Yoga + Pentecost = Namaste

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to join a yoga studio. But I’ve always been a starving student, or a missionary, or whatever. Now that I’m working again, Robert and I decided we have enough wiggle room for me to sign up with the new studio in town, YogaWorks. I was afraid that having a yoga membership wouldn’t be all I had dreamed (why am I always afraid of being disappointed?), but it has turned out to be amazing! I feel strong, my body confidence is way up, and it’s a fantastic stress reliever. After attending for a week there as a guest, Robert decided to sign up, too! So now it’s also a fun and healthy thing for us to do together.

Since September, I’ve been going through a the Ignatian spiritual exercises using a book called Journey with Jesus. Every day I ask myself “examen questions” and one of them is when I sensed Immanuel, God with me, in the previous day. It’s interesting that the most consistent time of sensing God’s presence has been during yoga. I wonder if that is because in a challenging yoga class, I must be totally “in” my body–I can’t disconnect or detach. (I just read a line by Dallas Willard where he states, “our body is a primary resource for the spiritual life.” Huh!) And that integrated activity, where I’m using my mind and my body, somehow becomes an almost spiritual exercise. I find the same to be true when I’m in nature–again, it’s a time when I’m not “checking out” of my body, like when I’m working on a computer or even so consumed in dealing with students at work that I can’t address my body’s needs like thirst–or even needing to use the restroom!

I was thinking about all this the other day, and remembering a piece I wrote last year for my Master’s thesis project, Telling the Treasure: Reflections, Essays, and Anecdotes from a Backslidden Mystic. It’s called “Namaste,” and it’s about the Holy Spirit and a little about yoga, among other things. Since Pentecost Sunday just passed, I thought I’d share the piece here on Eeper.

Namaste

“God in three Persons, blessed Trinity…” or so the old hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” goes. I’d sung those words a thousand times before I started to think about the three persons of the triune God as, well, three persons. There’s God the Father, of course, and God the Son—that would be Jesus—but what of the third? The Holy Spirit, or as some Bible Belt folk might say, the Holy Ghost. It wasn’t until halfway through my year in Norway that I heard someone really emphasize the importance of viewing the Holy Spirit as a person. For me, that changed everything.

Jan, a guest lecturer in our little discipleship school (and the rapping prophet I’ve written about elsewhere), reminded us of what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit. He called the Spirit the helper, the friend, the teacher, the comforter, and the one who leads us into all truth. One who plays these roles more logically falls into the category of a person, rather than some ethereal force—although I suppose the Spirit is that, too, if we think of the way she (or he) hovered over the waters before the dawn of time. Jan encouraged us to think of the Holy Spirit as a person, and to address the Spirit as such, praying to him as we might to Jesus, asking to guide us, to comfort us and be a friend to us.

And really, it is Jesus we are addressing—the Spirit is the way that Jesus chose to come and be present with each one of us until the end of time, when we will all live in a new city fresh out of heaven, where God will dwell among us in whatever holy and terrifying and joyful and astounding form that will take.

When I was fourteen, I attended my sister’s high school graduation, and the valedictorian’s speech ended with the saying, “Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift—that’s why it’s called ‘the present.’” Though now I would cringe at the use of such a cliché, I remember thinking at the time that it was clever, even profound. For some reason I remembered it the other day, and I thought about how Peter preaches in the book of Acts that the Holy Spirit is a gift. I’ve found that is partly because it is the Spirit who helps us get on in this daily life of ours, whose presence with me in the present is as much a gift as my husband’s is, when he sits with me and lets me cry or talk or merely sigh many heavy sighs.

In the Old Testament, the presence of God is something awful (or awesome) and indescribable—smoke on Mount Sinai, an unbearable glory in the tabernacle’s Holy of Holies. The presence of God is a desert shrub on fire, burning without being consumed. It is a cloud in the wilderness, swaddling the liberated Hebrews as it leads them onward. It is something to be feared and something to be desired.

Houswifery

There’s been a thin ribbon of feminism woven through my days for the past few months, it’s just something I keep gravitating toward on two entirely different planes: one, I’ve been more drawn to strong, intelligent women and awed by the contribution they make to society—and determined to be one of them. (The other day I was talking with my very pregnant friend Katherine about how amazing it is that a woman is able to carry, give birth to and then sustain a baby—all with her own body. Katherine concluded, “Women are the shit.”)

But at the same time, these past few months I could honestly fill in the blank after “occupation” with “housewife.” I’ve been job hunting and in the gaps between surfing the Internet for jobs and completing applications there’s errands and chores and cooking. I know some women who would see this as the fulfillment of a dream, this chance to focus on the nest and on caring for one’s husband. I, however, see it as…well, a cross between “repressive” and “defeat.”

Recently I read this post on the New Domesticity blog (I recently discovered it and highly recommend) about whether it is oppressive and antifeminist to hire a maid. My first thought was, “Hell no!” Nobody wants to do the grunt work around the home, male or female. It’s not that I want to go to work and have my husband serve me hand and foot. I actually dream of having a few kids and training them to do all the chores…but I digress. Anyway, I see nothing wrong with providing someone fair wages and honest work, all the while freeing up my time and avoiding the chores I don’t want to do! Of course, this would only be if my husband and I both worked full time. It’s one thing to not have time to do all of the cleaning and another to sit around and eat bon bons while someone does it for you.

So that’s where I’m at right now…with time on my hands and a husband working hard every day. I try to see it as “my share” in our partnership right now—he’s providing a roof over our heads, food on our table, gas in our car…I can provide a clean house and home cooked food and be the errand girl. I suppose this was the mentality in the 1950s when it was so much more common for women to be housewives—and proud of it.

But what is it about this arrangement that sometimes makes my skin crawl? Or that makes me feel so resentful, even when I can easily rationalize that Robert is doing much more work for us than I am—and besides, all of this stuff needs to get done anyway? I think it’s partly that 1950s mentality that one’s husband is the king of the castle. I’ve always hated that paradigm, and never wanted it for myself. It seems like a slippery slope to misogyny. The other side of a lot of housewifery is the coddling and mothering of one’s husband. (By the way, all of this is just going on in my own head…not coming from Robert!) Whether maid or mother, these are not roles that I ever wanted out of marriage.

I don’t know if many a woman goes into her marriage with visions of herself as a servant dancing through her head. But I do think a lot of women—some women I know—marry their husband with a dream of having a nest of their own, taking care of things the way they like to, having the run of the house and command of what everyone wears, eats, sits on. (I married a guy who is way too independent to let something like that happen—which is partly why I liked him in the first place! He wanted a say in our wedding décor and now our home furnishings and I often have to go to him for cooking tips.)

At any rate, whenever I imagined myself married, I pictured myself working, finding my own calling or purpose or way to give something to the world. Some women I know find this in child rearing, and that’s fine for them. But it’s not enough for me. Part of the reason I suppose is that, for my generation, girls were taught to dream about careers, not being a wife and mom—those were a given, not vocational options.

So sometimes when cleaning the house is the big thing I do all day, it scares me. I know I’ll find a job and things will be fine, but we do want kids some day, and I’ll be the natural choice to stay at home. I guess this is preemptive anxiety, but I am so scared of being stuck at home with babies and chores and cooking and man, I already do the dishes SO much I can’t imagine doing any more!

One thing I’m trying to do during these days is to find meaning in my humanity as I complete the menial chores of everyday life. I know in some places in this world, most of one’s day is taken up by such things—fetching water, cooking, washing, mending, gathering food from the garden or the fields—and it’s an awful sense of entitlement that makes me resent these chores. They are the most basic part of being human—feeding ourselves, bathing ourselves, cleaning and beautifying our surroundings—and yet I’ve bought into the idea that I will find myself by spending eight hours a day in a climate-controlled office.

So what do you all think? Are you feeling confined or set free by roles and expectations of our day? Do you delight in nesting, or are you a high powered career woman and loving it? A magical combination of the two? Men, weigh in, too!

Autumn’s Dying

Autumn during my year in Norway

A little post that went up recently on the Equals Record online magazine. Enjoy! Click here to read it on the Equals Record.

Autumn’s Dying

Growing up in Los Angeles, I am accustomed to hearing transplants and tourists informing me that my fair city does not experience the four seasons. I always nod in agreement, but with a smile that hides something I know and they don’t: we do have seasons here in L.A., but they are subtle and nuanced, a familiar rhythm to the native who knows the scent of fall coming in on the heels of August, the sight of jacaranda trees celebrating the summer solstice with brilliant purple confetti, the majestic oak trees’ stately look of determination as they stand bare and waiting through winter.

Autumn is the most discreet of Los Angeles’s seasons. Though the scorching heat of summer does not often subside until late September, the fall-fragranced breeze always dances into our days in late August, preparing us for darker mornings and cooler evenings, accompanied by frothy pumpkin lattes and hearty dinners. Even now in my late twenties, these subdued signals of autumn are enough to give me the same butterflies I’ve felt since I was a child anticipating a new school year.

We are just entering September and the autumn breeze arrived last week to sweeten my bike rides through tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood in Pasadena. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not starting school in a few weeks, and those anticipatory butterflies only fluttered for a moment before I shooed them away. In June I finished graduate school, and this summer, which started with a glorious month of resting, celebrations, and vacation, has ended on a long monotonous note of job-hunting in a sweltering apartment.

As the seasons prepare for their quarterly changing of the guard, my tediously long days become almost unbearable, and I itch for change not just in the weather, but in myself and in my life.

Lachrimae Amantis

Beautiful poem from Bread and Wine book. Had to share it! (Apparently “Lachrimae Amantis” means “tears of love” or I saw somewhere else “tears of the lover.”)

“Lachrimae Amantis” by Geoffrey Hill

What is there in my heart that you should sue

so fiercely for its love? What kind of care

brings you as though a stranger to my door

through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbor you,

that keeps itself religiously secure?

At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire

your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house

has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,

whispered, “your lord is coming, he is close”

that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time

bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:

“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”

Flood Watch

An intense inner desire is already the sign of his presence in our hearts. The rest is the work of the Holy Spirit. –Brennan Manning

Spring up, O Well
–or don’t.
What will I do
when the dam
built by fear
finally breaks?
A strong sweet
ache wells up
from the deepest
place where
only echoes of
other depths
sing in the
emptiness.
I perch on
an outcropping,
vigilant,
waiting
for the moment
for the flood
for the cataract
unleashed.
I know it will
demand of me
a leap.
My heart races
all the time now.
Who camps out
on a precipice?
Where will this
torrent take me?
Where will I next
set up my tent?

Advent (1)

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason

There’d have been no room for the child.

Madeleine L’Engle

“After Annunciation”

Get Married, Get a New Language

I don’t even remember how I stumbled on this article–about marriage and words and knives–a few months ago, but to me, it paints a picture of what I imagine to be one of the best parts of being married. I really like the idea of creating your own family culture…working on a piece about that now, and trying to decide if I should post it here, clean it up more and submit it to The Semi (Fuller student publication), or keep it to myself because it’s a bit too personal. WWALD? (What Would Anne Lamott Do?) Hee.

Enjoy this piece, The Language of a Marriage, for now.

 

Fuller Feminist?

I used to think I was a feminist. Back in high school, when I was full of opinions (kay, maybe still am) and the world was black and white and I just knew how things were. But now I know I wasn’t a feminist back then–I was a man-hater. Okay, fellas, before you stop reading, please understand that I was a man-hater…I’m not anymore. It was a distinct yet debilitating part of my identity, and when I finally decided I didn’t want to go around wounded and limping anymore, Jesus healed me and set me free. Four years later, I still can’t get over the wonder of how he rescued me from a life of bitterness and hatred.

So now, when someone calls me a feminist, I wince and recall the times I thought that men were the root of all evil. But this quarter I’ve been mulling over feminist issues a lot, I think, for two reasons. One is a short explanation in my Old Testament course syllabus about why we use gender inclusive language at Fuller. Dr. John Goldingay explains:

The Fuller student body and faculty agreed some years ago that we would all use “gender-inclusive” language.  That means we don’t say “man” when we mean “humanity,” or say “men” when we mean “people.”… The background is that the church has long behaved as if women were not really fully people, and we need to make clear in our thinking and way of speaking that women are just as much part of the image of God as men are. So I expect you to write that way in your homework and papers.

It was sobering to me to read that, and although it wasn’t anything new it hit me in a new way, and I have been considering the ways that women have been treated as though they weren’t fully people, and the ways that kind of treatment still happens.

Naturally, then, the topic I’m choosing to research for my 10-page paper in Systematic Theology 2 is feminist Christology, which means the unique way that feminists see Jesus Christ–his person, his mission, etc.

So I’ve been seeing things in this light a little more lately–becoming aware of a few of the assumptions we all live by in our daily lives, and also the way women have responded to them. Last night at dinner with my dad and my sister, Dad was telling us that when friends ask why he doesn’t have grandkids yet, he explains that all three of his daughters are in grad school–they’re not sitting around, he says. I pointed out that it seems as though we need a good excuse–grad school, in this case–to justify neglecting our determined role as babymakers. What if we were sitting around? Then must we have babies to have value?

Things like that.

And then, driving home, that old Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women” came on the radio. You remember it: “The shoes on my feet (I bought ‘em)/the clothes I’m wearing (I bought ‘em)/the rock I’m rockin’ (I bought it)/cause I depend on me.”  This is going to sound weird, maybe, but as I listened to that song I felt overwhelmed with sadness. I thought of all these women who have been oppressed, rejected, abused, abandoned, devalued. I thought of how each one at some point decides that if she doesn’t protect, provide, and care for herself, no one will.

So, in a way, I have my feminist hat on this quarter–but I don’t want that to be as scary as it sounds (especially to you men). It’s not about a battle of the sexes, it’s about…well, I don’t really know. One of my professors keeps saying that we have to determine what the questions are before we start looking for the answers. All I know is that something’s stirring. I’ll keep you posted.

**Bonus question: what kind of assumptions can you find in the image/caption below?

Off to Find a Story

You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you cant go back to being normal; you cant go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

Donald Miller

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Going to Norway, Italy, and–for a nanosecond–London. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. Ciao!

Swimming

I swam in a sea of words today.

I wanted to go to the beach, to sit and look at the ocean and feel myself come back to life.

Alas…I went to work, and then to the library, and floated among the stacks in the basement looking for a book that would be as wide open as the ocean. I left with G.K. Chesterton‘s Everlasting Man, Madeleine L’Engle‘s Penguins and Golden Calves (a discussion of icons with the backdrop of a trip she made to Antarctica…at the age of 74) and The Ordering of Love, an exhaustive collection of her poetry.

I went to Panera Bread and sat out on the patio with some iced tea, letting my winter-in-the-library skin bake in the sun like I was on a boat deck, and I loosed the moorings.

Didn’t even touch Chesterton, because I became lost in L’Engle’s poetry. Brilliant. She says, “Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.” I share the former reason with her…I’ve found poetry to be a portal leading out of myself when the weight is too much to bear. I don’t share mine often, but I probably would if it was like hers.

She’s my new hero, Madeleine L’Engle. She seems like she’s embraced life and her own humanity in all its heartbreaking, sensual, victorious glory. I’ve never read much of her, but she’s written over 50 books and I can’t wait to get to know her more.

My favorite from the day, The Samaritan Woman at the Well, paints the Incarnation in imagery I’ve never seen before.

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

Madeleine L’Engle

The waters are wild, are wild.

Billows batter with unchannelled might.

A turmoil of waves foams on the ocean’s face

wind-whipped the waters hurl

the rivers rush

fountains burst from the rocks

the rapids break huge boulders into dust

the skies split with torrential rains

waters meet waters

the wind and waves are too tumultuous

no one can meet them and survive

In this wilderness of water

we shall all be drowned

the ocean cannot be compassed

I weep, I die

Put my tears in your bottle

drowning

I thirst

Look!

the water is in a cup

(O Lord open thou our lips)

I thirst

Is it any less water

because you have contained it for us

in a vessel we can touch?