Interruptions

In the genealogy, at the beginning of His story, and your story too, mama. At the beginning of all that. In the genealogy, the lists of "son ofs," in the history and the lineage, there are the interruptions.

All these interruptions. Man, man, man, man, man, man, woman, man, man. Just a name. Slipped in like a breath. A breath of interruption. Nothing more. A feminine ending. A gentle sound amidst "the son of," "the son of," "the son of." Whispered interference in the patterns of centuries, patterns old and strong as the rocks, jutting up like monuments. Building heavy, stark monuments. Crying, "We saw the god here!" And holding that moment in stone forever. A trophy. An endless string of accomplishments. They see. They grasp. They claim. They Build. They say, "We are STRENGTH." Over and over again. And then  just these little breaths of interruptions. Girl names thrown into the pattern. Hardly there.

But you, mama. You, with a name that does not even fit in the pattern. A name that must ride alongside your husband's. A name that should not even be a breath of interruption, a whisper.

Your name, sweet mama, strong mama. Your name stops the story. Your name, spoken by an angel.

And your name, your breath of interruption, it is not some meek, quiet whisper, working its way around rock and monument of those men that keep seeing and saying, seeing, and saying, seeingsayingbuilding. No mama.

For all the ways you have been silenced. Over and over again. in the patterns of centuries. Mama, you have been the scapegoat. Strong and silent. Bearing what the monument builders could not bear. The blame, the unbearable beauty and utter sadness of seeing. Seeing without saying. Without building. Without claiming a monument. A trophy. Of seeing and bearing all the broken. All of the blame for the breaking.

For all of the ways you have been silenced mama, when your voice broke the pattern, it was not some whispered interruption. It was a cry. It was REVOLUTION that you said. Revolution. Not an interruption. THE interruption.

And all the names. All the breathless interruptions of feminine endings, of the emptiness where a "son of" should have been. Mama, they are like water splitting the rock. Drink for the thirsty in the barren desert of stone and monument. Living water.

Crying REVOLUTION. Crying WE TOO HAVE SEEN. Crying LOVE.

Signs You're Becoming an Evangelical

I used to be Catholic. I like so many things about the Catholic Church, and I find so many treasures in its traditions, rituals, teachings, and history. I loved being Catholic. But, for a variety of reasons, I'm not really Catholic anymore. I'm finding challenge in seeing things in a new way, in immersing myself in a different tradition. I've done a very improbable thing and have gone evangelical. High Church to low church.(I'm like Rachel Held-Evans in reverse. Only not church-famous). And it's starting to show. Thusly, I've compiled a helpful list for those who may be on a similar journey. I'm very helpful.


SIGNS YOU'RE BECOMING AN EVANGELICAL:

You snack on communion bread after the service. You don't get smote.

You become much more tolerant of lengthy sermons. You become much less tolerant of lengthy periods of silence.

You start to call them "sermons."

Your prayers contain an excessive use of the word "just."

Like, you just want to just thank you, Lord, for just loving us, and just caring for us. And we just want to ask you to just be with us, Lord, and just fill our hearts with your Holy Spirit, Lord. And we just want to glorify you, and just praise your name, O Creator of the Universe. You know. Just that.

And all of the sudden it's "Hallelujah" and not "Alleluia." But you're still not okay with "Jehovah." You're never going to be okay with "Jehovah."

Also, you're just not going to sing "sloppy, wet kiss" in church. You're just not. You don't care how evangelical it sounds, all you can think of is a large, lumbering dog, coming at you with it's dog-breath and wet tongue, and you love dogs, but you can't think about God that way. You just can't.

One of your arms tries very hard to fly into the air when singing praise songs. Luckily, your other arm is still firmly Catholic and will not allow that to happen. Not in this lifetime. It pins your charismatic/evangelical arm solidly to your side so you can sing quietly like a respectable person, thankyouverymuch.

But you sway a little when you sing. Even when the worship songs sound like pop songs. Especially when the worship songs sound like pop songs.

The songs you are swaying to say "me" and "I" an awful lot. A bit too much for your tastes. You were actually really cool with the "we" and "us" of Catholic hymns. They seemed less selfish. But the "me/I" songs do force you to entertain the possibility that you might individually matter. And not just if you give virgin-birth to a savior before you die a martyry death.

You consider the possibility that if God talks back, it doesn't mean you are a saint. You might just be a regular person. Which is disappointing. Because childhood-you had really planned on trying to be a saint. With miracles and whatnot. But whatever.

You start to wonder if maybe Halloween really is demonic. But then, nope. You're still good with Halloween. Because you're not that kind of evangelical. You're the fun kind. You just have to consider being spiritually paranoid and then reject it. It's part of the package. Oh my gosh, you're totally getting the hang of this!

You've started saying "oh my gosh" and "oh my goodness" instead of "oh my God" Because you like Halloween and Harry Potter, but you're not a heathen or anything.

Even though you were never in a youth group, didn't grow up listening to Christian music, and never had well-meaning adults police your burgeoning sexuality, you're still resentful about those years you feel like you spent in youth group, listening to Christian music, being sexually policed. You're jaded and cynical about how eagerly you (never actually) embraced the bland cultural Christianity that was (never actually) force-fed to you. Because you have a ton of empathy for all these evangelicals you've surrounded yourself with. And you're totally investing in this thing. Like, you're one of them now. I mean, you even know what "purpling" is and make jokes about it. You are SO an evangelical.

Like, you might possibly even be forming false memories of being born again, (and again, and again) at youth retreat altar calls you never actually attended.

That place you put your kids so other people will teach them theological concepts you're too uncomfortable to discuss with them is called Sunday School, not catechism. It happens on Sunday, and there are snacks, you guys! And crafts! So many crafts.

One of your children is baptized. The other is not. This makes you slightly uneasy, but you refuse to admit it, because you're not superstitious or anything. I mean, you're practically an anabaptist. But still. Limbo, guys.

You were into the liturgical calendar before the liturgical calendar was cool. Which makes you feel a little superior. You should probably go to confession.

You don't go to confession. I mean, you never actually went to confession in the first place. But you could have. (But you wouldn't have).

A woman stands up in front of you in church and talks for a long period of time, and no one has to do Canon-Law-gymnastics to make it happen.

But you have to be careful, because while misogyny isn't institutional, it's personal. You pick your church wisely to avoid this.

You pick your church.

You notice that no one cuts out of church immediately after communion in the Most Holy Race to the Parking Lot. In fact, you find yourself lingering after the service to socialize. People call this "fellowship" which seems like a stupid word, but a nice thing.

You don't want to say a scripted prayer before meals, because you feel like your prayer should be authentic. But saying authentic prayers out loud still makes you uncomfortable, so you let your kids pray, because that's valid now, and they say, "Thanks for farts," and you let them because that's authentic-you-guess, and also relevant. So relevant.

You really like things to be authentic and relevant. Maybe also radical, if you can swing it.

You know about different Bible translations, and you just go ahead and pick one, and you don't even ask anyone if it's okay.

You feel entitled to coffee during church services. You have a mini-tantrum in your heart when there is no coffee available. Because what are you going to hold in your charismatic/evangelical hand to keep it under control if there's no coffee?

But you are totally willing to sit on folding chairs. I mean, folding chairs are just a given.

You still do the Sign of the Cross compulsively and frantically whenever your spouse blows through a yellow light, or when someone cuts you off in traffic, though. Because the Sign of the Cross you will have with you always.

The Unlikely Existence of Aine Celeste

It is a strange thing, carrying immanent death inside of your body. It is heavy, dull, fragile, heartbreaking. It takes stoicism and fortitude. It takes a waiting and a care that do not feel like hope. It is a capitulation to the fact that all things die, that life comes to us wrapped in mortality, that love and life require both stinging pain and shattering loss. That this is a risk we take every time we dare to care or feel.

The likelihood of her surviving to "viability" (23 weeks gestation) was extremely small. The likelihood of her surviving past two weeks, less likely. The chance of a normal life, without ventilators, severe brain damage, and with the ability to speak, think and move normally, smaller still.

We decided to name her Aine, the Irish spelling for Anya, a name meaning "heavenly light." It was a deeply significant name, a symbol of her source and of where she would go, the light of the world that the darkness would not overcome. We named her on a day of bleak, cloudy darkness, when the sky was filled with clouds that seemed to streak past my hospital window carrying meaning, but not the meaning I wanted. Not hope. It was a clunky, unphonetic name, not one we would have burdened a child who would grow into an adult with. Not a name we would have given to a child who would be able to respond when her name was called for attendance. Not a name for a job resume, or a dance recital program, or a birthday card, or the top of a book report. It was a name for a tombstone, a death certificate, a name to hide away in our hearts when her lungs failed and her brain stopped, but her little memory stayed like an aching wisp in my chest and behind my eyes. It did not feel like hope, this naming. It felt like trying our very best to weave the pain into the most beautiful form we could. Aine, heavenly light, abstract, ethereal, spiritual, otherworldly, unreal.

*     *     *

In our sane moments, we dared not pray for her life. In our wild moments, we begged for miracles like little children. In our wild moments, our hearts gave us no other choice.

*     *     *

At church, a week before Easter, she grabbed her copy of the bulletin, flipped past the song lyrics, and found the sheet with blank spaces to list thank offerings, prayer requests and new member information. Her seven year old hands rifled recklessly through my purse, unearthing a pen. I let her use it to write the three things for which she was thankful. I looked away. I felt her pull on my shirt. "Mom, look!" On her sheet she had listed the usual things children are thankful for. Beneath them, in the prayer request column, usually reserved for the ill, the suffering, the grieving, was her name, printed in large, proud letters: Aine.

I started a bit. I had been raised Catholic. Prayer for me is mostly a private affair, or something very formal. The sharing of that intimacy in the form of a prayer request seems like a violation, an imposition. But Jesus said "let the little children come to me," and far be it from me to tell the child "no."

"Do you know what that's for, Aine?" I asked.

"Yes! It's for everybody to pray for me."

"And what would you like them to pray for?"

"For me, and for love," she said earnestly. And then, after a pause, "And that all the cute kitties in my life will live for ever and ever."

While I cannot possibly bring myself to have the earnest hope that requests prayer from strangers, my lovely daughter will ask every single person in the church to pray for the eternal life of all of the cats in her life. How could I say "no" to that? And so after scribbling a quick note on her prayer request sheet to reassure the pastoral staff that my beloved child was not in failing health or dire need, but merely wanted prayer for the kitties and for love, I let her place it on the altar with the rest, and promptly forgot all about it.

*     *     *

When you know there is little hope, you have to protect yourself somehow. The baby needed my body's stability, which relied on my mental and emotional endurance. I held my body still for her. My heart still. I died to everything around me that meant anything. I knew that loving her would kill me. And so I would not let myself love her as a person in the future. I would not imagine her as an adult, or even as a child or toddler. I imagined her as spirit, as an idea, as a precious, but vague being, as a symbol of something larger than I could comprehend, something that might give all of this meaning. Her name was Aine. Heavenly light. A name from a mother who could never hope to see her grow and thrive in this world.

*     *     *

She used to cry when she saw her name spelled wrong on Christmas cards. The first day of kindergarten she came home enraged that the art teacher had mispronounced her name. She demanded that I go yell at her. I explained to her that her name was special. That it was from a language that was part of our family's heritage. That it meant something beautiful. That it spoke to the light and life that shone from every fiber of her little, lively being. She made her peace with this eventually, but she still asks why her name has to be so difficult for everyone to say and spell. I remind her that it is special, like she is, but I only half believe this. Mostly I feel guilt.

Her name reminds me of my hopelessness. Of my inability to envision life for my child. Her name reminds me of the feelings of depression and sorrow that I have yet to shake. My child's name is a legacy of what little faith I had in her strength and survival. I have given her a name that wasn't meant for this world. I named her in my grieving, before I had a right to grieve, to name, to give up. It is a beautiful name, but it is a symbol of my pessimism. Meanwhile, she carries a resilience born of being told "no" from the very beginning. She is earnest, optimistic, hopeful, open, running toward hurt and pain in spite of it all, hoping to transform it with her abundant love.

The child who would never walk dances. The child who would never breathe, wails.

I am everything she is not. Her name reminds me of this.

*     *     *

On Easter, we dressed up and went to church as a family. She writhed in her seat, constantly tugging on my dress, until I began to half ignore her, smiling passively and making vague, unthinking comments in her direction.

Her tugging became more insistent. "Look, Mom!" She pulled so hard on me that I was forced to turn around and look down. She was pointing hard at the prayer request portion of the bulletin, at the list of names we would read aloud before communion, the list of suffering, grieving, sick, struggling people. In the midst of the names, I saw it: "Aine."

She was giddy with excitement and nerves. "Are they going to pray for me? Are they going to actually say my name?" she asked, anxiously, smiling and rocking and gazing at me with her small eyes wide behind her dirty, crooked glasses.

"I guess so."

"Are they going to say it right?"

My heart dropped. Once again, my lack of hope had let her down. "Probably not, baby. They will probably say it like "rain," only without the "R," because that might be what it looks like to them, sweetie. But that's okay, right?"

She nodded, reluctantly. Her face fell. She is used to this, but she doesn't like it. "But why can't they just say it right? Can we tell them? Will God know it's me?"

"We can't tell them, love. But it will be okay. They'll still be praying for you."

*     *     *

When she was small and frail, inside of my failing body, so many people insisted on praying for me. They didn't ask, and I didn't request it. They just prayed. They insisted that I join them. They insisted that if I prayed hard enough, God would save my baby. I hated them for that. What about the people who pray with everything in them, with the same anguish I had prayed, shrieking and moaning at the top of my stairs when the bleeding started, and I knew I would lose her? The people who fervently, from the depths of everything they were, screamed and wailed, "God, please save my baby, you have to save my baby," and who lost their babies all the same? I could not believe that God was so easily manipulated, like a magical totem. More importantly, I could not let myself hope that God would create some special miracle, just for me, when so many others suffered. Above all, I could not let God let me down. I was without prayer and without hope, aside from, "Let it be done to me according to your will," and "Let some beauty, some light, come from all this darkness."

*     *     *

As the Easter service moved nearer and nearer to the prayer segment, she wriggled more and more, nervously fingering her name on the program. My hopeful little child. I reminded her again and again that her name would probably be mispronounced. I didn't want her to be disappointed. I, too, was nervous. I felt guilty, letting her impose herself on the prayer life of a hundred-odd acquaintances and strangers, I, who could not even let people pray for her in the hour of her direst need. I, her mother without hope.

The pastor stood up and led the congregation through the next portion of the service. She introduced the prayer section. Then she paused "Before we begin, I wanted to point out that there is one name that might be a little hard to pronounce. It's A-I-N-E. It's pronounced Ahn-yuh."

My little Aine waved her hand in the air, smiling shyly and the surrounding churchgoers, who I am sure were wondering what horrific malady she was suffering from.

*     *    *

The prayer begins. We read the names out loud, one at time. Normal names. Names that everyone can pronounce. She jumps from foot to foot, nervously, still grinning. And then I hear it, even as I am saying it: "Aine." They say it just right. Her face is glowing. I have allowed her the prayers I had feared for so long. My heart overflows.

*     *     *

It is a strange thing to carry hope inside you. Hope that feels like desolation, still, and dark, and quiet, buried under realism, and reason, and suffering. Hope that isn't a running toward, but a holding still. It feels like sorrow. It feels like pain and an awakening to the reality that we are but dust.

It is a strange thing to see this hope bear fruit. To watch it enter the world as a child, loud and strong, against all odds. It is not triumphant, but terrifying and confusing, to let go of a vision of death, the ghost you thought you had already met and let fly. To realize that instead, there is a person, wild and reckless, full of a hope that looks like what you thought hope should look like. Smiles, and courage.

It is a strange thing to see the other side of hope. To realize that it must have been there all along as something wise and mature, dark and inextricably rooted in suffering and joy, death and life.

It is hard to release myself from the guilt I feel for naming a child the name of an angel, the name of a piercing, ethereal ray. It is hard, but now not quite impossible, to see the shard of hope that must have been there all along, without which I could not have carried, heavy-hearted, this precious life inside my weak frame, without which I would not have been still and wrapped her in my care.

All along it was there, silent and deep. And without it, she would not be here, this wiggling, smiling child, all limbs and energy, running toward love and suffering with all of her being, tugging on my sleeve, saying, "Mom, did you hear? They said my name!"

Aine Celeste.

Born of hope.

My little shard of heavenly light.

Self-loathing and Sanctuary: How I found Jesus in Sunday School

Ever since we started attending our new church, Sunday services had provided a safe place in the midst of a week of activities that invariably make me feel not-good-enough. I spend all week burnt out and exhausted working a job that I could have worked without my college education, or even without a high school education, for that matter. So I feel guilty for being exhausted. If I'm tired while I'm underachieving, how could I ever possibly contribute anything meaningful and achieve-y to the world? Day after day I am squandering any potential I may have, and I'm absolutely fatigued from doing it. So I feel like a failure. And I feel guilty.

One of the reasons I give for working the job that I have is that the flexible schedule allows me to be home with my children when they are home, to be a "better parent." But the fact of the matter is that I'm a mediocre, sleep-deprived parent at best. I'm jumpy, irritable, disoriented, and not-too-terribly domestic. I want to engage with my children, but mostly I just want silence and a dark place to curl up and hide. 

Socially, I'm pretty much addled with anxiety, which leads to depression, which leads to anxiety, and on and on. So I feel guilty and awful in relation to my friends because I spend most days in hiding, not engaging socially at all. 

I also teach preschool dance and I'm lucky if I can get ten minutes of instruction in before they start throwing shoes and licking the mirror. Yet another weekly marker of my ineptitude.

I get that most of these things are a matter of my perception. I understand that probably I am an okay mother. I get that my whole identity isn't bound up in what type of job I have (even if all of my time is). I know that social anxiety is at least a little bit chemical, and that I'm doing the best I can. And I have yet to meet a toddler who wasn't tempted to lick a mirror now and then. But I still feel the way that I feel. I still feel guilty and shameful and wasted.

So for me, looking forward to Sundays had been the one thing that could coax me through the week. On Sundays I could just go and be, and not worry about if I was failing or succeeding, achieving or just pathetically scraping by, presenting the perfect social face or just barely managing to drag my depressed self out in public wearing something other than plaid pajama pants. Sundays were the one time when I didn't have to worry about being not-good-enough.

Of course, church is more than just taking and enjoying (although sometimes it needs to be exactly that, and I think that's okay, too). I want to participate. I want to give. I want to share, and help, and be a part of things. And so I volunteered to teach Sunday school. My husband and I had been teaching elementary kids together at the old church, and it had gone well. They think I'm funny, and the feeling is mutual. I could handle elementary school kids. I understood them. I felt okay teaching them. Not exactly like a teaching superstar, but adequate...which is about as close to confident as I get.

But our new church needed a preschool teacher, and as the universe seems to be conspiring to fill my life with small people at every turn, I was placed with the toddler/preschool group. And I was terrified.

If I sometimes struggle with a small dance class of a half dozen three year olds, what am I supposed to do with a dozen toddlers? And on a Sunday, the one single day of the week where there is sanctuary from my self-loathing and inadequacy? Instead of having something to look forward to, something to cling to in order to make it through the week, there was something to dread and fear. Instead of being a part of something new, and feel-good, and worship-y, and wonderful, I would be confined to the basement never to be seen again. Woe is me!  Yes. I know how utterly selfish this sounds. And I'm not saying that I didn't want to contribute at all, but just that maybe I should have signed up to be a greeter, or a communion-give-y person because I'm sure that I will ruin preschool for everyone. And because The Basement Forever. Woe, oh, woe! (I am inadequate and so very many things, but one of the things I am admittedly good at is melodrama. I am so, so good at melodrama.)

But I don't want to be selfish. I want to be selfless and confident. I feel the way I feel, but I'm trying not to be a slave to that. Because how I feel doesn't have to be how I act. I may feel depressed, but I can act out hope. I may feel selfish, but I don't have to behave that way. I might not even die if I go against my feelings. Maybe. 

And so I diligently practiced the very-very-scripted story that I was scheduled to teach. I practiced making my hand circle "in a counter-clockwise direction" over the story scenery (because apparently, if you circle your hand in a clockwise direction, Satan wins?). I practiced not inserting snarky feminist commentary into the preschool Bible story, because I'm told they don't get irony. And then I told my inner whiny child to be quiet. And I made my way to the basement nevertobeseenagain. And I braced myself. Because I was going to mess this up so badly. 

An then something surprising happened. 

Preschool was amazing. 

Not perfect. There were weeping children, and bickering children, and children who just flat out did not like the song that we were singing, and children who ran too quickly to be caught, and children who absolutely would not put away the Play-Doh because their creations should be immortal. But all of the children were wonderful, too. They listened, captivated, to the story. They didn't even mind that the women didn't have names (I will have to work on that...they should mind). They shook my hand and offered me peace in manifold adorable ways. They took communion in as solemn a manner as anyone could ever hope for preschool children. And when we were done, I didn't feel defeated, or sad, or hopeless.

 I didn't feel anything about me at all. 

It turns out that the preschool children are exhilarating. They gave me energy. They made me smile and forget myself and all my crazy, neurotic baggage. I'm so excited to see them again next week. Even if they cry, run in circles, and fight over markers. Because even if I don't manage to construct the perfect Montessori-style preschool Sunday school class, I can for sure love and welcome these beautiful little people. I can marvel at how their eyes light up, and how their voices sing, and how curious and creative they are, and how they try so, so, hard to learn to live with each other. 

It turns out that I can meet God in the basement just as readily as I can meet God in the sanctuary (or the social hall, in our case). God is there in the midst of the little children. Of course, God is. 

Thank God for the little children. And thank God for the Sabbath. And thank God for every new opportunity to practice (heels dragging and heart racing) selfless giving and humility. And thank God for the knowledge that I never will or can be "good enough" at this selflessness. And thank God that there is love and grace enough anyway: love and grace that look an awful lot like Play-doh, goldfish crackers, and sticky little fingers. 

And honestly, I don't know if I can conceive of a sanctuary constructed of anything more beautiful than that.

This is not a cry for help (or, why I'm buying in a dark poetry journal)

Maybe it's the weather and I just need to invest in one of those ridiculous sunlight therapy lamp things. (But have you seen the instructions for those things? The ones you have to follow exactly or you might as well just throw them out the window?)

Maybe it's some sort of spiritual thing, and I just don't love Jesus enough. (Is there a depressed person's version of the Prayer of Jabez, some magic supernatural God-controlling silver bullet for emotion?)

Maybe it's because I'm ashamed of all my wasted potential and I just need a time machine to travel back in time in order to tell my defiant and idealistic 19 year old self to choose a reasonable college major.

Maybe it's solely physical and I just need to start taking all the medication.

Or maybe I'm just going through some sort of lovely third-of-my-life crisis, wherein I revisit the angst of my teen years. Maybe I just need to blast Nirvana, lock myself in my room, write dark poetry and hate my parents. Maybe.

Or maybe I'm still experiencing post-traumatic symptoms from almost losing my youngest child some seven years ago. Maybe I need therapy. Or again, all the drugs.

Whatever the cause(s) (let's just go ahead and decide it's because I'm a highly-sensitive genius, because I definitely favor that theory), I regularly find myself balled up on the floor, overwhelmed by life and just...sad.

Yeah, I know it seems ridiculous. My life is nice enough. There are people out there with real struggles who aren't angst-ridden basket-cases. I know. I hate myself for being this way. For inflicting it on other people.  But then I wonder how many people actually know? How many people see all that sadness and anxiety, and hopelessness that is raging just below the surface. I wonder if maybe I smile just enough and function just enough to hide all of this emotional nonsense from the people around me.

And I wonder if I'm not the only one.

A while back, I wrote this. And then I buried it. Because no one wants to hear me whine. But here's the deal. It's honest. And I hate burying honest things. I highly doubt it's healthy. This is my life. Every single day, mostly. For no apparent reason. It just is:

The morning before the afternoon that everyone found out that Robin Williams committed suicide I spent in bed murmuring the repeated mantra, "I wish I weren't. I wish I weren't. I wish I weren't."  This has been my mantra for weeks. Months. "I wish I weren't. I wish I weren't." Not a death wish, exactly. Not a plan for suicide. And please, understand this. Not selfish. Not trying to escape pain or sadness or hopelessness. Just depression, plain and simple. That cold, dull ache. That utterly heavy nothingness. And the gnawing, relentless belief that the world would be better if I would just stop burdening it with myself. That my children would be better if they had a functional, happy, wholesome mother who could do ordinary mother things like, say, fold laundry, wash dishes and brush hair without curling up into an overwhelmed fetal heap and weeping. If I could just somehow free them from the weeping mother, and leave them to some bubbly, busybody, maternal type who didn't go into existential crisis every single time she gardened, that would be a gift to them and to the world, right?

Depression is insidious. It gets a stranglehold on brains that move too quickly. That think too much. Nerves that feel too readily and with too much intensity. Chemicals that are so precariously imbalanced and that play with such reckless abandon on body and emotions. And depression doesn't let you stand detached and identify it for what it is. It lets you, no, makes you blame yourself. I am too weak. I am too melodramatic. I am too privileged and expect too much from life. I don't try hard enough. I am lazy. I am unmotivated. I don't care about my kids.

And so I try to do all the things everyone is always telling me to do to fix it. (People are oh, so helpful). I answer my phone even when it hurts (and when I can't because my fingers are made of lead and I panic and throw that terrifying intrusion across the room and curl up in a ball and hide from it, I make the very difficult effort to call back later). I leave my house. Every day. I try not to spend all of my free time in bed crying. I play with my kids, appreciate, and enjoy them. I list in my head the things I'm grateful for. Say prayers of gratitude. I eat as well as I can. Get out and do things. Smile. I try so hard to make the mantra, "I am glad that I am," instead of "I wish I weren't." But even when I succeed, "I am glad that I am" reverberates with "I wish I weren't." It's the obvious lie. No matter how many times I cheerfully tell myself that I am telling the truth, this little cognitive trick will not conquer the darkness.

I hate myself, the trajectory of my life (how did I fail to waste any and all potential I might have had?), my hatred of myself and my life, I resent other people for being successful and happy. I am tired, self-loathing, and...

...and in conclusion, I'm going to go ahead and get that high-maintenance light therapy lamp, therapy, angry poetry journal, and of course, all the drugs.

(This is not a cry for help (no worries, I plan to remain very much alive). This is not an attempt to get attention (not a fan of attention). This is definitely not an invitation for advice. This is just me trying to figure out, trying to articulate, why I can't sit through a prayer or a sermon with the message "you are loved," or "you are worth something" without feeling it as a full-on assault of everything I am. Why I can't hear "you are okay" without singing "shutupshutupshutupshutup" in my head. Maybe one day I will figure it out. In the mean time, the best I can do is not lie about it being otherwise.)

What About the Kids?

The morning she came out in church, my husband cried in the car. In the nearly 15 years I had known him, I had only seen him cry twice before--at the death of his grandfather, and at our wedding. "I just kept looking at all those people in the rows in front of us and next to us. So many of them were crying, holding each other. It was like they had been holding so much inside, so much of themselves. And hearing someone say out loud, in church, that she was who she was, was freeing to them, too. And I imagined if one of those kids were my daughter. If church had done this to her. Made her hide herself inside. Made her hate a part of herself. I kept imagining if it was my daughter up there asking to be loved, to be accepted, not sure what the answer would be. And I think about all the kids I grew up and went to church with who were abandoned by the church they loved. The church they grew up in. The church that taught them that God loved them as they were, and then encouraged their families to reject them when "as they were" turned out to be gay. I imagined if it were my daughters."

                   

We have been church-hopping recently, and I hate it. I don't hate it because I don't value variety of religious experience. If I could attend a half-dozen various churches a week, I would. But I don't like the possible implications of church-hopping. Are we entitled Millenials, mindlessly buying into the consumerist vision of church? Are we not willing to do the hard work that community requires? Are we too idealistic, too put off by real people, and real life? 

To be fair, some of our church transitions were inevitable. We moved two hours away from our college church, or we probably would have stayed there foreverandeveramen. One of the start-up churches we attended was too small to survive. And our house church was a lovely experiment, but it was always just that, an experiment.

But others, we left deliberately. The church we returned to after college was no longer a quaintly conservative, spirit-filled community, focused on prayer and study. Instead, it had become something very much less than the sum total of its (often very kind and beautiful) parts. It was cold, and seething with self-righteous anger, focused in absolute entirety on fear and exclusion. It was openly and unapologetically mysogynistic. It was a church defined by its homophobia. And it bore the spiritual fruits of its hatred and fear. I left in the middle of several services because I could no longer hold back the words that were raging in me. We could not stay. 

The mega-church we were attending was lovely. It was wealthy, educated, cultured, missional. It had wonderful pastors. It was comfortable. But we didn't fit somehow. Maybe it was the fact that, though we fit in beautifully, so did everyone else. I never met anyone there who didn't fit the cultured, well-educated, demure mold. I never met a brash woman with a loud voice. I never met anyone who knew how to ask questions. Maybe it was the fact that they handed my six-year-old a tract in Sunday school that reminded her what a hopeless sinner she was, and even though I know for a fact that she didn't, claimed that she had "accepted Jesus into her heart." She shook with terror that day and never really wanted to back to Sunday school again. Maybe it was how neatly, how quietly, anything or anyone controversial was swept under the rug, how privately decisions were made and hidden. The pastors were wonderful, the music was superb, but this wasn't our church. We did not stay.

Our newest church was by far our favorite since college. The children adored Sunday school and we liked the curriculum (they were even...gasp!...encouraged to ask questions). The people were friendly. They were smart, loving, interesting, diverse, and they were also a little bit charismatic, which was exciting, if a bit terrifying to my inner Catholic. Even though we had to drive a way to get there, we felt at home. 

But we seem to have a fatal attraction to churches in flux. As it turned out, this new church was no different. The sad fact is that embrace and inclusion are controversial, even in (especially in?) our communities that follow the One who welcomed those on the margins first of all. The organization to which our new church belonged was unable or unwilling to fully embrace all of its people. Those on the margins and those who supported them were just too far gone. They issued an ultimatum and the head pastor refused to comply. The church split. And of course, both because we cannot stomach the thought of any more exclusion, judgement or quiet conformity--and also because of our fatal attraction to the vulnerable communities, to the ones breaking and shifting and growing--we left with two of the pastors and half of the congregation for yet another new church.

I knew in my heart, and soul, and head, and all of me that it was not only the right thing to do, it was what we had been called to in the first place. Everything in me was singing and shouting out that this was right.

But then, a few weeks before we were to transition to our newest new church, a needling voice in my head asked the question, "What about the kids?" What was our constant church-hopping telling our children about faith? About integrity? Will they think that they should just find whatever place feels perfect for the time being and move on when it isn't? Will they question if their parents' faith was ever really genuine? If it was actually a selfish desire for a perfect and personalized experience? I don't want them to think that faith and community are easy, that they aren't a struggle. I don't want them to expect flawless perfection, lack of conflict, everything tailored to their personal desires. And our children were so happy at the church we had been attending. Sunday school taught them to express themselves, that who they were was good, that their questions were valid. Why would we force them to be church nomads yet again? I didn't want to be selfish. I wanted to think about my kids. What about the children?

But every last one of us is somebody's child. Every last one of us is a child of God, a child of the light. On the day she came out in church, on the day somebody's child, God's child, had to ask for embrace from her church, on the day other children, God's children, wept because who they were had been kept in the dark for far, far too long, my husband and I cried in the car. And we vowed that never again would our children go to a church that taught little children that who some of them were was not worthy of embrace. And we vowed never to put our children in a Sunday school that taught them that God loved them as long as they were quiet, demure, and didn't ask too many questions. We promised never to let our little ones grow in a church that taught them that who they were was beautiful, that their questions were valid, that God loved even the least of these, but that certain types of people just couldn't be in leadership, no matter how obviously they were meant to be there. 

What about the kids, indeed. The fierce mother bear in me refuses to rest until she finds a place where her children's big, beautiful hearts will not be crushed any sooner than the world is hellbent on crushing them. There are enough traumas and terrors in life that they will surely live through. The church is not perfect. The church, like any community, has its share of pain, conflict, and hard work. I will never reject that pain, conflict and hard work. It is how we grow, how we bring new things to life. But the church should not be a source of cruelty to children, even grow-up children. I will not be complicit in the rejection of any of the beautiful children of God. I will not be complicit in cruelty or rejection (well-intended or otherwise) in the name of God. I will not let my children believe that this is what following Jesus is about. I will not let my children believe that God cannot love them (or their friends and loved ones) as they are. The love that loves them no matter what--that's grace. It is not mine to deny. Or the church's. Not ever. 

And so we church-hop once again. And the children survive. And the children thrive. At our new church, the little one lights up more than she ever has before. She sings about Jesus with her whole being, which is made for love, which is made both powerful and supernaturally light with the love that fills it. She is a strong, loud girl. She asks questions. She loves boys, and girls, and cats, and cartoons and she wants to marry them all. Who knows who she will want to marry when she grows up? But she is not afraid of her loud voice, or her brash personality, or her questions, or her fierce, joyous love. And she knows that Jesus loves her. And she knows that God loves her, and that God always will. She knows that the infinite love she feels is a fraction of the much bigger love of God. A love that can embrace, and embrace, and embrace, so that none of the children are too far for its reach. Even the ones on the margins. Especially the ones on the margins.

"For it is true, together we live, and only

at the shrine where all 

are welcome will God sing

loud enough to be heard."

(St. Teresa of Avila)