On a clear late summer night, the woman sat on the edge of a field outside of town to watch the moon rise. In another age, she would have been known as a seer among her people. But times have changed and there’s no demand for seers anymore. Instead, she spends her days performing the dull, essential tasks that modern life demands of us all. … Continue reading Pareidolia
“We monks do not try to repress our sexual passions . . . Woe to those monks and nuns, who shovel into their subconscious their sexual passions. . . There is no spirituality in that. What happens, and what we aim at, is the transmutation of erotic energy from earthly attractions to God.” – Father Maximos quoted in The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides
In the old pagan world, sex and religion were all tied up together. Temple prostitutes and depictions of group sex on ancient Hindu temple walls and all that. Christianity has too often taken the opposite tact – sex as being so unholy that for a while it was considered a sin even in the context of marriage by the Roman church. Which led to possibly the most dysfunctional set-up ever; putatively and sometimes actually celibate priests being told each time a parishioner had sex with their spouse. What could be the problem with that, eh? Although the actual rejection of sex by the Christian church has varied wildly from place to place and time to time, the reality is that a lot of people continue to see sex and God as inevitably belonging in two separate spheres of our lives. To the extent that God and sex intersect, it is in the parsing out of rules for sexual conduct. But when actual sex takes place, well if our guardian angels could please exit the room, that would be great. And surely God has the good manners to turn his head for a few minutes. Wouldn’t want to be caught in flagrante delicto by the creator of the universe. That would be too weird. Continue reading “Allow Me to Screw Up Your Sex Life a Bit”
When I was putting together my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress last summer, I went back and forth and back and forth about including an essay I had originally published here titled “How Being Gifted Means Being Different”. It was one of the most popular posts I had done. And many people had contacted me since I put it up to thank me for writing it. However, it didn’t seem to fit. The book is very grounded in my faith and the post is about being gifted. The two seem incongruent. But every time I went to take it out, there was that little tug that I’ve learned to listen to telling me to leave it be. So I did without really know why it was there. And I’m sure that those who read it wondered what it was doing there as well.
It wasn’t until some time later that I began to understand why it was there. The fact is that the church as a whole does not do a good job of making room for or embracing those parts of the body which are smarter and more creative than the norm. We see this in those parts of the church which fiercely oppose science and will even claim that those who engage in the work of science are doing the devil’s work. It is present in those who insist that a “plain reading” of scripture is good enough and refuse to consider context, history, translation or any of the other issues which affect the way that we read and understand the text. It shows up in how churches deal with their members who produce art, literature or music. Continue reading “Christianity and Giftedness”
Dearest Rebecca,
Hi! I’ve heard that you’ve been having a hard time lately so I thought you could use some encouragement. I know that between being sick and hating housework and wishing you could have just one full child free day and night every couple of years, you feel like you’re drowning and can’t hold things together. Heck, I hear that you even lost your purse last week after leaving it on the top of the car. What a bummer! But, you know, shit happens. Shake it off. No use crying over spilt milk and all that. I mean look at all the things you’re juggling. You’ve got 5 kids. Everyday you make sure people are wearing clean clothes and sleeping on clean sheets and some days your own clothes are even clean. You check backpacks and harass errant students and sometimes even remember girl scout meetings before they start. Continue reading “Sometimes You Just Have To Be Your Own Cheerleader!”
When I was a kid, every time one of my parents said, “don’t be a smart aleck” I had to supress the mighty urge to respond, “would you rather I be a dumb aleck?” (I’m pretty sure my attempts at repression failed more than once.) Even worse was when my dad would get frustrated with me and tell me, “ah- you just think you’re right.” Well, yeah – of course I think I’m right. If I thought I were wrong, I would change my mind. Duh. Change my mind if I’m so wrong. (At this point my father is saying to the monitor: “finally – she tells it like it really is!” To which I must simply point out that I was a teenager who never drank, smoked, did drugs, went to parties, dated or had sex. And I was usually on the honor roll and attended mass daily. The challenges of raising me could probably be viewed as the parenting equivalents of first world problems.)
My favorite people have always been the ones who I could crack wise with to my heart’s content. Part of the bond I always shared with the qxh (quasi-ex-husband) was the fact that I could say almost any outrageous over-the-top thing that popped into my head around him. Which can create its own complications. I had to sit him down a couple of years into our marriage to explain that we don’t actually live in a sitcom and if he didn’t tone it down, he was going to find himself in the middle of a family melodrama with no batteries in the remote.
Last night I attended a divorce care recovery group where it was recommended that we make a list of what we have lost in divorce. One of those things for me has been having a place for my personality to just sprawl out where ever it wanted to go. Continue reading “An Aspiring Dumb Aleck Speaks”
by·word/ˈbīˌwərd/
| Noun: |
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My children know one of my old classmates by name. Not that they have ever met her. And it’s not even because I have told them stories about her. I have told them stories about lots of people I have known without bothering to add in their name. No, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that they know her name because when I was a kid, her name became a byword to me. Her name stood in for a set of behaviors which I associated with her and wanted desperately to avoid myself. I called it “Sally Ruthersbrodt* Syndrome” (*Not her real name!) My kids and other people who were very unlikely to ever meet her know her name and what it meant to me. In my mind her name meant thinking that people liked you when they didn’t.
I’m not even sure how that became such a big fear for me, but it was. I got that not everyone was going to like me and I was cool with that (eventually). But what if the people who seemed to like me didn’t really? That was an intolerable thought to me. The idea of thinking that you were safe with people who weren’t really safe freaked me out. And like any good geek, I believed that gathering as much information as possible was the solution. Because then I could figure out how to avoid this perceived threat. So, to that end, I applied my powers of observation to watching the people around me looking for signs that I might be turning into a Sally Ruthersbrodt.
Unfortunately for me, if there is a disorder which is the opposite of Asperger’s that makes you inappropriately hyper-sensitive to non-verbal social cues, I have that. Continue reading “I’m a byword for neurosis”
A friend recently sent a note in which she commented on the lack of “why me?” talk on my blog. Silly girl – I was raised Catholic. I can think of at least 100 reasons all of this is my own fault right off the top of my head! That, plus the fact that life has been handing me inexplicably little help for as long as I can remember means that I let “why me?” go a long time ago. There are only two answers: “you’re doing it wrong” or “because this is the way you need to go“. Either I’m screwing something up and should fix it – hence the Catholic guilt – or this is one of those things that will only make sense later. Frankly, Catholic guilt gets a bad rap – it’s downright empowering in light of the alternative!
This was a tough week. It was one of those weeks where an emotional rough patch and a life rough patch collided and made a mess all over the highway of my life. (I keep telling God he needs to pave the damn thing.) And just to make sure that all of this doesn’t get to be too routine, my wonderful parents were visiting, so I had an audience. (My poor parents; I’m glad and grateful that they were here, but I know it’s only marginally more fun to watch someone you love go through things you are helpless to do anything about than it is to go through it yourself. I have to remind myself that God must have his reasons for asking them to walk a path which includes me and my mess of a life.)
If you read my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress, you will remember that I first met God in a fit of enraged blasphemy. Which means that I’ve always felt free to itch and moan and be as upset as I want to be in prayer. Besides, Jesus was said to have prayed with “loud cries and tears” himself. So by the end of the week, my prayers had devolved into demands: “I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this. You need to fix this. Not just spiritually, but for real. In the real world. Continue reading “It Will Be Alright. Or So I’ve Been Told”
One of the worst things I ever did in my life was pull my sister Shannon’s hair. Well, it wasn’t just the hair pulling; hitting her repeatedly just before pulling her hair was pretty bad too. I was in my early teens and had been left to babysit my younger siblings, including Shannon who is 8 years younger than me. I have no idea what started it exactly, but I do remember that she was refusing to do something or another that I had told her to do. So, I hit her. And she laughed. Which enraged me. So I hit my very slight little sister again harder. And she laughed harder. Completely besides myself with frustration and anger, I hit her again and again and she laughed at me again and again. Finally, I yanked hard on her hair and she suddenly started sobbing. Which shot right through my anger to the part of me that can’t help but feel empathy towards someone in pain.
Saying that it was one of the worst things I ever did is a bit of hyperbole. More accurate would be to say that out of all the things I have ever done, this was one that I felt worst about. I had lashed out at someone smaller and weaker than myself in anger. I love her and had been entrusted with her care, but because I had not been able to control myself, she had wound up being hurt – emotionally if nothing else. As an adult, I went and apologized to her for this incident and learned (not too surprisingly) that she has no memory of it. Honestly, I’m quite certain it wasn’t the first time I had hit one of my siblings in an attempt to get them to do what I wanted or needed them to do. But her hurt this time was so raw it made a huge impression on me. I was married before I ever let myself get that angry again. Continue reading “Drinking Anger’s Poison”
“There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
I picked up this quote back in my senior year in high school while reading Hamlet for class. When I got to college, I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to the wall above my bed. It’s on my facebook page right now.
This quote has always spoken to me about the importance of perspective, responsibility and choice. It says to me that the way I see something – the emotions I associate with it, my analysis of what is going on, the assumptions I make about motivations – is a choice. If one of my kids says something which is unintentionally rude, I can chose to laugh or be offended. Sometimes I might have a good reason to be offended, but if I can, I’m going to laugh. It’s a choice. And that extends from the biggest things to the smallest things. I can choose how to view things rather than just go with random gut reactions. Continue reading “Thinking Makes It So”
Of all the epitaphs we throw around “lazy” is probably the one we see as inexcusable. Which is funny because we all have a tendency to be lazy. We were made to need rest. And sometimes what we call lazy is genuinely struggling to do something we’re not good at and find really unpleasant. It’s a normal part of life. And feeling bad about a … Continue reading Laziness
The Upside Down World 