact and fiction, or science and art) were competing, and faith/fiction/art won.

But I would suggest that choosing the better story does not mean denying the truth of the “lesser” story. Science and art/reason and faith/fact and fiction are not mutually exclusive stories. Art/faith/fiction helps us go beyond the bare facts and literal account of an experience. So much more is happening in every moment than anything we can convey in a scientific theory or a reasoned argument. Reason is what we believe. Faith is what we believe in, the deeper meaning we apply to the facts.

The stories I learned in Sunday School begin to breathe when released from the demand that they be factually correct. They shimmer with touchpoints on my own experience of the world; they poke into the transcendent nature of things which thoughtful, honest scientific research also points me towards.

I cannot – and do not – deny the bare facts of evolution as the most accurate explanation of the origins of life. That includes classifying myself and yourself as highly evolved “great apes” in the animal kingdom, formed from a process happening over billions of years and manifesting itself through countless life forms and an unfathomably long string of births and deaths. There are moments when this cold hard truth chills me with its starkness.

But there is a better story I embrace, one which gives me courage to accept the lived and living reality of the lesser, equally true story. This story (my chosen faith tradition) paints in richer hues not only the beauty and joy that exists in the cold hard truth (and there is plenty when you take the time to look), but the violence and suffering as well (there’s also plenty of that). It gathers up the facts and re-creates them, not to deceive, but to reflect.

Maybe I only call my faith tradition the better story because it puts me – or my kind – at the center. Pi’s better story put him at the very center. He was the boy and the tiger.

But isn’t it true? From your perspective, you are the center of the story. Everything is happening, ultimately, in your own mind, your own conscious being. That, at last, is the best witness you have to anything you call reality.

Maybe it is possible to choose the lesser story – facts and facts alone. But it seems to me that one of our most widely shared human experiences is to take the facts before us and to tell the truth again – in a better story. This story can take various forms – faith, art and fiction are a few of the names we give it. But in making any sort of comment or reflection on the factual truth (processing it within our own selves), I suggest that we are reaching for the better story.

When I approach my Christian faith tradition and its “holy book” of the Bible as the “better story” that I have chosen, then I can interact with it. I can move in and out of the stories. I can argue with the characters and the things they say about God. I can argue with the characters labeled God, too (they are inconsistent and sometimes infuriating).

On good days (which would be most of them), I get out of bed in the morning because I believe that I am part of this mystical something bigger than myself, this truth that is living and real. I am a character not only in the lesser story, but also in the better story. The holy book may be closed, but the story it began to tell continues to unfold, and it’s my story too.

You Are. Now Eat.

January 29, 2013 — 8 Comments

This morning I crawled out from under my rock and learned about thinspo. Sometimes there is absolutely no fun involved in a loss of innocence. This was one of those times.

I first heard the term “thinspo” last week on a podcast. Yes, really. Just last week. I googled the term today and glimpsed an Internet subculture that shocked and saddened me. There really are women who publicly, matter-of-factly, and completely reject their fully-functional, highly complex human bodies, because they are “fat.” There appears to be no self-pity in this, no seeking of a “there-there, I love you just the way you are” virtual hug from anyone.

The images and pep-phrases of thinspo (“thinspiration” – think “successories” for weight-loss fanatics) strike me as stoic rally cries for soldiers going to battle. The war is for acceptance in a cruel world that has no place for cellulite. These soldiers seem to be past making value judgments, as any effective soldiers are. They purse their lips and accept hard reality, willing to fight to the death for a place in this wretched culture rather than live oppressed and kicked around any longer.

Just over a year ago, I stepped on a scale and faced a new tens digit – one I had only seen between my feet before when I was pregnant. I looked up my height, weight and frame size on a BMI chart and discovered I was overweight. So I decided to change direction. Over the last year I lost twenty pounds and gained new strength as I began running regularly and started eating mostly whole, plant-based foods.

Blah-blah-blah. If keeping my mouth shut about my success would in any way encourage a thinspo soldier to open hers and eat something substantial, I’d do it.

But maybe the best thing is to talk honestly about it. Yes, I moved the needle on the scale. Yes, I dropped a couple jeans sizes. Heck, I even have some defined abs to show for my regular core-muscle workouts.

But the only way an image of my body would make it into thinspo would be as reverse-thinspo, images of not-thin-enough bodies to inspire the thinspo soldier to keep that mouth firmly clamped except for the occasional diet soda and iceberg lettuce.

The thinspo ideal is not the human body at its best. It is a matter-denouncing self-loathing shroud.

I met my weight-loss goal, and I did it because I wanted to, when and how – and if – I wanted to. Now I run and eat well because it’s my habit, my lifestyle, and one of my life’s pure joys. Not my means to salvation from a hateful body-self.

A thinspo soldier doesn’t know or care what she wants. She can’t do her soul-crushing job with any effectiveness unless she shuts her mouth – not only to food but also to her own voice.

My body is amazing, and so is yours. I’ve routinely listened to negative self-talk that tells me otherwise – in my case, that my breasts are too small and my thighs are too large. But what does that even mean? What is “too small” and what is “too large?” My breasts functioned flawlessly in feeding both my babies. My thighs have never failed to support my body and move it from place to place.

That’s not to exclude those with dysfunctional breasts or thighs from the statement that your body is amazing. The fact that you are here at all, breathing air, thinking thoughts (or not), pumping blood through miles of tubing, experiencing life as only you – only you of anyone else who has ever lived – can experience it: that is amazing.

Whatever else we are, you and I are embodied beings. Enfleshed. Incarnate. We must learn to live in peace with and within our bodies. Yoda had it so right and a little bit wrong when he said,

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. . . . Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

I beg to differ, honorable Green One. Luminous beings are we, alive through this amazing matter.

I’m including no links to thinspo material in this post. That’s because I know that images and catch-phrases are powerful, and our culture already screams at women, all day long, that they are not thin enough, small enough, weak and insubstantial enough. So if you choose to “go there,” view thinspo’s brutal additions to the daily stream of attacks at your own risk.

And let’s all think twice about how and why we pursue health and beauty, and how we talk about that with each other. There are too many young women of inestimable worth on the brink of enlisting in thinspo’s ranks, and our careless words can give voice to the lies that recruit them.

A Long Walk, A Thousand Miles From Newtown

December 18, 2012 — 2 Comments

On Saturday Silas and I walked downtown to buy a book for his kindergarten class gift exchange.

On Friday our town had been a snow-covered Christmas-fairy-tale village. Then it rained. It rained on Friday night, and all day Saturday. The rain erased the snow and exposed the husks and straw of fall to the numb gray sky.

We bought our book and headed home through the mist. Everything was crying. We moved slowly and silently, my 37-year-old legs newly attuned to his six-year-old pace.

The cheerful Christmas music piped through Central Park’s loudspeakers sounded alien and anachronistic.

We passed the post office and the library, who face one another across Broadway. Their flags waved wearily where they had fallen, halfway to the muddy ground.

We passed my children’s school, whose flag also trailed low, heavy with its load of grief.

We passed three neighbor boys on bicycles. I smiled and said hello. They were painfully beautiful.

That was a very long walk. I am still tired from it.

Happy Holidays and Merry Xmas

December 4, 2012 — 5 Comments

Every year, some Christian people get all defensive about people saying/writing “Happy holidays” or “Merry Xmas.” And every year I want to say something. Lucky reader, this is the year!

Even back in the days when I was a good little fundamentalist and so were all my friends, “happy holidays” was not unheard of in my circles. Remember, this is the holiday season. Even leaving out the other religious holidays, we still have Thanksgiving (which sort of kicks off the holiday season) and New Year’s Day. Right? So even if I want to be an in-your-face Christian but also red-bloodedly American, I can say “happy holidays” without turning into a wussy compromiser. Or something. (Personally, I prefer “happy holidays” outside of an all-Christian setting just because I try to be considerate and inclusive of others. I know, that’s probably un-Christian of me, but whatever.)

And then there’s “Xmas.” That little word, I grew up thinking, came straight from the pit. Satan had spearheaded the worldly attempt to take Christ out of Christmas, but we truth-bearers would stand for our Savior no matter what.

Here’s the thing, though. Just a little bit of research would uncover the very Christian roots of the “X” in “Xmas.” Wikipedia is a good place to start that research. In brief, “X” is an English transcription of the Greek symbol for the word “Christ.” I learned this when I was in Bible college and it proved to be a very helpful abbreviation for note-taking – for the amount of times I wrote “Xian,” “Xianity,” and even “X” – I saved five letters every time!

So, happy holidays to all my readers, and a big fat Merry Xmas to my Xian friends!