RIP Merlin Stone

Merlin Stone passed away this weekend. As usual Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt has an excellent write up on her impact in goddess studies. I try not to engage in hyperbole, but I can honestly say her book, When God Was a Woman changed my life. That book started a process that totally changed the way I think about religion and spirituality, their place in human history, and what all of that could mean to me.

I came across her book by accident. I was shopping in the college bookstore my senior year and it was on the clearance rack, marked down to some ridiculously low price. It looked intriguing so I bought it and promptly put it in the books-I-am-going-to-get-around-to-reading stack. When I finally worked my way around to it, I was totally absorbed. I had learned about the Venus of Willendorf, and Crete, and Catal Huyuk, but the idea that deeply matriarchal and spiritually vibrant culture was not an aberration was earth-shaking for me.

It didn’t convince me to believe in a literal goddess anymore than I believe in a literal god, but those archetypal images and symbols stuck with me, as well as a desire to connect with what they mean. Reading Stone helped me to understand how totally out of touch I had become with Christianity. I read it a second time a few years later and it revitalized in me a determination that my daughters not be brought up in a faith that taught them they were second-best.

Thank you, Merlin Stone. May you rest in peace.

Enabling Evangelicals

I earned some daughter points this week.

Through my work, I was able to get two tickets for my parents to attend a major evangelical Christian event next month. They are excited. They are disappointed that I will not be attending the event with them, but still, they are happy to be going.

I struggled with this a little bit. My initial reaction when a co-worker suggested I invite my parents was that I did not want to support something so totally antithetical to my personal views. Giving them the tickets felt like giving the event my blessing and I don’t want to do that. After thinking it over for a few minutes I changed my mind. I am not paying for these tickets; my company has already purchased them and someone is going to use them. Letting someone else use the tickets would not mean that the message would not be getting out. I am not encouraging my parents’ beliefs because they are not going to change them whether or not they attend.

Giving my parents the tickets will A) make them happy and B) show the respect for their beliefs that I would like for myself. In truth, I bear a fair amount of hostility toward their belief system, but I respect their right to worship as they please. I can’t really expect them to extend that respect to me if I am unwilling to give it to them.

This occasion does present the danger that my co-workers will be spending time with my parents, unsupervised – a chilling thought. I’ll have to take that risk.

Can We All Just Stop Hurting For a Moment?

Can everybody just stop hurting so much for a little while? I need a little break.

There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “Earshot” in which Buffy Summers temporarily gains the power to read minds. As the ability grows, she becomes overwhelmed with the burden of hearing everyone’s private thoughts. She explains to Jonathan, a suicidal classmate, that the reason no one notices his pain is that everyone, no matter how they seem, is busy dealing with their own.

I am feeling a little like Buffy this week. Everyone around me is carrying on living their lives, but underneath the surface is such pain. A friend found a second type of cancer after the first was successfully removed; an old high-school buddy threatened to shoot himself, a casual friend was left by her husband of 16 years and is now readjusting to her new role as a single mother; a co-worker and a sister both struggle in marriages that crush their spirits, but they are unable to fix and unwilling to leave; another friend just lost his wife to a protracted battle with cancer; a dear relative is combining the joy of expecting a baby with an emotionally abusive relationship; another friend is struggling with depression; body image issues are tampering a close friend's joy; one branch of the family is dealing with a possible drinking problem. These are just the things I know about, just the ones that come to mind at the moment.

Right now this pain is highly visible to me, but I realize that this is normal. This is life. I am currently noticing it more acutely, but I think the aggregate of pain is probably the standard. I am trying really hard to be there for the people I care about, but it is becoming exhausting. This week I feel a little overwhelmed. I am so glad that Husband S is the rock I am always depend on. He is keeping me stable so that I can be there for others.

Several UU bloggers, but especially Lizard Eater, talk about becoming a missional denomination. I admire their dedication, but I don’t usually feel compelled to join in. Lately when I look around and see all of the unfortunately mundane suffering I almost get the missional bug. I admire people who try to save the world, but that is not in my power. I just want to help ease some suffering, one person at a time. I can't fix people, try though I might (and believe me, I have tried), but I can listen, and I can accept, and I can love.

Learning To Disagree

I am becoming more and more convinced that learning how to disagree well is the foundation for …well everything. Anyone who has been paying attention has seen the toxic effect of I'm-right-and-everyone-else-is-a-horrible-person on American politics, but it is not just politicians and pundits we can point fingers at; it is us, too.

Husband S and I got married when we were young, dumb, and brand new parents. With an eye on the odds, you probably wouldn’t recommend that young people take this route. Sixteen years later, he is still the love of my life and I shudder to imagine my life without him. Most of the time I am at a loss to explain how we beat the odds to make our marriage work when so many others who marry young do not. The one thing I come back to is we always try to fight fair. Whatever either of us is upset or angry about, the goal of the conversation has to be to fix the problem and heal the relationship, never to make the other person feel bad. We never call names when we fight. This is hard. Really hard sometimes, but it establishes a foundation of trust. I know that S is never out to get me. I know that I can count on him to listen to me and that my feelings are important to him. Always.

I thought about this yesterday and we need to apply that same standard in our congregations. Yesterday I attended some communication training at our Fellowship and during this session, it became very clear that there are deep divisions within the Fellowship that are still in the process of being healed. Some of these revolve around a specific experience, but I believe many others are part of our denominational dialogue at UU’s: theists vs. non-theist, those who want the church to be a mission to the world vs. those who are content with a liberal oasis, etc. Do any of us want to be in a Unitarian-Universalism where the only people left think just like us? Or do we want to continue as a faith with a rich dialogue of dissenting voices? If the latter, we need to focus on remembering or leaning how to disagree.

The thing about your church that totally annoys you, well that might be just the thing that keeps the person next to you coming to church. For non-theists it can be threatening when people keep bringing all their god-talk into your last bastion of rational safety, and I know there will always be tension there between these two camps. But surely our commitment to support each other in our own searches for meaning is bigger and more important than whether or not we involve a divinity in that search. Working together to make the here and now a better place takes precedence over what compels us to do so.

When I am mad at someone, I friend of mine is in the habit of asking me if I want to be right or be happy. The answer varies based on mood and circumstances. I want to apply this question to our congregations in a broader sense. Do we want to nurse our sense of righteousness or do we want to have a relationship with others in our church community, one which nourishes both of us? We say we want a big tent, so we have to build that tent with our individual everyday interactions with each other.

2 Charming Graphic Novels - Highly Recommended

Completely free of any paid endorsement or incentive, I’d like to recommend a couple of graphic novels I read recently.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, written and drawn by Barry Deutch is a charming all-ages stand-alone story. The sub-subtitle “Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl” spells out the subject matter, and gives you a hint about the book’s sense of humor. Aimed at younger readers, I still enjoyed it. Mirka lives in a conservative Jewish community where the other women try to convince her to hone her domestic skills, while she dreams of becoming a dragon slayer.

One of the things I liked about this book is that Mirka does not have to learn to transcend her community realize her dreams. Her heritage is not incidental to her success, but a major factor in it. I would recommend it for older elementary and middle school kids for discussions about how our religion and community shape us.

I spent part of the last weekend reading Action Philosophers by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. I didn’t even know this book existed, but I happened across it in our local library. Van Lente and Dunlavey are both comics industry professionasl who were awarded a grant to publish this history of western philosophy under their independent label.

This book is awesome. It explains dozens of philosophers and their theories down in comic book form. I swear, I will never think of Plato in the same way again. Need a quick review of someone you read in college, flip through this book and you’ll be sucked in to read the rest. These easily digestible nuggets of complex ideas are actually funny. Try though I may, I still don’t get Wittgenstein, but I don’t hold Action Philosophers responsible for that.

While Van Lente and Dunlavey mostly restrict themselves to western thinkers, I appreciated the inclusion of a few non-Christians like Rumi, Boddidharma, Lao Tzu, and the guy who began Kabbalah (his name is escaping my mind). I would have liked to see a few more of these, but I still enjoyed the book for what it was. The only two women featured are Mary Wollstencraft and Ayn Rand, but I lay the blame for that more on western culture as a whole.

There are a few off-color jokes, but I think this would be fine for older teenagers. Thank you for indulging this moment of nerdery; you may now return to your regularly scheduled reading about important things.

The Impermanence of Parenting

I’ve been spending more time with Buddhism lately and it is affecting my parenting in a good way. Tall Daughter E will be graduating from high school and turning 18 in about a year in a half. This realization after the holidays started a panic beating in my chest. There is no way she is almost ready to be released out into the world as an adult. No. Way.

I am trying to take a step back and look at the impermanence of this stage of parenting. I do not feel remotely ready to be the parent of an adult; I can’t believe she is actually almost ready to be one. Unfortunately, me feeling ready and it actually occurring are unrelated ideas. No one is going to ask my opinion about the matter; it just is. So instead of railing against in inevitable, I am trying to savor and appreciate the time I have left with Tall E as my little girl. There are only so many more times she is going to hug and kiss me goodnight before she goes to bed. Only so many more times she will grumble as I ask her to help me with dinner. (That reminds me, I need to teach her to cook more different things.) The added side-effect of this is that is makes it easier to deal with raising a teenager. When I know that I don’t have that much longer to spend with her or to try to teach her my values it makes it easier to deal with things that, in the past, would drive me crazy. Why would I spend my remaining time with her being angry about small stuff?

Except when Tall E bickers with her little sister, the rhythm of our relationship has already changed in the last year or so. We relate and talk to each other differently than when she was a child and I can only imagine things will be even more different as she starts to lead her own life. I have been her favorite person for most of her life. She has always been bound to me in a way that I have sometimes found suffocating, but now I can’t imagine not having on a daily basis. It is hard to conceive of her not needing me. I have been raising Tall E almost my entire adult life so it is will real sadness that I view the end of actively parenting her, but that makes living with her all the more precious.

How To Discipline Yourself to Meditate

I’ve figured it out. I finally know how to get myself to be more disciplined in a mediation practice. All you need to do is get yourself in a situation so over-whelming and stressful that you need the mental time-out of mediation to deal with it. See, it’s easy to be disciplined. It’s like how I am able to stick with my morning yoga routine because my back hurts a lot if I skip more than two days. Apparently, the stick approach is working better for me than the carrot.

I haven’t been writing here for a while, mostly because of the same situation that drives me to meditation. I just haven’t been able to spare the extra mental energy for it and I didn’t want this blog to turn into a whine-fest reminiscent of a 14-year old’s diary. I am working on getting my act together and being there for some people who really need the support. Sometimes people close to you have problems that make you reassess the scope of your own. That is where I am at right now. Hopefully, I will find the time for more reflection here.