Cast All Your Votes for Dancing

I know the voice of depression

Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life

Still send their invitations.

...

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins

That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,

But then drag you for days

Like a broken man

Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.

Learn what actions of yours ...

bring freedom

And Love.

...

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun

From your prayers and work and music

And from your companions’ beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements

Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,

Be wise.

Cast all your votes for Dancing!

--Hafiz

A few weeks ago, I logged into the Chronicles to revisit the path I'd traveled and remind myself of the person I used to be.  I found this Hafiz poem I posted four years ago, the first summer I spent in my bed.  I've abridged it here from the version I previously quoted to highlight what sprang at me as I read again.  

After eight years of hysterical illness, four of them mostly in bed, I thought I would have learned to accommodate my disability, would have accepted the redrawn boundaries of my life. But the voice of depression still breathes her siren song from my own lungs, whispering seduction in my inner ear.

I still rebel against her, against my very frailty, by accepting that counterfeit coin, those invitations to indulge in habits of normal life so far beyond my capacity.  Make a pot of soup.  Shower and go to a therapy appointment in the same day. Have an argument. Simultaneously watch a documentary and knit a scarf. That's far more than a week's worth of energy.  

And then I'm dragging ass for days like a broken man behind the farting camel.  Life stinks. 

Because I have forgotten to indulge most in those actions that bring freedom and love.  Forgot that what I can still do is what is most valuable.  I can still pray. There is still music.  Sharing laughter with a child or a partner or a friend.  These are the coins of value in life.  With these coins, I buy freedom.  I can squeeze drops of the Sun, the source of life itself, from them.  

And I can even find life and freedom in the most insignificant movements that my body is still able to make.  I can still dance with life, with love.

The Weaker Vessel

I see myself

Repugnant

In the sight of men.

Men who exploited

My innocence,

My obedience,

My female body,

To gratify their own lusting.

To assuage the bursting ache of their own grasping for control, they used me.

Then,

Because of their use,

They despised me.

I am a

Walking manifestation of the

Evil they have been

And cannot acknowledge.

I must bear their shame:

It must be I who

Am too alluring

With my developing sexual body.

I who

In my very vulnerability

Should be protecting myself

And them

From their own over-reaching desires.

I am the one in the wrong place, in the wrong clothes, too weak, too alone, too silent.

I wear the mark

Of their transgressions

In my wounded eyes. 

I fear

The evil I must be

To have tempted those

In whose care I am

To violate their sacred responsibility.

The weight of their (my) shame weighs heavy on my soul.

(© 2013)

From Minister to Atheist

From Minister to Atheist: A Story of Losing Faith

I saw this link from at least three different sources today.  Including someone who I thought shouldn’t have been shocked at the story. Here is my response:

You can't believe that a church would treat the clergy this badly? You, who have yourself been the recipient of similar if not so public abuse? You, whose own son was thrown out of more than one religious job for absurd reasons and with likely illegal process?  Every member of your family through several generations has been boxed in, closed down, and shut out of Christian ministry positions, and this story surprises you? 

In my almost three years since coming back to Christianity, I have heard dozens of similar stories: ministers living a lie to keep their job or telling their truth and losing their credibility and their livelihood. I have at least three friends on Facebook (that I can think of off the top of my head, probably more if I were to go look at my not-extensive friends list) who were thrown out of their positions of ministry with public acrimony. This woman's story is tragic but mostly for its ubiquity. No one shoots the wounded like Christians. 

I long to create a sanctuary for precisely these kind of hurting souls. I have wanted to minister to the ministers (while I was in the Christian world or to other secular ministers when I wasn’t) for as long as I have thought about "what I want to be when I grow up" but I was told explicitly and implicitly that there was no call for such a mission and if there were I was unqualified to fill it. 

But the stories are coming out now. The need is desperately real.  I ache with knowing that I could have helped so many people just like this woman over the last few decades but I myself was dismissed, boxed in, and shut out of organized religion. 

And people wonder why I cringe at calling myself a Christian, why I don't go to church, why I blister tirades at religious incivility and bigotry, and wince when they tell me I need to forgive and listen to God more. 

Yeah, I was listening to God, and my God-given reason, when the church marginalized me right out the door. But now there is the Internet ... and I have a blog!

I'm not as angry with you, dear friend, as it might seem. I am angry at intolerance and prejudice, rudeness and contempt from people who claim to follow a prince of peace who said famously, "your fidelity has saved you; go in peace.”

Being Eeyore: When You Are a Melancholy Child

Recently I was talking with someone who asked if I’d ever struggled with depression.  I chuckled ironically and replied, “Eeyore is my patron saint.”  Gloomy, broody, shades-of-grey melancholia has been my gift/curse for as long as I can remember.  For my sixth birthday, my father bought me a stuffed Eeyore because it reminded him so much of me.  I treasured that little donkey for years because he understood me.  Though I lost his pinned-on tail more often than I repinned it. And, eventually, to my continued regret, I lost the animal himself.

When my friend asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with clinical depression and I said, “no, but only because I never went into a clinic for a diagnosis.”  Growing up fundy Christian, we had a horror of both depression and psychology.  “Just give it to God,” I heard, “depression is only the prideful ego holding onto willful selfishness.”  And the only cure preached was a deeper commitment to “submitting to God’s Will” because the Bible says that True Christians will always have joy, which was interpreted to mean being “cheerful and joyous at all times.” 

I faked it as best I could, but still found myself in pastoral counseling with my father as the pastoral counselor (who thought that was a good idea?) and when he gave up in frustration, I was sent with my despair to the senior pastor.  His answer to my 12-year-old inquiry, “how can I ‘love my neighbor as myself’ if I don’t love myself?” was to turn Jesus’s lesson on its head with an explanation of how hating myself was actually a good thing and loving others more than I loved myself was really what the Bible meant to say.

About the same time, my school started a series of suicide-prevention public service announcements and I began to wonder why Christians didn’t just engage in mass suicide and be done with it.  If physical life was just something to be endured until the “race was won” and we achieved our “eternal reward,” then why go through the rigmarole of petty humanity at all?  I determined then never to marry or have children and thereby tie myself to mortal life since spiritual eternity was all that mattered.

Existential angst has been the descant my soul sings against the dueling melodies of fundamentalism and secular materialism.  Both church and culture insist that melancholia and pessimism are wrong, real downers, and avoidable character flaws if only we Grumpy Gus’s tried harder to be happy (or, more recently, would take our  pills to change our obviously pathological brain chemistry).  When I first heard of existential philosophy, a rush of gratitude flowed through me—I wasn’t flawed, deficient or sinful!  Many brilliant mental giants asked these same questions I labored with.  My euphoria was short-lived when I recognized that both religion and psychology still saw them as something to be fixed, saved, analyzed. 

Years later, when I went on to college and studied psychology despite the tut-tutting of my family and church, I came across a little statistic that made me chuckle: depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressed people.  So, I realized, happy people were just lying to themselves in order to feel good.  That made so much sense!  If my experience of the world were normal, I couldn’t understand how anyone kept getting up in the morning.  I began to understand that what I’d thought for so long really was true—they were all faking it, but the primary people they were lying to were themselves! 

I felt vindicated but no more able to jump out of bed and be a good little cog in the economic wheel than ever.  I continued faking it, only with the self-knowledge that I was faking it.

In Memoriam

Matishayahu "One Day"

It’s not about win or lose because we all lose when we feed on the souls of the innocent.

Diana Butler Bass, "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent"

There is, however, a difference between memory—the snapshots that stay in our minds always—and RE-membering.  Remembering means to “put back together” the pieces of the past, to rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire.

Brilliant at Breakfast. "Ten Years On and What Have We Learned"

Today is not for politicians fighting the culture wars. It is not for religious leaders to try to score converts or demonize those who believe differently. It is not for posturing for the 2012 election. Today is for those who were there, for those who made it home, and for the families of those who didn't. It's for heroes and victims alike, and the people they left behind. Today is THEIR day.

Halaina Hovitz, Salon.com, "The 9/11 Stories We've Never Told Anyone"

But "living in the shadow of 9/11" means something very different to at least 16 children who grew up in Lower Manhattan. It means being engulfed in the "shadow" of the dust cloud, then watching it hover over your home for months (if your home wasn't destroyed). It means standing in the "shadow" of your apartment building whose entire north side had been burned off, allowing you to look directly into people's apartments. It means living in the "shadow" of your health that's been compromised from breathing toxic fumes. It means living in the "shadow" of the person you could have been, which was more than just interrupted.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Common Dreams, "America the Amnesiac"

For ten years after 9/11, the Arab Spring is here, reminding us that the future need not look anything like the past. Yet the past hasn't gone anywhere. It still demands its day of reckoning. But first, let us say Kaddish for the dead.

Michael Spencer, internetMONK, "iMonk Classic: Michael Spencer's Early Response to 9/11"

Our innocence is over, and if we try to protect our children or the flying public or the nation in general, we are going to see the beginning of a new dark ages.

Scott Morizot, Faith and Food "Reflections from September 11, 2001"

From my perspective, sadly, we did allow the terrorists to win. I don’t think in their wildest dreams they ever though they could provoke such drastic and lasting change in our nation from a single attack. They successfully instilled fear in our nation and acting under the impetus of that fear, we changed in ways that would have been inconceivable before that attack.

Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year With Rilke, "Dear Darkening Ground"

in that hour of inconceivable terror

when you take back your name

from all things.