I’d send a thank you card to whomever introduced me to art journaling–if I could remember who it was.  Maybe there isn’t a “somebody who introduced me to art journaling.”  Maybe it was God.  Maybe she knew I needed it.  I’ve been keeping some form of journal since sixth grade.  It started as a pared-down gossip rag . “Melissa likes Billy.  I like Ray.  I hate my hair.  It looks like I stuck my finger in light socket.  [It did.]  They served square pizza in the cafeteria today.”  Sexy stuff.

Overtime the journals evolved.  It’s hard to describe into what exactly.  Sometimes they’re observation logs–bits of people whom I’ve observed in real life destined to show up in my stories.  Sometimes they’re pieces of stories or ideas for stories.  I have pages that are nothing but lists of words I like.  Other times I write pages and pages of self-indulgent shit–me wallowing around in my ego.  I hate reading that crap.  I have one rule–I do not tear pages out of  journals.  That’s like lying.  Like saying I didn’t say all that id-ified crap when I know I durn well I did.  My journals are a chronological account of my evolution as a person and a writer.

I’ve always drawn in them.  Sometimes just analog emoticons–smileys or frustrated faces.  Other times I’ve indulged in colorful pens or sketched out ideas for paintings.  But recently I’ve found something wonderful.  And it just happens to coincide beautifully with my study of embodiment theology, quantum physics (the popular science kind that comes without math), and the search for more creativity in my busy life.  It is called art journaling and you can see some examples from my current journal above.

Embodiment theology is all about feeling.  Not just emotions–not even emotions, really.  It’s about how we experience the world through our senses on an on-going and relational way.  It is also about how God created the world in relationship to it (out of chaos and glorious darkness) and how we experience God in process.  I am not doing this theology justice because I’m still learning it.  It takes my brain awhile with a new subject matter; to let it soak in before I can teach it.  I have to let new ideas sit up there and trickle down into all those wrinkles and crevices.  Embodiment theology is a bit, um, cautious of words.  It emphasizes our direct experience of the divine.  This brings me back to art journaling.

Drawing and painting are like meditation for me.  They slow my brain and allow me to truly see what ever it is I’m trying to make.  Color connects me to my subconscious in a way I don’t understand.  That’s why its SUB-conscious.  Often times I’ll start with a word that’s been popping up a lot and just sit with it.  Then I’ll thow some color on a page, then, after a while, I’ll have a picture.  It’s a little like magic, or God, take your pick.  After I have the images, I gesso over them and write.  Sometimes I write narrative, sometimes I write poetry, sometimes I paste on words from magazines that seem to fit.  The poem post that pre-dates this entry was done in my art journal over images of wine, bread, and a woman walking away from a desk.  The images came before the poem.  They almost always do.

You don’t have to be able to draw to do art journals.  You can get some modge podge and do collages with images from magazines or the interwebs.  You can do stick people.  You can use crayons.  The idea is to be still and listen to what arises out of your soul.  The process has been truly life changing for me.  I can’t describe how peaceful and truly happy I am when I’m working with my journal–even when I’m very, very sad.  Yes, sometimes the emotion that comes up is sad.  Sometimes I work on a page–like the one above entitled “Not for Sissies” that is about dealing with something hard or painful, but working both visually and linguistically gets me through it and beyond it in a more complete way than relying on words alone.  Words can only signify so much.

So I invite you, those who write, to draw.  And I invite you, those who draw, to write.  Allow yourself to dwell fully within your body and give it fully expression on the page.  You’ll be surprised where the Spirit leads you.  And then there’s dancing…but that’s another post.

Peace.

A blue pen lays slantwise across an electric yellow pad.

The client exhales, forcing hot breath across the small space between us.

“The fair comes to town in the fall,” I say.  The words fall like snow.

“Do you mean there is no justice?”  the client rebukes.

No, that is not what I mean.  “Justice is for priests and philosophers.

I am a lawyer.”  The client wants to know why he is paying me.

I see  his alligator skin case and think he does not really want to know.

“Justice eats at the table with your adversary.  If it is justice you want,

You must meet your enemy at the hearth and break bread with him.  You must

Listen to his truths until your ears bleed, resisting the urge to speak until your tongue

Swells.  Then, when his truth abides within your cells, you may speak your truth—if any remains.”

Pour the wine.  Pour his glass first.  Then begin the lovemaking.

As you carried the anger of conflict knotted in your heart, now create with the relief of resolution.

You are pregnant with the possibility of peace—carried in the warm blood of relinquishment.

Justice is the love child of the aggrieved, born in the birth-slick of the now, she comes screaming into healing.”

The client clutches his alligator case and bares his teeth.  Again he asks.

“What am I paying you for?”  I say, as I have many times.  “You are paying

Me to speak your story to twelve strangers in the hopes that they like your story the best.”

“Well,” says the client, “We’d better get to work.”

You of this viscous space.  You and your hand-made wise.

I fear you’ll shout, “Move along now! There is nothing here to see!”

Though you’d be wrong.  You’d be speaking only of the bark on the birch tree;

That sways and bends in the howling, blowing, keening wind … yet

Does not break.  It gives little shade to those who seek solace in the TV set.

I suppose I played an unplanned game of hide-and-seek.  Counting one, two, three.

Hoping mightily that none would try hard enough to find me.

I am tricky to find, you see, buried down and down, so deep;

Beneath years of books and words and thoughts piled steep.

We who dwell in the Land of Law we value thought and reason above all;

And strive from the first year in school to wrap emotion in a pall. 

Amid the soaring, sailing song, I heard a crack in my heart’s protective wall that did;

Allow a pouring out of pain, and love, and empathy amid;

A rip, a tear, a tiny thread pulled loose and the darkness deepened;

I saw clearly in each heart my own.  Seven voices rising did sweeten;

The sound of hallelujah rocketed, skyward on a river of song.

I see you.  I am gazing into your vast dark.  I realize it’s you, my friend I’ve known my whole lifelong.

Actually I have several of them.  One in every haunt.  If it’s a town I frequent—somewhere I lay my head of overly big curls more than once a year, you can bet I have one there. 

Let’s see…there’s one at the beach in Atlantic City, North Carolina, one in Beaufort, North Carolina (no they are NOT the same place).  Of course there is one at home in Raleigh and in Chapel Hill.  I have a few in Charlotte.  My hometown in Eastern Kentucky is too small, but there is one in Lexington, and one more in Morehead.  I found one in Paris, two in London, and don’t even get me started on Oxford…too many to count.  I can get you to a couple in Manhattan and hook you up in Westchester.  I’ve even got connections in San Francisco and Houston. 

I don’t go in for the big ones.  I like ‘em small, svelte, and dressed down.  No coffee shop, please. 

Each is unique, with its own odors and its own style.  Blindfold me, spin me around, and plop me down and within a few seconds of running my hands over the merchandise, I can tell you exactly where I am. 

I am at the local independent bookseller and my blood pressure just dropped to double digits over double digits.  I am chill.  Note that for the record.  Chill.  Lawyer. 

Each of these small shops, owned by some a local person known by his her neighbors, has a unique feel and selection.  Almost all of them have a “local authors” section.  Generally, they host readings, poetry slams, and local writers groups.  There is, in each of them, a “Staff Picks” table or shelf that holds the selections of the local literati.  They rarely disappoint.  By the way, Millennials, “Staff Picks” are like Amazon Stars, only the publishing house didn’t pay for them and the author didn’t hit up all of his buddies to write the reviews.  Still with me?

The sizes of these luscious, loquacious stores vary.  The Rocking Chair Bookstore in Beaufort is tiny and carries both new and used books, as well as children and adult titles.  Its size, though, is misleading.  The buyer at The Rocking Chair has excellent taste—she is a sommelier of literature.  I have yet to visit this small, waterfront store with eye-popping views of the sound, and come out empty-handed.  For example, I spent two days in Beaufort this summer.  I bought, read, and loved five books from that shop.  Take that Borders.  Oh wait, Borders is bankrupt.  Oops. 

Quail Ridge Books and Music, which is only a couple of miles from my house, may be the best independent bookstore in the universe.  Somehow it manages to bring Pulitzer Prize winning authors to speak in its intimate environs while also staying true to its large collection of North Carolina authors and subject matter.  Recently the store re-arranged the stacks to maximize space and I felt a bit as if someone had come in to my home and rearranged my den.  I’m probably there a bit too much.  They made me take my quilt home. 

I grew up going to the very first Joseph Beth bookstore in Lexington,Kentucky, when it was still in a small storefront.  When it moved into the defunct mall at Lexington Green I thought I’d died and gone to book fairy heaven.  I’d never seen so many books in one place.  It was the first time I ever experienced choice paralysis.  How could one pick just one book, or even just five books, when surrounded with so many wonderful titles?  Of course, it was Joseph Beth that convinced me food and books don’t go together.  It was not long after they opened their fancy café that JB expanded beyond its local bookseller roots and became not much better than Borders, something I consider akin to being not much better than Halliburton.  Chapter 11 was not far behind.  Joseph Beth is a cautionary tale:  Beware of bookstores with diners in them. 

Of course Quail Ridge and Joseph Beth are both, well, upscale.  Raleigh and Lexingon intellectuals of note go there to see and be seen. (Right? I’m not wasting my time milling around, right?)  I’m not afraid to slum it.  I also love a good used bookstore.   There is a fantastic one in Charlotte, North Carolina at the corner of The Plaza and Central Ave.  It’s name?  Used Book Store.  Who needs fancy?  Within two converted storefronts are isles of wonderful titles for mere pennies.  I always left there with far more books than I brought in, but then I have a problem.  Maybe you don’t.  I’m designing a new house with more bookshelves than bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets combined.  This, in the era of the e-book.  My name is Amy and I don’t like e-books.  It’s hard to subtly flip to the end to see what happens. 

Not that I go there all that often, but the second best bookstore in the universe is in Oxford, England.  It’s just across from the university next to a chips place.  It smells like fish.  But inside, oh inside!  It has a domed ceiling and skylights and books on shelves and stacked up one atop the other from the floor like towers of knowledge.  And of course it helps that everyone in there speaks with a British accent, which is the accent I read in.  I used to know the name of the place—it was a pun.  Alas, I have forgotten it.  I was last there twelve years and two children ago.  You’ll have to trust me that it was clever and the store was everything I ever dreamed an English bookshop should be.

Some people collect bars.  Others have shoe stores.  I collect bookstores.  When I’m having a bad day at work I do succumb to the evilest, mega bookstore of them all.  It has no musty smell, no pun-y name, and no charm whatsoever.  It is Amazon.com.  It is killing my other loves one click at a time. 

This is my deal with Amazon. 

Wherever possible I, Amy, of this blog, try to use Evil Amazon to purchase only used books.  This way, I’m buying new titles (where the money is) from real booksellers and not from Amazon.  I know this is not a perfect solution.  It is not even really a great solution, but it is how I feed my addiction during work hours.  I’m a two book a week girl when I’m not on vacation, as many as six to eight when I am.  I read fiction, poetry, essays, nonfiction, biographies, and magazines.  About the only thing I don’t read is the local paper.  (I broke up with it over some crappy political coverage a couple years ago.)  Anyway, I can’t be paying full rates here people, I have kids to feed.

I justify my nasty Amazon problem this way.  I still spend a whole lot of money and time in my beautiful bookstores.  I buy new, hardcover titles there.  (Did you know that the author gets more royalties when you buy in hardcover?)   I drift in and out of there, take friends there, buy almost all of my Christmas gifts there.  I don’t love Amazon.  I just use it when I need a fix.  I love Quail Ridge.  It completes me. 

P.S.  Don’t tell my husband about the books I have delivered to the office.  Or the ones that I smuggle in to the house in my really big purse.   

May this post be the beginning of—or feed—your love affair with bookstores.

It is the question I’m most often asked.  It is a kind question, it demonstrates that the inquirer knows me, knows that I’m a mom, and wants to demonstrate that he or she cares about my kids.  Generally, I obey social convention and say, “fine.”  And on some level that is true.  My kids do not have a dreaded disease.  They are not ill with cancer.  They do not have a developmental disorder that will keep them from speaking or reading.  They are fine.  Except they are not.

Sometimes I give in to the vile temptation to tell the truth, and it spills out of my mouth, like a silk scarf slipping off a chair:  “They’re struggling a bit right now.  W vomits constantly and J is going through something that I’m not sure I can describe—he falls to pieces a lot.” 

Some people handle my confession with grace, listening, taking in the information and giving me something I need in a return—a safe place to set down my worry for a bit.  Others look startled, eyes wide like a doe.  That’s when I know that I’ve goofed.  I wish I could gather the words, pull them back in, scoop the scarf up off the floor and arrange it perfectly back on the chair, just as it was before I spoke. 

We do not yet know why W continues to vomit multiple times a week.  J is a great, ancient art work, beautiful, complex and exquisitely breakable.  We feed W the way you walk around an active volcano.  Each careful step full of hope, knowing the ground could explode at any minute.  J does not vomit, but he explodes all the same.  We tiptoe around him too, trying to be his glue, calming him, pressing him together, helping him feel safe. 

But carrying around the weight of two kids who aren’t functioning optimally is tiresome.  It is exhausting in the way having a chronic illness is exhausting.  It is a heavy weigh that pulls on you from behind, tugging as you try and move forward. 

This is the damnable misery of being human.  We deal with unknown illnesses and uncertainty and then we fix dinner, finish a brief, and get up and do it again tomorrow.

You might be tempted to think that I would be better at this because I deal with my own chronic illness.  You would be wrong.  With my own stuff I have some measure of control, if not over the disease itself, with how I choose to process and respond to it.  With our children’s issues, we are helpless. 

Our children believe our kisses heal boo boos.  Yet we cannot quell W’s vomiting.  We cannot shore J up, make him less likely to shatter.  The only ointment we have is the one we’ve always had.  It is an amazing salve:

Unconditional love. 

My boys are as they are right now—perfect in every way, even as they are imperfect.  But I am also fearful.  Fearful that I won’t like how this turns out.  Fearful that no one, not doctors, not therapists, not grandparents, or friends will be able to fix this.  I am afraid that when the time comes to surrender to the conclusion of W and J’s conditions I will stand clinging to my idea of what should have been, my knuckles white with my own desire. 

Intellectually I know I should let go of any preconceived idea of how this should turn out in the end.  I should surrender to God.  Or, in the parlance of my generation, I should understand “it is what it is” and let go of trying to change it, which I suppose is some quasi-Buddhisty-New-Age something or other.  But nobody actually does that.  We just tell other people to do it because we feel the need to say something helpful. 

I can’t.

These are my kids.  I’ve been imagining how their lives would unfold since I was a kid.  So has every parent who ever drew a breath.  So has my husband, who is my partner and a wonderful, involved father.  For right now I am investing in a psychological program that would not sell a self-help book.  I have decided to be angry, tired, and sad.  I might even engage in some, God forbid, self-pity, which is extremely un-Presbyterian of me.  I have decided to cling to hope until I have rope burns. 

Of course, I give you my word, that I will not to let my anger, self-pity, and rolling around in psychological muck interfere with my loving and compassionate parenting, because that is what unconditional love requires. 

I love every hair on my kids’ heads exactly as they are. 

Yet, honesty requires I confess that my best parenting of my struggling children also comes with fatigue and resentment.  I’m angry at the doctors that don’t have answers, at the doctors who waited to long to see that something was wrong, at the referrals that take months to get, at myself for not being better at defusing tough situations, and so on.  If I don’t say that is so, I do a disservice to other moms of sick and fragile kids out there who feel the same way, but who slither under rocks or turn off their computers when they read the sugary sweet musings of mothers, better than me, who “let go” and “give it to God” and all manner of other things that don’t involve a little anger and disappointment at dashed hopes. 

I believe in God.  I believe in Grace.  But I also believe in telling the truth.  See above.

I didn’t cry.  I was at work and there’s no crying in lawyering.  Especially not if you’re a girl. 

This whole health insurance mess is ludicrous—like something out of a Dilbert cartoon.  It is funny in a postmodern, Quinton Tarantino, brains on the back seat sort of way.  This is dark stuff.

The story is simple. I have a disease which, according to my insurance company’s published materials, qualifies me to use a very expensive drug called Humira.  My doctor prescribed this drug after another, exponentially less expensive, drug stopped working.  Humira costs about $2600.00 per shot.  As one of my friends with MS likes to say, “we’re talking dolla bills, people.”  My insurance company is performing contortionist-like feats to avoid paying for my Humira. 

Because of this no-pay yoga, I went three weeks without any medication.  I got sick.  The kind of sick where my alarm went off and I was so exhausted from the inflammation run amuck in my body that I went back to sleep with my children jumping on me.  Literally.  Kids jumping were on my head and I was still sleeping. They ran screaming through the house.  Asleep.  That tired.  And then when I did get up, I’d sneak out to my minivan to catch naps, oh, whenever I could. 

My joints hurt a little.  Like they might if you stepped out in front of—

the space shuttle.  Because autoimmune arthritis is systemic and my form of it means that I had tenderness and swelling in my shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, hips, back, knees and ankles, I was feeling like I’d been hit by a rocket.  Maybe more like on re-entry than take off. 

All the while I kept getting these pleasant voicemail messages on my cell phone.  Automated, of course.  “We’re calling from Curascript.  We just want to let you know that we’ve received your referral for your prescription and we’re processing it.  We just need a few more items.  You don’t need to do anything.”  And so I thought I’d get a nice package full of lovely Humira in the mail just any day.  That is, until I called to see if, even though I didn’t need to do anything, if I could do anything to speed the process up.  Because I was still working, and raising two kids, and I needed my meds.

I won’t bore you with the seven different phone calls it took for me to get someone on the phone with useful information about why I did not have a needle full of unicorn tears, or whatever Humira is made from that makes it cost $2600.00 per injection.  Suffice it to say that it took me swinging around the old J.D. (mentioning on the phone that I was a lawyer), and mentioning that I didn’t have any medication, and mentioning that I was getting sicker by the day to get an actual person on the Death Star, I mean Pre-Authorization Department in the insurance company on the phone.  This person told me that my doctor had sent them a form containing the necessary information about my health and my need for Humira, but it was not the Proper Form, so they could not process my claim.  They also said BlueCross had attempted to notify my doctor and tell him so.

So I called my doctor, who is a full professor at a public university and who also treats patients.  He doesn’t have much time to fool with insurance companies.  You know how this goes.  My doc’s office hadn’t gotten anything from BlueCross until about three minutes before I called them letting them know about the need for the Proper Form.  The doctor’s office was so very apologetic and had me come in for an injection of the magic elixir, paid for by the drug company.  Hey kid, the first one’s free.

Basking in the glow of my first Humira injection and reading over the patient porn that tells me how good I’m going to feel once it begins to work, I begin to think everything will be o.k.  I have forgotten the rule all lawyers know. Because I am standing there when my doctor fills out the Proper Form and faxes it in to BlueCross and it says that I have the Necessary Disease to qualify for the Humira I mistakenly think all has been fixed and I am on the road to recovery and peace.

Until today—a week ahead of my next injection—when I called Curascript to ask when I should expect my parcel of medicated goodness.  That is when I was reminded of the first rule of lawyering.  That is this:  It can never really be fixed with a phone call (or even a few phone calls).  Not really.

Lawyers learn this early in their practices when clients come in and tell starry-eyed young things that their big companies are afraid of bad press and will crumble if only said young lawyer will just send a threatening letter or make a phone call.  Not.  True.  If there are any young lawyers out there reading this…don’t buy it.

There is another hitch.  No wait, it’s the same hitch.  BlueCross needs another Proper Form to verify that I have the Necessary Disease.  They have sent me fax confirming their need for it.  I have yet again called my doctor’s office asking them to send said form.  The ridiculousness of this dance is apparent.  The fax to me says I must have Psoriatic Arthritis—which I do—to qualify to take Humira.  It says I must have failed at least one other drug treatment—which I have.  The information currently in the insurance company’s hands says as much.  But they need More Forms. 

And so I am left wondering, as I wield my J.D. around: What do people do who do not have my knowledge, tenacity, or economic power?  I mean at least I have insurance (in theory).  I know my way over to the Attorney General’s office.  I am empowered.  What do grandmas with RA do?  What about the uninsured with MS who are going blind?

Yes, this is absurd in the extreme.  But what about those for whom the result is simply that they are told “no” and they take it?

For now, I’m feeling better after the one free Humira shot I got from the doctor and from the steroids I’m taking to control the inflammation until I get “up to dose.”  We won’t know if I fully respond for weeks.  And I may need to try other biologic medications like Enbrel or Remicade.  Some patients respond to one drug and not others.  Am I going to have to do this each time?  I truly don’t have that kind of time.  Either the time to be sick or the time to fight with the insurance company.

And yet I don’t have the time not to.

Marcia juxtaposed the orthodoxy of atonement theology with that of incarnational theology.  Although we’ve had Marcus Borg come and speak, I’m sure this is the first time some folks have heard this alternative theology put so plainly and understandably.  And although some tend to lump all non-atonement folks in the Borg camp, Marcia isn’t Marcus.  She’s more mystical than Borg and allows more room for an encounter with the mysterious than Borg.  I love that about her.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Borg would take that away from people.  But to steal a phrase from Marcia, I think Borg is a bit more of a “brain on a stick” than Marcia, who really tries to embody the Spirit in her preaching and her life. 

I’ve blogged here before about sacrificial atonement and written about it extensively in Banned Questions about Jesus.  Suffice it to say that it’s my view sacrificial atonement, a view held by much of the Church over time, can be overly violent, judgmental, and focused on the individual at the expense of the collective.  You’ve probably heard the atonement view summarized as this:  We humans are all sinners.  God rightly judges us for it.  Jesus was sent in to the world and died on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins.  Through his bloodshed we are forgiven.  In his resurrection we are justified in God. 

Atonement is very focused on the personal sin of the sinner, the sacrifice of Jesus as the “lamb of God”—alluding to the sacrificial lambs used in theTemple— and the forgiveness of the individual is found only through Jesus’ willingness to die for us and be resurrected.  As I’ve written about extensively, as a small girl I was horrified that my sin caused Jesus to suffer so.  I’ve never quite gotten over that imagery.  I get guilty pangs in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. 

I’ve also written here and in Banned Questions about Jesus about several alternative theologies to this view including Process Theology, certain Mennonite theologians, Quaker theologians, and others including Borg, whom I would describe as a liberal pragmatist.  Incarnational Theology is another nonviolent, Spirit-filled theology that gets us past the violent Jesus-on-the-cross for our sins and puts us squarely in the land of Jesus-on-the-cross as an example of Jesus serving the people. 

Incarnational theology is about un-drawing boundaries and honoring uniqueness and individuality while focusing on the good of the collective.  Where atonement theology teaches that God judges and so should we, incarnational theology teaches God loves and so should we.  Where atonement theology teaches God forgives and so should we, incarnational theology teaches there is nothing to forgive because we are all knitted from a divine spark.  Where atonement theology is inexorably intertwined with patriarchy and hierarchy, incarnational theology is about eating meals with the unclean and the outsider.  

Some may say all of this is theology, high-minded mumbo jumbo for PhD’s and lawyers who have too little to do … Amy.   Others simply want to go to church on Sunday and feel good when they leave.  But theology matters even to those Easter and Christmas Christians who just want their church as light as they can get it.  Because theology seeps in to the pores of the congregates.  It gets in the Sunday School messages and in the sermons.  It becomes a part of the basic beliefs of an individual and a family.  Just ask anyone “raised up” in a church with a heavy emphasis on a hell …. Amy. 

You know those people who will find the worst possible interpretation of any situation?  Your nanny quit?  It was probably because your kids are badly behaved and she couldn’t take it any more.  Your car died?  It was probably because you didn’t get it serviced.  You lost your job?  You probably weren’t very good at it.  When it reality, your nanny’s mom was ill, your car had a fluid leak you couldn’t have known about, and your company was simply cutting numbers and you were the last one hired.  You know people like this.  They’re beyond Debbie Downer.  They’re Debbie It’s All Your Fault.  It’s like personal accountability on crack. 

Most of these people that I know were raised in highly atonement-oriented churches and atonement oriented homes.  They may never have heard the words Atonement Theology and would probably tell you they don’t give a rodent’s hindquarters about theology.  They just want a good Christmas Cantata.  As children these people were taught that humankind is sinful, and that honorable, “good” people own up to that.  They consider “telling the truth” about your “faults” to be a virtue.  If you don’t own up to your “short comings” your just “fooling yourself.”  How do I know?  Because this is how I was raised.  Was this done out of spite or mean-ness?  Lord, no.  Quite the opposite.  It was done out of love.  Pure love.  White glowing, angels singing, rocking chairs and big Christmases love.  It’s how my parents were raised, and their parents, and so on ad infinitem.  This is how loving parents raise their children in the atonement model and it’s why theology matters.

But there is another view.  There is the view that I think God calls us to hold about each other.  I think it’s the incarnational view or at least consistent with it.  I saw this in how Marcia delicately rephrased the congregation’s questions when they were tinged with judgment or self-doubt.  There is the view that each person is valued and valuable.  That a person’s uniqueness matters even if it means her body comes with migraines or arthritis.  God made this body just as it is and so we must come to love it, just as it is (I have to fight the urge to sing “Just as I Am” here).  Incarnational theology would say a life change is often just change—not good or bad.  We must sit with the Spirit and discern what is best to do with it.  Having studied Buddhism, one of the most important and life changing tenants of that faith tradition is that the only constant is change and great suffering is caused by trying to change that! 

There is so much healing that can be done in the Church if we can move away from language about sin, judgment, and forgiveness toward a more inclusive and healing view.  I’m not saying we have to abandon those terms altogether.  I’m not advocating throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  But so many lives have been harmed by atonement language.  Maybe we could use some new words for a while, and develop some more inclusive and less judgmental rituals to go with them that are intentional about embodying Jesus’ walk with the unclean, the unwanted, and marginal of the word.  Maybe we could spend half as much time un-drawing lines as we have spent drawing them.  Just maybe we could raise children who love themselves as profoundly as God does and who are wildly confident that they are loved in their homes, in their church homes and by their God. 

What kind of mission work would it be to send those kind of children into the world?

I then fooled around with the idea of a family as a healthy ecosystem, each person providing nutrients and acting as food—individuals giving and taking, depending on the need of the moment.  But that image seemed too utilitarian and a bit cannibalistic.  So, I put it aside. 

What image captures the essence or central idea of our family?  Then it hit me –washed over me, really. The perfect metaphor for our family is music.  And not just any music, but improvisational jazz– the in and out, up and down, all-over-the-place, order-in-the-chaos, of improvisational jazz is exactly how our family works, and meditating on that idea helps provide a useful framework for me to think about the beauty amid the chaos of family life. 

You don’t have to be a jazz fan to know that it is more than the combination of notes.  It is the spaces and the silences, the repetition and the difference—jazz is the emotion evoked by melodious, harmonic, and discordant sound.  Think about how many great guitar riffs are one note repeated over and over followed by a wonderful slide, scale, or Prince-esque go-to-pieces, that expresses the listener’s sense of joy at being “released” from the monotony of that one note plucked until we think we might just lose our minds from the hearing of it. 

No one note standing alone makes up a tune in the same way no one musician comprises a band.  Yet each note, like each musician, can be beautiful, useful, and unique.  In the absence of a particular note, the other notes may be rearranged into a different tune, but never the exact same tune.  In the absence of a particular player, a band is quite another thing altogether.  The Miles Davis Quartet without Miles Davis would have been three dudes with instruments. 

Our family is the same.  Some of us are the accidentals—the sharps and flats of the scales that hit the ear in a way that lets you know this scale is, for example, E Minor.  Some of us are the Major notes, the quieter, vanilla types that allow the accidental tones to bounce off your ear like silver on crystal.  Each of us exists in relation to the other.  Without husband there is no wife, without older brother, no younger brother.  As notes make music only in relation to other notes, family members make a family only in relationship to each other.

Like a house band that has played together for years, families even develop familiar “solos” or “riffs,” though they may feel like pure improvisation at the time.  Our three year-old likes to riff on dinosaurs and dragons or do his twist and shout about bedtime and baths.  Our two year-old gets down and low to the ground when he’s told “No.”  Daddy or I say, almost in unison, and with the harmony of a back-up choir, “No, W, not like that,” “we don’t listen to that in this house.”  It is how we make our music—listening, reacting to one another. It is woven from a fabric of sound and feeling, and it bears a richness of dimension, and codependence, and independence.  It sings in and out of time and space.  It is love down in the cracks and dusty spaces of life. 

For the youngest members of our band, they do not know yet how to count us in or cut off a song without trailing off.  When our oldest leaves us for a short trip to the beach with his grandparents there is always some drama on leaving and some drama on coming home.  He never says, “I am sad to leave this band because when I am home I know when to play—I know the rhythm and the rests.  I know our songs.  I am comfortable here.  I don’t know how the band works when I’m gone.”  Instead, he picks a fight, throws a fit, and gets sent to his room until he is calm enough to join us again in relationship.  This is how he plays out.  It is discordant.  It is not fun.  We should not pretend it is.  Not all jazz is harmonic.  Not all emotions are pleasant.  Love is not all pretty.    

He always has fun on these trips away.  These are tiny steps of independence—tiny solo projects.  His grandparents are there to protect him and guide him safely back to us.  But he has a hard time counting back in and picking up the tune when he gets back.  Because he is almost four he doesn’t say, “I missed you when I was gone.  I wondered what you were doing.  I wondered if you missed me.  I was both happy and sad to be away.  I had fun without you guys and I felt a little bad about that.”  Instead, he picks a fight, throws a fit, and gets sent to his room.  This is how he counts back in.  We play a slow song, come to him one at a time, allow him to pick up the tune, and soon he finds his pace again, once he feels assured that he is loved and that his big emotions didn’t change that.  They never do.

We pick up our song again, working him in, letting him feel his way back, until he starts riffing on the ocean, and then on sharks, and then feels his way back toward dinosaurs.  Finally, his invitation back to relationship.  “Can we play outside?” “What did W do while I was gone?”

His little brother begins to test whether big brother will tolerate a duet.  They bounce off one another in the way the jazz greats do.  They find spaces and fill them.  Giggles climb and spiral through our house again.  We slide into; no we glide back into our next piece. 

Until the next time something breaks our rhythm and we must change the set.  Something will come along and throw one of us off key or out of sync.  That is the nature of music.   Notes repeat until the soul demands change.  That is also the nature of love.  Repetition, relief, but always relationship.  Always relationship. 

This was not what we hoped for when we dreamed of becoming parents, not even close. 

“No!” he screamed.  His words echoed off the walls as his round chocolate eyes cut away from mine.  J flung his over-sized, three-and-a-half year-old body onto the floor, looking for all the world like a supplicant seized by the Holy Spirit.  He was in the throes of yet another tantrum— a full-fledged-go-to-pieces.

“I know you’re mad,” I said, validating his feelings like the parenting books instructed.  “Let’s take a breath.”  I breathed deeply, hoping he would imitate me.  No dice.  He all but held his breath and passed out to avoid compliance.

“No! No!”  He shook his brown curls from side to side, legs akimbo searching for something to kick. 

“If you can’t stop yourself, I will stop you,” I said, trying for a meditative tone.  The voice in my head railed. “Stop it you little shit, you’re really pissing me off.”   His hands balled up.  He wanted to hit something.  I would do in a pinch. 

This was my oldest, the one we adopted from birth.  The one for whom we had waited.  The one that came after the miscarriages, after the shots, after the fertility treatments.  This was the child who came after what we thought was the end of our tears. 

A couple of days later my husband and I sat in uncomfortable institutional chairs in a gray cement block room dotted with a smattering of out-dated toys.  We described J’s behavior to our school system’s early intervention team along with a history of behavior that had not seemed odd until we began to recite it to strangers.  Nothing clarifies an idea like speaking it out loud. 

J had never been a good sleeper.  Strike that.  J rarely slept at night. 

“So, when did Josh sleep all night?” I had asked my friend Ann, clutching her tailored silk blouse like the Shroud of Turin.

“Oh, we Ferberized him at four months.  I have to get my sleep,” she answered, as if my husband and I loved getting up four times a night for over two years and then working all day long at less than energizing desk jobs.  Ferberizing, or controlled crying, never worked for J.  Not for long.

Then there was the behavior we had thought was just quirky.  J didn’t like to walk on sand and could not abide a haircut.  I cut his hair at home with all the skill my English degree afforded.  As he aged, he enjoyed hugs only when he initiated them.  He didn’t like bright light or socks seams.   He ate approximately seven different foods.  Most of them were white.  He was a food racist. 

During this meeting, and a later evaluation by an occupational therapist, we learned our diva’s quirks were not all personality; they were pathology–Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), to be precise.  J’s central nervous system did not work correctly.  In particular his senses of touch and sight were not properly integrated, and his vestibular system was wonky.  J’s “fight or flight” alarm was triggered from normal stimuli, causing him to react to small nuisances as if under attack.

This meant our son was regularly anxious, mad, and unhappy—especially during transitions like waking-up, dressing, bathing, and going to bed— those times when his dad and I were most often home with him.  My husband and I got to watch our once gooey ball of smiles and giggles thrashing on the floor, trying to hurt us, because he felt threatened by the most innocuous things in life.  He was our Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde—at times a beautiful, normal, highly-intelligent three year-old, at other times, a villain who was completely out of control.

And when it happened in public?  We read people’s rolling eyes.  We were yet another pair of terrible yuppie parents who had saved the rod and spoiled the child.  And when you’re what we were, the White parents of a Biracial (which folks see as Black) child— well, we had up and ruined a perfectly fine Black male.  Shame on us.

Thankfully, SPD is treatable.  The nervous system is malleable, especially in children as young as J.  He now goes to occupational therapy once a week to work on integrating his senses.  It’s hard.  At first he hated it.  And I wasn’t sure his therapist was going to put us on her Holiday Card List either.  J has had to learn to touch things that frightened him and move his body in uncomfortable ways.  At first he melted down immediately after each therapy session.  Me too.  But I could a drink and write.  We don’t call that a melt-down, we call it art. 

We also incorporated daily home sensory therapy.  And a little at time, at first not so much that you’d notice, J’s tantrums got shorter and less frequent.

Now when they happen and we say, “J, let’s breathe, “ sometimes he actually does. Not every time.  But do you remember to breathe every time you’re pissed?  I don’t.  Sometimes I just say “fuck” and pour a glass of wine.  Three year-olds, well, soon-to-be four year-olds aren’t allowed to do that without necessitating government intervention.

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Jay is brushed several times a day with a surgical brush in a particular way that we learned during OT.  This helps integrate his sense of touch.  It’s a totally weird process that seems like it should do exactly nothing.  But it helps.  Maybe its placebo.  Maybe its fairy dust.  I don’t know.  But it works.  Our son is much more like a boy and much less like a screaming banshee than he was when we started all this business. 

Hope is a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, especially with President “BoBama”– as J calls him—using it as a campaign slogan.  There isn’t much that is more hopeful than parenting.  You take a helpless wad of slobber with big eyes and a floppy neck and endeavor to shape it into a kind, compassionate adult (with absolutely no guarantee of success) and hopefully—there’s that word again—it works.  So we do what we’ve always done, we hope for J, one brush stroke at time.  And when he cries or kicks or screams I remember that now I see a boy who is struggling to express himself, not a banshee trying to wreck our family on the rocks.  That is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug. 

Peace, my friends.

These words smack of Buddhism, Hinduism, and New Age crap.  They aren’t “washed in the blood” or “saved by lamb.”  And, let’s face it, we didn’t learn about them in Sunday School,Vacation Bible School, or at Grandma’s House.  I’ll bet not a single one of us made any thing at church camp having to do with meditation.  Well, o.k. you might have if you’re Episcopal.  But that doesn’t count.

I am hereby asserting on my humble blog that a notable failure of the modern mainline Christian church—yes, the creaky churches of high spires that often still don’t have “contemporary” services—is not teaching meditation, mindfulness, and reverence as integral parts of the Christian tradition.  There is healing in these arts.  Spiritual healing.  Physical healing.  Emotional healing. 

Mindfulness, meditation, and reverence practices are not new to Christianity.  In fact, there are a few different types of Christian meditation, all of which are ancient.  Mindfulness meditation was often called the practice of reverence.  A rose by any other name…

Take for example the Benedictine Order, which strives to live humbly and focus always on the presence of God in all things.  Their detailed and formal daily practices are all about Christian mindfulness.  It is about waking up and paying attention to the Grace that is everywhere. 

This post was prompted by another post, such is the nature of conversation in the post modern world.  My friend Nolan posted a Barbara Brown Taylor quotation on his Facebook page the other day, which brought to mind her wonderful book An Altar in the World.  That wonderful work is all about waking up reverently to God’s holy work in the small things that surround us in the world.  You know, the spiritual practice of actually seeing the beautiful God-made things we miss because we live behind our eyes rather than seeing with them? 

At one point in my faith walk I read the Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras.  These are both amazing Hindu spiritual texts that are dense, intentionally cryptic, and difficult to discern.  Each verse is intended to be studied and toiled over for years.  Yoga and Hindu practitioners work with gurus on one verse at a time, sometimes for decades.  For example, the first Yoga Sutra is this:  “Atha.”  It means simply “now.”  This is the essence of yoga.  It is to attain pure “being-ness in the now.”  No guru worth his or her salt is going to tell you that right off the bat.  Nope.  You’re going to have to read “atha” and then go sit on your meditation cushion until the “now-ness” of reality dawns you, then you can move on to the second Yoga Sutra.  It kind of makes you grateful for the nice canned Sunday morning sermon and lemonade after Sunday School, doesn’t it?

Taking the first Yoga Sutra as an example, we can see how The Bible contrasts from the Hindu texts in its emphasis on the daily grind.  The Bible is a series of human stories—a book of human details.  Abraham and Sarah want a baby, Sarah gets pregnant, Abraham is ready to sacrifice the baby, God says, “no need,” everybody wins because of Abraham’s faith.  No mere “atha” in that story. 

Indeed, I contend that The Bible is a virtual Zen kon of mindfulness.  Notice in Genesis the human need to categorize things as “good” and “evil”—eating from the tree of knowledge—ended up getting us cast out of the Garden of Eden.  It is only when we were simply o.k. to be with God without needing to judge that we were free to live together and walk with God.  When we got caught up in “good” and “bad”—as we all inevitably do—we got cast out.  What a mindfulness story!  What I take from Genesis is that when I meditate prayerfully, I have moments of reunification with God.  I can shut that inner judge down for minutes at a time, focus on my breathing, and come back into the garden.  Meditation is one form of incarnated Grace for me. 

I am not the only one to think this.  If so, I wouldn’t be saying it here for fear of heresy being shouted from the cyber rooftops.  Saint Teresa of Avila defined Christian meditation as follows, “By meditation I mean prolonged reasoning with the understanding, in this way. We begin by thinking of the favor which God bestowed upon us by giving us His only Son; and we do not stop there but proceed to consider the mysteries of His whole glorious life.” 

Contemporary Christian mystic Thomas Merton characterized the goal of Christian meditation as follows: “The true end of Christian meditation is practically the same as the end of liturgical prayer and the reception of the sacraments: a deeper union by grace and charity with the Incarnate Word, who is the only Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ.”  That is it.  Christian meditation, Christian mindfulness is about union.  It is about Grace. 

In a world where we move increasingly fast, where we stare at an ever-increasing array of glowing rectangles—I Phone, I Pad, computer, TV— where we are expected to be available to everyone, anywhere, at all times, it seems to me the calling of the contemporary church MUST BE a focus on slowing us down to see the beauty of God around us.  Lord knows we’re all to busy to see it otherwise.  My children help me with this, otherwise I would be completely lost.  And what better way to be in community than to sit and BREATHE together?

These ancient Eastern practices of mindfulness, of meditation, and of reverence are essential to helping contemporary Christians unplug and heal our relationship with the divine one vital, God-given breath at a time.  We should not fear them as practices of Eastern religions.  Fear is often a form of hatred and hatred is a form of idolitry.  Instead, we should embrace our rich mystical heritage our obvious need for help in these chaotic times.