NaBloWriMo 2012

 In a shameless riff on National Novel Writing Month, October is now National Blog Writing Month.  Since I've been so derelict in my blogging, when I saw this blog-fest, I just knew it was time to start writing again.  And with the daily prompts, I don't even have to dig too deep into my tortured psyche for profound and relevant topics.  

Today, the first day of the month, is getting-to-know-you day. Therefore, here are 

10 Things I Never Told You

1.              I bought a Hermes handbag at Goodwill for $12.  It might be real but even the knockoffs go for $500.  I liked it because it’s purple but it has ruined me now for cheap bags.

2.              I was asked to leave a McDonald’s in Budapest for taking photographs of the Cyrillic menu board.

3.              I have lived less than an afternoon’s drive from the Mexican border for seventeen years in four different states but I’ve never been to Mexico.

4.              I have brown eyes; my husband has grey/hazel eyes.  One daughter is green-eyed and the other is blue-eyed.  Go figure the Punnett Square for those genetics!

5.              I wanted to grow up to be a preacher, a doctor, a writer, or an opera singer.

6.              I read over 100,000 pages in real books, plus countless websites and e-documents, between summer 2009 and summer 2010 when my hysterical illness was in remission.

7.              I once dieted and exercised my way down to 19% percent body fat.  Men followed me down the street. I used to almost pass out on the commuter train on a near daily basis.

8.              I lied on my statement of faith so I could go on a mission trip. Even then, I almost didn’t get accepted because my supervisor on the previous trip wrote me such a bad recommendation because I had a “bad attitude”.

9.              I have curly toenails that frustrate my nail techs no end.  They grow every which way but straight.

10.           I was raped but repressed the memories for decades.

A Note to a Friend

 My overall reaction to my trip to see you last week is centered around the fact that you moved from your bed to my car to the restaurant and back again.  You had said how tired and lethargic you were when we have "talked" by e-mail, but to observe your lack of energy showed me how devastating and debilitating it has become for you.

Yep, bed…that’s pretty much where I’ve lived for the last 14 months.  I get up to go to coffee or the doctor or to drive the kids to something and go right back to laying on the bed.  Even hanging out on the couch has become too much since I have to argue for the space where I can stretch out and rest my head, fight with the family over light/noise/choice of television programming/clutter/dust-pet-hair, and so on.  My bed has become my sanctuary and my prison. 

My internet connection is my window to the world; Facebook is my social arena.  I can choose when and how I converse or if. When it gets too much, I can just not participate and it’s okay. For a month or so in January/February, I had a few really marvelous weeks when I was able to shop and cook and feel like a real human being not just play one on the internet.  But then in March I had some psychological stuff happen in an NAET session that really walloped me and it has been a loooong slow road back again.  In just about every possible way, I feel as sick as I was in December.  And that was really bad! 

 I pray you will find whatever it is—physically, psychologically, spiritually—that is getting the best of you; or that with or without that knowledge, you will find the means (homeopathic or otherwise, by yourself or with the help of professionals) to overcome what's been ailing you.  I sense that there must be an answer to this thing, and that you or someone else will be able to find it.  (Whatever you do, don't give up.) 

My healing partner says I can’t give up—as in suicide—because the curse of my condition is that it would take more energy than I have to kill myself.  Sigh.  Yeah.   More often than I can count, I’ve prayed for the energy to die.  Because living so isolated from anyone who actually believes I am sick and not just lazy crazy or stupid, so incapable of doing anything that makes me feel alive, so fucking tired in body, mind, and spirit, is not a life worth living. 

I know I have a purpose, a mission from God, but I feel much like Moses.  …it was Moses? Not Aaron?  Who had the speech impediment and felt unqualified to speak for God?  … I have this mission, and I even know what it is, but my self understanding is so lame, I cannot (will not) see that I can do the work.  And the harder I try, the less I can do.  My brain simply stalls as soon as I begin to think maybe I can do this. 

And, sure, there is that faith thing. If God has given you a task, he will surely equip you for it, right? So I must simply be faithful to the mission, fidelity is everything.  Except I can’t.  I literally lay here with my fingers poised over the keyboard and my mind freezes up—I can’t remember a single thing to write, I lose my words so badly I can’t complete a sentence even when I can remember my theme. Or I simply wear out and can’t even muster the physical energy to pull the laptop open on my belly here in bed.  

Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.

Book Review: Confessions of a Bible Thumper

Confessions of a Bible Thumper by Michael Camp was both a fun, quick, enjoyable read and a difficult, personal history resurrecting, thought provoking book.  It is part memoir of how Camp got into and out of conservative American Evangelicalism with his Christianity intact, and part deconstructive analysis of the cultural and social opinions that are considered de rigueur for the true believer.  The early part of the book is more memoir and is much more loosely constructed, more like reading a blog than a book--even the editing is sloppier--but as the book continues, the structure tightens up considerably, the vocabulary improves and the editing is much cleaner.  It felt as if the book had been designed from a series of shorter, more intellectual, well-researched articles or lectures and strung together with folksy jaunts down memory lane, then tied up in neat chapters with contrived conversations with conveniently progressive and liberal Christian friends in the brew-pub.

That was the down-side of the this book.  Once I got over my snobbish dislike of what I consider the over-used device of the fake conversation in self-help (especially Christian self-help) books, I actually really enjoyed this book.  Michael Camp's journey through Christianity mirrors mine at so many points that I almost could have been reading my own story. The easiest to read and certainly the most fun blast-to-my-past was the container story set in the microbrewery in Silverdale, Washington.  My family and I used to live in Silverdale, walking distance from the Silver City Brewery in which the aforementioned conversational tidbits occur.  I've even raised a glass and downed a burger there when it was still just a burger joint.  We had a lot of laughs together, snuggled on the couch and peering at Google Earth in the laptop, "omigosh, remember that green belt we used to look out at from our deck?  It's a grocery store now!" and "holy cow, look at what went in there!" and, "hey, right there, that's the apartment you were born in, there's a hospital just up the street now."

And then the memories of trying to find a church home in Silverdale when we moved there as a newly married Navy couple.  Camp's descriptions of the churches in the area make it sound as though not much has changed in the decade-and-a-half since we were church-shopping.  We finally gave up in frustration.  If only we'd stayed in the brew-pub a few years longer and Michael Camp had arrived a few years sooner, we might still be willing to consider ourselves Christians--though certainly Christians as on the fringe as Camp and his brew pals.

As the memoir dug a little deeper into Camp's history, I thought of my own days as the preacher's kid, the one trying so hard to live just right as a witness to my public high school classmates.  I went to more than one of those big sell-out-to-Jesus conferences--none so large as Explo '72 that Camp attended in Texas but Love Europe '89 was only a slightly smaller European version followed by two weeks of street evangelism at sites across Germany.  I'm sure I was that girl who curled my lip and tossed my hair in disdain at people who smoked cigarettes, drank beer and had the temerity to think themselves truly saved!

Although even then, and for some years before that, the issues that Camp raises--inclusion, inerrancy, legalism, abortion, apocalypticism, evolution, sexuality, and universalism--had been nagging doubts lurking in my head.  Granted, my bigger questions as a teenaged girl and young woman in the Church were gender roles, feminism, authoritarian power structures, and exactly why couldn't I offer a prayer in our Spirit-led service but my brother could?  It was hard to read through this book and see my old confused but prejudiced self, arrogantly certain of all the answers even as I secretly doubted even the most basic of the taught truths.

Perhaps if I had read this book back in the Eighties, I might have realized decades sooner that there are many more legitimate expressions of authentic Christianity than my fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing allowed.  I might have never felt that I had to leave Christianity altogether in order to find God.  Then again, perhaps not.

I would hope that a copy of this book finds its way into every church library, trendy-named evangelism-themed coffee shop, and onto the bookshelves of every small group leader, Sunday School teacher, and spiritual director.  Because every Christian who longs for their fidelity to the Way of Jesus to have meaning beyond the social networking possibilities will one day, sooner rather than later, confront every single one of these questions.  Camp provides a template for how to go about thinking through the questions, directions for where to get more information and better research than can be provided in this book, and hope that love can be the gold standard of Christian living rather than rules, dogma, and cultural knee-jerk lockstep.

   See also, the book's website, Michael Camp's blog, and a video promo of the book.  Also available as a Kindle edition.

I was compensated  in advance for this review with a pdf copy of this book regardless of my published opinions of it.

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.

A Glimpse of Normal

On the Feast of the Epiphany, I began treatment with a new healer.  By the end of last year, after slogging from doctor to doctor to doctor for my bleeding and other health issues, I was incredibly frustrated, exhausted, and desperate.  The dysfunctional bleeding finally stopped on Christmas Eve after my having bled for about 70 of the previous 95 days. After lots of testing, not very much listening, and quite a bit of passing responsibility to other practitioners, the best the medical profession could diagnose me with was pre-menopausal hormone disruption and being “as good as diabetic”.  Neither of which could begin to account fully for my last four and a half years of chronic fatigue, pain, and cognitive dysfunction.  I was grasping at straws, including paying good money for some online, unlicensed and barely legal naturopath who suggested about ten different diagnoses and told me that if I’d lose a hundred pounds (going to a fat farm if necessary), all my health problems would get better.  Note:  I do NOT carry a hundred pounds of excess weight on my body!

Over the holidays, which were horrible and mostly spent in bed, I stopped in at a nearby gluten-free store and found a single business card for a guy who practices acupuncture, applied kinesiology, and NAET.  I thought, “what the hell, I’ve been to everyone else, maybe this guy will think more like I do; he certainly has the credentials for Weird.”  He works out of his living room, sets up his schedule from his cell phone, and was willing to let me grill him on his philosophy of healing for twenty minutes before even making an appointment!  My kind of practitioner.  My first visit was on the Epiphany, which I thought apropos for beginning new directions in healing wisdom.

He let me talk for an hour and a half, telling my story, letting me say for myself what was wrong with me.  That in itself was worth his fee!  I came home feeling very much like I’d hired a team player rather than submitted myself to yet another person’s expert opinions.  That first visit I got nothing more than a formula of Bach flower remedies from the healer and I myself changed the delivery system of my homeopathic remedy but for the first time in over six months I didn’t have to spend most of my waking hours in bed (or desperately wishing I were). 

I was able to do all our grocery shopping by myself, a full restocking of the kitchen since my husband has been trying to keep things running for the last several months, not his forte.  I hadn’t been able to shop unaccompanied in years.  Before I had quit altogether, I’d had to take a kid and use the motorized wheelchair carts and now suddenly I had the physical stamina and mental clarity to plan and execute a shopping trip to three stores, put it all away, and then start cooking up a storm.  I cooked for that whole first weekend!  I hadn’t so much as made a complete meal for myself in months, much less whole family dinners and prep-ahead meals for the freezer. 

I lost another fifteen pounds in addition to the twenty I’d already lost by going mostly grain-free and low-carb.  My clothes are falling off me, I have to wear my wedding ring on another finger, I even had to go back to an old pair of glasses because the prescription for my visual acuity changed.  I was able to take my daughter to an open house at the technical school she hopes to attend and the same day go with my other daughter to her music competition, unthinkable even a few weeks before.  I attended swim meets, went to a movie with the family, and I’ve even gone clothes shopping for my ever-taller teens.  I felt normal, healthy, and capable of living the life I expected of myself for the first time in five years. 

And then the honeymoon ended.  The healer and I have begun a course of treatments designed to realign that nexus between the physiological autonomic nervous system and the spirit/psyche, to cause it to function harmoniously as one whole rather than acrimoniously as two separate aspects of Being.  The treatments reset unconscious beliefs that cause adverse physiological or psychological reactions.  The treatments themselves are innocuous—some holding of tiny vials of liquid, some thumping along the spine, and a little acupuncture—but the changes that occur afterwards are enormous.  The healing is deep and requires a lot of forebearance as issues come to consciousness to be released.  I am again tired and quickly fatigue, often lose my temper, and am forgetful or foggy.  But it is the tiredness of healing rather than the weariness of disease. 

That brief interlude of glorious health, that glimpse of normal, was a splash of grace.  Having experienced that two weeks, I can eagerly accept the challenge now of this healing work.  It was a foretaste of vibrancy that was sorely needed after these long years of increasing despondency and resignation, a reminder of what I can be, the impetus I needed to do the work remaining, allowing these treatments to dig deeply into the foundations of my Being and to rebuild my whole self from the very inmost soul-depths.

Another Ash Wednesday

Another Ash Wednesday.  Another Lent. Another season in the liturgical year to contemplate “what does it all mean” and “how do I live like it means anything at all?”  No matter what Jesus’s followers thought he was all about—and the Gospels record their opinions as all over the map—the events of that fateful Passover had to have taken them by surprise.  Whatever their expectations for the Jesus movement, his execution for criminal sedition was a big game-changer.  Who could have foreseen such an event? (Arguably Jesus, but if so, he didn’t seem to go about making it very clear to even his closest followers.) And having seen their leader die ignominiously, what were they to make of it?  In order to go on with their own lives, how were they to integrate his death into their own personal histories as a meaningful event? 

Eventually, the various atonement doctrines, revisionist messianic prophecies, and the deification of Jesus by the increasingly political church provided catechistic answers to these hard questions.  Ultimately, though, we each have to answer that question of meaning for ourselves just as the original followers grappled with it in the first century.  Each of us must find our own meaning in life regardless of what answers are served up to us by church or culture. 

Lent is a six-week period designed to reflect on what meaning we will give our lives. Two years ago, I began The Chronicles as a Lenten exercise, expecting 40-Days-to-a-Renewed-You.  What I got was a continuing odyssey in spiritual death and resurrection.  I thought that February of 2010 that I was nearly recovered from my then two-and-a-half year struggle with dysautonomia/adrenal dysfunction.  Little did I know I was only beginning a whole new adventure in chronic disease and spiritual health!  Like the first disciples, who could have foreseen how often in the last two years I would beg that this cup should pass from me, how many times I cried out from the depths of my soul for the God who had forsaken me, how close I would come to sighing simply, “it is finished.”

This sojourn in my personal Abyss has been more malevolent than I ever expected, the skeletons in my closet became demons that nearly destroyed my soul.  Not for lack of willingness on my part did they fail; more times than I can count, I pleaded just to die and to let the inner struggle cease.  But God kept waking me up to one more dawn; weep though I did at yet another day of hauling my weary, aching, broken self out of bed.  Grace is a terrible thing.

Lent has come around again. Why am I still here?  What is my purpose in continuing to breathe, to think, to move?  In the last few weeks I have been slowly resurrecting from the ashes of my old dead self, why do I live?  Grace transforms, whether we will or no.  What has grace wrought?  Like those devastated survivors of that crucial crucifixion, I look around me and begin to pick up the pieces of myself that I find and discover that they fit together differently that before.  I am not the same person who went into this grave, who is this new person Grace has borne?

Jesus’s followers began their fateful journey, leaving every part of the lives they knew in Galilee, traveling to another country for a religious celebration, only to find that everything on which they had staked they hopes and dreams was staked instead to a cross as a common criminal. Their lives, their plans, lay destroyed at the foot of the cross that scattered them to the winds.  Grace transformed those shattered people into a force that changed (for good as well as evil) the course of history.  What will Grace make of me? 

Lent. Six weeks to nurture the new healing, the tender green spirit that has sprung new roots into the Ground of my Being.  Forty days to reach for the light, to burrow into the ground.  Who will emerge from the seed of the resurrection?

God: You've Misunderstood the Criteria for Getting In

It is that you dared to live.

How End Times Teachings Is Terrorism and Child Abuse

Link to part two--I don't know why it won't embed!

Big Lies I Believe

Fundamental beliefs (aka Big Lies) held in common by people who suffer from chronic illness:

1.     I have to be strong. (Strong enough to handle anything, regardless of whether the weight is unbearable by anyone.)

2.     It is not right for me to be angry. (I have no right to anger, my anger is not justified, or even that anger is a sin akin to murder.)

3.     If I’m angry, I will not be loveable. (Love and acceptance are earned by our character or our behaviors—which are inseparable.)

4.     I’m responsible for the whole world. (Leading to hyper-controlling behaviors, being the Fixer, a compulsion to “save the world.”)

5.     I can handle anything. (It is easier just to do it myself than get other people to do it, if you want it done “right” you have to do it yourself, needing to be perfectly competent in all areas of life—perfect mom, perfectly decorated and kept house, perfect garden, perfect on the job, in the bedroom, in the ministry—being good enough is never acceptable in anything.)

6.     I’m not wanted—I’m not lovable. (Regardless of others’ intentions, I perceive that I am unwanted/unloved.)

7.     I don’t exist unless I do something.  I must justify my existence.  (My only worth lies in my utility.  I cannot fathom being valuable simple for Being.)

8.     I have to be very ill to deserve being taken care of.  (I should be able to buck up, mind-over-matter, just get on with things, no matte what.)

A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases… is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs.  If we would heal, it is essential to being the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life.  Whatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within.  The internal milieu must be changed.  To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the center of our own biology of belief.  That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—in our lives.

…The key to healing is the individual’s active, free and informed choice.  … Liberation from oppressive and stressful external circumstances is essential, but that is only possible if we first liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our ingrained biology of belief.

From When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, MD (the parenthetical remarks are my own)