praxis

In the Bible, in Mark 5, a man, a woman, and a child were healed–and that covers all people (putting aside that fact that some people are born intersex, for a moment–we are each a child at some point).

Though I am not familiar with sociocultural/religious rules for treatment of the demon-possessed, it is apparent from the description of the possessed man’s behavior that the possession itself prohibited the man from relating with his family or anyone else in his community–or even with himself, it would seem, and what of God? After casting out the demons, Jesus sent the man directly to his family to share the joyful news, thus continuing the man’s restoration to wholeness.

Of course the woman who was healed from her constant bleeding–under the religious law, she should have made Jesus unclean when she touched his garment, no? But instead, Jesus pronounced her healed by her faith, and called her “daughter”: He accepted and welcomed her, she who had been an outcast from society for 12 years. Not only was she restored in body, and restored to society: The fact that Jesus was not rendered unclean, despite the religious law of the day….is something to think about (at least we see no note of his uncleanness, unless you know of something different). Jesus told her to go in peace, and when he said for her to be released from her suffering, I can’t help but believe that her suffering included the 12-year estrangement from her society, from relationship(s), as well as the physical suffering caused directly by whatever ailment she had.

And, the dead girl. Did the girl know that she was dead? I don’t know whether she knew, one way or another. I do know that the person who approached Jesus was the girl’s father, and the people who were obviously suffering in this case were the parents. The girl’s suffering, at least her physical suffering, was at an end. Yes, it is important that Jesus raised her from the dead. It is not less important to see that Jesus healed the parents through returning their young daughter to them. Jesus made their family whole again.

Where did I find something in the Old Testament that reminded me of what we’d learned about God in a Bible study about the Gospel of Mark?

Leviticus.

The sin offerings. There’s sinning by breaking the Lord’s commandments, there’s an interesting one here–sinning by not
testifying when called, when you have relevant knowledge; by wronging your neighbor in various ways…

6:4 when you have sinned and realize your guilt, and would restore what you took by robbery or by fraud or the deposit that was committed to you, or the lost thing that you found, [5] or anything else about which you have sworn falsely, you shall repay the principal amount and shall add one-fifth to it. You shall pay it to its owner when you realize your guilt.

And then, of course, what one would expect to see in Leviticus–bring an animal to the priest as your guilt offering to the Lord, and the priest shall make atonement on your behalf, and you shall be forgiven.

The text in Leviticus 4-6 is rich, and I’m not going to go into everything I see, here. But the text in Leviticus reflects God’s concern for an individual’s peace with(in) herself, and for relationships between and among human beings. It is not concerned solely, as I think we usually (casually, at least) view Leviticus as being, with sin against God. It is broader than that, and more holistic: concerned with the restoration of a person’s relationship with society (read: others) and with her self, as well as the restoration of her relationship with God.

God is concerned with our wholeness as human beings. Our wholeness as beings created in God’s own image.

My husband left a blog post by a cartoonist up that he thought I would find interesting. I read it; I found it interesting; I started crying quietly, and my husband snored on (very cutely, of course).

The cartoonist/author wrote about having a memory that never happened, involving his mother. The event he was remembering could not have happened because the subject matter was recent, yet his mother has been dead for over 10 years. I’ve had a similar experience, a memory in which my dad appeared although it was impossible for him to have been physically present. Though it has been years since then, it was interesting to read that someone else has had this experience. I won’t write more about the post here, but if you do go read it, the author feels pretty much the same way that I do about such occurrences.

It started me thinking (yet again, I know…) about the times I’m sorry my dad has missed: my enjoyment of school once I got to college (after disliking it in grades 6-12), my becoming a fan of R.E.M. (yes, the band), and nuts becoming practically a health food (cashews were his favorite, and I certainly share a taste for them).

So now there’s something going on in my life, well, my family’s life, that reminds me anew of what I’m not getting to share with my dad. The conversations we aren’t getting to have. While I’m pleased and happy and thankful for what’s going on in my family’s life right now, I do have this sadness. And reading that cartoonist’s blog entry about his mom helped me to get in touch with it, and to think about it, so that I could recognize and process my feelings. Which are all positive things.

All that I’m writing about in this post (except, perhaps, my husband leaving the cartoonist’s blog post up for me) happened in the matter of a few minutes…maybe around 15 minutes? Easily a shorter length of time, and if longer, certainly less than an hour.

I moved quickly from thinking how nice it would be to know my dad today, and for him to know me, to the ridiculousness of such an idea. After his death, I started becoming an entirely different person than I would have become if he had lived. Okay, not entirely, since he and mom both raised me, and a lot of who I am, I learned from them, but…I am significantly different. So, if he were alive now? My dad would not know the “me” who exists now. It would just not be possible. After crying a little harder about this fact, I had the thought that ever since dad died, him knowing me–the person I’ve been becoming since his death–has been becoming more and more impossible, which is almost certainly a misuse of the word “impossible”. So then I started laughing. Just a little bit.

Teaching girls and women how to dress modestly, I mean, and the way it can border on or encourage victim-blaming, check out this video for a disturbing reality check.

I was a girl. I was raised as a girl.

By a mom and a dad, and with a sibling. My dad went to his job outside the home, and my mom drove us to dancing or piano lessons, picked us up at the end of after-school activities, and was a Camp Fire leader for both of us (separately, because of the difference in our ages).

My mom also volunteered as a room-mother for both kids’ schools. She helped out with field trips and celebrations, both in-person (e.g., as a chaperon) and behind the scenes (e.g., baking cupcakes or cookies or cake or….). One year, when the room-mothers painted ceramic Christmas ornaments for all the students to take home, mom took the time to paint all the details on the ornaments in different colors–while the other room-mothers just slapped one color on per ornament, ignoring the designs on them. At least once, she even painted all the ornaments herself. The ornaments still hang on the family tree, and they are still some of my favorite ornaments.

I remember tossing a football with my dad in the front yard. Walking on stilts on the driveway. Twirling a blue, metal baton in the front yard…and inside the house.  I remember a grouping of trees in the backyard that I pretended was a house with two rooms. There was a tree elsewhere in the yard that had leaves that were sour to chew on, but not poisonous. I remember playing in the woods, getting my brand new boots muddy while running around a creek bed with a couple of friends (both boys, btw). For some reason, I was afraid my mom would be mad about the muddy, muddy, new boots–maybe because she had picked them out with me?–but she wasn’t: not at all.

I was a Camp Fire girl. I went to a single-sex Camp Fire summer camp every year, and to the (co-ed) family weekends they had in between. I remember enjoying sharing camp with my family, the mountains in the Fall, canoeing on the lake, and making taffy over a campfire.

During summer camp, I enjoyed drama, arts and crafts, learning to shoot a bow and arrow, sleeping under the stars, hiking (which was the only way to get around camp, anyway!), and swimming. We had an orienteering class, took nature classes from a woman who liked snakes, and I went backpacking twice during my last couple of years as a camper there. I opposed boys coming to the camp, but made friends with some of them and got crushes on others, once they were there.

I was a bookworm as a kid: Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes…I enjoyed short stories like The Most Dangerous Game, and loved a set I owned of books by Frances Hodgson Burnett: Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden, and A Little Princess. I read all 7 books on Narnia, and in middle school wrote a paper about how The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was a Christian allegory (I don’t know that I’d realized it before then, and maybe I wrote the paper in high school, but I’m fuzzy about the exact timing).

I also liked watching TV, though: Land of the Lost, The Tomorrow People on Nickelodeon (in the 1980’s, not the ’90’s), the occasional Star Trek (the original one), Fantasy Island, The Love Boat. Also The A-Team; Hunter; Nero Wolfe; Magnum, P.I.; Remington Steele; the 1980’s version of Mickey Spillane’s ‘Mike Hammer‘…you get the idea.

The movie I recall most from my childhood, though you should know that I don’t have a great memory for movies, is Star Wars. The first movie that came out with that name. My dad managed to get a copy of that movie for me even before it came out on VHS, if I recall correctly. I lost count of the number of times I’d seen it at about 13.

I attended church briefly as a teenager. I enjoyed singing in the choir, and I thought that calling Jesus Christ, “Christ Jesus” was some sort of Southern Baptist oddity, since I never heard it explained.

I attended public schools. Well, after attending a pre-K program at a nearby church (I think) and maybe a private kindergarten. I was mostly bored with school in grades 6-12, having enjoyed the gifted program I was in grades 3-5 a lot. Who wouldn’t find regular school boring after studying paleontology and going on a fossil dig, acting, starting to study French, reading Shakespeare, making a movie, interpreting a painting, learning to play chess, dissecting a frog, and studying aerodynamics complete with experimenting with our own paper airplanes?

I did have some amazing teachers in high school, particularly in biology, comparative government, and in English, who kept my attention. But they weren’t enough for me to shake off the whole feeling that–well, that’s for another post. Let me just give those teachers their due.

I listened to the radio a lot, and recall being able to name songs I liked by artist and title (sometimes by album) even in elementary school. We had free time on Fridays when I was in 5th grade, and if we’d earned the privilege, we got to bring music in to listen to. Another One Bites the Dust by Queen and My Sharona by The Knack come to mind.

I rarely dated people from my own school. Dressed all in pink and white, with a hoop skirt to boot, I attended the junior prom of a boyfriend from another county. When I attended the senior prom of a different boyfriend the next year (and/or my own junior prom? I honestly don’t remember), I was wearing a dress that I had no hand in picking out. My dad had just died, and while I was still attending prom, I was planning to don the pink and white hoop-skirted dress from the year before. Until my mom’s brother showed up with a dress the perfect size. It was fitted. And black. With rhinestones and lace. It wasn’t particularly low-cut, and it came down to my knees–it was nothing like you see at some big-city proms today: It was appropriate for a prom. But paired with black gloves that came nearly to my elbows, it made me feel a little like Stevie Nicks. Which was, to clarify, a fun thing.

I don’t remember my parents ever telling me that I couldn’t do something because I was a girl.

See whether you think I’m at all on the right track here. This is not the only way to think about these subjects, of course, but it’s a rabbit trail that I’m currently following.

If being good means not doing that which is considered bad, then “good” sounds like kind of a passive thing. We are not being bad.

On the other hand, if “bad” is defined as what we do (e.g., smoke cigarettes, have sex outside of marriage, get drunk, lie, cheat, steal–choose whatever you recognize as “bad”), it sounds as though “bad” is viewed as something active.

Looking at slang in the US, we use “bad”, “bad-ass”, and “kick-ass” to describe things that we like. Obviously “bad”, when used literally, means pretty much the opposite of what it means as slang in a specific context. And the last example crosses into the territory of powerful.

I think we view bad, view evil, as powerful. But is powerful a word that we would use to describe good? I don’t think we are so certain about that. How powerful is good? I know we give lip service to the power of good, to the power of God, but when it comes down to it, many Christians act as though the world, filled with people who aren’t Christians, can taint them: perhaps irredeemably. How strong, how powerful is good that can be so easily overcome?

At least, that’s what it seems like as a kid, right?

Don’t put your elbows on the table.
Don’t pull your sister’s hair.
Don’t speak out of turn in class.
Don’t stand on the pew!

Even as an adult–our codes of law address largely (and do let me know if you have a different view) things we are not to do, albeit sometimes by prescribing the particular way we are to do something (e.g., drive a car).

Maybe this could be part of why we associate holiness with what we don’t do and whom we exclude, rather than with what we do and whom we include. It makes me think of parents telling their children not to fall in with “the wrong crowd” in school.

…Because I heard a promo for him today while listening to the radio (on a station that will go unnamed for the sake of my relative Internet anonymity) in which a man claims that Sean Hannity loves America.

I have to ask: If he does, why does he contribute to the contentious atmosphere that has all but drowned out political/policy conversation in today’s America? There are shouting matches and people screaming “facts” at one another–but is anyone listening?

Have you ever spoken and/or worked with a public official on an issue on which you both agreed, even though you generally disagree/the politician does not belong to the party you support/you voted against the person? Because that, in my opinion, is a large part of the way the system is supposed to work. It’s the way things get done. And you may even end up having the official’s ear on an issue on which you have disagreed in the past–and if you do, then speak your mind. It’s expected. It’s the way things work.

It’s much better than all this shouting.

*This post is not exclusively or even particularly or exactly about Sean Hannity. There are other people I could name on the conservative side and if I were aware of a comparably popular personality on the liberal side, I would have named that person, as well. It’s the atmosphere that both sides contribute to that is the problem.

I have a nagging feeling that I have blogged about this before, but I am still irritated by it, and I think I can better express why that is now, so I’m forging ahead.

I’ve heard a few things in the past 5 or 6 years…

“I was raised a feminist.”

“I was raised Republican/Democrat.”

“I was raised Christian.”

People may be under the impression that this communicates something about themselves to the listener. I find that it tells me more about your parents than it tells me about who you, as an adult, are. That’s fine, if you want to educate me about your parents.

Re: “raised a feminist”
What is a feminist? Does a feminist have to be female? Does a feminist believe that there are no differences between men and women? Does a feminist believe the masculine is inherently of more value than the feminine, or vice versa? Is a woman who does not wear makeup a feminist? Is a feminist a gender separatist, or simply someone who believes that power imbalances based on gender should be questioned, examined, and addressed? [edited 6/7/2010 to add the word "questioned"]

Re: “raised a Republican/Democrat”
I’ll admit I don’t have questions about this. I find that even prior to becoming a Christian, I could not put enough faith in a single political candidate to put effort into her or his campaign (though I was sometimes paid to work on campaigns, as part of another job). The only question I can think of is going to sound rather rude, and I apologize. Isn’t being taught that one political party is the correct one the same thing as being taught, at some level, to trust politicians? To trust some of them, at least?

Re: “raised a Christian”
Did you know that there are unitarian Christians? No, not Unitarian Universalist Christians (which there also are, BTW), but Christians who believe that those Christians who believe in the Trinity have fallen out of orthodoxy? I know of two people who were raised as [unitarian] Christians; one is now a pastor and teacher with a unitarian Christian faith, and the other–whom I trust will correct me if I am mistaken in any of this–is now agnostic or atheist.

There are “conservative” Christians and “liberal” Christians, Sabbath-observant Christians, self-identifying Christians who “try to follow the example set by Jesus”, Quiverfull Christians, born-again Christians, and on and on. So which way were you raised?

I’ll buy that most, if not all, of us went through  some sort(s) of indoctrination as children. And our parents certainly were a part of that. Yet the above statements create more questions for me than they provide answers.

What do you believe now? What do you think now? What made you examine what you may have believed as a child, and what did you make of it? For example, maybe you still believe in God, but you believe in God differently, somehow, than your parents did/do. Have you questioned what you were taught as a child? How so? That’s the more interesting story. Or more interesting stories, as the case may be.

This post is going to be interesting to write while maintaining some degree of anonymity, so please bear with me.

Yes, my father died a couple of decades ago. Are you wondering how that affects my life? What impact has that had on my viewing God as father? I’ve noticed other people weighing in on these sorts of things over the past 6 to 7 years and not talking much with me about it, so I thought maybe I’d post on the topic of the impact my father’s death has had on me.

Hypochondria: My father’s death at a relatively young age–he was relatively young–has helped me be a touch of a hypochondriac. I’ve gotten better about that over the years, though as with any other mental health issue, it ebbs and flows. Oh, see, he didn’t die of an accident, but of a health condition with (of course) some genetic contributors. Hence the bit of hypochondria. There is a good side to that, as well. I watch what I eat and I exercise more than I’d be likely to if he hadn’t died. I’ve seen empirical evidence that my exercise and way of eating have had a positive effect on at least one risk factor for my dad’s cause of death.

Reality: I think I may be less of an ass. When he died, we lost our main source of income. I started working in the marketplace at an earlier age than I otherwise would have, and I think I have a greater appreciation for the value of  money and the value of work in part because of that work. I was also exposed to sexism and racism in the workplace that I may not have seen, otherwise.

In some ways, his death may have made me more empathetic. That’s up for debate, of course.

Sense of Humor: My sense of humor is probably darker than it would have been, since I use(d) humor to cope with the death of my father. I think that what enables me to have that sense of humor, however, is some hope in an afterlife. I mean, I wouldn’t find many of my jokes very funny if I didn’t believe that my father still exists. I still use humor to cope with dark or depressing or disheartening situations.

Relationship with Mother: I probably started getting along with my mom a lot sooner than I might have, if my dad had lived.

Feminism: For various reasons, I didn’t learn how to drive a car until a few years later than most people did. From whom did I learn about car maintenance? My mom. She took a class on it. She then taught me about car maintenance. Why? Because if one drives an automobile, one should know some basics about how to care for the machine one is driving. The ideas that females don’t need to know about cars and that men don’t need to know how to prepare food are patently preposterous.

I saw how my mom was treated by various financial institutions when they learned that her husband had died: regardless of the length of time she herself had been paying the bills. I also saw the suspicion with which she was treated in society as an unmarried woman.

I’m probably more of a feminist than I would have been, if my dad had lived.

What do I miss?: Of course I missed my dad, as I grew into adulthood: mainly that he missed the point at which I began to enjoy school again. Now, what I miss the most is that I can’t get to know him as he is now and he can’t get to know me as I am, now. Of course, were he alive, I’d be nearly an entirely different person.

Miscellaneous:

I’m a little more child-like (easily amused) and childish (annoying) in some ways.

I’m a sucker for vocal harmonies, and have been known to forgive sappy lyrics when paired with a notable voice. Me? I have a decent enough singing voice, but so does my mom, so that could have come from either parent.

If you think I’m looking for a “father figure”: That horse left the barn years ago. Sorry, that position has long been filled by a good, very human man.

…But I won’t call him–or anyone else–”dad.” Or call anyone else simply “mom”. Either would feel weird.

God
It was a little confusing, at first, as a teenager. When was I talking to dad and when was I talking to “my father”? Did it matter? Were both actually hearing me? I mean, they kinda had the same name. And a similar address. As my view of my dad has become less idealistic over the years, I’ve found it easier to separate the two.

In addition, I now understand that “father” is one way to describe/address/think about God: that God has many, many characteristics, and that all of our words for God fall short of describing God. Or of even beginning to do so. We should not confuse our pitiful language for the actual being, because to do so could be considered a form of idolatry.

Do you have questions? Ask me. I find being asked questions preferable to the speculation I’ve noted over the last 6-7 years.

Why is, “I won’t attend a church that ordains homosexuals,” presumed to be a stance grounded in good, Christian morals?

Why is, “I won’t attend a church that does not ordain women,” considered a preference, rather than a moral stance? As in, “You know you won’t find a church where you agree with everything…”

IF you have said this to me before, about this very issue, I hope you don’t take this personally: It isn’t meant so, and I apologize if I hurt your feelings (please contact me directly so that we can talk if this is the case). You are not alone in having said this to me, and I do think your point is a good one.

Have you ever mentioned it to someone who said they were unwilling to attend a church that ordains homosexuals?