Faith in the Borderlands

As I am assembling today my materials for my FTE presentation in Atlanta, I am thinking through the most meaningful moments from my summer. At the top of that list is certainly the worship on Sunday morning at General Assembly, with Rev. Abhi Janamanchi preaching. While I am working on a full post today, I will start by just sharing this video from that worship service - in this video, the worship starts at 26:30, though feel free to skip ahead to Rev. Abhi's sermon! Also, here is the reading he refers to as a part of his sermon - it's on page 6.

Lessons in letting go

It is about midway through the 2nd part of Kushner's Angels in America when Prior proclaims, tragically, painfully: Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. It is a stubborn greed: I want more life. Beyond what we should ask for, wanting more of this, wanting life, as Prior says, "past hope." Though the Angel has just warned him that life is but a "bad habit" he should finally release, bringing him and everyone only certain suffering and persistent pain, he insists, relentless, I want more life.

This stubborn resilience is one of the reasons hospice workers are such a needed presence in the midst of death. Having someone nearby to shepherd our giving in, to remind us that giving up can be the greatest gift, to teach us, moment-by-moment, how to let go.

I'm starting to wonder if in my own death, I may need a team of hospice workers, a small town of hospice workers, each to tend to a single muscle, bone, cell, all conspiring to cling to more life.

My tennis coach in high school never told me I was a great tennis player - I wasn't. But she did tell me, repeatedly, how much she admired my tenacity, and for that, I often found myself at state playoffs or the last rounds of local tournaments. Despite my marginal tennis talent, I have won more matches than I can count simply because I had more fight in me than my opponent. I could last longer, dig deeper. I had greater reserves of determination and drive. These are things I know myself by, a way I can identify myself when all else is confused or undone: I can outlast.

And yet, since deciding to leave my job just over 2 years ago, I feel like I've been in an endless lesson about the wisdom of giving up. See, this too is about grace. (Is everything?) It is a lesson where not doing more is ok, not reaching limits is better, going half-way is wise, where resilience is not a gift but an obstacle. It is a lesson where in fact already and always you have attained everything you might ever need - nothing else need be done, or gained, or earned. There is nothing else but now and here and this air and this love and this good earth.

Oh, but I am stubborn. And so although I have felt, from the very beginning, that adding a third trip this summer as a part of my FTE project, would be too much for my family, and for me, I felt it was the only way to make sense of this gigantic quest, these questions. And it was the only way to earn the right to make a claim to such a prize, to gain something grand enough, to gain worth, to be worthy, to be wise. And so I made plans to head to Rochester, NY, to visit First Unitarian there, to witness in person a large church that seems to me alive, and relevant, dynamic, and filled with great depths held by a rich faith.

Generally, when people say to me that they heard the "voice of God" speak to them, I must admit that I have to do a lot of heavy translating to correlate what they expeirenced to something that I can understand. I know I owe this blog a post on God, but since that is still yet to come, suffice it to say that my understanding of God doesn't really include a "voice" per se. Rather than clear directions coming from a burning bush (Ex 3:2), my sense of God and the messages you might say you receive from God tends to be closer to the "sound of sheer silence" (1 Kgs 19:12). But last week I experienced the closest thing I have ever felt to hearing the voice of God, and let me tell you, it wasn't exactly a congratulatory note.

I was getting ready to head to Rochester last week. I was confirming details with people from the church about where to meet, and considering what questions I might ask that would illicit information about underlying cultural norms, what lessons I had learned from my trip to Chicago that I could apply here. But I have to confess, I didn't have enough time to do any of it, at least not well - as a full time mom this summer, one of my biggest lessons is that full time mom really does mean full time. There isn't anything else that can be done but being a mom. But I was pushing on, dammit, getting to Rochester, no matter what.

And then, Monday night, I went to bed after working late, and had just turned off the light when I felt something. I turned on the light, and saw four small red bugs. I woke Carri and we quickly realized what was going on: we had bed bugs.

I know this isn't something that people talk about. There is a lot of shame, and believe me, we have had many moments of feeling like great pariahs and wondering if we should just close off the outside world until we had eradicated these pests - sometime in the next few months, we can hope - and then never talk about them again. But in addition to the fact the work of fighting them off simply necessitates outside help, I can't possibly convey just how stubborn I am, or how loud the lesson was, without sharing exactly the mess my family found itself in as I was preparing for Rochester. So, forgive me while I speak directly about this social taboo...

We had bed bugs. We panicked and struggled immediately - it was midnight and there was nothing for us to do but look at each other with grief and fear and weary desperation. We reached the exterminator first thing the next morning, and they advised us to get every single piece of fabric we had out and into the laundry to be washed on hot. Dry-clean-only's and delicates could be dried on hot. All carpets had to be thoroughly vacuumed, and all toys and books needed to be taken out and put in black garbage bags outside to be "baked" in our backyard. And if we wanted the exterminator to come right away, it all had to be done by 3. We were lucky enough to find some help watching our kids, and Carri and I went to work. We got the entire downstairs cleaned out - that's 3 bedrooms and a bathroom, including closets. We got most of the upstairs done, though from our initial inspection, it really looked like they were confined to our mattress, which is downstairs.

Bags of our clothing, linens, towels, baby clothes in boxes, stuffed animals, pillows, shoes...all filled up our cars so that we could take them to the laundrymat. Carri took on the laundry while I picked up the kids and grabbed some dinner. We found a hotel just down the road where we (including our dog) could sleep for the night while the chemicals did their job in our house. By the 4th hour of laundry, just over$50 of change spent, the kids were tired and acting out. I needed to get them to bed. But, we needed enough laundry done and in bags to fill my car so I could take the kids to the hotel - there was too much to fit into just Carri's car. So we were just waiting for the dryers to get enough dry - each family member took their turn crying or screaming. Finally, at about 8:30 (nearly 2 hours after the kids' usual bedtime), the kids, the dog, and I all headed to the hotel. We were exhuasted, and I was feeling a little nauseous, but we were at least on our way. I told Carri to make sure she grabbed a tennis outfit for me -I had a lesson I needed to attend the next day. She looked at me like I was crazy, but I just shrugged - don't we just press on?

We were on I-70, just past the Quebec exit when I knew I wasn't just a little nauseous. It hit fast and hard. I said hold on kids, I have to pull over. Gracie says, why mom? Just a sec, honey, mama has to throw up. Yes, with 1/2 of our family's linens and clothing in black garbage bags, my two kids, and our dog, on the side of the freeway, with Carri laundering the remaining 1/2, and with nearly all of the rest of our posessions in our backyard in black garbage bags, with exhuasted kids and speeding traffic whirling by, I opened the door of my jetta and threw up everywhere. And right then, I felt God speak to me. God said: What in the hell do I have to do so that you will give up?

I wish I could say I decided right then to abandon dreams of going to Rochester in 3 days. But though the night brought a fire alarm (with me pulling the dog and the kids out of their deep sleep and down the stairs and into the dark night - Carri wasn't yet done laundering) and my continued vomiting, I still awoke the next morning unsure. How could I give up?

Eventually, after much personal torment, every stubborn cell conceded. I cancelled my trip to Rochester. We spent the weekend working like crazy to attend to the rest of our home, to clean and scrub and let go. We watched our bed and box spring get taken away by the garbage men on Monday morning, and after finding a bug in our leather couch, we wondered which would bring its demise - the bugs or the Colorado rainstorms it now faces in our backyard. Gracie woke up often every night with nightmares, and asked us repeatedly if the bugs were yet gone. Each morning she opens our back door to just "check on" her toys.

Thursday morning, as I made the calls to officially cancel the trip, I kept hearing Kenny Rogers. Yes, you know, Kenny Rogers' wise words from the Gambler.

I knew it was time to give in, time to "walk away," despite persistent feelings of guilt and fear. Even without the bugs, leaving my family for the 3rd time in 2 months, was too much. And yet, how now would I earn my fellowship? Earn the good things I have been given? Earn this life?

In retrospect, I confess that as I considered how I would respond to the FTE fellowship, I approached it using these questions more often than I should have. And although my project ultimately seeks to explore fundamental questions about congregational life that are central to my own discernment process and what I see as crucial for Unitarian Universalism, its foundation lacks faith, lacks grace. And so the central lesson of my fellowship, despite other intentions, will inevitably be about these things: the folly of clinging to tangible evidence of human worth rather than standing firmly on the faith that regardless of what I have acheived or what I have learned, I am already inherently worthy. And that to receive the grace of God, we cannot go chasing earthquakes or fire, or wind or breaking rocks, but must instead know there is nothing to do, but be open to the sound of sheer silence.

Ya basta!