water and fire

"We make vows we intend to keep, and then we spend our days in life's middle, clenching them tight. How could we know what our vows mean until we've dug our fingernails deep into them all those years later. How can we notice the hard beauty of such words, the thick holiness of hope, until we experience what living a vow requires? Vows always demand an entire life."" 

(Micha Boyett, Found)

When my oldest was nearly one, we ordered overpriced stationary, used my new-found online shopping skills to select a delicate white gown and bonnet, and commissioned a fancy cake in blue and green frosting with "God Bless Sylvie Noelle" scrolled across the top. Having grown up in traditions that practiced infant baptism, it seemed natural that my husband and I would have our first child baptized as a precious baby, to the oohs of delighted parishioners and the glowing pride of  first time grandparents. Neither of us were sure we actually believed in infant baptism, but were assured that the ritual could be performed and given whatever level of meaning we wished to ascribe to it. We called it "baptism" because "dedication" sounded a bit watered-down, but held the term loosely,our unformed theologies bridging the tension between the two.

Our oldest daughter had been a terrifying surprise and a sleepless baby. We seized on her baptism as a declaration of welcome, asserting  that yes, this child was God's wonderful gift, even if our future together now looked vastly different than we had planned. Yes, she was wanted. Yes, she was loved and adored. Yes, her life was desired and longed for, a sign of the hope that surprises and knocks us off our guard, the God who gives in unlikely times and unlikely places, to unlikely people, ready or not.

When my second was nearly one, she had just recently drawn breath with enough strength and regularity to earn freedom from the menacing oxygen tanks and tangles of tubing that had anchored her fragile self to our home for so many months. Her breath and laughter were as much prayer as I could allow in a world that had almost taken her from me, a world that now seemed ripped by the awareness that death is real, that the normalcy of daily life is heaven on earth and never to be taken for granted, that the universe is a capricious place, taking and giving life at a pace that left me almost as breathless as my child who wasn't supposed to live.

For months and months, I waited for the other shoe to drop. Why should my child live while others did not? Surely tragedy was just around the corner. I never let my guard down. Not for a second. And I never breathed a prayer. I was certain even a timid "thank you" would result in the earth swallowing her up, as a lesson to me for thinking that it should be otherwise.

We used her condition as an excuse to stop attending church, to take a break. We met for a while with a pastor and his wife who hoped to plant a new church. My oldest played quietly with toys on a blanket in the corner of the little chapel in which we met. My husband participated, praying and singing, and socializing. I spent the time repeating the one prayer I could pray, screaming silently to God "I need you to be good. I need you to be good. You have to be good. You have to be good." The baby careened around with reckless abandon, shouting "Alleluia! Amen! Glory! Glory!" But we didn't have her baptized. These pastors did not believe in baptizing infants. Only dedicating. And now, dedication didn't have that same, watered-down feeling. Now, it felt more sinister.

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In the Bible, dedication isn't merely a kind word, a sprinkle of water, and the polite clapping of friends and family. In the Bible, dedication is serious. Dedicating your child to God, pledging someone to the Holy One of Israel, can get them killed. Isaac avoided the fire by the grace of a goat in the brambles. Jephthah's daughter was not nearly so lucky. Samson was pledged to God as a child, grew his hair as a sign of that pledge, and it was this hair, this symbol of his dedication, that was both his strength and his undoing. Jesus was dedicated in the Temple, baptized in the Jordan, and crucified at Gethsemane. Certainly, Jesus rose again. Certainly, Isaac helped found a nation. But not everyone gets to be an Isaac. Not everyone gets to walk back down the mountainside. And the nation of people pledged as God's own, scattered like stars in this magnificently expanding universe, those people suffered and starved, were enslaved and sacrificed.

Dedication is never safe. Vows are risks. I had just received this child against all odds. I grasped her life, wrapped myself around it, and protected it greedily. She was mine. My beautiful, unlikely child. I couldn't take the risk of dedicating her to a God that asks for sacrifices. I was not ready to have that sort of faith credited to me as righteousness. I just needed God to be good. And to leave me and my child alone.

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But she has been God's from the beginning. I had made that pledge already, with the hasty intensity of Jephthah, going out to battle, with the naivety and uncertainty of Abram needing to believe that God is good, that this wild universe is woven together with glorious purpose, and gentle mercy. 

The night I was rushed to the hospital, at the top of the stairs, hunched over and screaming, wild and irrational, about to lose the life growing inside of me, I promised God my child. I promised that if she were allowed to live, she would not be mine, but God's. The blood, and tears, and terror were all bound together that night like an ancient sacrifice. My screams rose up like smoke on the altar. 

This world is more wild and awake than we like to admit. We create rituals to both remind ourselves of the profound mysteries and heart-stopping savagery of existence, and also to contain them.  That night at the top of the stairs, on the verge of heartbreaking loss, there were no birds split in two, no flesh consumed by flame, no precious oils or dreadful ash, but there was blood, there was holiness, there was dedication, and there was a vow.

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On Sunday, my youngest will be baptized in our church, a church that has pledged itself to the all-embracing love of a God of hope for unlikely people. She will have no gown, no cake, no embossed invitations. She will probably wear torn leggings, smudged glasses, and a goofy, self-conscious grin. Water will be poured out. She will make her own vow, a vow she has repeatedly asked to make, even if she does not fully understand it (do we ever fully understand it?). And I will not hold her back. This child is mine, surely. But she is also the child of a God who is larger and more terrifying than the inflatable hot tub/baptismal font and her goofy grin let on. She is my child, but she is also the child of a God whose love is wilder, freer and more profound than even our best rituals can fully reveal. She has never not been God's child. But now she will declare this daring truth, the one I dared not speak for years. And I will let her. 

Some rituals are fire, blood, and sacrifice. And some are water, oil, and new life. Our vows lead us to both. They curl up like smoke. and they leave us empty, vessels for spirit and living water. And in between is all this earth. In between is where we hold each other in the blessed miracle of day to day life, woven together with glorious purpose and gentle mercy.

And so I will continue to hold her, and her sister as well. Hold them as mine, and not-mine. Trusting that the pledges we make will shape us and leave us more whole. That they will lead  us into risking a more vulnerable and powerful humanity, living as children of a God who I choose to believe against all odds is breath-takingly and breath-givingly good. A God who is with us in the consuming fire and in the life-giving water, in the earthy forgetting of the everyday, and in our breathless, fearful vows. At the top of the stairs, knee-deep in baptismal waters, and every moment of the in between.

Alleluia. Amen. Glory. Glory.

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.

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)