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?