Category: God

Categories
Baptist Finding Gnostics God Introductions Seeking Seeking, Finding

Some Things What I Believe

Container of soap isolated over white

When I tell you that I am a Gnostic Baptist, it’s not a lasting label. I haven’t been anything long enough to safely (and sagely) say, “THIS I BELIEVE,” with any sort of lasting conviction.

In a back-and-forth with my friend Steve, after calling myself a Gnostic Baptist, he wrote, “Gnostic Baptist suits your eccentricity. Would that mean the same thing as Know-it-all Fundamentalist?” And it a little bit hurt my feelings because it sounded dismissive, or that I had been caught in some sort of Divine Contradiction. Any time I feel challenged, I tend to respond negatively. I tried, though, this time, to be matter-of-fact:

(I can handle a little ribbing about my conversion. But I’d prefer it not to be entirely dismissive? My being a Christian is as weird to me as it must be to you, but I’m working on not rising to defensiveness and, ironically, I’m asking for you not to help me practice so much.)

* * * * *

As I’m prepping for my Wolf Hall lecture series, I’ve been thinking a lot about historical claims and what is “true” in history. I revere Dame Hilary Mantel above all other writers in the known/unknown universe, and I agree wholeheartedly with her stance: Historians tell us what we have — a book, a letter, a speech, a brooch — but that’s about all they can definitively tell us. They can’t always tell us why we have it. We’re all liars. We lie in letters, we lie in our diaries, we lie to each other. Any sort of looking back is done with an agenda more than with any hold on the slippery truth.

I’m still working on how to describe myself, religiously, if I’m ever asked. I haven’t broadcast this New Mike very widely. (I’ve stopped posting to social media. I found that I was using Facebook as a means of emotional gratification, so that I had, in a sense, trained myself to go to Facebook to feel good about myself and that seemed…unhealthy.)

Zach has been wonderfully supportive. He just wanted me to feel spiritually connected/whole in the way he does, and had no care at all how I got there. (He did reveal to me, later, that there were some anxiety attacks when he thought I was going Catholic, only because of his own experience with that church.) He’s also been really good at asking questions that help me better define things.

* * * * *

I thought I’d share some of my beliefs here:

  • I call myself a Gnostic Baptist because I’m pretty against orthodoxy. Were they kooks? Sure. They all were. But I like the communal practice that gnostics encouraged. I like that there is some heavy leaning on Eastern traditions. (One part of gnostic belief: the resurrection simply referred to Jesus’s experience of enlightenment, and that we all can be resurrected as each of us, in our own way, reaches enlightenment.)
  • I don’t believe in sin. Or, rather, I think we can sin against ourselves and each other by causing harm, but I don’t think God keeps any sort of score card that he balances when we die. I believe salvation is already guaranteed (and didn’t require Christ’s crucifixion; but more on that in another bullet), so our job on earth is really to care for each other. We do this not because if we care enough, or more than someone else, we will end up in a better part of the afterllife. We do it because it eases our own sense of suffering to do good for ourselves or someone else.
  • I don’t think Christ was crucified for us to be saved. I think he was executed for practicing radical politics that centered all the “others” rather than the status quo. (When I see you next week I’ll tell you about an EXHAUSTING Quaker Bible study I went to. I tried to explain my idea about sin and the crucifixion, and I tried to explain how I don’t believe sin exists. “No, sin exists,” I was told by a Very Young Woman who performs her faith more than she seems to live it. By the way, I was told a lot of things, but listened to rarely; it was as if two Wikipedias had trapped me in a Starbucks in Adelphi, Maryland, and I alone was there to hear too much. “It is translated as ‘missing the mark,’ like in archery.” And I said, “You can’t believe that Christ died because we kept not hitting the target in archery, right?” And she said, “That’s not what I said at all.”)
  • I think God is just an aspect of some sort of divine experience in which we all participate. My beliefs are no more correct — or wrong — than any other belief. It’s all ways of trying to understand and grapple with the ineffable. All beliefs are valid, but not all beliefs work for all people. I’m not a Catholic. I’m definitely not a Quaker. I like my radical Baptist pastor a lot.
  • I think the Bible shows a deity that is learning how to be a deity. Is learning how to love and be loved.
Categories
Baptist Finding God New Testament Seeking Twinbrook Baptist

Mustard Seeds (26 August 2018)

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”

— Mark 4:30-32

Zach is the one who found the Baptist church for me. I wanted more religion in my religion than the Quakers were able to offer, though I respect them greatly (but quietly). “The pastor is a woman,” he said, and that alone would maybe have been enough for me to give it a go — but she’s a queer(ish) woman who preaches a radical theology of unfettered acceptance. I didn’t want a quiet room echoing only our own good will. I wanted a loud roar of agreement.

God isn’t in the wind, or the earthquake, the fire, or the loud roar of agreement — I know that. But I know where God is, and I know what my heart needs, and these can be in agreement, and anyway it’s mine own, mine own, mine own.

* * * * *

The day before I visited Twinbrook Baptist, I talked to my mom on the phone. She is 73 years old, thick in the muddle of Alzheimer’s. She mostly knows who I am; it’s the when I am that gives her trouble. Sometimes my brother and I are little kids to her, but actual, not in the way all parents always see this own offspring as children. Sometimes I’ve died. She was rarely kind to me, not necessarily out of any sense of malice; instead, out of a sense of just not knowing how. Her life provided few, if any, clear models of lovingkindness.

So the day before I visited Twinbrook Baptist, I talked to my mom, about how much my brother and I sound alike. About how some cat treats a friend sent gave Little Baby Fosco horrible diarrhea. (She laughed hard and long at that.) How beautiful the weather had been — so nice that for two days I was able to keep the windows open in the house. “Which helped,” I explained, “with the cat having diarrhea everywhere.” She laughed even harder. My mom, now in the dimness of her memory, has the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy.

At the end of the call, when we were saying goodbye, she said, “I wish you’d come out and visit soon.” And then she said, “I hope you have a beautiful life.” And it wrecked me.

* * * * *

Mustard seeds are small, stubborn, and selfish — which are also words one could use to describe me, as long as you also whisper “petty” under your breath, too. In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, we’re told that faith as small as this can, if tended, if noticed and cared for, can provide shelter. My mother, saying, “Have a beautiful life,” when that isn’t the story I have ever told myself, or others, about my mother’s love for me, was a shattering and obliterating piece of love and forgiveness — given and asked for — when I wasn’t sure I deserved it at all.

Depending on how you work your faith — if you have it, if you don’t, if you believe in Divine Guidance, or if you’re happy with the serendipity of chance — I’ve room for all of it. But I do think I was meant to be at that church on that day for that sermon. My own faith is easily as small as a mustard seed.

* * * * *

I began this current iteration of a Spiritual Journey back in late October/early November of 2017, when I reached out to a Catholic church near me, because I thought I was being called to that form of worship. (I was not.) I flirted, briefly (and embarrassingly), with Santeria, because I wanted form and ritual without having to also swallow a lot of what felt like popish nonsense to me. (I am sorry, Catholics who are fellow travelers on this journey, too. I don’t feel it’s as much nonsense now as it is just Not for Me.) I tried Quakers, which felt, if not entirely right, right enough at the time to get me used to the idea of regular church attendance. And then, in a Baptist church not 10 minutes from my house by bike, Pastor Jill shared the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and I felt my own mustard seed crack in my soul.

Pastor Jill connected mustard seeds and faith to the news that Twinbrook Baptist would be closing for good at the end of the year. (Try as hard as she could, the Old Guard parishioners were not interested in growing and developing within Christ; but, instead, wanted what was comfortable and affirming to what they already believed.) And then she shared that the proceeds from the sale of the church/land — some $1.3 million — would all be distributed to other affirming and like-minded churches, as well as social service endeavors. None would be kept by the church. In its dying, the church sends seeds and runners out into the world to grow goodness and wholeness as much as it can.

* * * * *

My faith isn’t large enough yet to harbor birds (but our house does, and it brings me joy and the cats something to look at that isn’t each other or the ghost that I am sure haunts the upstairs); but it’s growing.

Categories
God Mental Health Seeking

Suffering, Part 2: Good Suffering

This is what happens when someone tries to lead me through a guided meditation. They’ll want to start in a field — not physically, though; I’m not an Outdoorsy Kinda Guy — and they’ll say something like, “Breathe in the clean air of this meadow,” and I’ll breathe in but I’m not sure what “clean air of this meadow” means, or how to pretend it so it makes sense to my body, and while I’m struggling with what that might feel like, how the air would smell, what I might be hearing around me– unless it’s a terrifyingly silent meadow, and what might cause all the birds to be silent? Is something stalking them? Has there been some sort of environmental disaster? What would I do if there were an environmental disaster? I’d immediately get Zach, of course, and the cats, but we only have one cat carrier and three cats. Is this meadow I’m in near a store, maybe? God, if my therapist heard me musing about stores he’d be very frustrated because I just sent him an email a couple of days ago that said, “I’d rather not talk any more about shopping — what I can buy, where I can buy it, why it’s good to know where buyable things are. It takes me out of the appointment. And you may see this as an Issue to Be Solved — but I’m asking permission to maybe leave that problem, if it even really is a problem, until a much later time. There is so much else I’d like help with, so many other wonderful things wrong with me; and I’m sure there are complementary things within my set of traumas that could be used to get at the kernel of the problem without also making me frustrated.” And I wrote an email that said that because at our first session I said, “Sometimes being in a store can trigger an anxiety attack for me.” And then — this is an actual sentence he said aloud to me — he said, “You might be in a store, like Costco, and you’ll see a lot of people with appliances, but you won’t be in the market for an appliance, so you’ll file that away, and then later, maybe you need an appliance, and because you were at Costco, you’ll think, ‘I saw a lot of people at that Costco with appliances. I bet they sell appliances. I bet they have good deals on appliances because so many people had appliances in their carts.'” And by that time, dear reader, I was ready to Girl,Interrupt myself and I am now as far away from the idea of meditation, literally, as I am, metaphorically, and this is what it’s like when I try to meditate, and it’s suffering.

beautiful meadow during sunset

There are two kinds of suffering: useful and unuseful; momentary, and ongoing. There is some suffering we can learn from. And there is some suffering that is merely performative, done in some misguided sense of purpose. The suffering Margaret puts herself through is what I would call Stupid Suffering.

Communion_BreadWineI love Margaret with my entire heart and soul. I love her love of God. I would lay down my life for her. I think she is wrong about what Christ wants from us. He tells his disciples to do two things in memory of him: eat, and drink. He doesn’t say, “Oh, and also, I need you to suffer.”

Suffering is something we do to ourselves, but it’s not something we should do for God — except I’m about to go back to that “two kinds of suffering” argument and play it out for you.

Sitting mindfully, in quiet, so that you close out the noise and thrum of not just the physical world, but of your own self, is useful. It’s restorative. It allows you to be in touch not only with your Very Self, but with the Still Small Voice of God, too, if that is what you are listening for. (You don’t have to listen for it. “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” — Mary Oliver.) But there is some suffering, initially. Sitting quietly is alien to us. Actively trying to silence everything inside and outside of us goes against everything this chattering world has been built on. But the suffering one goes through to reach peace is a Good Suffering. It is building callouses. It is working metaphysical muscles. It is suffering in the pursuit of eventual peace and comfort. Even if it only lasts 15 minutes. Even if it only lasts 15 seconds. Especially if it’s just for one brief, glowing moment.

Margaret’s suffering — her discomfort in the heat, the pain she feels in her body — these she wants to offer up to Christ as if that will somehow lessen his own suffering. She may think her suffering is in pursuit of peace, and it would be hurtful and wrong for me to take that from her; it’s not my place. But that thinking is so deeply misguided to me as to be alien. It’s the Parable of the Hole done wrong. Once there was a man, and he fell into a deep well. His calls for help were answered by a woman, passing, who lept immediately into the hole with him. “I am here with you, and now we are both in this hole.” And nothing changed except for the math.

Categories
Belief Finding God Seeking Seeking, Finding The Bible, KJV The Bible, NIV

Suffering, Part 1: Margaret

Who were the homestead wives?
Who were the gold rush brides?
Does anybody know?
Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in the pages they wrote?
The land was free, yet it cost their lives.

— “Gold Rush Brides,” 10,000 Maniacs

A lovely woman whom I don’t remember meeting emails me periodically to check in on my faith. She’s Catholic, and named Margaret, so I probably met her at the one (1) catechism class I attended before I realized with the deep sweetness of unerring certainty that I was Not a Catholic.

We started emailing because I asked her not to email me any more. She organizes Dorothy Day Dinners (I imagine I’ll write about Day at some point in the future. I find her fetishization of the poor to be…worth writing about) and had sent an email to a group asking for people to contribute ingredients. It’s stone-soupy, if you will, if stone soup is a reference you’re familiar with.

I wrote to Margaret in early August, saying, “Please take me off your email list. I am so glad of the work you’re doing, and admire everyone. But after a lot of searching, I feel that my spiritual home is with the Quakers.”

So, as it turns out, my spiritual home is not with the Quakers, but that’s not the point of this story.

Margaret wrote back, “I have a sense of loss in reading that you are leaving our Communion and wonder if you would honor me with some details about what we are missing that you find attractive with the Quakers.”

So I did.

Margaret:

When I came to the Church, it was at a time where I finally was able to stay out of my own way about faith and God. Before, I worried that I was being intellectually disingenuous; I had always identified as an atheist, and thought that made me smarter than everyone who was a believer.

Of course, then God comes along and quietly reminds me that I’m not smarter than anyone at all. I’m just loud. 🙂

I knew I needed a spiritual home. I really thought it was going to be Catholicism. But I think there is so much culture there — being Catholic is more than just going to Mass. And I didn’t feel Catholicism in my heart at all.

Growing up in a faith tradition is easier than converting; and I feel maybe one should convert only if one cannot find what she needs in her own “home.” And I was starting out too late in the evening, as it was, to be an effective Catholic; I would have felt very behind all the time, and my disbelief would be heavy.

I found the Quakers because my husband said, “What about that?” He’s a Won Buddhist, a Korean-form of belief. (He’s not Korean, by the way.) His conversion was also circuitous. He had gone to a Quaker school in North Carolina (Guilford), which, by virtue of being a contemplative religion, made stretching into Eastern traditions less jarring, I’d guess. I went to my first meeting, and was sort of overwhelmed with peace and love. I could start there, from the beginning; whereas, while everyone was lovely and welcoming to me when I came to my one (and only) catechism class, I didn’t feel like I was starting from a place of love. I felt like I was starting only from a place of struggle.

I now identify as a Quaker with a sense of Flannery O’Connor about myself, and an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I’m not completely hidden from Catholicism.

Again, I can’t stress enough how much I now do not identify as a Quaker, though I admire them greatly. Our breakup was not the never-speak-to-me-or-my-good-strong-sons-again type. I just need more religion in my religion than unprogrammed Quakerism provides. I need the Bible. I need God and Jesus. I need pews and awkward hymns and a sermon because, as it turns out, I really need structure. I didn’t grow up feeling necessarily safe and secure; when I feel like things are too come-what-come-may my anxiety spikes and I’m left chewing the skin around my fingers and counting my steps to soothe myself.

My friend Steve, through a teacher he had, explained to me once that one is probably best served within the religious tradition in which they were raised. Those cultural groundings are important. It’s not a necessity — clearly, as Zach is incredibly content and thriving in Buddhism. But, as I learn more about myself and my relationship to faith, it is a necessity to me.

I later sent Margaret an email with a link to an essay I wrote. I titled it “of possible interest” and she very graciously said, “I probably will not be able to check in on your web site but things change and I may find time to do so in the future.” I love Margaret very much, and her honesty. I probably wouldn’t have time to read my own writing, too, but would lie to me and say, “I can’t wait to read this tonight.” But I’m trying not to be like that. Margaret went on to write, “My ex-husband’s health is declining and very soon I am going to need to give more of my time to him.” She also said, “Today, I am going to try and get through the heat, cook and can spaghetti sauce and make an offering of my day to God.” And she closed by asking for prayers for her and her family.

(The thesis of this post, by the way — suffering — we’re getting to it. I promise.)

A few weeks ago I completed hospice training. As part of my religious focus, on myself and the world, this felt like something I could give that also needed giving. Right now, it makes me feel useful. My hope is that it will make me humble. There’s something self-serving in announcing, “I PROVIDE HOSPICE CARE.” And it’s there because we’re humans, with human feelings and emotions. Even Christ let slip he was the Son of God every now and again, and he was both wholly human and wholly divine.

“You sound dead-set on turning your stove on today, so I won’t counsel against it. I baked cookies on Sunday and thanked God for air conditioning,” I wrote her back, among a bunch of other things, including how now, at 40, I’m better able to hear the Still Small Voice of God. When I was younger — in my 20s — I expected, or, rather, demanded, that God speak to me in a Giant Booming Voice. And when He didn’t, I told myself, ‘Well, that proves it. He doesn’t exist.’ But none of us are smart in our 20s. Now, in my 40s, I hear God in the still small voice from 1 Kings. I think about the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and how a very small faith, if well-tended, can provide safety and shelter. It is incredibly humbling. And such a great rejoinder to Twenty-Year-Old Mike, who didn’t know how to listen.

Margaret explained the stove thing to me:

The stove thing is because my garden had produced a nice crop of tomatoes and I must “do” something with them and not let them spoil. I often think, at this moment each year, about the pioneer women, or even early 20th c. women who slaved over a wood heat stove to can. They died young but at least I have made it to 70 and have fans. If I make the heat today a prayer, it is called the prayer of the body. What I mean is this: I pray aloud or silently and this is pleasing to God. If I offer my whole day to God, my prayers, works, joys and suffering, and I unite myself to His passion and death, then suffering the heat of the day IS a prayer.

And we’re where I need us to be, now. Thee and me, we are all caught up. Because I want to think about religious suffering for a few more words.

I want to make this clear at the start: my religious beliefs and practices are very much mine. They’re influenced by what I’ve read, what I’ve heard, whom I’ve met, and what feels right to me, which is ever changing as I’m influenced by the aforementioned three other things. (“I’m new in town…” — John Mulaney) I’m sure this is true for a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ. The idea of God requiring suffering from me is so foreign, so unutterably alien, that I am actively compelled away from the idea of lovingkindness when considering it. Faith that values suffering is a faith that I don’t wish to have. It is a faith that is alien to me. It’s a faith, nonetheless; it’s just not mine own, mine own, mine own.

Within my faith practice, suffering is something I commit against myself. When I push against the mystery of God, when I give in to harmful/uncaring thoughts against my self (cf Cheri Huber, e.g.), I cause suffering. I can also cause others to suffer, too, which is reflected back on to me like rubber and glue. There is no good in suffering, as far as I can see. And Christ, of all people, certainly does not need my suffering to weigh the love I have for Him.

But it’s Margaret’s, and not mine to take from her, or disavow to her.

“Ok, I begin,” she ends.

Categories
Belief God Seeking

“Advice” by Ruth Stone

My hazard wouldn’t be yours, not ever;
But every doom, like a hazelnut, comes down
To its own worm. So I am rocking here
Like any granny with her apron over her head
Saying, lordy me. It’s my trouble.
There’s nothing to be learned this way.
If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don’t confuse hunger with greed;
And don’t wait until you are dead.

–Ruth Stone, Topography and Other Poems