In Jack’s Absence

Jack tells me that whenever I’ve gone on a trip without him, I come back just a little different.  More confident, more relaxed, somehow stronger.  Whenever he says this I change the subject, not because it’s not a compliment, but because I’m afraid of what that means for the rest of my life.  If I come back independent, confident, and strong to the point that my husband is startled, it must mean I’m less these things in my daily life.  I’ve written on this blog before about my insecurities about being a wife, my fears that maybe I only married because I thought I needed a man, and that I’ll never be truly brave and strong.

A couple weeks ago I stayed home, and Jack went on a trip, which I don’t recall happening in our marriage before.  As I dropped him off at the airport a 5am, I wondered if he would come home to a more independent and confident wife.

The first day, I reveled in my aloneness for a good 10 hours, then I got bored and lonely.  So I invited a friend over for dinner.

Wait, what?

Spending time with people is usually a much more complicated process for me.  I’m never sure if I’m lonely or just exhausted.  I don’t know whether I want to see people or just see them on facebook while a movie runs in the background.  I hem and haw and fret and just don’t know what I want.  And eventually I decide to see people, or not see people, but I don’t feel at ease.  I spend the evening thinking that maybe I would have preferred the opposite.

But for some reason, on the day Jack flew to Boston I knew that what I was feeling was loneliness, and what I wanted was company.  To know what I wanted was, I’m sorry to say, the strangest feeling.

The whole week without Jack was marked by me knowing myself… as if my desires had cleared their dusty throats and started singing with shocking clarity.  And I was like, wait, who are you guys and what is that beautiful song?

I made french toast for dinner three nights in a row.  I left dishes in the sink overnight, not worrying about whether I’d regret it in the morning because I knew I wouldn’t.  I had 10 people over for a study group and loved every minute.

It was such a delight-filled week, but I was also scared.  Jack would return, and I didn’t want to have to say, “the week you were gone was one of the best of my life.”  I brought my ambivalence in to my counselor, asking her why just the presence of Jack (who is a very kind man) muddles my own thoughts and desires.  And we talked and came to some realizations, and I cried, and I left with more wonder and joy and sadness than I had come with.  PEOPLE, THIS IS WHY I’LL BE IN THERAPY TWICE A WEEK FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.  That’s $12,000 a year, if you’re curious.  But it’s worth it.  It really is.  Go to therapy.

The day before Jack came home, I read a chapter from a book called She Who Is, by feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson.  The chapter was on conversion.  Johnson writes about how religious conversion is often talked about in terms of “disowning oneself,” but this language is only really useful to those in power.

She writes:

If pride be the primary block on the path to God, then indeed decentering the rapacious self is the work of grace.  But the situation is quite different when this language is applied to persons already relegated to the margins of significance and excluded from the exercise of self-definition.  For such persons, language of conversion as loss of self… functions in an ideological way to rob them of power, maintaining them in a subordinate position to the benefit of those who rule.

Okay, there’s more, but take a deep breath.  If you’re anything like me, your stomach is churning and your heart is saying “more!” and “stop!” simultaneously.

Johnson continues:

Analysis of women’s experience is replete with the realization that within patriarchal systems women’s primordial temptation is not to pride and self-assertion but rather to the lack of it, to diffuseness of personal center, overdependence on others for self-identity, drifting, and fear of recognizing one’s own competence.

(Johnson, She Who Is, 64)

And my first thought after reading this was, NO FUCKING WONDER humility never worked for me.  I remembered myself at 20, a new convert, presenting myself and my new faith to roommates, family, and friends.  I tried to appear joyful (because that’s the image I was supposed to project), but was dying of fear inside.  A few people, mostly men, men who were probably used to power and privilege, scoffed or laughed or bragged about themselves in response to me.  It was painful and infuriating.  But I thought they would come around if I was more humble, if I listened to them and laughed at their jokes and was nice and gentle.

When really, I probably should have thrown some tables around.

Diffuseness of personal center.  Overdependence on others for self identity.  Fear of one’s own competence.

It’s heartbreaking to admit that all these phrases describe me in relationship, even in my marriage to a truly humble man—the kind of man who, when I told him that I was more free and alive in his absence, responded, “let’s keep working on a way to let you be free and alive when I’m around, too.”

I do have parts of myself that are capable of harming others for my own benefit.  But most of my sin comes out of the belief that my identity is tied up in how others think of me, that my opinion of myself is secondary, and that I should check with someone else before doing, thinking, or even feeling anything.

Before reading this Johnson excerpt, I kind of worried that I was going about personal healing all wrong.  That all this therapy was “secular,” and God was impatiently tapping his foot waiting for me to get back to humbling myself and diffusing my personal center (God-construct, anyone?).  But Johnson gives me hope.

There’s theology and then there’s theology.  Some theology is like, “Oh, so that’s what perichoresis means.  Interesting,” and some theology makes you go, “Holy fuck, maybe God is good to me.”

Voice

Last week I finished a women’s self-defense class.  It was only four sessions, but I did learn a lot.  Mostly I learned that by making it to my mid twenties and marrying a non-abusive person, I’ve won most of the battle.  Chances of me being assaulted now are very very small.

(Side note, it’s not being married that reduces the chance of assault, but being wise about relationships, knowing the signs of abuse and power-control, and able to listen to your instincts.  Just to be clear!)

Also, I re-learned the power of my voice.  That phrase makes me cringe, but I can’t think of a better one so I’m using it.  In the class, we spent a lot of time making eye contact with each other (which, in the Western world means, “I am so not kidding”), and yelling good strong words like, “No!” “Stop!” and “Let go!”

After yelling my first couple “NO”s, I realized how very unnatural it is.  My instinct is to resolve things quietly, to not draw attention.  The one time in my life I remember being grabbed (in Russia, in a park at night, by a drunk soldier, by the wrist.  Sorry, Mom), I gasped, yanked my hand back (he couldn’t hold my thick coat sleeve), and walked away quickly.  Didn’t yell.  Didn’t run.  How foolish and lucky I was!

I’ve had blessedly few occasions to need to yell in my life.  My mom has had more.  Recently over the dinner table, she was giving her “the bus is good enough for a mother” speech (did anyone else watch Bye Bye Birdie as a kid?).  Which led into a story about the wierdos on the Metro buses at night.  Which I’m sure was not told to make us feel guilty about making Mommy take the bus while we get her car for 10 months of the year.

So, my mom was on the bus to the airport (which I think is the route no Metro driver wants), and it was semi-crowded.  There was a man who seemed chipper and talkative, until a woman in a burqa sat down.  Then he started badgering her, asking if she knew there was a war going on, talking about her “shifty eyes.”  My mom saw that the woman was trembling and apparently trying to shrink.  She told the man to stop.

He responded with something like, “You don’t get it, you’re just an old white woman.”

And MY MOM, in all her upper-class liberal glory said, “Sir, this is not about race, this is about human beings respecting each other!  This woman has every right to ride the bus without being harassed by you!”

Then the whole bus applauded.

I was so proud.  Because I know my mom struggles with fear just like me, possibly even more.  I know that it’s hard to think about someone else’s safety when you’re so obsessed with your own.  If I were on that bus, I might have convinced myself that the woman in a burqa wasn’t threatened (it was a public bus afterall, during rush hour), and I needn’t do anything.

But my mom used her voice for a woman who had none.  Just like our money, our skills, and our time, I think God gave us our voices so we can give them away.

http://www.strategicliving.org/

Fear and Prayer, Part II: The Woods

Part I of this post is here.

Two years ago one of my customers and her grown daughter were murdered while on a popular hiking trail. It was all over the news, but they still haven’t solved the case. I worked the early shift that day and someone brought in the front-page story by 6am.

A lot of people in the community had known this woman, and many came in crying that week. I grieved her death too. But I also dwelt on the horror of it all. A mother and daughter, shot, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer, on a well-known hiking trail. That morning when I took my break, I called Jack in tears. I told him what happened, but he didn’t really get it.

He didn’t get it because I didn’t know how to explain it. What I told him was that I had known one of the women on the front page. I didn’t know how to tell him about the fear and terror that was settling in. I pictured myself hiking on a beautiful summer’s day and finding a gun at my head. In every way I imagined it, I couldn’t escape.

After a few months, these dark thoughts had formed their own dark place in my soul. I privately named this place “The Woods.” Soon, like all roads leading to Rome, all of my thoughts ended up in The Woods. If I started worrying about falling off my bike, five minutes later I was imagining my lifeless body lying in The Woods. When my mom invited me out for a walk, I refused, certain that the park would mean The Woods. If I couldn’t get a hold of Jack… well, Jack is confident he would not only get out of The Woods alive, but also whoop ass while in there. But in this horrible part of my imagination, no one was safe.

I didn’t know how to talk about any of this. I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t about my customer and her daughter anymore, but about the terror of my own inability to control anything. The thought that maybe God really didn’t care… or else he just didn’t get that being murdered in the woods would be really fucking scary. Why else could it have happened to those women? Where was God then? If he let it happen to them, he might let it happen to me.  How could I trust him?

A year after the murders, Jack and I were driving North to visit relatives. We were driving through the town closest to the hiking trail where it had happened. I imagined two women driving and chatting through these roads, not knowing it was their last day. I felt nauseous. I started sweating, and my heart was racing. We weren’t in The Woods, but we were close, and it was too much. I started crying, then I started bawling. Jack pulled over and I cried and cried.

The next day at church I asked a couple to pray for me. Bill and Becky had a reputation for being “good at prayer,” which is kind of hilarious… but they were good at it. They would do things in prayer that I wouldn’t be caught dead doing, like speaking in tongues, and sighing, and saying “Oohhh yes. Ohhhh yes Lord, yes Jesus!” But I think the strangest thing that they did was listen. They didn’t start their prayers with “Dear Heavenly Father, please give us…” they started their prayers with long silences, believing that God knew what they needed and would speak.

I told them about the murders. I told them that I still saw the woman’s husband every day and I didn’t know how to reach him in his grief. I told them about the trip through the town the day before. I didn’t tell them about The Woods because still, I didn’t really know how.

So we all bowed our heads and no one said anything for a minute, except that Becky was murmuring in a whisper. I was crying because, well, I cry a lot. The worship band was playing an inappropriately upbeat song, and the rest of the church was clapping and singing in the streaming sunlight.  After a few minutes, Becky looked at me and said, “Christine, the word that comes to my mind is “images.” You don’t know what happened to those women, so your mind has been filling in the images of how they were killed, like thousands of movie clips. You see yourself in these scenarios too, and you can’t stop them. Is that true?”

And I couldn’t answer, because it was so true that I felt like my soul had just been read out loud. And maybe what I should have thought was, “Holy shit, this woman is psychic.” But instead, like a spring breeze blowing open a rusty window, this thought rushed in to my poor exhausted soul:

“God knows.”

God knew about The Woods. He was in the deepest darkest most alone place of my psyche. He had stood next to me for a whole year while I imagined his absence. He had held me in his enormous metaphorical hands while I tried fending for myself and planning my escape routes. Once again I had turned around and collided with Jesus.

I wish I could remember the rest of that prayer time. It was amazing. The thing I do remember is that in the weeks and months that followed, I didn’t imagine The Woods. The worn path (more like a slip’n’slide, actually) that led there had closed off. I felt like I could breathe deeper and love more generously than I had been able to in months; not because I would never be in a place like The Woods, but because I knew if I ever found myself there, I was pretty sure I could turn around and find Jesus behind me.

But in recent months, like an abused dog slinking back to her cruel master, I’ve gone back to The Woods. It’s a terrible place, but so familiar and in a way, comforting. It’s easier to trap myself in fear than to try to comprehend the freedom, love, and courage that I have with Jesus.

Paul (the Bible’s Paul… or as I think of him, “run-on sentence Paul”) wrote a lot about the old self and the new self. He insisted that the old self, the one that’s trapped in fear, or lust, or self-deceit, or all three and then some, died because Jesus’ death killed it. The new self is free from the old compulsions, and is a slave only to the deep-wide-far-and-high love of God.

I wonder if Paul noticed how often he was having to “remind” his flocks of this. Apparently, the Christians in Rome and Corinth and Ephesus also found The Woods easier than the grace of God, because every one of them got the “Old Self, New Self” lecture.  Being trapped is just so much easier than freedom.

Pray for me. Pray that I remember that my fear is in the old Christine. That the new Christine is free to breathe deep and love big, and to play and run a long way with her Jesus.

Fear and Prayer, Part I: Colliding with Jesus

I became a Christian when I was about 20, over a period of several months. And even though my wedding day was awesome, and I loved that one trip we took to the beach and spent a whole day making apple butter, and even today there’s a warm breeze and I have the whole day off… despite how happy my life has been at so many times, I think the months of becoming a Christian were my happiest.

(a side note: I agree with this guy that faith is a process and not a one-time event, but because I am lazy, I’m going to pretend I only had to do it once).

I had made a few friends who were Christians by then, and when I told them that I wanted to commit to following Jesus, they brought champagne over to my apartment and celebrated with me. And it was actually kind of awkward because my mouth was full of toothpaste when the doorbell rang, and my roommate had no idea what was going on, and I really just wanted to sleep. But the intention was so sweet.

I told a lot of people about Jesus then. I know it’s corny. I know you’ve been accosted on the street by fake smiles and fake enthusiasm and a tired old sales pitch like: “when you hear really good news, you don’t hide it, do you?” But I didn’t think I was like that (although I’m sure I was).

So I told all my friends that I had found Jesus, or he found me, or… well, more like on the walk of life I turned to look behind me and collided with him. And the shock of knowing he had always been there made me drop all my crap, but Jesus was a gentleman and was helping me pick it up. Some of my friends humored me and some retreated away from me. It got old for everyone pretty fast.

I started wishing I knew some grown-ups. I mean, grown-ups who would be excited for me. Christians over the age of 22, surely they must exist? Then I realized, hey, I know two. My parents had two Christian friends, and I had known them all my life.

Now, most of the blogs I read anonymize people’s names. It seems silly with a readership of, oh… like 4 now, I think. But I suppose we live in strange times. If my Dad can find my blog mere days after I set it up… anyway, let’s just call them Paul and Nan.

So I wrote to Paul and Nan, and told them that I had collided with Jesus and he was helping me pick up all my crap. I looked online for their address and sifted through pages on pages of their common last name until I found what I hoped was them.

And I swear, like a day and a half later I got a package in the mail. They had sent me books, great books on what to do after you and Jesus finish picking up the crap you dropped. And Nan wrote me a letter that was a thousand times better than the awkward champagne party. Hell, she might have been drinking champagne while she was writing, that woman was so happy. They celebrated with me in their letter. Of all the things I’ve ever lost, I think I’m most sad about having lost that letter. I don’t know what happened… in one of the moves since college it disappeared.

So that’s the back story. I promise this post really is about fear and prayer.

I got another letter from Nan yesterday, after she had read my post on Wrestling/Psalm 13. I read the first line of her email: “Your dad sent me your blog address today.” Then I had six heart attacks in a row.

Once I got over my dad finding my blog, I read the rest of Nan’s letter. It was about her experience with God and with prayer. If I try to summarize it I’ll ruin it… let’s just say that for every 99 people who can talk about the love of God, one person is stunned into silence because of it. Nan is in the 1%. She knows God loves her, and the rest of us just babble endlessly in hopes it will make him love us.

The point of her email, though, was to encourage me to pray about my fear and my godless thoughts. I’m not using that term ironically… they really are thoughts in which God is absent. And she said she was praying for me, which I cling to like a lifeboat, because I just don’t know how to pray anymore. I start praying then I use bad grammar in front of God, and how embarrassing is that?, so I stop.

And I started thinking about my fear, and what it’s meant in my life of faith. Grandpa John says “perfect love casts out fear” (“Grandpa John” is how I think of John in his letters in the New Testament. He reminds me of a toothless Grandpa that can’t throw you in the air anymore, but is hell-bent on making you know that you’re loved and should love others in return). And I think he’s right too, God’s love leaves no room for fear.

But I’m also pretty certain that this particular disease– fear and worry– will be much like doubt in my life. Never quite eradicated, but in good times, submitted to the will of God… and maybe for brief moments, invisible under all the awe and worship I have for him.

Nan talked about miracle healings, and I indulged my cynicism for a day. A family joke is that Jack’s Nana gets up so early because “there’s so much worrying to be done.” Like Jack’s Nana, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t fret. If God healed me of fear, he’d have to heal me of boredom next.

But then I remembered The Woods. And the way God healed, or delivered, me from The Woods. And I’m so embarrassed to have forgotten what God’s presence feels like, to have gotten an email from Nan and responded, at least in my mind, with sarcasm. If I’m going to talk about fear and prayer, I need to talk about The Woods.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Woods tomorrow.

Wrestling

I found a little booklet while I was unpacking called “Prayers from the Bible.” The prayers are divided into four sections: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication…or ACTS.

OH BUT WAIT a minute! ACTS is a book of the Bible! And a handy acrostic! This is to help me remember that God doesn’t want me to launch directly into “Shit that I want,” or STIW. Notice that there is no book of STIW in the Bible.

So naturally I flipped straight to the “Supplication” section. Because what I want to know is, what shit do the Bible People ask for? Because if the Bible People ask for it, surely I can too.

Here’s a random sampling of what the Bible People ask for:

“Show your strength, as you have done before.”

“Correct me, Lord, but only with justice–not in your anger, lest you reduce me to nothing.”

(Are you feeling like your prayers suck? I sure am)

“Help my friends grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”

Side note: I can’t help but notice that in the, ahem, editing process for this little booklet some Biblical prayers were left out, such as

“Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.”

Apparently the International Bible Society doesn’t want me praying that. Even though David did.

OH HO HO HANG ON!!! I just thought of something way better than ACTS…

AMOS!

Asking for Shit You Want

Moaning about Shit you Don’t Have

Obsessing over Shit You Don’t Want God to Take Away

Supplication.

Now doesn’t that come just so much more… naturally?

Okay, but none of this is what I meant to write about. What I set out to post was this: as I was flipping through the Supplication section, looking for ways to ask God for Shit that I Want, I found this prayer from Psalm 13. A supplicating prayer. Ready?

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?/ How long will you hide your face from me?…”

Do you hear the despair in those lines? David must have known such love and joy from the Lord, and an equal measure of sadness and fear at his absence.

The next line is absolutely shocking:

“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts/ and every day have sorrow in my heart?”

What happens when God hides his face? Think of the world without God’s presence.  Then listen to this again: How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?

I don’t know about you, but my thoughts are only about Shit that I Want. Then my prayers become about Shit that I Want. Not like a Wii or naturally hair-free legs… mostly I pray about not getting raped or murdered, not ever being unsafe or uncomfortable. Jack, I happen to know, prays that he will never ever appear inept at anything ever. Okay, maybe he doesn’t pray it. But I know he thinks it. He wrestles with the fear of failure just like I wrestle with fear for my safety.

And I don’t mean “wrestle” like “I’m trying to give it to God but it’s hard.” I mean that every day my imagination goes haywire. My nephew is kidnapped, I’m murdered in the woods, my mom is killed with me or else wails at my funeral. Even when I don’t do anything all day I’m exhausted from wrestling these horrible thoughts. When God hides his face (whatever that means), there is no joy or peace, just wrestling in my mind and sorrow in my heat.

Here is how the psalm ends:

“But I trust in your unfailing love;/ my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me”

And my final question is: how long did it take David to write this? Years? Decades? Because I’ve been stuck in the “how long must I wrestle with my thoughts” bit since, oh, like a day after I became a Christian. When do I get to move on to verbs like trust, rejoice, and sing?

I’m not much for Acrostics or pneumonic devices or corny sermons or really anything in Christiandom outside of Jesus and maybe Paul (and now, possibly David)… but tonight, I might be browsing the other sections of this booklet.