A Relationship

On retreat I once wrote in my journal, “How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings created by intimacy, for the possibility to give back and to give something to You—as if I could give anything back to You.

You offer me the possibility to undo, to please, to apologize, to change, to surrender, and to grow. There’s room for stages and for suffering, for mutual passion and mutual pity. There’s room for mutual everything.”  This is good religion, worthy of free, intelligent, and mature people!

Richard Rohr, From Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality p. 67

What a beautiful way to put it :)  I always felt like there was some sort of truth to this thing underneath all the masses of weirdness and creepy christianism I traversed my way through upon first coming upon this God in Christian form.

It was something like this I was talking about.  Room.  There's room here to just BE.

Always the Way

Funny how these things happen. The first two years after my marriage broke up I was desperate to be ready for another relationship. It seems almost insane to me now, really. What was I thinking? A crazy trying to get away from myself, from this churned up, busted part of me that was in pieces, in a way it's never been before. I wanted to be whole and shiny and ready. It was a form of insanity, really, and a terror. No wonder the dynamic of the rebound is so tempting to so many. An easy short cut, something to throw yourself into to forget your grief, shove it on down.

There was a crazy white-eyedness that came with the break-up of my relationship on the tail of being ill for so many years. I was bowed down double with grief and guilt, leaving the man who stood by me all those years. Oh, boy. But I had to go. I had to crawl away into a cave, by myself. I had to. Oh, boy. The guilt, the guilt.

I have been not afraid to die over these years. I would have welcomed it. More than once or twenty times I have cried out for an ending. Now is another sort of fearlessness to re-cultivate. One of not being afraid to live. You cannot have one without the other. Much of Christendom has taught differently, and many rich Christians think that this is what it is all about. But the way of life through death is exactly what Christ teaches. He knows how deep it all goes. He knows the gold swells out the ends of dead threads, that death has lost its sting. That life always comes after death.

Something has shifted in my self image. Perhaps I have finally forgiven myself for not being perfect :\ Now, it is not beyond the realms of possibility to look in the mirror and think that someone somewhere could love me. Maybe even will. After all, it's happened before, I'm sure it can happen again. I am, after all, quite lovable :) And yet, as is always the way, now that I can consider the idea of a man in my life, I am really not all that interested! Always the way.

It is amazing, the time factor. Some things you think will gape open forever. I guess some things do, with a bit of puckering along the sides as the years pass and the shock and numbness wear off. This wound is a sharp slice from the sharpest knife. The tears that came out of that wound filled several Olympic sized swimming pools surely. I still cry. I am not sure that all of those tears are not coming out of a series of joined-together wounds, all stretching way back into my childhood. They are not going away. They are a part of me and they belong in my body, in my life, like stretch marks, from the good and bad choices and the occurrences beyond my control. The tears that have flowed out from those spaces have oiled the way for a greater compassion to come from there, too. And for the light to get in.

Shitty Priorities?

I was planning on catching up with an old school friend on Friday night. She's cooking dinner and having a few mutual friends over and invited me last Saturday. I just realised my football team are playing on Friday night. I am too guileless to lie (and I can't be stuffed trying to keep in my head what lie I told whom) but perhaps I'm a little too honest :) This is the text message I sent:

Hey love i just realised its the footy on Fri nite so I am going to that - which is an awful but non negotiable fact about me and socialising in the winter months :) I am planning on catching up with Deb in the coming weeks so maybe we can catch up then if ur not too offended with my priorities :)

Her response included some kisses but also a reminder that my football team is down and out. Haha.

One thing I like about getting older - learning to make less apologies for the more unpalatable aspects of my personality, like shitty priorities :)

How about you. Would you text me back and say "shove your friendship up your bum"?

Third Places

Richard Beck, as always, is getting me pondering. This time it's about his latest series, Alone, Suburban and Sorted. At this point in the series Richard is talking about the need in our culture for "third places", those Cheers-type spaces that are not work, are not home, but are the third shared places where the potential is for everybody to know your name. No show-runners required.

This rings true for me like a giant gong. It is, in fact, the central drawing card for the gallery space idea I have been rolling around in my mind. An idea which will most likely morph over time to become something completely different. But an idea for a place, a central space, a cultural glue. No jacket required. A comforting sort of an idea.

Third places are not hosted places. No one is guest, no one is host. The place is shared or neutral. This allows for independence and freedom. As Oldenburg summarizes, "There must be places where individuals may come and go as they please, in which none are required to play host, and in which all feel at home and comfortable."

According to Oldenburg, the reason third places need to be neutral is that they help resolve a paradox of social mixing. Specifically, we need a degree of distance and autonomy from the very people we might seek to associate with. Our interactions need to be voluntarily initiated and dropped if we are to agree to participate in them. Anyone who has ever been forced into social mixing knows exactly what Oldenburg is talking about. Churches make this mistake all the time. Compulsory mixing is forced and effortful and we quickly avoid or distance ourselves from it. Oldenburg cites Richard Sennett's assessment: "People can be sociable only when they have some protection from each other." The protection offered by the third place is that one can come and go and interact with others as one pleases.

A space where, as Beck points out, conversation is the main activity. A safe place where we get to interact each other to each other instead of all moving around inside public spaces ensconced in our mobile phones, mistrusting each other, feeling like we are interloping into our own spaces. Thank God for global financial crises where we are going to be forced to confront and learn to live with each other again.

Becks' series, which I recommend fulsomely in its entirety, is thought-provoking stuff. Reading this hones for me why I get so frustrated at certain places like, for example, the MCG or Telstra Dome (or whatever it's called these days), and make my poor mother sigh. But I am not just ranting for the sake of it. I am ranting because these spaces are important if we are not all to go completely insane, and yet they have been co-opted by the powers that be, over and over.

We are informed, in a myriad of different ways, that none of our spaces are really ours. We must share them with giant big screen televisions and giant airbrushed billboards and jingly jangly pokie machines. We allow our technology to take us away from each other even from our public spaces. And we like it thus. Because we really don't like each other very much.

The MCG is as close to a third space that I experience on a regular basis for half of the year with people I know and people I don't know. This is why I get so incredibly frustrated that this space has been turned into a giant lounge room - not the cosy sort, but the sort where the giant plasma is the absolute centre of everything and relationships are pushed, as they are always pushed in crackpot land, to the periphery. Alienation. Continual and unabated. No wonder we're all half mad.

You're not half mad? Oh, must just be me then, heh :)

We need to relearn how to be around each other. We need to relearn how to love each other. Sounds funny, doesn't it? Especially if you refuse to believe that you haven't been born knowing how to lurve. But maybe we only know what has been first demonstrated to us.

Which makes me grateful that I believe in a God who loves us. His life drips down the way the free market is supposed to :) I learn to love because he first loved me. Now, if only I could begin acting like it ;)

The Dance of Body and Mind

I'm telling ya, there is something to this chakra business. Not of course that it could be scientifically proven or deduced, in the way that we often expect truth to be available to us. Some describe it by saying that chakras exist on the spiritual plane of our bodies. I wouldn't know. I'm not all that interested in being able to scientifically test whether these chakras exist so as to prove them to other people and validate my own experiences. All I know is that when I meditate upon these balls of energy in my body, I begin to inhabit my own body again. It is sometimes distressing to realise how much of my life has been spent removed from my own body, in a sense. I have intellectualised, or fantasised, when I could have been dancing too.

It is a funny thing, but I never really felt like I could dance. All clunkiness, you know? I didn't understand how other people could do it. And so in my late teens and early twenties, when my friends and I were regularly getting together on a weekend and drinking and dancing at the pub, I would sit out on the sidelines. I felt too unbalanced to dance.

The whole idea of the chakras is that loosely there are three that are related to your body, three related more to the mind and the spirit, and the one in the middle, the heart chakra, that binds them all. It is a nice thought, isn't it? It is also interesting to note that, regardless of whether these things actually 'exist' or not, I consistently notice that those chakras related to mind and spirit are very strong in me - I have a strongly developed sixth sense - and the ones that are related to my body are often undefined and difficult for me to tap into unless I work to strengthen them. This is certainly my weakness. It is becoming so apparent to me I wonder how it is that I could have missed it for so long. But then, it always feels like that, doesn't it? We see what we see and wonder how it was that we couldn't.

Last night I did some chakra meditation, and I could feel the effects of this uncomfortable period I have been going through in the last couple of months. All of a sudden I have felt back at the beginning again, before I started all of this creative and bodily exploration. Almost without realising it, I have become way more ungrounded and fearful, feeling a certain disconnection from myself. Thing is, I spent so many years feeling that sort of disconnection that I suppose in times of stress I slot back into it, unless I am aware. I suppose that it is no coincidence that this period of unsafety of the past few months has dislocated me out of my own body.

It is no coincidence that most people I know seem dislocated from their own bodies. It's a product of living in a Western society. We lose our heart because we lose our feet, and so we lose our heads. I can only pray that the Body does not forget what it is joined to. Sometimes I think we are living in the converse of the Renaissance. At that time, people were supremely confident about the ability of humans to rise up to greatness. There was a flourishing of creativity in that period, of discovery, of realising how much people had been held back in the past. Where is our vision, these days? Where is the vision of the Body? Oh, I see smidgeons of it here and there. I see it is returning. I see that one of the greatest things we seem to be grasping hold of is the untenableness of grasping hold of anything else except God. Perhaps this is all we need.

Of course, that idea that we can do nothing of ourselves, that we are the branches - well, it doesn't sit well, does it? I think it's something we all need to learn for ourselves, what that looks like, feels like, plays out in reality. We think that acknowledging that we are just the branches is taking something away from us, making us smaller. I suppose much of life involves God showing us what it looks like when the focus is instead not on what we lose but in what we gain. Life giving water instead of broken cisterns of our own hewing. This takes so long for us to learn, does it not, this overcoming the horror that we are not the Great Originators? But over that hump is the vista that we don't end up losing anything at all that is not worth chucking in the first place, and we gain everything we could desire. This is our giant collective blind spot.

The Body has sat outside of itself too much in the past. It has allowed itself to be violated by the culture. It has sat outside of itself so much that I think it is just beginning to get in touch with the levels of its own self-hatred. This is scary work. You need to be safely connected to the heart to begin to acknowledge and recognise the disconnection. Perhaps this is where we are at? I don't know.

I am seriously tempted to start up some yoga again. The lovely discovery of yoga was that it was like a form of dancing to me that I could do. How wonderful to discover that I could do these movements, these postures, with something like grace. And afterwards, the most wonderful thing of all, the settling of my fears and insecurities in some strange way. It was like tapping into my body, actually moving in it, twisting it (sometimes into such forms I never would have thought I could twist it into) settled and calmed the fears. In writing this post I am understanding over again how it is that I don't need to have all of my fears removed, as if they are a cancer within my body that I must have surgically extracted. It is enough instead to be held, and have them quelled.

I have had a deep loathing of my own body for many years. It is way too hairy, lumpy, wobbly. I believe I have still not quite come to terms with it. I also believe this is like a manifestation of some things I have going on inside of me. I am not willing to share my body with anybody else until I have come to some sort of healing, to some extent. Doing yoga, I felt that I was entering into my own body in a way that made me realise how hollow I often felt within it, how not at home I was within my own body. Like us. We're often not at home in our own Body either.

But we're becoming more so, I believe we are. I have no evidence to back up that claim except what I feel in my own heart. Do you feel that too? I think it is about acceptance, of ourselves with all of our hairiness, lumps and wobbly bits. But even more than that, it is something overarching that we need to realise. I think it has something to do with vision, with seeing, more than it is to do with getting rid of all of our many and horrible sins. I think that is a byproduct of the seeing way more than anything else. I don't quite know what it all looks like yet. I know that it is the same sort of vision and scale removal and grabbing hold of something that is not from ourselves that enabled those first century Christians to chuck all they had in common with each other. We haven't experienced anything like that yet, not really. I think maybe we've all had glimpses of it. We haven't even begun to dance yet. I don't think we believe yet that we are able to. I think maybe we are just starting to hear the music.

Compliments

It's nice getting compliments. We all need feedback from time to time on how we are coming across to other people, don't we? You know how sometimes someone will say something thoughtful and it just makes your day? Or even if it's not so nice for you to hear - if you can accept it, that kind of feedback is priceless, because it always costs the person giving it to you - and honesty is sometimes like diamonds because people don't like to hurt each other's feelings.

I've had a few nice compliments recently. Nice things my dear cousin said to me, my ex-husband. My friend Michaela told me via email that she admires the way my brains works, which was kinda nice, you know? Sometimes I like to pretend to myself that I don't need anyone else's validation. Sometimes I think I am more of an island than I really am, crusty old dame that I am becoming :) The thing is, I can see the downside of being validated by other people. It can become an addiction, requiring constant affirmation by other people to make yourself feel worthwhile. And I'm not interested in playing that game. Indeed, tonight I came to the startling conclusion, whilst getting off the train to go to the footy, that another layer of caring about what other people think of me has been stripped away. I can't say how much of a freedom that is. I don't know how it happened. I never, ever really thought I would ever get free of it. But it is happening, ever so slowly. I think it is the desire of Love for that to happen for us. For us to be able to be ourselves even if that is something that is too big or too small or too whatever for other people. I simply don't care anymore if I don't slot into other people's paradigms or ideas of what I should be for them. Paradoxically, I feel more accommodating than I ever have before. I feel like I can put certain things of myself aside if it makes other people uncomfortable. It's just that it's on my terms when I do it, and it's not to gain anything from them. I don't need your validation anymore, peoples. It's a beautiful thang. I like getting it, but it's not gonna change my perceptions about myself.

Which is really good, you know, 'cause here is Tyler's take about me:

Five years ago, my only friends who were tatooed, pierced and were "naughty little potty mouths" were unsaved, and that was comfortable for me, taught me the "proper" line between "them and us."

My friend Sue changed that, and it was uncomfortable for me. But I needed Sue or I was never going to accept Kim.

Which is just about the most backhanded compliment I have received for a while :) But hey, at least I'm not Kim, right? :D

And I'm not tattooed or pierced. That's skanky people like Erin ;)

Only jokin', Tyler darling :) (and Erin :) I couldn't resist having a lend of you. This cracked me up when I read it. You know I loves ya :) I think it's really awesome how such disparate people can click, you know? Chatting with you and Kim is really an edifying thing for me because you're right - we are so different. And yet I feel the oneness when I talk with you guys. Gives me a kingdom taste. Makes me smile :) It's awesome :)

The Life of the Left Hand ... And Meanwhile the Right

I'm on an email list that discusses and shares relational Christianity. Have been on it for years, came across it when I was in the process of leaving the church building I attended, and Googled something to that effect and came across Wayne Jacobsen's wonderful site and the yahoogroup that goes along with it.

I had some really cool online fellowship there, came across a whole stack of people who were feeling the disconnect in the building just as much as I was (oh, bliss to find likeminded souls) and it was just so good to be able to share without being judged, you know? To ask the difficult questions, and the questions that sounded as if you were losing your mind or your faith or both, and to have validation and affirmation. Sweet stuff.

I haven't been as involved lately (funny, but it's probably the time I have needed the fellowship the most, but I have been quite disabled at fellowshipping the last few years, far too focussed on my own stuff. And anyway, there's this blogging community I've fallen into now.

Actually, even though these two online forms are both situated on the internet, there are differences. Blogging is a far more public space and yet is singular expression in its general form. A forum is a confluence of voices. The dynamics created are much more representative of 'real life fellowship' than blogging. But blogging affords people a voice that they might not have out in 'real life fellowship'. I imagine the best type of real life fellowship would be a combination of those two things - everyone heard, everyone contributing, in a great symphony. That sounds a bit corny, but I still harbour hope :)

But anyway, I digress from my real aim, which is to reproduce a post one of the members made to the forum today (permission granted, of course) which resonated so with me that I wanted to share it with you:

In January of this year, I realized that June 14, 2008, would be the 40th anniversary of the day I decided to follow Jesus. It really overwhelmed me, as I looked back, because it seems I have wasted so much time. There were far too many years in the wilderness, far too many bad choices and living out the consequences of them. There was half a lifetime of doubts and fears, knowing I could never measure up to all the requirements that were tossed out at the Sunday club. Most of my life, I was a taker, a seeker of healing. Being so self-centered, I paid a big price. I never felt that my life made a difference.

I think it has been ten years or so since Father started nudging me outward, away from my inner needs and pains. I did spend half that time hating it, struggling against it, trying to keep the focus on me and what I mess I thought I was. Through a confusing loss, I spent about a year refocusing. The healing came slowly, but it DID come! So, the realization that I have been a follower of Jesus for 40 years was bittersweet, as my heart longed to make a difference for others.

The first conscious thing I did was to volunteer with Hospice. After being peripherally involved in the death by cancer of a life-long friend, it became a longing in my heart that could not be quenched, to be a friend to those who are dying, to make the last months of a life less stressful, more natural. So, I do that as God gives me grace.

But I wanted to do more. I wanted not only to reach out to others, but to show Father in some real and impactful way what our relationship means to me. I decided to plan a retreat. I wanted to get away and be with Father, sing and pray and read and journal for a few days, just to focus on Him and tell/show Him my feelings for Him in a concentrated way.

I saw a bumper sticker once: If you want to make God chuckle, try "making plans".

To hasten to my point, this week I am sleeping in a tent in a campground along the coast of California with my eight year old granddaughter. I brought a backpack full of books, Bibles, journals, etc., and haven't opened it once. I have learned much more, love much more, just by allowing Father to do what He does best: Love me. Here's what has happened:

Every day has been filled with activities. We are exhausted every night and fall straight to sleep. But each and every day, Father has been showing me something new.

Yesterday, as I sat on a piece of driftwood and watched my granddaughter romping in the surf, I thought about her life these past few years. Her bio dad is a drug addict, which she doesn't realize. She adores him. She doesn't know why her Mom divorced him, she just knows that her life is very different now, which is fantastic of course, but she doesn't understand a lot of it.

At almost the exact day of the divorce, her baby sister was born. So, not only had her dad left her life, but now she had to share her mom with a baby, who did and still does (at 2 1/2) get the lion's share of attention. Less than a year later, her mom met and quickly married a wonderful man, whom I adore and she kinda does. He is 20 years older than her mom, and a former Baptist minister, now a chaplain at our hospital. He is very strict, needless to say, and has three children (23 and 22 married, 12 living at home and spoiled rotten. So, she has gone from only child to middle child, and has had a rough time. As a result, I have spent a lot of time with her, as she lived in my house most of her life and I am the only relationship that has not changed in the past three years. Our relationship has been her only stability.

Sorry for that length.

Anyway, as I was watching her in the surf Father revealed to me that this is a life that I have ministered to in more significant ways than I am able to understand, not the least of which is this vacation we are taking together. I cannot even begin to explain the ways I have been blessed.

I broke down crying and began praising Him as I realized that instead of me coming on a trip where I could concentrate on Him all by myself, could pray for ways to make a difference, He clearly showed me the life He has placed right in front of me, a life in which I have made and continue to make a significant difference. The thing I had been wanting to do was right in front of me. I just didn't realize the depth of impact that I was having until Father opened my eyes to my little girl and her heart, her pain, the changes, the adjustments, the criticism, the demands...all the things she has had happen to her...and the solid place I am for her. What an honor.

That was SO long, but this has been SO impactful to me. I think in the back of my head I did realize that my relationship with my granddaughter was important, but the depth of it, the long-term impact seems enormous as I see it through Father's eyes.

Last year, my granddaughter made the decision to follow Jesus. Her mom did the same thing at the same age, but this child has known adversity much more than her mom did, and so I see her heart really being changed as she learns to love her God. What an enormous privilege it is to witness our Father at work in a young life, and to be a part of that work in ways I could not really see until right now.

Again, embarrassed by the length, but I am sitting in a tent waiting for a child's eyes to open for the day, and feeling SO much love.

Collaboration

Graffiti I did like at Tottenham Train Station:

"Help Me Help You"

Got me thinking ... about relationship. About the constant collaboration, the give-and-take. And then I got to thinking about all this dross and stuff that's being burnt off in me, and I'm liking to think that maybe when it's all finished I will be able to be more outward focussed, able to love more. That made me hopeful and expectant (and hopefully without too many expectations :)

Then I thought about how the Trinity is a constant collaboration (thank you, The God Journey). And the more I think about that concept, the more it ripples out and reverberates into everything and I realise - I don't need to get stoned, I just need to ponder the Trinity. And then the more I think about it, the more I can think about it. Until my brain explodes. God is a collaboration.

Wow. God is a collaboration. God is a relationship unto itself (and it goes way beyond gender, but for sure, the Holy Spirit is definitely a chick. The classy way she does her stuff? She's a chick for sure).

Then I was reading about everyone's favourite current darlings, Arcade Fire, and about how they seem to be one very fluid kind of collaboration. There isn't really one leader; they all take it in turns doing different things.

Then I thought, that's the kind of community I want to be a part of. But then I thought of that graffiti again and then it all scared me.

I seem a bit scared this evening, don't I? I am. But I'm also pretty brave. No point in living life unless it's gonna scare the shit out of you from time to time, me reckons. The whole idea of a scary brave life makes me want to go crank Olive the Skanky Mitsubishi up on the freeway. It's a hot summer night. The best time to do so :) Shame I can't be bothered. I think I'll go lie me down instead on that World's Comfiest Couch and watch me some DVDing.

This post meandered like my brain and I don't know if it ever got anywhere. But sometimes it's good to not know where you're going. Or so God reckons, anyway.

Easy for him/her to say :)

Oh Lord, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

So how many of you feel generally misunderstood? I have been pondering it over the past few months and the conclusion I have reached is that I haven't generally felt "got", except by a select few group of people, since I was about 10 years old. It's probably the reason why I am drawn to write. I guess I'm just so used to feeling generally misunderstood now that it doesn't worry me as much as it used to. Growing up in my family, feeling like the only one whose aim was to live in reality instead of denial, has set the groundwork, I think, for being used to the general discomfort of people not getting me. But then again, perhaps all of us feel this way, perhaps it's part of the human condition to be painfully aware of the gap between our true selves and what the world sees on the outside. Only God can know us fully.

Most of us would say that the criteria for a good friend would be someone who "gets" you. I think the main reason why I am feeling relief that the romance-or-friendship-or-whatever-it-was is finished (never really started anyway, but is finished in my head, I guess I mean), is that for the majority of our communication I had the unsettling feeling that he didn't really understand me, nor was he in a place where he could try to. What a lonely feeling that is. (Edit: I think in that respect it was a two-way street. I couldn't understand him much of the time, nor did he allow me to).

Such a strong urge within us, to be understood. Surely some of the best, most loveliest moments are within relationships and friendships when you know the person you are speaking to "gets" you, yeah? Such a foundational issue. It reflects our God image, this desire to know and be known. It reminds me of the Trinity and the relationship that goes on within that most mysterious of things, a relationship that has always existed and from which all our relationships come.

My hope is for community out in the real world. Some fellow believers to hang with and be real with and see what God would have us do together. A few people that would "get" me. That sounds good to me.

Question for you: how understood do you feel in your life generally? Most bloggers seem to be the more introverted, introspective types and I wonder - is this why we are drawn to this medium? The more we feel people don't "get us" out there, the more we want to connect "in here"? So how about you? Are you "got", or do you have to work extra hard to get people to get you?