Festivities

This was my first Thanksgiving not spent with family. In retrospect, it is really one of the first Thanksgivings that I even had a choice. Most of my friends were married young, they live near their families and holidays were not a time to spend with friends. So, it was really amazing to have a group of friends to share a traditional Thanksgiving meal with this holiday. There was so much difference at the table that wasn't filled with conflict or drama, but instead inspired curiosity and laughter. Different family traditions, different cultures, different stories, and I still got to sit in front of the TV with a full belly to watch a post-dinner movie. Thank you Jessica and Rachel for hosting us and cooking an amazing turkey!


The day after Thanksgiving I did something I have never done or desired to do - enter the post-Thanksgiving Christmas bonanza. Having easily accessible public transportation helped alleviate the parking frustration. And the amazing Seattle street performers added to the enjoyment of the craziness. For instance, I learned from the crazy street preachers that Thanksgiving is a holiday to thank God he has not killed me yet; good to know. Thankfully, the joyful tub-thumpers were nearby to remind me of the beauty of God's creation and why there is much to delight in. Then there was the free Starbuck's tent endearing a bunch of "buy local" Seattle-ites to mega-corporations one tiny cup of free hot chocolate at a time.

However, the festivities were all about the Christmas Tree lighting and the fireworks. It was the first time I felt playful in a really long time. There was some dancing, some yelling, singing along with carols, and a lot of waving the fun star lights in the air. I felt free, and it felt good. That is so much to be thankful for.

Happy Birthday & A Self-Soothing Christmas!

So, October is great. However, I think I am equally excited about November 1st. First of all, it is my dear friend Tira's (AKA Sporty Spice) birthday! Happy Birthday Tira! Welcome to the world of your third decade; I hope it's full of all new surprises, growth, children, and fun memories together.

This is also the official start of the Christmas season. This can be an incredibly irritating fact, like our entire world wants to skip over gratitude to get to the gifts. But one thing I am thankful for is the amazing string of made for TV holiday movies that will be blessing me with wonderfully heartwarming, romantic fluff for the next two months. There will be a creative retelling of the story of scrooge, the criminal hiding out in a small town who finds redemption, the work-aholic corporate woman who discovers love on Christmas Eve, and of course the black and white classics (of which, Holiday Inn is by far my favorite). And then, a couple weeks before Christmas, the tv executives will get really creative by having the "12 Days Before Christmas" countdown. This means instead of one holiday movies a week, I will get to watch one every single night!!!

Part of this holiday movie extravaganza fantasy is plush carpet. As I am taking a sexual disorders class right now, I may need to grapple with the fetish level of this carpet desire as I literally became teary-eyed rubbing my feet into a carpet the other night. But in the meantime, my holiday fantasy for this season will definitely involve watching these movies on the comfort of the plush carpet in my family's homes. Many of you know...I am what I like to call a "floor dweller." I would choose to sit on the floor over the couch any day. But I am also very tactile...I love texture. I calm myself by sliding my hand over various textures, like my polished nails or my therapists suede couch. Anyway, I don't have carpet at my house, so typically I just lay in bed to watch movies, which is really a horrible habit, but what is a tactile, cheesy-movie loving girl to do?

So fanciful holiday movies + plush carpet = Sarah's self-soothing Christmas.

For my counseling friends, I just want you all to know that I will continue to plunge the depth of meaning into these various pathologies so that the self-soothingness of these activities will be out of the choice to be kind to myself rather than perpetuate dissociation from the realities of my life experience and feelings. =)

Braking & Falling

Happy October!

October was always one of my most favorite months back in 'zona, but this month has become my full-fledged favorite now that I am in Seattle. While east coasters bemoan the weak display of fall colors, my desert-raised self glories in what is on display in the great northwest. When you add some sunny days and little warmer weather to the mix it becomes downright fantastic. The sky has cleared the last few days, which to be honest has made me really grumpy, but today there isn't a cloud in the sky so the beautiful Olympic Mountains are showing off above the Puget Sound. I think there is something about these grand mountains that always humbles me and makes so grateful for life and beauty.


To add to the fall excitement, today I went grocery shopping with a bucket load of coupons. I saved $80! I am so fricken proud of myself. Plus, I got things like apple butter, pumpkin cream cheese, beef stew fixins and a lot of red wine.

This week is also fall break for mhgs. It is a much needed break for me. Though the weather and colorful beauty of this month are wonderful, it has been a rough month. School has inadvertently been playing out my internal struggle to know who I am. My perfectionist and very-latent overachieving self has pushed into a schedule of classes that was way too much. The papers and projects have called me to live into who I desire to be, and yet they have fed into my same ole self and perfectionist patterns. It is a strange dichotomy. I am caught in this place of wanting to be different without knowing exactly what it is I want to change.

So the idea of braking has been a nice one this week. Just stopping. Not falling apart, breaking into pieces, and giving up...all of which sounds very tempting right now. But pausing long enough to feel the weight of the questions and struggles that I am working through right now. Letting it all sink in, perhaps with the quiet hope that change will come whether I know it or not!

Church History Brain Drain

This is what happens after a graduate student drinks coffee before going to bed, can't fall asleep, then sleeps in late, has a paper due the next day and therefore chooses to forgo bathing and getting out of bed in order to work on said paper all day, and then becomes so tired of paper topic that taking photos of oneself becomes a welcome distraction:

Rain and Ryan Adams

The rain has arrived in Seattle. It is so beautiful and refreshing. I just don't get how people don't like this weather!?! The fall colors are also starting arrive. You can see little patches of red and yellow appearing on the green trees. It is so beautiful. I am so excited for fall!

The perfect musical accompaniment to the fall season is Ryan Adams. I realize I am one of the last people to become a fan of Adams, but whatever. I actually had one of his albums on my iPod for a while now, and as I drove a friend home a few weeks ago he told me I needed to be in love with Adam's song Avalanche. I did, and then moved on to other Ryan Adams gems. I just can't get this one out of my head:

"When The Stars Go Blue"

Dancin' where the stars go blue
Dancin' where the evening fell
Dancin' in your wooden shoes
In a wedding gown

Dancin' out on 7th street
Dancin' through the underground
Dancin' little marionette
Are you happy now?

Where do you go when you're lonely
Where do you go when you're blue
Where do you go when you're lonely
I'll follow you
When the stars go blue

Laughing with your pretty mouth
Laughing with your broken eyes
Laughing with your lover's tongue
In a lullaby

Where do you go when you're lonely
Where do you go when you're blue
Where do you go when you're lonely
I'll follow you
When the stars go blue
The stars go blue, stars go blue

Laughing with broken eyes...oh my, I think I want to rename my blog based on this line. This song just feels and sounds like life to me. It is melancholy and oddly happy. It is filled with love and loneliness. There is beauty and darkness. Life.

Playing House

It occurred to me today that my life feels like a very prolonged game of playing house. The game has become very complicated with relationships, bills, and lots of keys (which really was a sign of adulthood to me in my pre-teen years...adults get to have so many keys!)

I am doing all these grown up things in my determination not to be a child, but unfortunately I just can't continue to hide the fact that I am really a little 8 year old pretending to know how to be an adult. There are other problems...

Children don't know how to express their needs and desires.
Adults don't want to be friends with children.
Children are very easy to trample over.
Children are prone to tantrums.
They need help to grow and mature, and children playing house think they can do everything on their own.

Apparently, in my pretending, I forgot that I was just playing. Of course, children pretending to be adults have no time for playing.

Now I am sitting here with grown-up problems that my very mature 8 year old self just doesn't know how to pretend my way out of, and I am pissed. I am pissed at the 8 year old for not having it figured out, and I am pissed at the 30 year old that let an 8 year old run their life for the past 22 years.

Summer School Recap

It was a long, hard summer. It started with two classes...

Psychopathology 1: it was as horrible as it sounds. Probably made especially hard by my own pathology, but whatever. This was my first Master of Counseling Psychology class since I switched from M.Div. to MACP. It kind of freaked me out to be sitting with counseling students talking about psych hospitals and reading (and rewriting) giant medical manuals...this just wasn't part of my new vision of combining theology and psychology.

New Testament Genre: ahh, a breath of fresh air surrounding my psychopathology class each week. Taught by Professor Joanne Badley, whom I highly respect, and I got to learn about the ins and outs of NT theology. I went through the book of 1 Corinthians to outline the narrative of the church relations with Paul that led to his writing of this letter, and it was fascinating to see the context and story develop. I know it bores most people, but this kind of stuff makes me smile...any chance I get to help me make more sense of the bible is a very welcome thing.

In this midst of these two classes I had a Leadership intensive class. What I thought was going to be a very cerebral class turned out to be tremendously emotional for me. As I was taking personality tests realizing how different my way of relating to the world is compared to most of my MHGS peers, I was also missing out on the student leadership retreat I was meant to be at. The culmination of these two isolating experiences probably set the tone for one of the loneliest seasons I have had in years this summer. oh, fun.

July and August were filled with lots of free time with two intensive classes in between:

Multicultural Issues: Holy shit. It is a humbling, sad, frightening experience to have your white privilege held up for you to see. It is even more humbling when it is people of color, who have experienced all the hatred they are calling me to recognize in myself, who offer this education with such incredible grace. One of our assignments was to go to places where we would be the minority. It was stunning to pay attention to what I was thinking and feeling - terror, self-consciousness, fear, mistrusting people's kind greetings, the relief to see another white person. It made me realize that even my theology of church is an indication of my privilege; if I was the minority in every church I visited, I would surely find comfort in almost any church where I was surrounded by people who look like me, and my personal church style and theology preferences probably wouldn't even be a consideration. There were lots of realizations during this class, but this one was most impactful because I have held to the idea that theology, or our faith in God, is what could bring us to racial reconciliation. Now I see even that idea is seeped in issues of white privilege.

And finally, Philosophy 1: just a big, long mess of trying to grasp Plato and his Forms; Augustine and Aquinas' attempts to make Greek philosophy Christian; and the depressing turn in Descartes and Kant to complete doubt, individualism and relativity. This was the first class I almost dropped, but I made it and am glad for it (thank you Blaine for recommending Passion of the Western Mind!). Like it or not, our ideas of Christianity are seeped in ancient philosophies, so it was helpful to get the background understanding.

So, that was my summer school in a very big nutshell. I don't know if I am genuinely struggling with this whole student thing, or if I am simply on the brink of burnout after a full-throttle year, but I am tired. And yet, I can't even imagine what I would do if I re-entered the "real world." So, I hope to just hunker down over the next few months with Christmas as my light at the end of this tunnel.

Vacation!

My Mom and Aunt Elaine came to Seattle for a visit last week. It was so nice to be treated to a luxurious vacation in my new home state. We visited Pike Place Market, the historic underground tour of Seattle, the Ballard Locks, Golden Gardens beach and ate a ton of great food in Seattle. For a family that is perfectly happy watching movies and drinking wine all day, that is a pretty impressive list. (Although, we did get our share of wine in too).

Then we headed over to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, which I have wanted to do since I moved here last summer. We stayed in charming B&B's, went whale watching and visited the beach and mountain parks. It is stunningly beautiful. Here are some pics of the places and the family!

Mom & Aunt Elaine at the Market


Me & mom hanging on drift wood

Massive, beautiful driftwood on Rialto Beach

Hoh Rainforest

Sol Duc Falls

It was so wonderful to be with family. My last name is Casbeer, but being around my mom and aunt reminds me that I am all Chapman! It felt so good to be with people who know and understand me even in the midst of all of our differences and quirks, and who love me just the same!

Love you mom!

Some Thoughts

Amidst a flurry of various hell, fire & brimstone messages on a overtly Christian bus of sorts was this message:
The words of the living God are the highest of all education.

I think it simply frustrated me. Not because I take personal offense to the evangelist tour bus, but because I know this thought is fairly prevalent among Christians. I am in school to learn about the living God and God's word and how that knowledge intersects with an understanding of self and others. I wouldn't say that this education is more valuable than knowledge of the Bible, but I also think it is naive to think that the Bible is plain text. The word of God would be meaningless to someone who could not read or understand the language it was presented in (which, by the way, would include all of us English speaking evangelicals considering the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek!). And if this pithy phrase was meant only to refer to the moral education offered in the Bible...that would require a whole other post, but my thoughts would be somewhere along the lines of how the Bible has been used to justify all kinds of cruelty and harm against others out of selfish ambition.

Okay, the next thought.

I realized this weekend that if you take away Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart and every other big box retailer, I have no clue where to buy a toilet bowl cleaner. How sad!

End thoughts.

Angels My @#$

I just discovered one reason to NOT like living in the East Lake Union neighborhood:
The Blue Angels. Oh my goodness, those jets are loud when they are flying directly over your roof!

Body Love

I have been reflecting on the body a lot lately. I have been wrestling with my own body image issues as I try to get myself back into the gym for the hundredth time. I wish I loved it. I wish it made me ecstatic. It doesn't. Mostly it just makes me tired, but maybe I just need some time.

Right now I am somewhere in between angry and motivated. I got a flush of anger at a cafe this week as a woman sat with her legs crossed twice, like her legs were little vines intertwining each other. Is that really comfortable? I also got perturbed with the guy that was double stepping the stairs to the grocery store. Is that really necessary? So your skinny, so you are athletic. I am tired of fat jokes and open scrutiny of other people's bodies. Do you see me? And I am really sick of the nation's new found focus on child obesity that blames the children and let's the parents in charge of feeding them completely off the hook. I wish there was a study of those parents. I would put my total savings on the outcome being those mothers and fathers having serious eating disorders or at least seriously disordered eating. Why don't we get that behaviors are learned, even if it is an opposite behavior? This is a portion of my anger.

I wonder how much of our body issues truly are mental. And by mental, I do mean psychological. Like the Indexed image above, our minds are getting played with all the time about what we should look like. The crazy thing is, most of us know this to be true, and yet we still judge ourselves and each other by magazine cover standards. Psychologically, these are issues of self worth. But I think after exploring the psychological aspects of this issue for a couple of months, I am still left wanting for more.

This has led me to the concept of honoring the body as spiritual discipline. From Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath, here are some thoughts along this line:

Attending Christianly to our bodies is a matter of some urgency, because there is no neutral way to be a body...What I want is to pay more attention - and more explicitly theological attention - to my body and the things it does every day and the connections between the work of my body and the daily service of God.

...the church fathers labeled Gnostism, with its insistence that spirit was separate from and superior to matter, a heresy...Even the most faithful Christians can sometimes catch themselves in a Gnostic mindset of wanting to deny, rather than rightly order bodily desires for sex, food, even sleep.

I also started reading Honoring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell. So far, she is speaking to the dichotomies of the body. Integrity (our distinctness) and relationality (our connectedness with other bodies), freedom and constraint as "practices that seem to constrain the body often have freedom as their motive," and lastly sacredness (deeply blessed) and vulnerability (fragile).

I wish I could soak this all in. I wish I could have such a vision of the body, a vision that internalizes the goodness of God and the beauty of my created self...body and all. I wish that as I go to the gym tomorrow I could maintain the perspective that caring for my body is one small practice of worship to God, and that God does not require self mutilation or condemnation in this practice in order to make it holy. I hope that I will soak up the belief that God actually cares about what I eat. That the God who instituted feasts, dietary laws, Lord's Supper and the tree of good and evil actually still cares about how, and what, and when, and with whom I eat.

Is this possible? This mix of freedom and constraint, this tension between sacred and vulnerable...are they neat categories, or could I really learn to "rightly order" my body?

Coming Down

I'm coming down from a long week. It started last week as I worked, for money, for the first time in many months. It felt good. I basically made coffee for 4 days for the Story Workshop at school, but I gained a lot of pleasure in making coffee...something to do with mindlessness, and being out of the house, and making a little money. But, I sat in on the final few hours of the workshop which was the most heartbreaking and the most rejuvenating experience. I sat and listened to the attendees share their stories, their past stories of harm, as well as their current stories of feeling hope. It was a great reminder of why I am at this school. It is graduate work, but it is a whole lot of heart work too, and it is beautiful. For anyone who is interested in experiencing Mars Hill Graduate School but doesn't want to be a student, I highly recommend this workshop.

Then I sat in on Philosophy for 4 full days. I have zero experience with philosophy, and those four days didn't improve my knowledge much. Hopefully working on the final paper will help it all come together. But we had an entertaining professor, Carl Raschke, who has a knack for saying and doing some crazy things. I thought I would share a few of the moments that snapped me out of my lecture stupor...

Theology is the shotgun marriage between Plato and Paul.

What makes us Christian is that we have a God that actually pooped.

One of the best ways to shake up a church is to read scripture.

And for those who like to stay up to date on Postmodernism, apparently...
Derrida is out. Spinoza is in.
You can take that information to the bank...or at least wikipedia!

Happy weekend!

Plato

He says about unity that "by diverging, it agrees with itself...like the harmony of a bow or a lyre." ...Harmony is concord, and concord is a kind of agreement; but agreement cannot be created from divergent things while they are still divergent, and harmony cannot be created unless divergent things agree.

The Symposium

Hate

It is amazing to see, as I plumb the depths of my hate, how much of life appears to be a complete facade - a play with well constructed scripts and costumes, perfectly practiced gestures and facial expressions. People will say, "You don't hate yourself-you look so put together," "you're not a racist-you're so nice to people," "you aren't playing a part-you are so honest." I think today is the first time in the past year at MHGS that I have truly believed in the complete and utter depravity of mankind.

Today, I see no good in the world and I find no hope in God - the apparent mastermind of this mess. And yet today, I went to church where they are celebrating a year of hope, and it felt so good. But now I sit here, trapped in my little room in the enormous world too afraid to step out and fuck it up all the more by my mere hateful presence, and too scared to stay in here all alone murdering myself.

The Fourth on Franklin

Happy Independence Day!

We inaugurated our new home last night with our first party for the fourth of July. Our Eastlake neighborhood basically shuts down as we are just blocks away from Lake Union where there is a fireworks show. The night started with just hanging in our front yard watching our new neighbors having water balloon fights. These soon turned into throwing water balloons at cars driving by.



Most of the drivers laughed it off, but someone got pissed and called the bike cops, which left the lingering question...how do you call a bike cop? Anyway, Rachel was on top of it - eaves dropping and filling us in. She actually heard the bike cop say, "help me help you!"





Then we headed down to the Lake to watch the fireworks. Hope everyone had a good holiday!

Father's Day

Today has been filled with so much emotion. It began with me recalling how fun and funny my dad was. He was filled with life, and yet he always had this hidden twinge of melancholy about him. I wish I had known what that melancholy was about when he was still alive.

I have joined Student Council at Mars Hill Graduate School, and today was the end of the annual retreat. It was spent in worship - silence, remembrance, communion. On days like this, silence is deadly. My 30 minutes of silent prayer and reflection were filled with tears and wrestling. Dan Allender said in my Leadership class this week that it is a beautiful thing when we can leave behind our deconstruction of idols because we have something even greater to reconstruct. I reflected on this idea. Is it time for me to stop deconstructing my dad, my family? I know the patterns, the pain, the worship of my dad; is it time to begin reconstructing myself and how I will live out my story in the ways of Jesus?

There is part of me that thinks if I could get to the place of reconstruction then I could finally truly mourn my past. There isn't a lot of room for real grief in the midst of anger.

I have also been reflecting today on my understanding of God, of our culture's understanding of God. In my New Testament class, we read a little bit about the culture of 1st century Roman empire/Jewish culture where the father was the provider for all - wife, children, slaves, etc. The emperor was the father of a nation, Paul was a father of the Philippians, God is Father. Can we even know and understand this idea today where father does not necessarily imply provider, life-giver, leader? Even in families where fathers are the primary providers they are often very absent emotionally. Can middle/upper class Americans have a theology of fatherhood that informs our knowledge of God? Do we even want that today in a culture where leaders and fathers are absent and/or corrupt?

This got me thinking about the names of God; specifically, God's name for Godself in the OT - I AM. I know this will probably sound heretical, or at least outlandish, but I wonder if I AM is the God we can relate to today in our First World experience of individualism. I don't know if this even makes sense, but as I searched today to understand God in light of my sad and difficult relationship with my dad, I turned immediately to I AM, the God who is self sufficient and all knowing, and yet created humanity and lives in communion with the Son & the Spirit. I can relate to I AM IN COMMUNITY. That is bigger than me, it is more glorious than me, and yet it helps me understand God perhaps in the same way the Biblical heroes understood God as a Father within their culture.

In my culture, our American culture, "I" is the only real source of power that we know. We create our own futures, we make choices to determine our 5-10-20 year life plans. God is intermixed with these individual pursuits of happiness, but ultimately it is up to me. If it took Paul and the early church to adopt the idea of God as Father as a frame of reference for the character of God within their culture, then perhaps I need to embrace the idea of an individual God in the midst of community as a frame of reference for my understanding of God. I am an individual who needs community, but I fail at this all the time, and so I need a God who is an individual within community to turn to for my salvation.

This is what has been floating around in my head today...Happy Father's Day. May the concept of Father be redeemed in our broken culture. I AM knows I need it!

Bible Club

It has begun. Bible Club convened with the reading of a modern day Epistle written by our fellow worker in Christ, Cabe, which was so apropos. We proceeded to hash out all our thoughts and hopes and interests and expectations, and then we finally settled into John 17 as our first passage to study. I am so excited.

Kate asked at one point why we were all truly interested in this idea. It immediately occurred to me that I have never really experienced community reading the Bible together, studying together, wrestling together. I have been in lots of Bible Studies, but that means I have been in lots of groups where leaders told me what a passage meant and how I was supposed to live and believe. I am not dissing those experiences because I know I learned much from many leaders in my past, but all I had to do was show up and soak it up...it required very little of me.

There is something incredibly more exciting about engaging the text myself and with others, of getting to follow the passion within me that draws me to a text while still learning from others. It is exciting to do this with the intent of learning how to really live the gospel out in our 21st century, American, affluent, and pluralistic society, as opposed to just fulfilling my Christian duty with a daily quiet time which has always brought me more guilt and confusion than real transformation. We get to "play" with the Text, which to me means I get to get my hands dirty with friends as we struggle to understand what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed in a society where we get pre-maid mustard in handy, squeezable bottles at the supermarket; or, what it means to love your neighbor in a culture of fences and locked doors...and terrorists who decapitate their enemies. This could perhaps be called a midrash group, at least deep down I hope that will be the experience.

I feel kind of weird being so excited, but this new group brings life to my soul. I have had a really rough week, but tonight I have laughed and smiled much. It is good.

Unlocked

In the past week I have had my personality tested and my handwriting analyzed. In one page or less all of my problems have been made sense of. I literally want to print out this stuff and take it into my therapist or my school or my house and scream...maybe this is just the way I am!!! Maybe all these relational and personal and familial issues are just my personality.

For instance, I hate chit chat. On occasion I can do it, but as a general rule I just don't get it. Here is the answer:
INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship).

Of course there is a lot more, but I am an INTJ, so I am too private to share it all. Sometimes these assessments help me feel free, even for just a moment, to be okay with who I am. Maybe I just need to scream that to myself.

Next Things

It has been almost a year living in Seattle. What a ride!







I can feel the sentimentality as well as the stress approaching as Stef, Smruti and I have to move by the end of the month. This house, which has come to called the Meridian House, has been so wonderful. So much has happened within the confines of this space, good and bad. There has been lots of tears and laughter, deep conversations and partying, football and Grey's Anatomy.

It would be really sad if we weren't moving here, the Franklin House:


This big, beautiful house is going to be our new home. It is closer to downtown and in a really cute neighborhood called Eastlake. And we will be adding a new roommate, Holly, which we are really excited about.

The other big news...Bible Club is starting! Yeah! There is just something oddly ironic and subversive about starting a bible club at Mars Hill Graduate School. Not because we don't respect and believe in this Text, but because we spend so much time deconstructing all the ideas we have ever held about the bible that have gotten in the way of us actually reading it well. It is kind of exciting to know that I can continue deconstructing while at the same time reconstructing a new appreciation and love for this odd and beautiful text. If this club gets off the ground, it will have to be in honor of Joanne Badley, NT scholar and professor at MHGS, who first gave us the assignment to study the Sermon on the Mount that inspired the Bible Club.

Self Service

I just returned from a wonderful weekend with old friends. It is interesting to consider how adulthood, marriage and motherhood have changed our views of the world. There was a lot of discussion around selfishness. The message is everywhere, from Oprah to Christian self-help to the endless array of fashion, home improvement, flashy cars and more that are paraded by us every minute of every day. Where we once would have enjoyed dishing on celebrity gossip we are now turned off by the excessiveness of our culture.

And yet, here I am working on a graduate degree in counseling psychology. Everything I learn is about the self - the part of us that is the culmination of parenting, environment, learning, experience, as well as the mysterious internal make-up of innate personality, desires, likes/dislikes that makes us each different. We were created diverse, there is not one human being that is the same, and so therefore I have to think there is something about "self" that reflects the glory of God. If we believe we were created by God, then understanding our self must reveal something of the glory and character of God, right?

I remember my first encounter with therapy. My therapist did not practice from a Christian worldview, and he kept telling me that I needed to be more selfish. I was dumbfounded and resisted him for months. Then I read a book that talked about co-dependency - enmeshing yourself with others to the point that you don't think or act out of your own agency. I remember going to my next session with the a-ha: he wasn't asking me to be selfish, he was asking me to stop being self-less, or without a self. I wonder if the Christian community has become so enmeshed in pleasing each other by obeying social structures that we have forgotten to really seek God's call for our own self. Have we come to equate living out of one's uniqueness with selfishness? It seems kind of ironic really, because if we are upset with others stepping out to do something different aren't we really getting upset because they won't be around for us anymore!

Of course, I am probably making this more complex than it needs to be due to our lack of language. There are more obvious external forms of selfishness - living with no regard for how you impact others (i.e. drunk driving), consuming and collecting stuff without need, not sharing what you have been given with others. But I also think there is internal selfishness that can only be unearthed with a little digging. I hide. I have never thought of this as selfish because I never really thought anybody needed or expected anything of me. But as I grapple with my self - my personality, calling, worth, I am realizing more and more that hiding is selfish. A selfishness that comes from the sad place of not believing you have anything to offer.

It is an odd paradox that the more I have come to understand my self, the more I desire to extend myself out to others, to serve. But I guess that is another language issue. Is not being selfish the equivalent of serving others? Can you serve others with an attitude of selfishness? I guess a truer sense of self will not always lead to service, just as serving others will not always be a sign of selflessness.

So where does this leave me? I think a lot of this has been stirred up not only from my girls trip, but also from just finishing a paper on Luke 12:42-48, the parable of the unfaithful servant. Read it. It's disturbing. But ultimately it is about being vigilant and watchful for Jesus' return. It is about choosing to treat our brothers and sisters with dignity and care since the kingdom of God is here, and not yet. It is choosing to work and live out of Jesus'example. For me, this is where theology and counseling intersect. The goal of the therapist should be to help the servant live more fully into the kingdom of God, building the courage and strength to fight against their depravity in order to live out of their God-given glory.

Folklife

This weekend is Seattle's Folklife Festival. It is one of those events that provides wonderfully amusing people watching and some good music. Lots of tie dye shirts, kilts, and opportunities for checking off your list of things you never thought you would see.

Old man being a human video game, check:


My brothers in Christ. Uhg:


Wading in the water with Cabe & Kj. Don't look too close, there are naked children in the background!


Bluegrass under the Space Needle:

Spring

I just went through some pictures from this spring. Thought I would share...

Loving Life

I sleep until at least 7:30 every morning, get up, drink coffee while reading or watching the Today Show. Some days I don't groom until the afternoon as I putz around the house and do homework. This morning I did a weekly blog read through, took out the trash and looked up to see the Olympic Mountains, which are covered in clouds today, but I still know they are out there and it made me smile.

I am embarking on my toughest trimester yet, and I feel less stressed than I have all year. Go figure. I just paid bills and realized that I have money in my account, which means my tax refund finally arrived...praise God! My skin is still sensitive from a sunburn as we had a week of sunshine! Also, I have not had my life story and style of relating prodded and picked at for almost two weeks now, and I gotta say...it has been wonderful.

I am just happy.

Remembrance

Today I attempted to review the ending of my second semester at Mars Hill Graduate School. What a mess.

I didn't even make it to my class notes; I didn't even make it through all of my personal journals. but what I have recalled so far is that it was a semester rich with heartache and confusion for me. There have been moments of such hurt and disappointment, and there have been moments that felt like the glory of the sun breaking through the clouds. I love dark, cloudy days, but anytime the sun rays break through here in Seattle, my head and neck seem to respond automatically - lifting up and toward the light and the warmth. There have been several days as I walked between skyscrapers on my way to school that I would shiver in the shadows of the buildings hoping for a red light to stop me at each intersection so I could enjoy a few brief moments of sunshine.

Isn't it interesting though that the most beautiful skyscapes are those that have light pouring through a gray sky, sunset colors painted on big white clouds, or the rainbows created through the raindrops. In the end of this semester, I came to realize some important things...things that give me hope that I can endure two more years of dark, cloudy days...or a lifetime of them.

It's not about me. The process, the transformation of a broken heart or a lost soul, especially my own...it's not about me. I don't think God is a crutch. I think religion is a crutch, a man made structure that we can lean on while the amazing, almighty God does his healing and transformative work on us. The crutch, perhaps I could call it community since I am not attending a church, doesn't ease the pain, instead it creates blisters and muscle pain in your arms. The new pain is helpful because it gives me something else to bitch and moan about while the slower healing work is going on inside.

I think eventually, I hope at least, that I will see how important that community is in relieving the pressure off my broken body. I can't end any of this, I can't fix it or make it go away, and I can't fix you either. All I can do is make your arms ache while your body heals, just as you do the same for me. It's a blessed and hopeful thing that in rubbing against each other we are in essence offering our bodies to God for healing.

I have also learned that wounds can be full of hope. I have gone back to the story of Jacob wrestling with God, and I find it fascinating that he was simply touched by the stranger and his hip was disjointed in a manner that marked him for the rest of his life. A wound of hope because it forever represented that night that Jacob saw the face of God, the night he was blessed with a new and redeemed name. I was talking to someone yesterday who told the story of being pierced by hope. Same idea...hope is full of suffering.

As I reread this it all sounds pretty self-centered. But I guess that has been the reality of the past year for me - a lot of looking at myself so I could hopefully get to a place loving others well. I sat down to reflect on the last four months so I could "close the book" and move on, but I am realizing that just can't happen. I have been marked, wounded with hope, and I think I may be limping for the rest of my life, and I am okay with that as long as it always draws me back to remembrance that I have seen God.

Jericho

This semester has been a roller coaster. Here I am right back at sad. I am tired of story, of my story in particular. Sometimes I just wish a question could be a question and not some deep reflection of my past wounds. Sometimes I wish I could just be sad without it being about my fucked up family. Sometimes I wish I could make a decision without considering what patterns I am falling into.

As I feel things falling to pieces, this has been my theme song:

Jericho
Tara McLean, Passenger

March around
Jericho loved the music and fell
into your arms breathless

Heard a sound
Shut my eyes so tight
From the whisper of a storm coming

Oh, funny how
I spent this time waiting around
It's a lie
Everything you felt until now

Saw her dancing
The floor gave way
Opened its mouth
To say her name

Saw her falling
Cast away, cast away
She learned to fly one day

Oh, funny how
I spent this time on the ground
It's a lie
Everything you felt until now

Same place I've always been
I'm just lost on these roads again
Just as i got near the end
I keep falling in the holes you left in me

Oh, funny how
I spent this time lashing out
It's a lie
Everything you felt until now

Farewell March

This has been a month of full of newness and life for me. It began with a 10 minute eye surgery that corrected my vision forever. Stunning, amazing, unbelievable...how is that everyone doesn't get LASIK?!? That was actually the beginning of the most anxious filled three weeks of school yet, but this is a post about life. So.

Next up was a funeral for my twenties in order to create the space I needed to celebrate my 30th birthday! Yes, a funeral, and it was beautiful, holy, an amazing blessing to mourn the heartache of the past decade with my dear friends. My 30th birthday was such a great day. There were phone calls and lunch with a friend and getting highlights in my hair, and then a surprise dinner with friends. So special.

There were two births in the Spice Girl group. Nixon born the end of February and Simon born two weeks ago. Congratulations Tira and Holly! Can't wait to meet you new little boys!

And in true Mars Hill fashion, there was emotional turmoil and wrestling that has led to much life within me. I have been grappling with the idea of leaning into the person I was created to be. My automatic reaction is to shy away, to find comfort in the corner, but I have really been challenging myself to take up some space in life, and to be okay with it. The result, honestly, seems to lead to more heart ache right now, but it is the kind of heartache that is bittersweet; the kind that even as I am sitting in the shit of my life feels a little hopeful because I keep getting whiffs of blossoms. There is more life to come.

So, farewell March. You have been good to me, and I thank you for the blessings that I will forever treasure!

Breaking Things

I wrote a paper last week where I compared the horse whisperer/trainer character (Tom) in the movie Seabiscuit with the Holy Spirit. I wrote about how Tom had to "tame" Seabiscuit's angry and bitter behavior in order to give the horse the freedom to be a racehorse. This has been sticking with me.

I keep talking about my sadness. It might be getting obnoxious. But it's just so present. In terms of my own experience right now, I keep getting the image of my body being full of bones that have been broken and healed improperly. I just kept trying to get past the pain by ignoring it, and now those bones are being broken so they can be set correctly, and healed correctly. This is my process of being tamed, and my light at the end of the sadness is the hope of a new sense of freedom.

Damn, every week, more broken bones. Everything hurts. Some times I start to get scared that I am getting used to this state of being, other times I feel like the pain is too much to bear. I question whether or not I am forcing myself to stay in a hard place when I should just be getting over it and moving on with life. And then I wonder if that attitude is exactly what led to so many broken bones healing so poorly.

So tomorrow begins my weekly process of being broken all over again. But I am finding that the more I stop fighting this process, the more I feel cared for in the midst of this process.

Wrestling

In the midst of sadness, there has been major wrestling. I wrote a paper last semester describing my personal hermeneutic as one of wrestling with God, Scriptures, Truth, etc. I think it is a good metaphor for me. I know I don't struggle with much grace. My most unkempt moments are those of struggle.

I am wrestling with diversity, multi-culturalism, reconciliation. My month at mhgs has been one filled with talk of oppression in various forms, from the somewhat trivial (adult popularity contests) to the severe (my acts of oppression on a friend), and there have been some in-betweens as well. I suppose it is a sliding scale measuring depth of impact, and in the end I can only be accountable for how I oppress others. But how?

There have been many conversations, some very heartfelt apologies and very real tears on behalf of others. There is the helplessness of simply being born into a situation that is oppressive to others (white, middle class, suburbia). There is the empowerment of reconsidering my belief systems and embracing new ideas. There is the hope of breaking through the awkwardness and fear to enter into what diversity, culture and reconciliation even mean to begin with. There is the systems level dreaming...what if the western Christian church stopped talking for the next 2000 years and just started listening to church leaders in other cultures (as asked by my inspiring prof Dwight Friesen)?

I can only pray that this is the start of more reflection and ultimately action. I can feel the wrestling leaving my body and mind...I know it could so easily slip away into "a difficult conversation I had that one time years ago." I don't want that. Too much is at stake for my friends, the church, and my own transformation into the likeness of Jesus.

For Comfort, Mourn

The last two weeks have been a time of mourning for me. The sadness, frustration and hopelessness have felt constantly present, which has led to a lot of tears and even more time in bed. Bed has become my one place of comfort. I just feel in constant need of being held, and my bed is the only thing available that envelops me.

For a class this week I read a 4th centurty exegete's sermon on the Beatitudes. He had a simple phrase that brought a little hope in the midst of this uncomfortable sadness: if you seek comfort, then mourn. It certainly twists the order of the words of Jesus, but in a way that opens comfort up to all people if they choose to mourn. And some days, I think there is so much for every person to mourn, even if it is just on behalf of another.

This little sentence has also caught me in all my efforts to create comfort in order to avoid mourning. I have worked so hard throughout my life to avoid pain and suffering, as if the bad feelings are what needed to be comforted rather than the actual loss that caused the bad feelings to begin with.

So here I sit in the midst of the sadness, laying in bed with wadded tissues all around me, just hoping for comfort.

Time

I pick up Time magazine to read about the presidential race. I am flipping through the pages and came across the factoid that a measles vaccine costs only $0.16 and most Africans can't afford it, but you can also buy a bottle of beer for dogs for $2.14. I flip a couple more pages to the election coverage and find out that it costs $100 million to run for president and there are currently 20+ candidates, which means there is about $2 billion dollars potentially in play to elect our president.

I admit that the poverty statistics in Africa have never really moved me, but for some reason reading all this in a matter of 5 minutes just really pissed me off. If I did my math right, if we bypassed the mudslinging tv ads we could vaccinate over 12 billion people, which I know is ridiculous because the world population is only 6 billion. And beer for dogs? really?

Limbo

As usual, I find myself at a natural ending (the end of January) realizing that I have not paid much attention to this blog. And so, I have so much to share, and yet so little since memory has already slipped away. I am fighting those guilty feelings, and then shaking my head in disbelief that I feel guilty about a blog.

This new season has become more pronounced. School is in full swing. I am in a bunch of classes and activities that are surrounding me with new people, so I feel like a freshman all over again. My freshman year of high school I switched high schools. I went from my community, small and Christian, to a public school. Everyone had their cliques and groups and roles, and I was the newbie. It was so lonely. There is that inherent awkwardness of not knowing where to butt myself in and where to hold back in meeting new people. I am in that place all over again.

My job has finally come to an end, which was more sad than upsetting. I love my boss. I doubt I will ever work for anyone else like him. He has been a huge support and a huge cheerleader for me going to grad school. He was also my last real tie to Phoenix outside of friends and mom that are there. All the things that physically connected to me to Phoenix are gone. Any illusions that I wasn't actually a grad student are also gone as I am finally facing student loan checks and FAFSA filings.

And then there is the constant call to enter my story more deeply. To experience the grief, sadness and joys that are there. At this point gratitude seems far off, and grief and sadness are just too close and disrupting to enter. So I feel in limbo, in all of these areas, there is just that funky feeling of not knowing what's next, where to turn, where to look, where to enter. Limbo.

Seasons

This week was the beginning of a new season, another trimester at mhgs. I spent 12 hours of lecture time with Dan Allender as he presented his teachings on marriage and family. It was fascinating, disturbing, uncomfortable. He says that the goal of marriage is to call forth the glory of your spouse, so there was a lot of talk about glory. It is weight and light, it is substance and essence, it is God and God reflected in us.

It started snowing on Wednesday. I am captured by the glory of snow, just like I was captured by the glory of the fall colors. It was midnight and I was restless to go to sleep because I knew the snow was pouring down right out my window and I didn't want to miss it. I got up and sat in a chair facing the window and just watched the snow fall for an hour. It is amazing, glorious. The next morning I woke up to this outside my window:

As much as I love these changes in season I don't handle them very well. This snow season has been costly for me, literally. As I watched the snow fall I kept wondering what it was about the snow that was so intriguing to me. I finally decided that it was silent and yet leaves a beautiful mess the next day that can be so destructive. Rain is violent, and yet it leaves clearer skies and produces greener spaces. Snow causes me, and this whole city, to slow down, or even shut down. It makes us wait, but the view is beautiful.

I am compelled to consider which season I am transitioning into right now, or will it even be that different than the last? In retrospect, I entered last trimester with complete anxiety and fear. As I look to the year ahead, I think this season will be more about some kind of active rest, letting go and yet pushing forward, pulling people closer even as I gain more clarity as to who I am called to be.

New Year's Musings

Amazingly, I have not put a lot of thought into the new year. No resolutions, no stated hopes, no real regrets. But, for posterity sake I feel I must post some musings. Here is where I am at on the first day of 2007:

I am quickly approaching my 12th day of sickness. Perhaps the reason for so few deep thoughts lately. I am so sick of being sick! *cough*

2007 is the year I will turn 30. It is scary and exciting. It feels like such a mile marker, and yet completely over-hyped. I never had a crystal clear picture or plan of where I would be at 30, but I am absolutely sure none of my daydreams included grad school, seattle or single!

I read three books about the Celts over Christmas and came to realize that everything I learned last semester (and hence, perhaps the foundational theology for this school?) comes from 4th century Celtic Christianity...as in St. Patrick. All of humanity is made in God's image, and therefore at our core, true self we are good. Sin cannot take away from the inherent goodness within us. Jesus is the savior of our true selves, through him we can live out a taste of the fulfillment we will experience in heaven. Why do we cling to all that is bad within us? Why was this message considered heresy in favor of the emphasis on our depravity?

I can't stop playing Sufjan Stevens music. I can't pick a favorite song or album. It's all good.

My hair is finally long enough to twist up, which makes me wonder why I am trying to grow it out in the first place if what I am excited about is being able to pull it up?

*cough* *cough*

My old worship pastor stayed at my house over Christmas, and I got to have dinner with him and his wife before they left. I felt my deep judgement of the Church and Christianity spewing out to them, which has made me deeply desire for a time when I can get past this place of judging.

I am longing for some good reality TV marathons today, but my only choices are Beauty and the Geek and the Biggest Loser. I sooo need to get a job in TV and set these networks straight!

I actually made it to midnight last night at a 007 new year's party. I was quite proud of myself because I felt like going to bed around 8 p.m. But that would make me just like my mother, and despite turning 30 this year, I am still too young for that! =) *laugh at myself* *cough* *cough* *smile* I left at 12:05 a.m. to find a fire cracker had hit my windshield and left several circular cracks. The kicker...I just got my car back after a month in the shop following my snow slide accident (see post below)! I refuse to take this as an omen!

Happy New Year!