We aren't meant to do this alone

Photo by Rebecca Siegel

January 2018, on a trip back to Maryland:

I’m sitting in friends’ living rooms, and we’re talking about Big Ideas: community and faithful living and hospitality and parenting.

Only, we aren’t just talking about ideas, because their fridge is full of homemade hazelnut milk and granola, their backyard has chickens and a garden, their guest room is occupied by an Ethiopian asylee, they are on the ground entering their kids’ world through some delicate balance of play and instruction, structure and freedom. These friends are imperfect yet living embodiments of the ideas; they are an invitation into an alternative way of being.

And as I drive back to my parents’ house that evening I’m thinking how something in me—some part of me that longs for this deep, hard work of faithful living—is awake.

It is, of course, not the first time that they have invited me in. These are the same people who were once roommates. Who taught me to bike to work by literally showing me the way, who taught me to garden by handing me a shovel and a fresh tomato, who taught me hospitality by letting in the Jehovah’s witnesses for a glass of water, who brought rhythms of community prayer and laughter to my life at a time I needed it.

I have been shaped by them and others like them.

*

It’s a point that sticks with me, especially this month, this year. Here we are: February now, the time when just about everyone has given up on those New Year’s diets and gym habits. And is it honestly any surprise? Trying to muscle change through on the strength of our individual will is, except in the rarest of cases, a futile effort.

A pointed example—we recently marked the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. And I think of all the chatter, the determination a year ago:

The morning after the election when my husband told me, “we might have to hide people in our home,” meaning immigrants in danger of deportation.

The pro-refugee rally we attended with a friend, and spent the whole drive back brainstorming an alert program that could notify people of an ICE raid, so that allies could flock to a home or business and put their bodies in the way, to block violence and dissolution of families.

The millions of desperate calls and letters I wrote—my senators on speed dial, calling once a week at first—determined to do something even though this didn’t feel quite like the something that could make any difference to anyone.

Now, it’s a year later and there is no one hiding in our home. There have been no recent rallies, and far fewer calls to legislators. Maybe I need to muscle up and push through. But if I’m honest, it’s not a different law I’m longing for, not a different governement that will bring the changes I seek, because it’s about spirit and community. It’s about something that has to be lived.

And by the sheer force of my own efforts, I just haven’t been able to keep up the energy.

*

When I talk about the need for community, this is not just a hippie commune idea. It’s the same reason monks live in monasteries, because who could pray the psalms all day long on their own strength? It’s the same reason we have AA or study groups or meetings for prayer or parenting. Because we are better in community.

Growing doesn’t come naturally. Most of the best changes in my life have been painful, like pruning. Which is why we need each other to become the people we want to be. God knows I do.

A Tanzanian host family taught me to give up my private “me-time” in exchange for the treasure of belonging over kerosene-lit dinners of ugali and greens—and my sense of family expanded. That first group house in Maryland inculcated in me the hard work and discipline it takes to bring about a garden and a daily practice of prayer—and I grew more open-hearted. My chaplaincy group this year has given me a devastatingly honest glimpse of myself and in the process taught me how to love better.

I’m grateful for all that. And now I’m longing for a new level of engagement. I felt something real and important last month as I saw the effect of one afternoon in Maryland, soaking in shared wisdom. I’m not sure exactly what this new engagement will look like, or who it will help me be. I don’t know if it means deepened engagement in a current community, or embarking on something new. And I don’t know if it will make climate change stop or save a single person still under threat of deportation or make me better at prayer or teach me to speak more gently when I’m tired.

One thing I do know is that there are a few characteristics all of these great communities in my life have in common:

-Some version--often explicit but sometimes implicit--of a covenant, a commitment to one another. For my group house, or the folks at a summer camp, it was written out. In chaplaincy, we negotiated our norms and expectations with one another.

-A shared vision or purpose. Neighborly life together. Deepened spiritual practices. Reducing our impact on the environment.

-Grace. For ourselves, and for each other, because it’s messy and we couldn’t get far without grace.

Commitment—vision—grace. All of this sounds an awful lot like church. What church could be, should be. Deeper than showing up on Sundays and abstract reflections on Bible passages. The vision that beckoned me to be a pastor.

I’m currently seeking a position as a pastor in a church. So it all comes together, somehow, and the hope and prayer is this: that I may be so lucky as to find myself in such a place of authenticity and growth. That I may have the discernment and courage to commit when the time and place is right. That I may play some part in helping to shape and be shaped by deep community.

The political is personal

I cried at least once a day for the first ten days after November 8.

There are a lot of reasons, and there is no single reason I can explain. But it’s been a month now, and its time for me to start writing stories again. Because stories are how I process the world, and goodness knows we need to process, and because stories will be so important in these months as we try to remember how to love one another.

This story is imperfect and selfish and true and has nothing to do with policy, really. And it’s not at all the most pressing reason to mourn, but it’s one that has somehow cut me deep in these weeks.

Photo by Walter A. Aue

On November 8, 2016, no matter how you spin it, this country chose as its next president an (alleged) sexual predator over a qualified (if polarizing) woman.

I could not have predicted the blow that that feels like to me as a woman.

During the campaign, I was more anti-Trump than pro-Hillary. And my chief concerns with Trump were about the effect his presidency could have on undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ people, international relations, the environment, free speech…I could go on…

The point is, I didn’t feel a personal threat or affront as a white woman. And I didn’t feel a particular attachment to Hillary. It took me several days of sobbing to realize that my grief after the election was not only for all the anger and fear and pain for people I care about (and probably also some kind of illusion/idolatry I’ll explore later), but was also deeply personal.

In one of the more poignant moments of the debates, Hillary said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self worth, and I don't think there is a woman anywhere who doesn't know what that feels like.”

I felt that. I know that. But I didn’t know, until 3 am on November 9, what it feels like to see that a person who treats women in this way, in word and deed, is judged fit to be our president.

I didn’t know what it feels like to hear in a concession speech a reminder to girls that they are valuable and powerful—and to sense that it was a word that needed to be said, a word that could no longer be assumed. “To all the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful,” she said, and I sobbed.

When I was eleven years old I became the president of my elementary school’s student council. I was really into it—whether as a power trip or because I really cared about which Lisa Frank items we sold at the school store, I can’t say. My grandma bought me a gavel for Christmas with the words, “President Katie” engraved on it. I told everyone I was going to be the first woman president of the United States. “Hopefully,” my mom said, “that will happen before you’re old enough to be president.”

In mid-October, with Hillary’s double-digit lead in the polls, I recalled this moment and smiled. My mom was right! We would have a woman president before I turn thirty-five. But I’ll be thirty-five in 2021, and (barring the problematic and improbable #Michelle2020) now my mom looks so naïve. Now, it looks like we were not at all ready for a woman president, so not ready we chose him. (And oh, I know it’s more complicated than woman vs. man, but I do think sexism played more of a role than we realize in Hillary’s unpopularity).

When I think of the convention center Hillary chose on election night for its glass ceiling, I understand why she couldn’t bear to speak that night in that space. I would’ve wanted to smash it.

//

But it goes beyond this, too. It turns out that I developed a fondness for Hillary, a personal sympathy far beyond my initial skepticism of her candidacy. Because when I think of a qualified woman being rebuffed for a job, when I think of how hard it is to be a woman in her career field, I think also of my own journey.

My church taught me that women cannot be pastors, and I think I believed it, or at least I let it seep into me, enough that I was 24 before I realized I might have a calling in the church.

I still love the church that raised me. They are loving and radically welcoming of immigrants and dedicated to the arts and marvelously anti-Trumpian and all the things you might not expect of a church that taught me women can’t preach. (Things are never what we expect, are they?)

In July, I happened to visit on the day that a peer of mine had been invited back to preach. He was being ordained that afternoon in our very church. And as he began to speak, at the same moment I felt excited that he was stepping into the path of his calling—I was overcome by a dull sadness.

Because I will never be invited to preach in that church.

Perhaps some of those church members will one day come to a church where I preach, and perhaps they will pray for my ministry, and surely there will always be hugs and love and encouragement for me in that place. But the church that first gave me a space to use my gifts in God’s service—a sanctuary in which to sing my first solo, a microphone to share my testimony of faith, a pulpit to write my first sermon, which was okay because it was a skit for youth Sunday—will not invite me back into that space.

The truth is, the hurt I feel from all of this isn’t strong or permanent; it comes in waves. It happened to be magnified on that day. But I left the church at 23, before I wanted to be a pastor. I never butted my head up against their (rather opaque) glass ceiling. I never tried to change their minds. It would hurt more if I had.

//

When I visit this church, I’ve never quite been sure how to talk with people about my career. I mention the places where I have been interning or the classes I’m taking, and most people are deeply supportive and interested. But still every word I speak feels to me too political, confrontational. By being who I have been called to be, I am an affront their system. So sometimes I talk about the community service program I started, and don’t emphasize the controversial parts like preaching. And when asked if I’m hoping to work with youth or be a chaplain I try to shake my head gently and explain that no, I want to be a pastor.

That Sunday my friend was preaching, the district president (our version of a bishop) was in attendance, and someone introduced me to him. He seemed apologetic about the place of women in our church. “Our denomination has lost a lot of very talented women to other churches,” he said sympathetically. In usual form, I smiled and shifted the topic to keep things non-controversial.

In this post-election, time, though, I want to engage more honestly, vulnerably, and fully in places like this. I wish I’d said, directly and gently to him, “Yes, you have lost us.” I wish I’d said, “It’s painful to me to hear my friend preach here this morning and know I’ll never be able to do that.” It probably would have been good for him to hear.

There will be many times when it is important to speak in the days ahead. And I know myself enough to know I’ll need a lot of fierce prayer to stay patient and keep telling stories. But after Hillary, after the tenacity of that glass ceiling, after the startling toleration in this season for violence and words against women, I’m no longer going to be sheepish--anywhere--about the political overtones of my calling or my identity or my beliefs or my story or the Jesus I believe in. 

It’s more dangerous to be quiet.

Open-hearted

To be open-hearted: this is my touchstone for the summer.

You may guess that is because I see in myself over the last couple years, a tendency towards walls, towards clenching, towards closed-heartedness. I am not sure why I stopped playing the piano and writing tears into my journal and keeping my soul open to the kind and unkind things that people said. I only know now, that it is easier to watch TV than to write in a journal. It is easier to tolerate people than to love them. It is easier to be busy than to be still.

To be open-hearted­ comes with such risk.

*

I was the epitome of an open heart, then. I was aching and frightened but so tender, so ready for healing, ready to meet God, however terrifying God might be.

So I sat, broken heart and all, fears and failures and all, on a roof under the stars in Tanzania and I said to two people whom I had met less than a week before, I am going to need community.

But who tells two people you have just met that you are aching from a rough year and desperately need their friendship? Deep needs should be reserved for a friendship of six months, at least.

The hazy, humid air was silent except with the buzzing of mosquitos, and I wished I hadn’t said it, but the words were unswallowable.

Wondering if you’ve said too much is a byproduct, I think, of life open-hearted. I was just naïve enough to hope these people might actually care. (I was lucky. It turned out that they did.)

*

This summer, I am trying to be naïve enough to imagine that people care.

To imagine that I might have something to offer to the woman sitting next to me who is just out of prison, motivated for her recovery from addictions, and desperate for a job. To imagine that she might have something to offer to me. It may be a long shot, but I have to be prepared for the moment when it comes.

To intentionally drain the demanding, sarcastic tone from my voice before I speak to my husband. Instead, to tell him how soft and vulnerable I feel, how unlike myself. Perhaps, in that one moment he misinterprets my tone, senses me accusing again, and snaps back, I will hurt. But I keep my heart exposed anyway, because the oxygen and the yearning will bring it healing.

To let theology be simple sometimes. “I don’t question God,” the man sitting next to me says at support group. “I just ask for help for myself and others for today.”

To return with trepidation to my long-abandoned journal, unafraid of what I might learn about myself, about God. Even if the truth hurts, it will set me free.

*

Church of the Saviour is a good place to be, for all of this. It is rather a way of life, here, to ask and be asked, “what is your deep need?” It is hard to get far here without sharing from an open heart.

In one of the groups, I am asked to share my “money autobiography”—all the thoughts, feelings, and experiences I’ve had around money throughout my life.

When I was in perhaps middle school, I asked my mother about how mortgage worked. This led into a conversation about her income, worth of the house, debt, and various other personal financial details. At the end of the conversation, she told me that I should probably not discuss any of the information with others. They are not the types of details that we share publicly.

They are not. And yet, in this community, sharing them is part of the practice of being open-hearted and together. So I try to share honestly about money—not dollar amounts, but the experiences of giving and receiving, of shame and conflict and generosity and hurt and acceptance and power that have surrounded my life as a person in an economic world.

I enter the room anxious, but when I leave, I know that we all have struggles with money, and no matter what the details—rich or poor, envy or shame—we are in it together. We need each other.

*

Three days later, on Sunday, there is a period in the church service where people can share aloud their gratitude, or their prayer requests.

In most churches in my experience, church prayer requests follow an unspoken rule of being restricted to aunts with cancer, travel safety, and grief for a lost relative. But here today, a woman’s voice is cracking as she speaks about her friend whose father is returning from ten years in prison, and another woman is crying with joy about her sister’s return to this country after two years abroad, and a man in the back shares that his work has, and a grandmother says she is just so grateful for her daughter-in-law who has been a pillar of strength as her son is going through a hard time.

You sit there listening, and if there is something on your heart, you feel that maybe next week you might be brave enough to share it. You feel like people really want to know what’s going on with you, like people are really willing to tell you what’s going on with them. You feel there is a sense of deep caring and deep trust. It gives you inspiration, and you think you feel the walls crumbling a little bit in your own heart.

A time to mourn: My seminary encounter with Christian violence toward Jews

If I had to tell you one seismic shift in my thinking since starting seminary, it would be the way I understand Jews and Judaism. My favorite classes have been Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and Hebrew. I've had multiple professors who are experts in historical Jewish-Christian relations. And I have been smacked in the face with the grief of the way my religion has treated our such close Jewish brothers and sisters.

I was not, or at least I thought I was not, anti-Jewish in any way before I came here. But sometimes we don't realize the subtle ways our beliefs build walls or breed condescension.

Like a good Christian, I saw the Jewish faith in some way as incomplete, misguided, overshadowed by the advent of Jesus Christ, as though God's intimate and messy history with the people of Israel were no longer worth much attention, except as it prefigures Jesus or reveals human brokenness.

Like a good progressive whose husband spent a year living in the West Bank under the shadow of the Israeli dividing wall, I mourned the way Israel went from oppressed to oppressor. I began to associate Judaism with 18-year-olds on catwalks holding AK-47s, pointing them down to intimidate all who travel through the Bethlehem checkpoint from Palestine into Israel. I began to associate Judaism with Europeans living in wealthy modern cities built on the tears of displaced people. (Americans, and Christians are of course implicated also in these things, which are never simple.)

I still believe Jesus changes everything. God did a new thing in Jesus, but there must be a way to hold that newness in tension with the good and faithful things God was doing and continues to do through the covenant with Israel.

I still believe that, though it is complicated and sometimes painful to talk about, though there is mutual violence and enmity, the state of Israel should be rebuked for the times it has been an oppressor. But this should not define Judaism.

*

Meanwhile.

Did you know that in the middle ages, Christians made up stories about Jews desecrating the bread of Holy Communion in order to justify killing or expelling them from cities?

Did you know that the Nazis extensively used the language of Martin Luther and other Protestant Christian reformers to build up their rhetoric against the Jews in the 1930s?

Did you know that on the way to "take back Jerusalem" in the First Crusade, and aflame with apocalyptic ideas, Christians pillaged and ransacked Jewish cities and killed their brothers and sisters?

Did you know that language from our very own Gospels was used for centuries to view Jews as children of the devil, killers of Jesus, stubbornly unreachable?

Did you know it's not over today, or at least, its felt ramifications are not over today, in the small ways Jews hear our language as superiority, in the small ways our assumptions carry forward?

All of this I deeply mourn.

*

So especially this week, a week when so many of us Christians will unthinkingly associate Jews with the death of Jesus, a week when so many of us Christians will celebrate the historic event that seems to us sometimes to render any of God's work in the world before the time of Jesus as irrelevant or secondary at best, I want to pause and celebrate the beauty that I have found as I've learned more about Judaism.

The Hebrew Bible is an exceedingly beautiful religious text, remarkable for its time.

I love that out of all the ancient religions of the Near East, the Jewish people were the only ones who lost their land and kingdom and independence and yet did not lose their God. Instead of believing (as was typical) that the destruction of their kingdom was a sign their God was not strong enough, or had abandoned them, they believed that their God went with them into exile, and 3 generations later brought them back.

I love that the vast majority of works preserved in ancient Hebrew are theology. We have references to other literature, like political records and court documents, but what was important enough to them to preserve was the story about God.

I love that God's crowning act of creation and a centerpiece of God's law given to Israel is a day of rest. (A day which Christians have largely ignored or explained away, and then have said Judaism is a religion of works and Christianity a religion of mercy.)

And if this is not enough...Jesus himself was deeply Jewish. Christians have sometimes divorced his teachings and theology from its Jewish roots, offering a caricature that paints the Torah as legalistic and Jesus as focused on the heart. But Jesus' teachings are deeply connected with the Hebrew Scriptures, and many of his "innovations" have long precedent in the Torah (Here's a great book about that.) His last word, his last prayer, was a Psalm.

All of this--all this beauty, all this pain, all this mangled history--calls me to mourn. I mourn for the violence of my heritage, and I mourn for the years of missing out on so much richness of my spiritual heritage by not looking deeply into the Torah and the offerings of historical Judaism. I come now to a place of humility, and I think now is my time to listen, and learn, from the tradition that taught the world so much about God, and shaped even my Jesus in his ministry to all.

Ode to New Leaf Church

Last week, New Leaf Church met for the final time in College Park. This lovely little church community made the courageous decision that it was time to die.

I wasn’t there; I haven’t been there for a while. The community had changed a lot since I left in 2012. It had no longer been the focal point of my returning when I visit DC. It had become a diaspora of young people moving and visions shifting and needs changing. In emails and conversations from those still there, I sense gratitude and acceptance around the ending of this place. I also know there has been some rupture, some hurt.

So I’m not sure how to receive this news.

*

I am twenty something and I arrive back home, after five years gone to college and Africa, and I am not the same; home is not the same; maybe God is not the same. I have lifelong friendships here, and these lovely people buoy me up as I adjust, but there is something missing: a community, a place that is big enough for the new me, a place to belong.

When I find it in this funny group of people called New Leaf Church, I catch myself laughing harder than I’ve laughed in a year. I catch myself feeling, sometimes, that I’ve never been more at home, never more fully understood, than in this place, with these people.

It is not true in the strictest sense, because I have been at home before: on a sleepover with girls who have known me through pimples and braces; on a starry night with blankets by a lake in Pennsylvania; in a sunlit cafeteria with bowls of rice noodles and baby corn and love through growing pains; even for a moment in a ten-thousand miles-away concrete classroom in Africa, singing with other homesick girls. I'm grateful for all. At New Leaf, though, there is something new: I am known, for the first time, as an adult. My ideas and gifts and talents are accepted and prized in new ways.

This is a kind of joy I needed. I am playing silly games in a brightly-lit living room, and I am praying fervent prayers by a candle lit at twilight on a winter Sunday, and I am creating new recipes or learning how to bike to work, taught by new roommates in a new neighborhood.

*

We are moving chairs and putting away instruments and microphones after church on Sunday evening, and they tell me that they want to start a writing group: a Friday night potluck where we can share our words. This group of nerds and me, we gather around vegetarian pizza and herbal tea and we read poems and stories and confessions, reluctantly at first but deeper as we grow. I learn to share of myself in a different way than I’ve been allowed to before—a way that fits me. Something amazing is at work. Writing group seems to invite all kinds of disparate people together into friendship, seems to welcome people who aren’t so sure about church, seems to be an authentic way to be open about our fears and our craziest creative ideas and our Jesus.

Without writing group, I don’t know if I’d have ever started my own blog once I moved away. I don’t know if I’d have ever come to believe that by being honest with a blank page, my story could matter to someone else.

At one point, the group started a blog called Resurrections. I guess it is fitting now. I can’t help but believe that New Leaf’s disbanding will not be the end of its impact.

*

In 2010, I catch my first conscious inkling that I might want to go to seminary. I have coffee with a New Leaf friend who is in seminary, and after a two-week panic of "if-I'm-going-to-do-this-I-must-do-it-NOW!" I let the thought drift away for a while.

It keeps coming back, through hospital waiting rooms and unexpected job interviews and the patient persistence of the Holy Spirit. I work in another lovely church for a while, and keep attending New Leaf in the evenings. I start thinking maybe I will really follow this inkling in my heart.

Three weeks before my wedding, four weeks before my move to a new state (which I am not looking forward to), I am signed up to preach the sermon at New Leaf, and I wrestle over it late into Saturday night and even into Sunday afternoon, never quite getting it right, revising in my head as I drive around the beltway to church. The topic is Jesus' words, “Do not worry,” so how could I really get it right, when worrying is all I do lately? I feel so inadequate, so presumptuous, to pretend to speak words from God.

I arrive a few minutes late (traffic) and I am invited to sit on a stool with a small group of people I love sitting around. The message comes to life as I speak. I am not funny but they are laughing at my jokes. I don’t have it figured out but in the discussion afterwards some insights come to light. We meditate in silence, and Jesus is here.

Afterwards, a few different people put a hand on my shoulder and tell me they see in me the gifts to be a pastor. They know I am thinking about seminary still, and they tell me to leap ahead, to go for it. On a hike a couple weeks ago, another woman in the community also affirmed me in this way. Today, here, I look around at the faces and I realize I am going to go for it. I am really going to take this leap of faith, apply to seminary, be a pastor.

This community, the one that has been my home, gives me the courage to live fully into my gifts. They echo the quiet whispers in my heart, confirming what I already hope and fear and know about my future. I am full of gratitude and love for this community, and I see how ministry can be enlivened by deep relationships; I see how I could be a pastor of a place like this.

*

What does it mean that a church where I felt home, where I felt called to ministry, where I felt affirmed in my gifts—no longer exists?

I don’t know.

What I know is I’m grateful. For the people who struck off on a risky venture and started a church in a new place, with a new idea of authentic community and spiritual depth and commitment to the poor. For the people who taught and sang and baked bread and folded chairs and made power point presentations and prayed and sent emails and offered bread and wine. For the people who kept going even when it hurt, and for the people who knew it was time to say goodbye. For the people who let me sing, the people who let me write, the people who believed in me enough to give me a wooden stool and a microphone to speak the gospel, the people who held my tears when Grandma died and danced like fools at my wedding.

New Leaf is no longer a worshiping community. But it is not a failure. It has been, and still is, a deep blessing in my life. I would not have become who I am without New Leaf.

And I know I am not the only one.

What I'd give for a cup of coffee

Photo by Chichacha

I visit Grandma in the nursing home where she is rehabbing from pneumonia. It is a lovely, mild summer day, and I wheel her out into the garden. We sit on a bench and talk. She asks about my job situation, and I launch into it all. I am renewing my contract to teach adult literacy and I enjoy it and it is stressful and not forever and it is good experience and helps my resume and I am learning and I love working with low-income and marginalized people and I am somehow not using all my gifts and I want to work in an area more basic and physical and human.

“You think very deeply about your career,” she says when I finally stop to take a breath. “I’ve never been so deep and thoughtful as you.” I start to protest but she keeps going. “I am sure you will be wonderful at whatever you do.”

*

We are standing around her bed in the ICU. We have just made the decision to pull the feeding tube and the oxygen, because we have all, in the last week, slowly come to terms with the fact that this stroke was fatal, that even if she were to wake up she would not be herself, that this is not another cancer she is going to fight off or another bout with pneumonia that she will come through. This is the time to say goodbye.

The doctors say after they pull the oxygen, it will be a matter of hours. We gather and call in her pastor, and we begin to pray and sing hymns. Our family is founded on music, so in four-part harmony, we sing her favorite songs from the Presbyterian hymnal. The words to the hymns have never meant so much. This is grief, this is letting go, this is worship. The pastor brings our singing to a close with a liturgy for the dying. We unclasp our hands, touch our faces to her still-warm body, and exhale, surrendering to the blips on the monitor.

At one a.m. we are still sitting there, blinking to stay awake, alternating laughs and tears, waiting for her to go. We are her children, all, and this grief has brought us together, and we have never been so certain of our calling as this moment, in which are called to be with her, to be a family, to fill this room with love.

On Friday afternoon when it is finally over, I go home and write three poems for her and then I cry and fall asleep.

*

I write a thank you note to her pastor, enclosing the generous donation of my friends. I say, You will probably never know how meaningful your presence was, how life-changing those days were for me, learning to lean into the loss and celebrate the life and release her into resurrection. I think, what meaningful work it is to be a pastor, to be with people in those crucial moments, to offer a prayer and a liturgy in which they can pour out their goodbye in the presence of God. I think, I would love a job where I could be with people in that basic, human way.

*

Now, four years have passed, and I have enrolled in seminary, and this summer as a pastoral intern in the country, I visit lovely old ladies in homes and nursing homes and hospitals. There is one ninety-something firecracker who is organizing a Fourth-of-July parade; she shows me the archives of photos for the last eight parades. There is another ninety-something who is thoughtful and kind and wants to hear about my life even though her hearing impairment prevents understanding most of it.

There is a little bit of Grandma in both of these women, and I think of her often this summer.

*

I am waiting in an airport when the desire hits me strong—for just a cup of coffee and a couple hours to catch up.

I would tell her about my new path, seminary, the road to becoming a pastor or chaplain or minister of some sort. She would ask me how I came to this path, and whether I mind public speaking. The idea of me as a minister would make her happy, I think, and over it she would speak a word of encouragement and acceptance and love. 

I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

Poetry, song, and the language of faith

Photo by saffroncisco

When I started asking big questions in college, when I started drowning in my own thoughts and fears and the simultaneous existential crises of my friends, I could not turn to theologians or philosophers or scientists or even pastors for respite. I see now as I look back that even when my mind was rebelling, questioning, unsettling, I had a truer kind of knowing in poetry, music, and art.

During that time of my life, and many times since, the book I have continued to return to is a lovely little reflection on faith and art: Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle, who writes about “probable impossibilities,” about naming and being named, about vulnerability and faithful doubt. Her approach of honest questioning, coupled with the openness to receive and affirm it all, has stayed with me.

“I have been asked if my Christianity affects my stories,” L’Engle writes in Walking on Water, “and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my faith, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner back into an awed faith.”

My stories, yes. And the stories and poems of others. My faith has been formed and re-formed and renewed in the poetry of songs and hymns and liturgy.

So at a time faithful people are abuzz with what kind of programs and churches and relationships and opportunities and strategies are the best for helping the young and the old cultivate their faiths, I want to offer simply this: let us not forget the arts.

I sang in my mom’s church choir when I was old enough to talk. And little by little, as I grew, I noticed the words in the songs. I began to cut out pieces of the church bulletin that held prayers or liturgy or music I liked. I taped them in a little pink journal. I began to close my eyes during the songs we sang, to sense the wonder of Christmas, the agony of the passion story, the joy of Easter.

The poetry of sacred music was not restricted to church, because God cannot be restricted. I found God everywhere good music and good poetry were offered.

In high school, we sang secular music, sure. We also sang gospel: The storm is passing over, hallelu. We sang Mozart: Hail true body, born of the virgin Mary, who truly suffered and sacrificed on the cross for humanity. We sang poetry, scripture, psalms, laments.

There were songs that touched my heart more deeply than any sermon. The idea of listening for God’s guidance first struck me when I was ten and sang, Do you know your shepherd’s voice?

I experienced the power of nonviolence and justice during a high school choral tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.: The world is sick with war. When I lost my voice in eleventh grade, I leaned into Jesus: if my joys and comforts die, I know Truth is living.

I felt peace in the midst of newness in my first college choir rehearsal when we sang the twenty-third Psalm, and I meant it wholeheartedly when I sang in sophomore year of college, the time of my doubt, why should I wander an alien from Thee?

And years later, I still feel shivers of truth and beauty every time I sing certain hymns.

So I think what I want to say is simply that I am grateful: to the poets, the liturgists, the composers; to the music teachers, conductors, and mothers; and to a creative God, for the ways in which art can invigorate us, pull us back to amazement, for the ways in which we, as artists, are made co-creators with God and dreamers in an unfulfilled world.

Mix CDs and mustard seeds

Photo by Linda Tanner

It was six a.m., and I was driving to Duke Divinity School for orientation.

I was thinking of a recent faith conversation with my brother. I did not articulate my point of view clearly, and I was wondering—if I can’t speak definitive answers about theology, do I have any gifts at all for ministry? Has my vision has become too vague?

Naturally, these thoughts led me to the recurring whisper in the back of my head, that little voice which says, do you really believe any of this at all? If you are so scattered, so vulnerable sometimes, so unwilling to prove anything concrete—can you truly be a shepherd for other believers?

I am not ready to become a pastor, I was thinking. I have squandered this wilderness time in Cherokee. I have not prayed enough. I have become more cynical, sometimes snarky. Seven years after the “doubt crisis,” I am still an intermittent doubter—sometimes of God and sometimes of myself.

Besides, I thought, I know that I am good at teaching. Why change careers now? Teaching GED classes matters. It is meaningful. For the most part, it is safe.

My mix CD changed to an old Nickel Creek tune.

Can I be used to help others find truth if I’m scared I’ll find proof that it’s a lie?

Can I be led down a trail dropping breadcrumbs that prove I’m not ready to die?

Please give me time to decipher the signs

Please forgive me for time that I’ve wasted

I’m a doubting Thomas

I’ll take your promise

Though I know nothing’s safe

Oh me of little faith

When the song was finished, and my tears, I pressed repeat. I pressed repeat about eighty times, singing along as a plea, as a prayer, until I arrived at Duke.

*

Imagine, for a moment: this is how it has been for you and doubts.

You have a question and you climb down a rabbit hole to follow it to its depths, because if you don’t you will always wonder, you will always worry. And when you follow it down, you find the hole does not go on forever; there is something solid below, something to stand on. You stand on it.

But you don’t live into these questions every day; you can’t spend all your days chasing shadows and digging holes. So most of the time when the shadows cross, you watch them go. They are mostly shadows you’ve already followed all the way down.

You are going on your memory, and like all memories it is hard to retain the certainty of that feeling. You did find solid ground that day when you reached the bottom, you are certain…right?

The thought of starting seminary this fall terrifies you, because you know you will be diving down into some of the holes again, and it is possible they are deeper than you have yet known.

*

I arrived at campus, still a little weepy, humble.

But as soon as it had begun I could sense that they were going to remind me why I was here.

They said remember that you are loved deeply and gifted uniquely by God.

They said remember that the church does not exist for its own sake; it needs to serve and love the world; it is the body of Christ on earth and it must sometimes learn to die so that it may come to life again.

They said remember that the kingdom of God is about all of us—poor and rich, privileged and unprivileged, powers and marginalized, believers and doubters, black and white—seeing each other as children of God, seeing each other as both gifted and broken. It is about all of us, giving and receiving and sharing together.

I remembered. I remembered that this is good news, particularly for the poor and broken. I remembered that the kingdom of God has grabbed me and continues to grab me, that this is why I believe in spite of my doubts, that I can be healed from my loneliness and my numbness and my fears, that I am not in this for a stable job but for a vision and a sacrifice and a resurrection. I remembered that joy is a fruit of the spirit.

I drove back thirty-six hours after arriving, my heart hurting from the good news and the good people and the good God. I felt crushed, wrecked for my status quo, and certain that this place will continue to draw me forth and form me. It was not the first time I have departed that place in tears of longing and belonging.

When I played the Nickel Creek one last time as I drove over the last mountain back home, I heard it differently.

Oh me of little faith. Perhaps a little is enough. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. He said, a mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it is planted in the ground, it grows and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and all the birds of the air nest in it.

I am embarking on a good and beautiful journey. I am ready to plant my small, sometimes-wavering, vulnerable seed of faith in the soil. I am ready for the Spirit, and the risen Christ, and my new community, to make it grow into a tree where birds will sing. 

When words build walls

Photo by The Delicious Life

We are sitting in a diner, the twilight sun of a beautiful day shining across our plates as we talk, as we catch up. I am telling her about my current quest to discern where I will fit as a pastor—in which brand of church. I smile and stutter quickly past the main options, knowing all of them will be more liberal than the churches in which she finds herself at home.

She was my Christian buddy at public high school. In between the singing in choir and eating chocolate and walking to the creek to test the water for our science project, I would cling to her and ask, “what have you been reading about in the Bible lately?” and “can you pray for me?”

Now, as we are sitting eating spinach salads and basking in this first warm spring day, I notice that I feel self-conscious about my career path and my church journey. She hasn't said anything to suggest judgment, but even still, I worry that somehow the new trajectory makes me less Christian in her eyes.

In order to justify myself, I resort awkwardly to the old language. “I’m sure God will lead me to the right place,” I say, though the truth is I feel more vulnerable than sure, and I can’t wrap it up so neatly, and I’m not sure these days how exactly providence does its work.

*

In certain company, I have started to feel defensive about my faith. I feel the need to throw in phrases like, “praying about it” and “God is calling me”—whether or not I’m praying about it, whether it’s God’s voice or my best approximation that I am pursuing.

I’m not sure when it started, but I think it has to do with two litmus-test items in conservative Christianity. I am a woman who decided to become a pastor. And, worse, I came out as a supporter of gay marriage. By simply being who I believe I am called to be, I worry that I have become controversial, maybe heretical to them. They are my friends. I still look up to them in so many ways. They aren't stereotypes (unloving w/ heads in the sand), just as I am not a stereotype (unwilling to take the Bible seriously or sacrifice for faith). I want to stay connected, keep the conversation going. So I feel the need to show them that my faith is still vibrant, real, spirit-filled.

I suspect it is mostly in my perception. There really is no need to be defensive, to throw in the language I usually don’t use anymore because I have become more careful about words and their theological implications. Maybe it is really I who judge myself: I think of how me of five years ago would have looked at me now and wondered about her devotion. Or maybe I am afraid that if I no longer speak my friends’ language, or what I think is their language, we will no longer understand each other. Maybe I am grasping at straws because if I have come to this, there are definitely some ways in which we no longer understand each other, or no longer give each other the chance to sit down late at night and explain where our paths have taken us.

I worry that if I have to prove myself still Christian enough to use those words, maybe I am insecure about something deeper, about my own connection to the source and the ways in which it has become difficult to pray, difficult to hear God’s voice. Maybe that difficulty exists because I am in some kind of wilderness, or because by my pride I have put a wall there, or because I am not trying hard enough, or simply because I am in a spiritual middle where some forms and rituals have to die in order to spring forth again in new life.

I am tempted to end this post by some beautiful description of a transcendent experience in which I show that I am still Christian enough, in which I make you see that I am deeply connected to God, that I am in fact actually more Christian than I was when I used all the lingo without second thought.

But that is not true. We’re on a journey. You, me, the feminists and the LGBT advocates, the ones who have strong convictions against women pastors and the ones who have strong convictions against gay marriage, the ones who believe in hell, the ones who don’t, the ones who don’t know, the ones who are hurting and lonely, the ones who feel like they can touch God when they pray, the ones whose faith is simple and unassuming and matter-of fact. All of us. I have been in different places on this journey, forward and backward and sideways, and I am here now, and maybe we are in the same place or maybe we are in different places, but we are together on this journey. And God is still working, molding us.

So today, it turns out, is really about confession. 

I have not been completely honest. I sometimes use words as walls. I am sorry. 

As our paths diverge and twist and then meet again, I want to give you myself as I am: plain clothes and plain words, weaknesses and deep convictions and wobbly steps towards a kingdom. I hope you will understand and love me that way. I want to share this journey with you, to see you and understand you and love you, just as you are.

Becoming Pastor Katie

This is (one angle on) the complicated, messy story of my journey to Duke Divinity School, where I will begin my studies next month.

Photo by Keith Kissel

We are yawning through our Sunday school or confirmation class and we are debating what societal roles are acceptable for women. I have no desire to join the military so I could care less when we debate the role of soldier, and I am fairly certain we are going to have a woman president within a few years, so that part of the discussion seems superfluous. But when we get to pastor, I pause. I have the sense that this question matters beyond our class today. Matters to us. To me.

My teacher shows us a Bible verse: Women should be silent in the churches. And another one: I do not permit women to teach or have authority over a man. My friend protests, but I am looking at the words right there, and I take the Bible so seriously, and I can’t see a way to wriggle around it.

That night, I ask my mom what she thinks. She tells me some of her best friends are lady pastors, and if they are sharing the gospel of God’s love in Christ, she can’t see why God wouldn’t approve.

*

I have volunteered to share my testimony—the story of my incredibly unexciting spiritual journey to age fourteen—in church. I walk to the front of the congregation, grab the microphone, and talk about learning to pray, learning to trust God rather than popularity or success at school. At the end, I tell them that I want my whole life to be about serving God.

The people in the congregation smile proudly at me as I look around the sanctuary. Afterwards, a few come and tell me they enjoyed my speech.

The official teaching of our church is that women can’t preach. But it doesn’t seep down far into our culture. This feels like a good thing. Women serve and lead in almost every ministry. They are elders, they read the scripture, they serve communion, they speak in church, they lead youth group, they teach Sunday school to adults and to children. I have always felt free. I have never felt limited.

It’s just that when I start to think about serving God with my life, and what that will look like, the idea of being a pastor never occurs to me.

*

At camp every summer, I live with a community of girls for two weeks, and my I get my yearly quota of deep, spiritual conversations. On Sunday mornings, women and men speak in front of the whole camp, sharing their life stories. In Bible studies, my lady counselors blow my mind with new ideas about living life for God. During rest periods, I creep over to counselors’ bunks and ask for wisdom, and these women encourage me to grow.

It is one of my deepest, loveliest summers—a summer of stars and brownies and skinny dipping and late-night whispers—and I am exploring in this place that is expansive, open. I have started to question some of the teachings of my church, especially the political ones. “What do you think,” I ask my counselor, “about women being pastors?”

“Well,” she says slowly, “I don’t know for sure. But I do wonder whether women have the necessary qualities to lead a whole church.” She stutters a little. “I mean, personally, I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors as I have from men.”

I breathe in thoughtfully, nodding. For the moment, it makes sense. I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors either, I think. It is a safe phrase to hide behind when the Bible is ambiguous—this pretense of personal experience. For several years, it becomes my line.

But the truth is, I have never had a woman as an official pastor to “get” things from.

And yet most of my spiritual development has been guided by women.

*

I am twenty-three and working in the nonprofit field, serving God with my life by loving the poor. I enjoy my clients, but something is missing in my relationship with them, something about sharing stories and doing life together and delving into the big questions.

John has been teasing me for a couple years now. He says I need a job where I can talk about faith; therefore I should become a pastor’s wife. He says this flippantly, to mock established roles and bring lightness to heavy conversations.

When he says it, I laugh. The idea that I could take the word wife off of the phrase and then claim pastor as my calling, still doesn’t register.

Until one night I am reading Bonhoeffer, and something in the words on the page leaps out at me, and echoes of the past months reverberate around me, and I realize that pastor is a word for the things I feel most called to.

After a few excited, sleepless nights, I tuck it away. I know my personality; I am an Enneagram Type One whose deepest fear is of being ethically wrong, whose deepest hope is to be so good that I am beyond condemnation by anyone. I am still a tiny bit afraid to make waves, to become something that could possibly be against God’s plan, something that could draw confused looks from my more conservative friends.

I keep working in nonprofit, and then a church job literally drops in my lap and I think, Okay God, point taken, I will try it and see what happens.

*

In June 2012, Rachel Held Evans hosts a “Week of Mutuality” on her blog, which is a glorious bombardment of posts designed to make the case that the Bible supports equality for women in the church. I eagerly tune in each night, learning about women apostles and Greco-roman household codes and an end to patriarchy. I devour everything, and the last strands “women should be silent” are removed, and the last whispers of “I’ve never met a good woman pastor” slip away.

At the end of the week, I feel utterly free.

A few days later, I have this transcendent moment in a glorious church. I confess to God all my fears of being wrong or controversial or inadequate. The organ is echoing in my heart, and the desire to follow this small voice is now greater than my fears, and I know it is time to take the next step.

Loving my enemy

Photo  by Kate Williams

On Sunday, I was assigned to give the children’s moment at church. Struck with what I thought could only be a shot of 11:30pm-the-night-before inspiration, I conjured up a lesson to go with Valentine’s Day.

I stopped by the dollar store at 10:30am on my way to church the next morning and bought some Valentine lollipops. I talked with the kids about Valentine’s Day and people we love and explained that Jesus calls us to love enemies and strangers and people who are different—not just friends and family. I gave them each two lollipops, one to keep and one to give to someone who is mean to them or someone they don’t know very well.

One kid went straight back to his seat and handed the extra lollipop to his older brother.

*

Who can internalize the radical enemy-love? While we admire Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, which of us really learns how to truly forgive and love our enemies?

Whenever I read these words from Jesus, my first thought is to skip over them. I don’t have enemies. By grace, I’ve never been hurt by someone in a way I couldn’t forgive. The only personal enemies I can think of today are friends’ exes, and it’s probably better I don’t contact them.

But don’t we all make abstract enemies all the time?

Lately, Facebook and blogs have seemed to blow up with all these controversies—some more substantial than others—from the Grammy weddings to America the Beautiful to Duck Dynasty to the MSNBC/Cheerios commercial fiasco. In socio-political and religious matters, we seem to have reached a new low in discourse, and I am among the guilty. I too easily write off or ridicule viewpoints I don’t agree with.

There are good reasons to stand up for what we believe in. But in general, most of us are probably too quick to judgment, too slow to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

Love is about listening and trying to understand. So today, I have been reading some articles and watching some videos from people who have different viewpoints than I do. I am looking for depth, trying not to waste my time on sound bytes and easy-to-ridicule editorials just for the pleasure of a cheap jab. So far, it has been good. And though I am short on time, I want to make an effort to read or watching something at least once a week by someone with a different perspective—whether theological/religious, political, cultural. I want to listen, to read, to try to understand why people are coming from where they are coming from, why they believe what they believe. I want to try to put myself in my enemy’s shoes.

I need help with this one. What do you think it looks like to love our enemies?

A journey, part 3: April showers

This is part 3 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling

I resolved that nothing was more important than my inquiry into the reality of Christianity. I was going to dig deep.

After some internal debate, I went to the registrar on the last drop/add day and dropped Professor Stansell’s Old Testament class. I’d never quit anything before and feared I was copping out to avoid challenges. But when I went by his office to ask him to sign my drop/add slip and said goodbye, I felt free to pursue the questions in my own way, on my own timeline.

I walked across the prairie with my boyfriend and told him I needed a lot of space. We decided to take a break. For me this was going to be a solitary journey.

I e-mailed the mentors of my childhood. I checked out of the library a stack of books on theology and faith I couldn’t carry. I drilled my roommate with questions she couldn’t answer.

My father typed up a summary of his own winding path to God, and sent it to me by e-mail. It comforted me for a moment, but I woke up the next morning afraid that I, as my father, would have to stray for years, to let go of God completely for a season, in order to truly return.

I canceled my spring break plans and went home to Maryland. I lay on the couch all week, discovering my mom’s 1960s folk LPs and sleeping. I didn’t visit my friends.

Natasha, my old youth minister, called and told me to come over.

When I walked in, we didn’t sit down, just stood in the foyer. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Well I guess I still believe in God.” I hung on the railing, not wanting to look in her eyes, yet wanting desperately for her to know my pain. I rambled about the latest fears.

“You are hearing a lot of voices, Katie,” she told me. “Mostly voices that are telling you God is distant. Give yourself time to hear the voices that speak for God, too.”

“I can’t run away from it,” I told her.

“You don’t have to run,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. Just listen.”

While I was home, my mother took me to the National Zoo. We walked around in chilly April air and saw the sea otters playing, carefree on their stone waterslides. We stood in line to see the new baby panda, black and white and fuzzy. At the elephant house, the zookeepers were giving the elephant a bath. I fell in love with the elephant as he gently stretched his trunk into a perfect loop and stuffed a tree in his mouth. How beautiful the giant grey folds in his skin, the slow, deliberate swinging of his trunk and tilting of his head.

As I watched him, I thought, yes, he evolved through natural selection, and I thought, yes, he was created by God.

*

Back in Minnesota, I went to church on Good Friday, wary of hearing canned statements about Jesus dying on the cross. I was broken. Why should I ask for pardon and atonement?

I sat in the hard wooden pew while a short pastor told a different Good Friday story. He spoke of a group of people who gave their whole lives to their friend, because they believed in him. One day they turned around and saw him stabbed and hanging on a tree to die. From the tree, they heard their friend cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

These words hit me anew. Was the Christian story from its beginning a story of doubt? Was even Jesus himself not immune to it?

I stayed up all night that night, sitting in the lounge with my roommate and another friend, nothing important to say, just that we didn’t want to turn out the light. Something in me began to open. In recounting her own journey, Simone Weil writes in Waiting for God:

If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something…that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.

Was it possible that in stripping away everything, I would still find something left?

On Easter, two days later, I heard of quiet, fearful women unable to find Jesus’ body; whispers that something strange and frightening and wonderful was happening. A story I couldn’t touch. I liked it.

I began to amble back slowly. In quiet moments walking on the trails, a blooming pink bud reached a part deep inside me that still felt God. As I opened my Bible again, I skipped over certain books and stayed on the gospel accounts. When I accidentally opened to a confusing passage or heard a pastor say something contradictory, I felt my heart miss a beat. So I flipped back to the gospel of Mark, again and again, where the women wake up early on the first day of the week, go to weep over Jesus’ body and find an empty tomb, and don’t know what to think.

There are hiccups on every journey. I skipped a girls night with my friends one weekend, sat in my room feeling disconnected and misunderstood. I waded alone again into the library. Why should I put my heart through the dangerous business of hope once again? When I still had not answered the logical questions?

I called and told Ellen, the director of my Christian camp, that I would have to back out of my summer contract as a counselor. I couldn’t be a mentor of faith to teenage girls. She listened to my story and said, “Nonsense. We want you here.”

To read about that beautiful summer at camp, go to Part 4.