“When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.” 

― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara 
Artwork: Tanya Torres 

The Magnetic Poles of Love and Fear

   I know so many people whose very foundation of being in the world is love, people who strive every day to defy the pressure in society to be not love.  No matter how often I contemplate it, I never lose my fascination over how such a simple concept can be so complex and difficult to live out. After all I’ve been through the past few years, how do I find myself, once again, moving closer to this truth about love?  While I dreamed of escape from the misery I lived in, three years ago my faith ran on fumes.

   Three years ago I lived a life of fear. Every day I woke up, went to work, consoled others about their fears, and came home to the embrace of complete terror. My heart and soul was locked into a commitment to be a mother. All around me I saw the puzzle pieces of my life falling into place, showing me that I could have a “normal” life, settle down, be a part of community and family, find meaning in helping my local community, and be happy. Except for one problem. One huge enormous barrier. My own fear.

   Deep within, under the signs of a good life, the fear became a mantra, its own living breathing creature. I am not good enough. I don’t deserve to be happy and loved. I will screw up everything. I could not let go of the belief, irrational as it is, that being able to conceive was the only true sign that I was worthy in the eyes of God. Now to me, God doesn’t sit on a cloud and decide things. But the order within the universe, the structure amongst the chaos, it has meaning for me. And if all the infinite variables leading toward conception merged to create life within me, then somehow, I would be anointed and blessed as whole, good, and worthy. And bypassing that crucial step by adopting or fostering a child, well, then, I would be avoiding the judgment of God. I would be living a lie that I was whole and happy while the conviction that I don’t deserve any of it festered in my heart.

   The fear of not being worthy of love, I see now that it is a common human affliction, one that doesn’t really make anyone special or unique, except in our own minds. But the ghost-like tendrils of doubt and anxiety affected my decisions and choices. I lived in fear of that one moment when the world, through one person, a group, an event, would show that the blanket of love and acceptance I lived under was a lie. Bizarre, strange thoughts limited the choices in my head as my spirit and my fear battled inside me. The battle was gruesome and exhausting. The battle immobilized me from participating in my own life. The need for acceptance conflicted with my fear of being found unworthy. Not unworthy for a simple smile or a laugh, but judged and condemned in an ultimate, uncompromising way.

   The opposite of fear is not fearless. The opposite of love is not hate. Somewhere, somehow, in the chaos of infinite possibilities, exists these poles of love and fear. The lure within the magnetic field of existence, drawing us towards love or towards fear, influence every aspect of our lives.

   Letting go of the dream of conceiving life released me from one of the strongest lures towards fear I’ve ever had. I was stuck in a maze of my own making. As long as I clung to the fear I needed to conceive to be worth something, then I had to find “natural” ways to deal with the stress, anxiety, and depression… as if monkeying with the hormones of a woman is “natural.” Not only did I sacrifice my sanity to the god of artificial hormone drugs, I exposed my deepest vulnerabilities and pain at the same time. Once again, my body became a thing to control, reward and punish. No longer the subject of my own life story, my body became the object I had spent years deconstructing. Years of resisting the messages in society to reduce myself to a thing and all it took was the inability of getting pregnant for me to fall off the wagon. OK, that is a lie. Acute onset hypothyroidism, PCOS, insulin resistance, and chronic pain kinda tipped the scale. With all that happening, how in the world is one supposed to NOT be drawn into the web of fear?!

   The thing is, even with all that fear and doubt, I could never truly convince myself that I had no choices. Even as I lied in bed in a fetal position, unable to move, I wanted to move. I KNEW I could move. Living in constant fear is a path I’ve walked before.  So, I did the work, in fits and starts, two steps forward, ten steps back, 15 steps forward, 8 steps back… until the suffocating quick sand of fear had less pull.

    As I spend more time and energy focusing on love, there is a weight lifted, a gravity released, and a freedom to live fully and wholly. I find myself at times feeling giddy with freedom. It’s not as if the insecurities disappear or the fear vanishes. But the choice, the option to move towards love, becomes easier. As love becomes the driving force behind more and more of my actions, I find myself becoming increasingly bold and prophetic in its witness. It’s not courage or pride bolstering me, but a kind of “Why not? I’ve experienced another piece of hell, been through the fire” and all that.  I tried to mold myself into something I am not; I tried to be something limited and restrained, but that time is done. Now is the time to be bold and to be loud. 

   It’s an interesting place for a trained chaplain to find herself in, being bold and loud. It’s not so much that we are a quiet lot, though some are, but more that we train with intentional focus to mute our “self” in order to hear more clearly the person in front of us. Sometimes there is a misperception that means suppressing our own beliefs. However, if done well, it doesn’t have to be. There was no denying of myself or my beliefs, because the very act of being open and accepting is the heart beat of my faith. I strove to embody my theology every day by working on being open, hospitable, loving, accepting, relational, and compassionate. There was nothing insincere about it. Even in the moments I couldn’t really feel it for myself, I never doubted my love for others. How crazy is that? And somewhere within the practice of loving others, I also helped my own heart, mind, and spirit.   Honestly, that practice, the intentional loving of others, saved me. It was the light that led me through the darkest of nights.

   So, now that I am once again basking in sunlight, something within me is more than ready to voice my experience.  This morning I read a quote on http://www.henrinouwen.org/. Nouwen wrote in Here and Now, “My hope is that the description of God’s love in my life will give you the freedom and courage to discover God’s love in yours.” I’m feeling more ready to proclaim what I know, deep in my bones, to be wrong. I’m ready to try to name what I see as truth and shout it from the mountaintop. My sense of truth isn’t in any way ultimate or universal. But I think there are people out there who may find their truth complements mine and mine theirs. And I will forever be grateful for the light of others who led me through to this place. Love is all you need.

Embracing my difference and celebrating yours

In the early 1990s, when I was 16, I participated in a youth leadership training to be a part of a “Multicultural Panel”. From what I can remember, the training was developed by Friends University and included a day or two long workshop that assisted youth to contemplate, describe, and learn about their own cultural experience. Say what?! Learn about your own culture first? Yep. Our job was to be able to ad-lib a 2-3 minute talk on our culture and respond to questions by the audience about the various cultural experiences of the panel. At each presentation, the panel would represent about 5-6 types of cultural diversity including race, gender, class, and physical abilities.

My expectation of the class was to learn about everybody else’s culture, because what did I, a white girl from Kansas, have to contribute? My culture was The Andy Griffith Show mixed with Full House sitcoms. I entered with the assumption that my culture was so overexposed to be non-existent. I felt guilt and shame for being part of the privileged masses. It took quite a while and some petulant teenage angst to acknowledge that my cultural experience had complexity and value. Instead of asking the privileged white kids how they are scared of or adapt to differences, the facilitators taught us how to name our own value in a way that did not de-value someone else. Not only did I learn positive and enriching language and conversation skills, I also learned listening and interrelational skills with those different than me. I discovered solidarity in a group not because of race, gender, class, but because of a common openness and ideal. I learned more about stereotypes and assumptions within myself, groups, and society than I had in any other context. I also shed much of the shame of my own differences, whether as a representative of the majority, of geeky science girls, or of children living with poverty. Before, I saw the community I grew up in as boring and my identity in it as a freckled Irish/German American Kansas girl with glasses as being a dime a dozen. I valued any difference from my normative experience as more valid, interesting, and meaningful. I felt invisible.

What I discovered is that my peers had never had bierocks and had no idea what a Volga German was. I learned that my family history mattered and that I knew very little of it. And as I worked on reforming my family and cultural narrative, I discovered my family history had experiences of marginalization and oppression, some not so long ago. I realized that I had embraced the caricatures created by St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest without truly understanding my own heritage. My family was no longer an assimilated melting pot with no cultural identity but what the media promotes. I no longer fell for the biggest lie our society and media feeds us.

In 1881, Irish caricature:

from: http://irishmemory.blogspot.com/2013/01/irish-industries-cartoon-1881.html

 

2012, t-shirt:

from: http://irishamericanheritagemonth.com/why-we-need-irish-american-heritage-month-the-2012-winner-of-the-know-nothing-award/

 

 

 

found on: http://imgur.com/gallery/FXugjVI

 

The experience with that Multicultural Panel revealed I was connected to and a part of a universal, global, human story expressed in unique communities and individuals. By embracing my own difference, I realized that my neighbor’s difference was valuable as well. I cannot claim that I embraced my value as a female so young. In fact, I kind of ignored it as long as possible. However, a first step to understanding occurred there.

This reflection bubbled up while preparing for my re-entry into academia. As I read essays that repeatedly stereotype European American and Western thought, I felt the resurgence of guilt and shame for being lumped into such a category. There is more discomfort while reading these pages than I thought there would be. Who am I supposed to identify with if I am a complex unique individual who exists with both privilege and marginalization?  Perhaps if we even have one area we feel tossed aside, not important, or directly attacked, we should be able to recognize a similar struggle in someone else. Even if our struggles do not match in content or even degree of oppression, perhaps there is still a way for us to relate to, sympathize with, and value each other.  

I have many other thoughts related to this, including pre and post modernity and caricatures of scientific thought, gender value, and how can this white woman learn about her heritage and history of women and pastoral care in the church and society.

The Shaping of the Hollowness of Me

Mother Wisdom Speaks

by Christine Lore Webber

Some of you I will hollow out.

I will make you a cave.

I will make you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.
You will be a bowl.
You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.

I will hollow you out with knives.

I will not do this to make you clean.
I will not do this to make you pure.
You are clean already.
You are pure already.

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.

I will do this for the space that you will be.
I will do this because you must be large.
A bowl.
People will eat from you and their hunger
will not weaken them unto death.
A cup to catch the sacred rain.

 My daughter, do not cry.

Do not be afraid.
Nothing you need will be lost.
I am shaping you.
I am making you ready.

Light will glow in your hollowing.

You will be filled with light.
Your bones will shine.
The round, open center of you will be radiant.

I will call you Brilliant One.

I will call you Daughter Who Is Wide.
I will call you Transformed.

 

As I travel through the tangled experience of deep grief, I’ve been trying to find the words to describe how it feels to be healing and transforming. Even as I talk to others about the experience, the words sound so trite and hollow, the words that mean nothing when the grief is still raw, the words that at one time seemed they could not be true.

Society has long attempted to marginalize and set apart the darkness of spiritual life. Grief, despair, anger, and fear are the antithesis of a good spiritual life, experiences to overcome and conquer. There is great irony within the postmodern experience that the aspects of religion we judge as harmful are also the places within our souls we hide and deny. So often we talk of a death denying culture, but really, it is a darkness denying culture. Sterilize, deodorize, and bleach out the parts we don’t want to acknowledge. Yet, no matter how much detergent we apply, it cannot eliminate the fundamental life experience. Every time I’ve peered deep into the looking glass to understand the source of my dark emotions, the same area appears. A shadow of darkness that is a subconscious certainty I am nothing, I am useless, worthless, unloveable, and unredeemable, a certainty that I deserve all the suffering in my life. There was a time that I considered this shadow to be a remnant of learned behavior and definitions of self I blamed on misogynistic harmful religion. But the thing is, this inherent sense of suffering is not unique to one religion. It is not even unique to one philosophy or culture. Across the globe and throughout time, humanity describes these same feelings of worthlessness and a sense that suffering is inevitable, deserved, even destined. I no longer am certain these are learned ideas.

Within the realm of progressive postmodern thought, so many want to skip ahead to the joy and peace and rainbows. In fact, progressive social activists will ridicule those who embrace theologies that try to explain suffering, claiming that to explain the origin of suffering, intentionally or not, causes harm. For us, suffering is something to deal with, cope with, handle and manage. The resulting emotions of grief, despair, anger and fear are byproducts of an unhealthy spirit, of not “handling” the suffering well.

This just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. It does not make sense to cut off and deny a good portion, even half, of my own human experience as pointless. What are the options, though? On one hand, I cannot really say anymore that suffering is pointless or meaningless. However, when I try to say there is a reason for my suffering and attempt to explain it, I fall flat on my face.

Ultimately, there is a mystery in the spaces of meaning making. There is a limitation to our ability to communicate and reason through the human experience. I want to pull it apart, observe and describe this space, but it so often eludes me. The attempts by others often bring me comfort, however. For over a decade the poem shared above has aided me and reflects how I desire to see the space of suffering and meaning.

 

Why back to school? grad school reflection

Since the beginning of my discernment, my call to ministry has been to ease spiritual suffering. I continue to passionately believe that the environmental, social and physical suffering in this world will never heal if we do not first address the spiritual suffering. If our sense of self and sense of community were fully realized, how could we live in voluntary ignorance and destructive apathy? After 6 years of answering that call in chaplaincy, I wish to grow as a caregiver and scholar. Participating in the cultivation of theologically and pastorally trained leaders is a natural progression of my call to ease spiritual suffering in the world. To do this, I am seeking a PhD program to study and expand my base of knowledge in pastoral theology, cultural anthropology, psychosocial theories and pedagogy. As a pastoral theologian and scholar, I want to expand the conversation in postmodern theology and to make it applicable to today’s society, especially within the realm of fertility and infertility.  The school I'm applying to has a progressive postmodern voice that is important to me and to accomplishing these goals.

The path to finding a spiritual calling can be an interesting one, but looking back, each step along my path led me with a clear and passionate purpose towards the work I now do. Even before I could name it, discovering meaning and purpose defined my life’s path. The spiritual abuse I received as a child in a fundamentalist Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church steered me towards science and as far away from religion as possible. However, by studying and working with science, I discovered that religion is not the only place cognitive dissonance lives. During that journey, I found my best conversation partners were with progressive Christians.

My healing did not solely happen by leaving the place of abuse or by discovering a replacement faith system. Through secular counseling, I learned how to pull apart my emotions and thoughts, how to distinguish self from group, and how to empower myself and others to live fully. Through earnest and honest seeking, I discovered the joy and peace that the spiritual experience brings. Spiritual direction, monastic retreats, and many other experiences also helped heal my connection with God.

Then, after all that, seminary helped me dismantle and deconstruct hidden precepts and assumptions not only about religion, but about life. I began seminary with a passion for biblical interpretation, seeking to dismantle not only the misconceptions I was raised with, but also to address the assumed authority and power scripture has. My past may have taught me that scripture was the key, but seminary taught me that history of church, theology and even pedagogy are just as key.

Seminary is  a place of crucial integration. By increasing contextual awareness and understanding in many subjects, a person with a call to help others turns into a beautiful  kaleidoscope of skills.  However, my time in CPE and working among professional ministers and chaplains revealed a genuine lack of theological integration with the pastoral care they give. How people view God affects how they view themselves and the world.  As pastoral care providers, I feel we are called out not only to have a clear understanding of our own theology, but also how it relates to traditionally held beliefs. Often, when people have holes or inconsistencies within their theology, it can be due to lack of language to describe their feelings and thoughts about it.  As we listen to people, we should be able to reflect back confusing thoughts with different and hopefully clear language. In order to do that, however, we must do the work of theological construction and integration long before the conversation happens.

Many who seek such understanding attend seminary and labor through CPE, hoping and anticipating some of the theological and spiritual fog will clear. I help with Mid-Year Consultations for CPE residents and each year I’m assigned to a student from an evangelical background, often with a theology that creates separatism and exclusivism. The struggle and pain this brings them is hard for me to observe. I have no desire to convert the world to my way of thinking, but I do desire to ease these spiritual leaders’ suffering. I desire to aid them in exploring the struggle that exists for a theology that may give comfort in some ways, but cause conflict in other ways.  I want to help them discover not only how to fill their own theological gaps, but also how to minister to the diverse world compassionately and competently.

Professional chaplain gatherings also revealed to me several things.   I observed that many chaplains who teach and lead come from faith traditions rife not only with visible cognitive dissonance, but also with moral conflict. In addition, I noticed that chaplain leaders from progressive faith backgrounds often redirected or avoided uncomfortable theological subjects by encouraging religious diversity and focusing on psychosocial or ethical theories.  The field would benefit from more leaders who bring integrative and constructive postmodern theology not just to the discussion table, but to the practitioners in the field. I desire to expand my knowledge of theology and how the work in pastoral care interacts with it. My passion is for the postmodern voice, one that is steeped in understanding modern logic, but acknowledges that to authentically reflect reality, the voice of experience and context must always be heard.

Currently, my ministry entails working in hospice as a chaplain and bereavement educator. The time spent as a child ministering with my grandmother in nursing homes and to elderly church members imprinted not only an awareness of, but also a comfort around physical limitations and end of life.  So, here I am, walking the path with many, a path we all will or have taken: facing our own limitations and mortality. My personal limitations currently involve fertility, conception and pregnancy. When I faced accepting infertility, I had to search deep inside myself for the balm to my spiritual suffering. I had no ready way to process it.

My Master’s thesis combines feminist and process theology, so it should be no surprise that the language of co-creator is comfortable for me. It makes sense for a woman with a biology degree and healthy suspicion of power structures to want to find a theology that not only supports but empowers the individual. Accepting that I am unlikely to conceive life felt like I was sacrificing the very foundation of my faith system as a co-creator, not because I cannot envision other ways of creative being, but because the sacred unique creation of life is no longer within my grasp.

When I studied biology and biochemistry, they fed my desire to understand and revel in the mysteries of life as a creative and distinctive process. It laid the foundation for my understanding of who we are and how we relate to God and the world. What happens when someone with such a foundation finds out that she is not part of the cycle of life?  A piece of writing or the influence I have on people's hearts or minds is not the same as creating life. We must acknowledge the unique and complex process of creating life and the sacredness of such creativity. We cannot deny that all life is sacred and that the ability to create it is sacred as well. Therefore, the loss of such a sacred identity means infertility is not just a loss of function, but a complex web of experience. Infertility is not just a disorder or a dysfunction, it is not just a loss of anticipated future, and it is not just a loss of identity. It is all of the above combined with constant ethical and moral dilemmas, decision making that determines the rest of one’s life, and continual exposure to familial as well as societal pressure and judgment.

 I want to develop a way for pastors and chaplains to approach this rapidly growing area of spiritual discernment among individuals and families. I want to make the language of fertility issues normalized and eliminate the negative repercussions of shame and guilt. Above all, I wish to find an integrative postmodern theology that not only provides comfort to the infertile, but also provides a spiritual and ethical compass during a difficult time. I have my own thoughts and experiences, of course, but I want to dig deeper as a scholar and as a chaplain to add this particular context to the training of our pastoral leaders.

My call to ease spiritual suffering continues to evolve and I greatly desire to be a postmodern theological and pastoral voice in our world. I wish to not only contribute to scholarship, but also to the transformation and growth of pastoral care providers. The PhD program at this school combines the crucial elements of respected scholarship with the spirit-filled mission to cultivate competent and compassionate pastoral leaders. I request approval for admission to the PhD program for Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care.

The Song of a Spiritual Midwife

There's a part of me that cringes at making comparisons about birth and death. I'm 34 and I am not a midwife ushering in the hopes and dreams of new life, but a midwife to a journey that reveals to us only the end of this mortal experience. Everything in my being can be convinced that the end is the beginning of something terribly wonderful and unimaginably beautiful, but I don't get to see that beginning. I do not get to witness the blossom of a person's life after death or watch how she grows into her true self. All I see is the labor of death, all I can do is hold her hand while she makes that journey on her own.

Here I sit, a spiritual midwife to hundreds of people who labored through death. I witness how precious life is, how precious love and connection are. I desperately want to be a part of this cycle of life. I want to watch a life begin, grow and blossom. I want that life to be one I helped create. But, I will not be creating a baby, a new life within my own body. However, I have so many options for fostering and adopting and watching a life grow and blossom within my care. I'm sure many wonder why I don't just push forward towards those options. I'm not sure why myself at times. I could claim it is the inherent wisdom of a hospice chaplain to honor the time of grieving an unattainable dream. However, I can only say my heart is not ready.

Meanwhile, I spend much of my time with people close to death by singing softly to them. That which calms and quiets the fears of those new to life, also creates peace for those at the end. Tonight as I was perusing books about infertility, I came across the title Unsung Lullabies and it felt like grief was stabbing my heart. Of all the images that break my heart, the worst is the dream of singing my baby to sleep. What an intimate moment of connection. So full of meaning. It is not just that image, but of singing to my baby in the park, in the car, throughout life.

Singing is more than a balm for restless nights. Singing connects an experience with our emotions, our memories and our spiritual selves. While singing Amazing Grace to a patient, not only are memories and emotions evoked, but perhaps even her experience of the sacred. Someday I may hold a baby and sing a lullaby to her and calm the fears of being new to life. Yet, I already am singing lullabies each day to someone new to dying. It is sacred, this role of midwife, whether for birth or for death.