Belated Christmas Reflections

Heaven on earth, we need it now...This season of peace, joy and good will is starting to grate on me, slowly decaying my sense of sugar-coated inevitability. As I was cutting up fruit for Christmas lunch on the morning of the 25th, I was watching SKY News which was screening a lengthy report on the continuing work Medecine Sans Frontiers is doing in Southern Sudan, a region wracked by starvation and insidious religious violence. As infant children cried out in hunger, my sharp stainless steel knife sliced through mangoes and rockmelons, while a little girl was being treated for serious injuries sustained after being knocked down by a car, while the sick and starving walk for hours and days in suffocating heat I wash my sticky fingers and wipe the bench down, scraping watermelon seeds into my hand and throwing them into the bin.

Sitting in Church next to my mother later that morning, I asked myself where He is in all of this, is there really any balance in such horrifying contradictions? Is it fair that while I cut up fruit others starve? There is this seed of hope inside me, this instinctive knowledge that he is food for the hungry, that the currents of his love run strong and pure around the weak but I find it so hard to overcome my anger, my thinly veiled bitterness at the self-centred tilt of churchianity, the inability to comprehend that he has asked us to be his hands and his heart.

We sit in our pews or plush chairs saying the Old Testament points to Jesus, the New Testament points to Jesus then proceed to ignore him completely, preferring to listen to that which does not challenge us directly, sculpting his words into a more acceptable form. Where is our covenant with the poor? Why do we let them wallow in such squalid conditions, feebly explaining away our inaction, forgetting what John Donne said about none of us being an island. We only diminish our own souls when we let another needlessly slip from life.

Fragmented

Days like this I am reminded of just what a brittle and fragile clay pot I am. When the thorn in my side embeds itself deeper, sends down strong roots into my soul, when I don't even have the words to describe the pain of withdrawal, of my weakness and utter need for it and my inability to let it go. Where is the mortar that makes these fragments whole, Where is the light that shines out of all of this?

(Days like this, I don't know what to do with myself
All day - and all night
I wander the halls along the walls and under my breath
I say to myself 'I need fuel - to take flight')

Do This in Remembrance of Me

This post is inspired in part by Heather's post on going back to REAL church for the first time in a long time, and partly by the visit this weekend of one of my close friends from the CILB, with whom I shared this experience.

A month ago I went to Sydney to attend a friend's exhibition and spend a frenetic weekend catching up with friends and former flatmates. On the Sunday evening I ended up going to church with three of my good friends from my CILB. The only catch was, we were not going to our 'regular' church, but to another building, another denomination a few suburbs away - they were finding their current church experience was progressively stagnating, and I have to admit, having them say that made me feel a whole lot less crazy about what I went through last year.

Though I have an inkling I was just not made to function to my fullest potential within the institution, the service we attended filled me with hope at the fact that there are churches out there whose hearts are truly seeking God and community in a real way. Worship was stripped of its adornments and was so real, more so than anything I had experienced in a long time, teaching was solid and spirit-filled, and afterwards we were welcomed by people who were truly interested in what was said and what we had to say. Nobody seemed to be going through the motions, and we almost skipped back to the car!

Later on I remembered the last supper, how Jesus had gathered his friends together for what was, essentially, a meal: the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, how he had said do this in remembrance of me. So as we sat eating KFC and watched traffic fly past us, laughing and reflecting and sharing, I remembered him and thanked him for this crazy, diverse, honest group of girls, glad that he has let them be my church.

Keeping it Real

If you're at all interested in music, or interested in how international man of hype Kanye West is keeping it real in his new record, this little blurb says all I want to say about it.

Why Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak is worth Listening to

Simple lessons

Living in the country, I am priveliged to share my surroundings with an myriad of different animals. To be more precise, I'd actually say it's a rather motley bunch of native and introduced species, those who reside here for agricultural purposes, and others, who like myself, have found themselves here mostly by chance and instinct. Most of the time they will be the only living things I interact with.

One of my favourites is the small Blue-Toungued Lizard who seems to migrate through the large cool concrete corridor that borders the courtyard, but seems to favour mostly the kitchen for the fruit I leave there for him.

Most of the time, our interaction consists primarily of me entering the kitchen, and him scuttling away frantically. But sometimes, if I am lucky, I will come to the kitchen and find him un-selfconsciously sunning himself in the random patches of sunlight that dot the wooden floor, neck up, eyes (presumably) closed and completely unaware of my presence. This morning he sat by the fridge watcing me curiously as I made a cup of tea. We appraised each other, I said hello.

I sometimes wonder about this flight instinct that animals have, and wonder if it is present in me a lot of the time, especially in the way I relate to God. As my little lizard friend scuttles beneath the fridge I try to reassure him that I am not a malevolent creature looking to eat him for dinner, to no avail. Whether or not it's an entirely reasonable assumption, I can just see God taking delight in my un-selfconscious experience of Him and then trying to reassure me as I run for cover when I suddenly become aware that He is present, ducking and weaving in the hope of avoiding what? Intimacy? Pain? Fear of rejection, retribution?

But these moments of curiosity, where flight is not the primary instinct give me hope. Through familiarity comes trust, and just as this morning, where the lizard and myself shared a brief moment of curiosity, so too am I growing less and less fearful of approaching my Father.


(Also, it must seem like I have a God complex or something, but I don't, I really don't! Maybe I'm just so selfish that the only way He can show me new things is from my inner experience.)

Contradiction

I am going to be honest. There are more than a few passages in the Bible that I have trouble with, that leave me scratching my head thinking Surely God, surely you don't mean that? But the one that has been more difficult for me than anything else, that I have turned over and over in my mind and that has troubled my heart for a long time is Exodus 20:12: Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

I was born into an extremely dysfunctional household, one where abuse was constant and the tension was palpable. I am the second youngest child of my father's third marriage, only girl amongst a pack of rough and tumble boys, born 11 years after my next eldest brother due to the fact that my mother did not want to bring another child into such a volatile environment.

The abuse I experienced was in a small part physical, but was mostly emotional. My father, a chronic alcoholic, possessed an unpredictable temperament, and when he'd spent his nights at the pub, none of us was sure whether the happy or violent drunk would greet us at the back door. But it was not merely his alcoholism that was to blame, his violent temper, or the threat of it, was used in the way a toddler throws a tantrum to get their own way, and if we dared question him we were guaranteed sore limbs soon after.

So where was my mother in all this? At the time she was our rock, holding everything together, or at least trying to. She was gentle but firm, and instilled in us a great sense of justice and fairness - which I think made life at home even more difficult for me to understand. Even as the years went on, and separations and reunions continued much to my dismay (I must have been the only child who would have been happy to see my parents divorced), I continued to view my mother as a heroine. Recently though, I have begun to question my mother's spiritual decision to stay with my father, especially as it put us, as young children, directly in harm's way. Knowing what I know now, I realise I am back at square one with no idea where I stand.

So this is what it comes down to: it has taken me up until only six months ago, to realise that both my parents have failed me in major ways. Now I know that we are all going to fail as parents on some levels, and as human beings we can never be perfect, but are some failures avoidable?

This is what I want to ask, and keep wrestling and struggling and getting myself into trouble about: if, as a parent, you perpetrate abuses of that responsibility (physical, violent, sexual, negligence), do you void your right to be honoured by your children? I don't struggle with honouring my mother, as much as I do my father. How do I reconcile honour with someone who has made my childhood a place I'm never likely to revisit with much fondness?



*NB. My father passed away almost 10 years ago. How I've reacted to that is a whole other story, or maybe not.

Charity > see Love

Please read this article first:
Harvey: charity not so sweet

This article makes me mad enough to want to gather together my disjointed thoughts on the subject of charity (so I apologise if this little rant is a bit on the inarticulate side). Thankfully this is not an attitude shared by all in Australia’s corporate community, but it is more than a little disheartening, and perhaps more than a little ire-raising that such negative attitudes towards the poor are still present within society. I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising, considering the undeniable lean towards a meritocratic society that has taken place within Australia during the last 10-15 years.

At its roots, a Meritocracy is full of lofty and socially beneficial ideas, however, in his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton examines how this seemingly egalitarian system becomes distorted into attitudes that are more akin to Social Darwinism. The distortion begins when one assumes everyone has started on a level playing field: that no-one has been abused in childhood or born into poverty, that students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds have the same access to quality education as those in wealthy areas, that a parent’s illness or death will not place extra stress and responsibility on an individual – the list has endless possibilities. Therefore, in a meritocracy, it is assumed that the talented rise to the top and the ‘losers’ remain on the bottom, seemingly where they belong. In the end it is just another way to marginalise the poor, but now because of the idea of a level playing field, they can be acceptably regarded as morally corrupt, they are no longer human beings worth helping, but a useless drain on society. Sadly, this attitude has also pervaded some areas of the institutionalised church.

Mr. Harvey said he believes in “developing people to their potential,” what I want to know is how is feeding and clothing a human being reduced to their lowest not developing their potential? I find it impossible to fathom how helping someone who cannot help themselves is not edifying to them, and does not fill them with hope and a sense of their potential and innate value as a human being who in turn feels they have something of worth to contribute to society. Are we not all valuable to society purely by being alive? Just because theirs may be the lowest rung of the ladder does not make it any less important. Are they to be deprived of the chance to climb it simply because they have fallen off?

Why must we always expect something in return? The idea of charity is that it’s not a transaction where goods or behaviours or lifestyles can be purchased in exchange for a hefty sum. In fact, I was curious to learn that the word charity derives its meaning from the Latin word caritas, which meant, among other thing, ‘Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem’. How can we truly offer charity - as we now know it – if we cannot hold in esteem the lives of those whom we wish to help? Charity is more than money, it’s not even really about money, charity is an attitude, a way of life, and if it is not grounded in love we are wasting our time.

I like the way one of my search results at Bible Gateway seems to sum it up: Charity>see Love.

Reading the Body

(after Jenny Bornholdt)

Your death
Invades
Like the mist
Silent moving
Through me
Gathering the bones
Of my intention.
Spreading
Like a blessing
Embracing every fingernail
Every failing part.
Breath by breath
A way in the darkness.
You
The ever-living ghost
Absorbed the bruise
Of my past
An elongated contusion
MovingLike a shield.


*I am sure in my creative licence I have mixed up my theology, but, oh well, I'm learning!

Like a Vein of Ore...

Another of Rilke's poems from his Book of Hours that is really speaking to me at the moment. I don't really think it needs too much explanation - I'm sure we've all felt like this at some point in our journey.

It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can't see any path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it's you though -

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.

Perspective...

I am currently making my way through So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore? And finding it so revealing and confronting on a deeply personal level, especially regarding God's unconditional love for and acceptance of me. I have always, always struggled with this aspect of faith, maybe being able to comprehend what it means in theory, but never instinctively able to accept it as real and meaningful in my own life and relationship with God.

I can't say I am at that point of accepting that unconditional love, but I think my perception and understanding of it is being changed. I have a wonderful, beautiful friend who struggles daily.... Despite being extremely intelligent, articulate and deeply caring she can only see herself as worthless, and often wonders aloud why I would want to be friends with someone like her, someone so unworthy.

She is bravely confronting her demons, but most of the time is unable to recognise her inherent worth and beauty. But despite this, despite her reasoning with me that she is wholly unworthy, I cannot be convinced. If I am honest, sometimes it can be more than a little frustrating, but most of the time it makes me sad and angry that for some reason or other she cannot she what a beautiful soul she is. I can suddenly see that this is probably the same frustration God experiences over me, my refusal to see myself as worthy or beautiful. The same (but more infinitely patient) love, that pursues me and my fears at a relentless pace.

I am not articulating this as well as I would have hoped, but it is true that my perspective has definitely changed, a step in the right direction has hopefully been made. But it's still so confusing. Where, where to start?

These Fragments

I love this poem by the young Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Book of Hours, an exquisite collection of 'love poems to God' that speak of the joy, elation, pain and excruciating tension of a life entrusting itself to Him

I am praying again, Awesome One.

You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.

I've been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.

In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried
me.

It's here in all the pieces of my shame
that I now find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart -
oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God - spend them however you want.

I remember when I first read these poems, a non-church friend had lent the book to me as she thought I, as a Christian, might find them interesting, relevant. I was struck by the beauty of the words, but could not relate to the author, and developed a rather condescending attitude towards Rilke, who during this intense spiritual stage vacillated wildly between piety and debasement. I remember thinking, 'poor man, if he had really loved God he would never have done those bad things.'

Looking back, I can't believe how naively I had interpreted the situation. When I separated myself from the church, and looked at myself warts and all, these poems became somewhat of a beacon to me, notwithstanding the Bible. I felt his joy, and the ache of unworthiness in the face of God, so compassionate and benevolent. It helped me to embrace the tension, the duality of existence, to step outside the black and white.

After all, tension is balance. Whoever said it was going to be easy?

Detox for the soul...

Last Monday I started a complete detox, a total simplification and purification of my eating habits. I lasted all but 36 hours before I caved in craving some incarnation of sugar, salt, msg - or maybe all 3! It happened, despite all precautions, while I was staying with a friend. The next day we got to talking about what had been encouraging for us recently, or rather, she shared with me a particular passage from the Bible that had encouraged her. When I opened her Bible to read the passage, my eyes fell on a verse that seemed more than just a little timely:

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

I'd been feeling dismayed at having to give up - albeit temporarily - my large mugs of milky tea, my favourite Nigella recipes and homemade banana bread, and was angry at myself for not having the discipline to stick to my detox for even 2 days. But, this verse got me thinking: of course if I've trained myself to enjoy eating rubbish, it's going to be all the harder to give up. It made me realise that anything that's a struggle is usually worth it.

Then I got thinking about the implications that verse had for my spiritual life (fancy that! the Bible getting me thinking spiritually!). Pulling away from the mainstream church, where almost everything seems to be mass-produced, mass-marketed and with as much depth as a wading pool, I've found it difficult to re-orient my relationship with God, and have, at many points, given up and given in to my own desires. When you're in the minority and being questioned and misunderstood by those around you, it's hard to feel like you're on the right track, the broad way sure feels tempting...

And so I am reminded, that anything that's a struggle is usually worth it...

The Journey Away From Mainstream...

A quote of a quote from a blog I've been reading...

“Andrew Jones describes four areas people move through while undergoing a paradigm shift: first is the old paradigm, the old mental map or way of seeing things. Over time, it becomes increasingly cramped and feels more like prison than freedom. In area two, there's a high degree of frustration and reaction. An individual in this phase turns against the old paradigm and can't stop talking about how wrong, inhumane, or unsupportable it is. In area three, people gradually turn from deconstructing the past to constructing the future and begin the hard work of designing a new paradigm to take the place of the old one. This is a time of creative exhilaration, challenge, and perhaps anxiety: because the discovery of a new paradigm that will be superior to the old is by no means assured and because the wrath of the defenders of the old is likely to be unleashed on those who dare propose an alternative. If the creation of a new paradigm succeeds, people move into area four, where a new era develops and expands freedom and possibilities."

If I am honest, I don't know how I've ended up at this point. I didn't seek it out, I didn't intentionally seek to, as they see it, rebel. I went on holiday, isolated from my usual Church environment, and found amazing, crazy things start to happen. I was reading "Frequently Avoided Questions" by Chuck Smith Jr. and Matt Whitlock and found myself agreeing with a large proportion of what they said. This book was striking a chord in me that I didn't even realise existed. It validated and gave a lucid voice to all those niggling questions that had circled in the back of my mind since I had become a Christian almost 3 years earlier, questions I had quarantined there because my thinking was so overwhelmingly not in the majority. I clapped and smiled my way puzzledly through those first two and a half years wondering why I had lost the intimacy with God I so desparately craved. I suppose such a drastic change was always inevitable.

I came back from that summer interlude completely changed, but also sensing that all but a handful of people around me would understand the changes that had taken place in me. Thankfully my mother was completely supportive of my decision, and to be frank, I think her spiritual intelligence and refusal to unecessarily follow the crowd informed my decision. Back home things were not so rosy. I had instinctively held my silence, fearing the worst and finding myself unable to articulate this massive paradigm shift that had taken place: my initial paradigm had freshly crumbled and I had no idea where I stood in relation to anything. After a couple of months my flatmate confronted me about why I was not attending church and I fumbled through a response that didn't nearly do justice to my current position. Later that evening I sat down and wrote her an email articulating exactly what had happened to me that past summer and the change that had been wrought in me. I was by no means making excuses for myself (as I had when she had first spoken to me), and though I knew she would be unlikely to understand, I felt it necessary to make it clear that I had not and was not "falling off the deep end theologically," or "turning away from God, or away from the Bible, or at least away from the Body of Christ," as Heidi Daniels so wonderfully describes it.

Not long after this I uncoincidentally received a seemingly inoffensive email from a counselling pastor at our church (in whose office my flatmate had recently been employed) casually enquiring about where I was at and asking me how my art course was going, all polite catch-up, touch-base sort of talk. Without wanting to seem rude, I honestly wonder how stupid they must have thought I was to potentially think I would not see right through that email. A few days after receiving the email my flatmate said, "I should have told you, I was really worried about you so I spoke to _____ about what was going on." Needless to say I was not wholly impressed. After speaking to my mum, I had found out that this pastor had emailed her about my situation, to which my mum had emphatically replied that she had every confidence in me spiritually and as a person.

I decided to cut the crap and confront the issue and wrote back to this pastor, telling them exactly what I had told my flatmate, by now not expecting understanding, nor seeking any form of validation. However, I was still hurt when I read their reply which openly questioned my decision, calling it "dangerous, whether you think it is or not," and saying that "anyway, your college requires you to be regularly attending church." (I attend a Christian Arts college)

The irony so far was that I bore no malice towards my church community when I left it. I had not been spiritually abused, and compared to a lot of Pentecostal/Charismatic churches I had experienced this one was refreshingly honest and real to a certain point. It was just a simple case of a round peg in a square hole: I had grown out of their structure and was seeking something different.

As I mentioned earlier, I attend a Christian Arts college, and it is there, and also in my household with my other Christian flatmates that I find I experience community in the truest sense of the word: we experience God together, share our ups and downs, our frailties and joys, we read, pray and delve deeply into scripture to find Gods true heart. I have given up trying to explain this to my friends from my former church community because sadly, every time they see me I am reminded subtly that I "need to be going to church." I know they mean well, but it's so disappointing to realise that they simply cannot think outside the box and accept that there are different ways of living out God's community.

Surprisingly, I found understanding from the person I least expected to: my seemingly triumphalist flatmate. We were talking one night, and when I brought up my self-imposed exile from mainstream Church, she had said that she had been wanting to ask me about why I had seemingly 'dropped out' of Church life. When I told her of my desire to experience real community, and not just the bums-on-seats Church model that is so widely and unquestioningly accepted as the only valid expression of Christian community, she leaned forward enthusiastically, saying, "Yes, yes! So many people forget that community is about people, not tradition!"

In the past 10 months I have read a plethora of material, but mostly blogs which recount stories which are surprisingly similar to mine. And above all I have admired the humility,grace and integrity with which these people have told their stories and recounted their experiences. And I use these words in their truest sense. It makes me feel like such a slacker to be honest; in a lot of areas I find I have spiritually let myself go, and it saddens me that I've lost that edge and passion and integrity, like Paul said in Romans, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." And so I have ended up hating myself for what I do, and finding myself more afraid of confronting my mistakes, being less honest with myself about where I'm at.

But I've hit that wall, that point of enough is enough. I've felt like ditching this whole shebang, and come back from the edge realising that I need to take hold of my life, to make it my own and stop drifting with the current and accepting whatever flotsam flows my way. This goes for my spiritual life as well, time to cut the crap and crack out the broken and contrite heart for real this time: I can see that every time I give in to ungodly behaviour I am simply devaluing my position in God, I am saying "I am not worthy to be your daughter, I am not worthy of eternity with you God," and that is the biggest load of nonsense ever! Thankfully I've recently found out about a great group of seemingly likeminded people who get together literally around the corner from where I live, so the future is wide open...