Radical motherhood.

When Dad was here last Sunday, he and I went with Anne to see Spotlight, the movie about The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting on rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests – and the deliberate cover-up by powerful Catholic officials.

In that cloud of context, we drove home, and Anne ran some ideas by me for the prayer she was writing for that week’s coming Bible study.  Harry had invited Jeralynn Brown Blueford, whose son was killed by the police, to speak with us as we looked at the Biblical connections to Black Lives Matter.  (Ultimately, I wasn’t able to be there.  Ricky said it drew in a lot of people.  We’re looking for some place to resonate our griefs off of one another, I suppose.  And this badass mother – who could stand up and lead in that group.  Dang…)

Having lost a son herself, Anne wondered how she could both express solidarity with the mothers of so many sons murdered by the police but in no way claim to “understand what that feels like.”

Dad said (and Anne didn’t hear, so we didn't go on about it) that he could really see the connection there to Mary, another mother who lost a son.  

Such a good point, Dad.

Mary’s son was also executed within an unjust criminal justice system. The Sadducees, Jewish leaders themselves, often get blamed for Jesus’ death, but it seems to me to be more like men (ahem) scrambling for some semblance of power under the crushing weight of the self-evidently more (much more) powerful and oppressive Roman Empire.

(Police today are for sure a horrific part of the problem [and I’m afraid that this analogy might be anti-Semitic because of my pronounced ignorance about Jewish history], but White Supremacy has been the name of the game for a lot longer than the NYPD, and etc.  [As the Roman claim for dominion was certainly not Jewish-only antagonism.] Our country came to be under conditions not possible if not for those White guys’ already undeniable commitment to White supremacy.  It’s how we do.)

AND Mary was no naïve, whimpering victim.  No no.  Mary was our comrade.  Even at the very beginning of her pregnancy with Jesus, she boldly claimed that our God is a God who cares for the poor, the downtrodden.  She sings out: Our God is not a God who feels the need to assert that “Blue lives matter!”  Duh, they matter, but God’s immediate concern is not for those with the power to execute at will with impunity.  (God seeks and waits for them, gives unearned grace, and will rejoice at their turn toward God, but) God calls us to make the oppressors see that the lives of the oppressed matter (, too.).

And Mary said:  

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”

I got an email from a dear friend recently who made a self-deprecating joke about her plan to be “a stay-at-home mom” next year.  Nuh-uh.

I like the model of motherhood that Mary offers us.  Mother as freedom fighter.  Motherhood as a liberation movement.  A couple days later I saw this piece on the shackling of pregnant women in prison – a piece published by MomsRising (!).

I’ve thought a lot about how God created us to be in family to help us to understand better, to give us some framework, for understanding God’s relationship with us.  God mothers us all.  (And God values the work associated with motherhood.  We're the ones who think it feminine and thus base or undignified or disempowering.)

Thinking about motherhood this way brought me back to one of the most compelling for me scenes in the passion.  Here’s John’s:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” 

Comrades, here you are. 

My child, here is my child.   Go out, as you are called to do, and help to restore God’s order, God’s (social) justice.

Black lives matter to God.

God cares about all of us as, for example, we care about one another in our family relationships. 

God worries about the way that we’ve designed “race” as a powerful construct by which we move away from God’s justice, by which we forget or ignore that God calls us all God’s children.  All lives matter.

God worries especially about those of God’s children who are poor, who are murdered, who are silenced.

And God calls those of us who are squandering, who are murdering, who are silencing, to remember that God worries about us, too.  God will rejoice when we give up our shit, nurture our create-ivity, and sing together.  Yeah duh all lives matter. Seriously duuuhhhhhhh.

God mothers us all.  God watches Black people getting gunned-down again and again (and again and again).

AND, WITH SCREAMING URGENCY:

Black lives matter to God.

the soul felt its worth

"Long lay the world / in sin and error pining / 'til he appeared / and the soul felt its worth."

Still my favorite.  I cannot get enough of this song.  I even listen to the Christmas song radio session, suffering through the likes of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” in case they play “O Holy Night” next.

“The soul felt its worth”

I’m writing this from 30,000 feet, on my way home for Christmas.  As we took off, I noticed that I was terrified.  That’s typical for me except that last year, I remember feeling that if the plane crashed, I would really be okay with that.  No fear.  Whatever.

“Appeared” and “Felt”

Past tense.  I love that.  Jesus has already appeared, has already helped us to make sense of the worth of our souls.  Reminds me of the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer upon learning of her pregnancy.  She praises a God who has already brought justice to our world – an audacious and almost praise given the continuing injustices in her world and in ours.  Her past tense praise claims an absolute faith in God’s intention to keep God’s promise to us – that we are Good and that God wants to be with us and wants to work with us to bring us in to closer relationship with God.

Mary’s prayer reflects and moves beyond Hannah’s prayer on the occasion of her own conception of Samuel, centuries before Mary lived.  Hannah finishes her own past-tense praise with a reiteration of her faith in God’s promise to the people of Israel; Mary finishes her prayer with the assertion that God’s promise extends to all people.  I went on and on about this here.

And Mary’s and Hannah’s past-tense prayers are reflected in “O Holy Night,” written in 1847.  And Mariah Carey killed it in 1994.  I mean am I right or am I right.

“Long lay the world / in sin and error pining”

Laying versus pining.  One passive, the other more active.  Both demonstrations of hopelessness.

I talked with Theon recently about a sermon on waiting that he was working on.  So difficult, he said, because it doesn’t seem like a time to wait.  I know what he means.  Each time I hear about another atrocity committed against Black folks by the state.  They executed Mario Woods.  He raped thirteen Black women. I want the world to change right now.  I so identify with the compulsion to break some fucking windows.  But the way that change happens is so much more annoyingly slow than that.  And I don’t just mean generation-by-generation.  I mean that right now, organizing a protest means sending out emails ahead of time, making phone calls, strategizing about where and when – all activities that matter to be sure but don’t exactly quench the urge for intense emotional release.  Even attending the protest, shouting and marching.  It matters, but nothing changes in the moment of the marching.  We gotta wait. 

We gotta lay there in our “sin and error.”  Sin is such a blaaaaaghhh word.  Ron always asks us to understand “sin” as“missing the mark,” as inadequately demonstrating the Goodness that God created in us.  So yeah, I sin.  Sometimes intentionally – and sometimes accidentally, in “error.”  We just lay there.  I just go to bed and sleep for hours and hours because I don’t have the energy, physical or mental, to face the world.  The afternoon that I learned of my banishment from the prison, I left work early, went to bed, and didn’t get up until two days later.

But we also pine.  We do organize those protests.  I did meet with the warden and get myself back in.  Waiting is not essentially passive.  We can actively wait.

Theon used Romans’ acknowledgment of our groaning in his sermon.  When we groan, we lay there and we try to pine, but we can’t find the words, the energy, the effective strategies.  We try and yet sometimes all we can manage is to groan, and God hears our groaning.

“O Holy Night.” 

The darkness, it’s still holy.

Donna told me a couple of weeks ago, as I feared aloud that I could feel the lowness setting back in, that it could take over again: Use the hopelessness.  Write about it.  Let it teach you.

At Bible study this week, a year from my first time at Bible study, we read again the story that we read and I wrote about last year.  This year, what struck me was the genocide caused by Jesus’ entry into our world.  He appeared, and the soul felt its worth, and Herod had all of the Jewish baby boys slaughtered, and the mothers weeped.

We got a genocide, and we got a baby.  And we’re supposed to accept that the baby is it.  That’s so hard.  They keep killing Black people.  They keep raping women.  They keep demonizing immigrants.  They keep refusing refugees.  And we get a baby.

Sara from Bible study collected money last week so that we could send baby toys and some cards to women incarcerated in the private prison up the street.  They’re there because they’re either in the last months of their pregnancy or somewhere in the first three months of their babies’ lives.  I can’t imagine.  We get a baby, and we get an incarcerated mother.  I’m not okay with that.

But we gotta wait.  And he’s already appeared.

shit I don't love

A couple of months ago, this guy came to our Bible study and talked about a project he and some friends did where they tried to see what it would be like if they took seriously the Gospel call to give away half of what you have to the poor.  The first month, they started with clothes.  Then books the next.  And so on.  (NOT MY BOOKS.)  They got together each month to talk about it, and they found that when they tried to sell their stuff to give the money away, they weren't able to get much for it.  And they didn't miss it.  They thought a lot about the value of their stuff -- and the value of the liberation they felt without it.

When I talked to Donna about it, she told me that when she moved away from the city, she decided to only take with her things from her home that she loved.  It was really hard, she told me, but such a relief when it was over.

I've been going through my clothes over the last week, getting rid of the stuff that I don't love.  I'm finding that it's sometimes so easy, sometimes so difficult to figure out whether or not I love something.  I make the two piles, and then I have to weed out the "things I love" pile again.

I did decide to keep one dress I don't love anymore.  A brown paisley wrap dress that I wore so many times  when I taught at Urbana.

style, God, and grace

A little more on Adam and Eve.  I saved my favorite part (about clothes, duh) for a separate post.

So they eat from the Tree of Knowledge and "realize" that they should feel shame about who they were created to be, even though they were pronounced Good.  

They sewed fig leaves together as makeshift clothes for themselves.  When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God. 

 God called to the Man: “Where are you?” 

 He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”
  

God said, “Who told you you were naked?

 That "Who told you you were naked?" line gets me every time.  I hear it said with such compassion.  Chicken, who told you you had anything to be ashamed of?  Oh, baby, who told you you're not Good? 

But God understands that despite our Goodness, we have trouble confronting the reality of our not-Godness.  And so, though God did not see us as needing to cover up ourselves, since God loves us even though we are not God, God met us where we were.

 God made leather clothing for Adam and his wife and dressed them.

Just before their expulsion from Eden -- not a punishment but as the inevitable consequence of this new knowledge -- God makes for them more durable clothing than the clothing they made for themselves.  God meets us where we are.  That's grace.

Ron always says, God doesn't have to bless a situation to be in it.  God didn't have to believe them that they needed clothing to provide for them.  God doesn't have to bless violence to be present with those experiencing it.  God doesn't have to bless male supremacy in order to work with people of all genders, wherever we are in our understandings of the Goodness present in all of us -- transgendered, cisgendered, gender non-conforming, etc.

God's not waiting for us to be perfect before God will be with us.  God has always known that we are not God and that we are Good.

That's a relief.

Adam / Eve / Steve / Stevette

Last night in Bible study we hosted Pastor Yee from the Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church.  Who knew Baptists could be so rad?

We read Genesis 2 (starting at verse 5) and 3 -- basically the Garden of Eden story.  That's a well-trod one and one I usually just dismiss as yeah-yeah-every-culture-has-creation-stories.  If anything, when I think about it, I just get annoyed at modern Christians who read into the "woman came from man's rib" and "Eve fucked up" things and find justification for male supremacy.  Also shit like this.  Puke.

She suggested a reading though, that looked at the Garden story not as prescriptive transgression and punishment story (i.e. Listen to God or else...), but as a descriptive story that can help us think about the nature of humanity in relation to God.  She explained that most Biblical scholars believe that this part of Genesis comes from the Jahwist source which is characterized by an emphasis on relationship.

We didn't get all into the from-the-rib thing, but we did talk about the names Adam and Eve, prompted by T, a transwoman who told us that she was mostly of the mind to just throw out all this Adam and Eve bullshit because it has nothing to do with the loving God she knows.  "What about Steve?" she asked, "And Stevette?"  She insisted that the trans community has always existed and that the gender binary in this story is a bunch of bullshit.  Boom.

Adam, PY agreed, is the Hebrew word for human.  (Flashback to the first year of college, when we learned to push back on the idea that the man is the universal and that then woman is a variation; that White is universal, and that People of Color are variations from that norm.)

I was still tripping on the part that went, "And he called her Eve because she would be the mother of all the living."  That cause and effect relationship made no sense to me.  Sounded a little like "because I said so."  So when I asked, PY told us that "Eve" is a lot like the Hebrew word for "living," which is kind of interesting.  God created humans, and then so that humans could have companionship, God created living.  I'm gonna keep thinking on that one.

So eventually the two major tensions that we got to in this story are:
(1) That we are not God.  That's what we came to know when we decided to do things our way instead of God's way.  Reading it this way, the silliness of the don't-eat-that-tree rule can fall away as just one arbitrary instantiation of God's order:  When we follow God's rules, participate in God's order, we experience Eden.  Eden: all creation living harmoniously. When our free will leads us away from God's just order, we eventually experience the humiliating pain of relative powerlessness before God -- a pain that can translate into the trampled end of oppression, but also the trampling.  Those with "power" (in the human sense) deceive themselves as somehow deserving of it, as somehow godlike.

We are not God.  We are not eternal. We know death -- not because we are being punished with it as a result of Eve's disobedience, but because death is fundamental the experience of humanity.  There was death in the Garden before they fucked up.  It takes a lot of death to make living possible. Plants and animals die for our consumption, and for consumption by innumerous other species.  But in right relationship with God, trusting absolutely in God's provision, we could live without the overwhelming desire to put off death.  We wouldn't scramble to create ways for us to have power over death.  We'd know we're not God and be cool with that.

(2) That we are image-bearers of God.  When after they hide from God and are found, God asks them, "Who told you you were naked?"  God made us Good, but then when, as a result of our free will, the world came out of God's order, we came to "know" that we are not good enough as we are, that we have reason for shame.

I thought of the question that's been hanging around me over the past few months.  I was telling my therapist a story that I was thought was fairly inane about a dude whose attention I'd wanted so badly in college.  My tone was amused, self-deprecating; it's not an issue for me anymore -- over it.  I was smiling, but she wasn't.  She does that.  Makes me take myself more seriously than I'm wont to do.  My storytelling ended abruptly when she interrupted me saying, "I wanted to be important enough to him that..." to ask me, "Ellen, who taught you that you're not important?"

"Who told you that you were naked?  I made you Good."

When we thought about it that way, it made sense to us why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, from absolute harmony.  If we'd followed God's plan, lived under God's justice, we would be unconcerned with our not-Godness and we would be in touch with our Goodness.  We wouldn't know power struggles -- on interpersonal and international levels.  We wouldn't know war, rape, the use of imprisoned bodies for profit.  We wouldn't have to know.

The word ignorance was tossed around the table.

I thought about the afternoon a few years ago when I was driving home by myself, up 57, and I got a call from my principal.  I love driving up and down 57 between Champaign and Chicago, but that's because I generally run melancholy.  For most of the year, it's not not a bleak landscape.  Definitely bleak in late November, which is what I'm pretty sure it was.

This, but waaaaaaay grayer.

She told me that the school-wide antiracist project that R and I had been working our asses off to launch had failed to meet a hurdle it had to meet in order to move forward.  All our efforts were essentially for naught.  It'd be dishonest to withhold the truth that the humiliation of such a public failure didn't sting.

But when I got to thinking about it, I got viscerally overwhelmed by the realities of the what it looks like for racism to keep sneakily and slowly but steadily pushing our babies out of our classrooms and into prisons.  Most of the way up, I earnestly wished (as embarrassing as it is to admit) that I'd never learned what I have about racism.  I tried to understand why so many of our colleagues refused to get on board with our project, and I thought back to high school, when I had no idea I was White and that it mattered.  I could have had the English teacher life I'd imagined for myself when I sent in my college applications: drinking tea before a sea of adoring students who behaved just like I wanted them to and who loved literature like I did.  My own book club.  That possibility seemed so fucking blissful as I drove up, my shitty driving worsened by the sobbing that was puffing up my eyes.

But I do know, and I know that it's better that I do.  What I didn't want to know, but was having to confront, was not just that racism is ubiquitous, but that I am almost powerless before it.  "Ignorance is bliss," but not really because the more life-giving, sustainable thought is, "I am not God."

the axe-murderer

One of the pastors held a creative writing group at church this morning that was so cool.  Pitched, he told us, as something akin to a drop-in yoga class -- an hour of exercising (maybe exorcising).  Writing as a practice.

You've got Marvin to thank for this vomiting of posts this evening (and by "you," I mean, you, Mom, my only reader).  I've been noting things I've wanted to write about over the last couple of weeks, but I have not been making time for my practice.

In the group, I got to writing about Conor.  Marvin asked us to think about sensory details, to include colors, smells, and tastes.  Nothing like that struck me at the time, but as I laid (lie?) down for a nap this afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me to try to write what's below.

---

It had to have been a summer day because I remember light streaming in, and I remember feeling like I richly deserved this Nachos Bell Grande I was about to eat, having survived another day of unending boredom at her office.  I used to make so many things -- stories, crafts, games, role-playing games -- out of that office paper they had with the tear off edges with the little holes.  I'd sit on the floor behind her desk bopping my head to the music of the dot matrix printer.  Florescent lighting.

So it had to be summer, because I remember that the natural lighting was such a relief. I could not wait to squeeze a few packets of that Mild Border Sauce onto those nachos.

Mom went up to order and sent me, Neil, and Conor to sit and wait at the table.  I'm remembering now that there was always the unspoken expectation to try to keep Conor relatively quiet.

I held his hands down, gently, with great disgust at their drooly-sliminess, resigned to tolerating it until I could wash my hands.  Let him rub all his cold, wet fingers all up and down my wrists and forearms as I tried to keep him from slamming his hand down on the formica table.

There wasn't anything special about the shouting he did in Taco Bell that day.  I mean, it was loud.  Puberty had started to deepen his voice.  So so loud.  Make you wince a little loud.  And, (presumably) pissed about the (as I said, gentle) restraining I was doing, he'd finish his few seconds of screaming by slamming himself backward in his shoulder and forcefully pulling his hand back up into his mouth for a little gnawing (and to recoat it with that good stuff).

Put that on repeat, cycled through every thirty seconds or so.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

Mom came over with the tray, and we all shared our amusement that he was doing the axe-murderer, as we called it (as we still call it).  A soft taco and some Coke exorcised him of that demon for the time being.

I remember noticing that other people were looking, and I remember genuinely not giving much of a shit.  

"Love is nothing if not ritual."

That was a line in a poem read last night at a vigil at Glide for the nine people murdered in Charleston this week.

Made me think.

against niceness

At Bible study this week, Harry had pulled together a collection of excerpts from various places to help us think together about the pain in Nepal and in Baltimore.  Harry loves Dr. King.  He had us read this:

No I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames.  And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. (Emphasis is mine.)

Militant non-violence?  That's some striking shit.

Militant kindness.

Militant creativity.

Militantly humane.

Militantly authentic.

---

I hate when people use military-tinged diction to talk about public schools.  Teachers are "on the front lines."  Ew.  "Veteran" teachers.  WHO IS THE ENEMY IN THIS SLOPPY METAPHOR?

---

At AERA, Dave Stovall called for an ethic of self-care among antiracist educators that "engages love when it's no longer nice."  That guy is always dropping lines like that that make me think for several years.

"I mean really magnificent"

Last night, our Bible Study crew got to sit in Cecil Williams' office, talking with him and his badass wife, Janice Mirikitani.

When asked how they managed their personal overwhelmed-ness in the face of their massive transformative successes, they said:

Cecil Williams: "Most folks, when they get caught up in something that is about to be magnificent, I mean really magnificent, and they get caught up on it, what they do is they cut it short because they get afraid."

Janice Mirikitani: "Or they want to own it."

CW: "They want to own it.  That's right.  And you can't own it and get it going in faith and courage.  You have to, you have to be open to it.  Don't own it.  Be open to it."

JM: "And give it away." 

CW: "Yeah.  And give it away.  Yeah.  Yeah.  But, that's one thing I found out about by looking at the stories of the Old and New Testament of the Bible, and that is that you gotta take a risk.  If you don't take a risk, if you don't, if you don't say, 'I don't know it, but I'm doing it.'  If you don't know it... What we've got to do is learn how to take a risk, take a chance.  We just have to let it, and all of a sudden, it works, and it may take other folks to help it work, but it's working.  The important thing is it's working.  And, well, I got into a lot of trouble taking the risk, but I still took the risk.  I will always take the risk."

MTJ

I started graduate school in the spring of 2010, and that semester I took a class with the locally famous choir director, Mr. Summerville.  The class was called “Harmonizing Select Differences Through African-American Sacred Music.” (It used to be called “Harmonizing Differences Through African-American Sacred Music,” but he added “Select” because “we’re not gonna argue about whether or not Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and that He’s in this room because He IS.”  Got it.)  The class was a trip.  I’d go into some of the stories, but it’s impossible to do so without somehow giving the impression that I’m making fun of Mr. Summerville (because some of the shit that he said and did was funny), which I have no interest in doing.  I learned so much from him in that class.

One of the things that we had to do was visit a bunch of historically Black churches in town for Sunday morning services and write up reports of our experiences.  I loved that assignment because it got me further into a practice I was already doing, visiting various places of worship in town to see where my students were on Sundays (or Fridays).  As a teacher, I could not recommend this practice highly enough.  I did learn so much about the spiritual, cultural, and linguistic communities to which my students belonged, but more importantly I learned that I had so much more to learn about them, from them, with them.

As a person, I came to believe in God.  It happened sort of gradually, and it happened sort of suddenly.  The gradually part I’ll leave for some other day, but the suddenly part I’ll take up now.

I was visiting New Covenant on the invitation of a dear friend and co-worker.  The teaching that day was on Acts 12:1-19, a story I’d never heard before.  Because it’s a good’n’, I’ll quote The Message version of it in full here:

Peter Under Heavy Guard  

^1-4 That’s when King Herod got it into his head to go after some of the church members. He murdered James, John’s brother. When he saw how much it raised his popularity ratings with the Jews, he arrested Peter—all this during Passover Week, mind you—and had him thrown in jail, putting four squads of four soldiers each to guard him. He was planning a public lynching after Passover. 

 ⁵ All the time that Peter was under heavy guard in the jailhouse, the church prayed for him most strenuously. 

 ⁶ Then the time came for Herod to bring him out for the kill. That night, even though shackled to two soldiers, one on either side, Peter slept like a baby. And there were guards at the door keeping their eyes on the place. Herod was taking no chances! 

 ^7-9 Suddenly there was an angel at his side and light flooding the room. The angel shook Peter and got him up: “Hurry!” The handcuffs fell off his wrists. The angel said, “Get dressed. Put on your shoes.” Peter did it. Then, “Grab your coat and let’s get out of here.” Peter followed him, but didn’t believe it was really an angel—he thought he was dreaming. 

 ^10-11 Past the first guard and then the second, they came to the iron gate that led into the city. It swung open before them on its own, and they were out on the street, free as the breeze. At the first intersection the angel left him, going his own way. That’s when Peter realized it was no dream. “I can’t believe it—this really happened! The Master sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s vicious little production and the spectacle the Jewish mob was looking forward to.” 

 ^12-14 Still shaking his head, amazed, he went to Mary’s house, the Mary who was John Mark’s mother. The house was packed with praying friends. When he knocked on the door to the courtyard, a young woman named Rhoda came to see who it was. But when she recognized his voice—Peter’s voice!—she was so excited and eager to tell everyone Peter was there that she forgot to open the door and left him standing in the street. 

 ^15-16 But they wouldn’t believe her, dismissing her, dismissing her report. “You’re crazy,” they said. She stuck by her story, insisting. They still wouldn’t believe her and said, “It must be his angel.” All this time poor Peter was standing out in the street, knocking away. 

 ^16-17 Finally they opened up and saw him—and went wild! Peter put his hands up and calmed them down. He described how the Master had gotten him out of jail, then said, “Tell James and the brothers what’s happened.” He left them and went off to another place. 

 ^18-19 At daybreak the jail was in an uproar. “Where is Peter? What’s happened to Peter?” When Herod sent for him and they could neither produce him nor explain why not, he ordered their execution: “Off with their heads!” Fed up with Judea and Jews, he went for a vacation to Caesarea.

In her teaching that day, the pastor talked about Peter’s half-sleeping fumbling.  He's about to be lynched, but then he gets saved, and he’s like, “Wha..? Nah, I’m cool.  Just let me go back to sleep.  Weird dream.”  He doesn’t really see or believe what’s happening.  And there’s no reason for him to do so.  Duh: His participation in the leadership of followers of the Jesus Way has made him an enemy of the state.  The authorities have gone to great lengths to securely isolate him from the movement.  His comrade James has been imprisoned and executed.  He is imprisoned and will be executed.  He gets it.  It all makes sense to him.  And maybe the reason he’s even able to sleep that night is because he’s just so clear on the fact there’s not shit he can do about it, and he’s “given it to God” as some Christians say. 

It’s easy to judge him as having no faith in God’s capacity to deliver, that faced with the choice between freedom and oppression, which should be a no brainer, he’s un-believingly dragging his feet.   But it seems more kind and right to see it from his perspective: He’s in a shitty (the shittiest?) spot, and he’s being asked to make a choice between the known, what makes sense, and the unknown, which seems ridiculous.  (An angel?  Aren’t they just metaphors or something?)

The pastor asked us to offer our own selves the same compassionate understanding as we teeter on the edge of decisions.  If the tough choices we had to make presented themselves as “choose freedom or choose continued oppression,” we’d know what to do.  But they don’t show up like that.  Often, they show up more like, “take a risk and change your life and trust in … whatever it is that you believe there is to trust in… or keep doing what you’re doing and just, y’know, suck it up.”

God wants for us freedom, and God will lead us there if we just let God and quit trying to predict and know and calculate.  Peter doesn’t really get that he’s being led to freedom by God until it’s already over.  The angel’s gone, and then he’s like, “Holy shit, I’m free.”

(And then there’s that whole Rhoda scene which reads like something from a romantic comedy about somebody coming home for Christmas.)

When I heard this teaching that day, something in me assented to this version of explaining what life is all about, to explaining why the hell we all even exist.  I was (like I am now) in the middle of a serious depressive episode, the way out of which I could not see (like now).  So I decided to just… believe in this Jesus Way even if it didn't really make that much sense.  Until that day, I identified squarely in the atheist camp.   Until that day, I could not argue with the logic of “Nothing happens when you die.”  But that morning, sipping my Dunkin Donuts (side note: Why the hockey puck is there no Dunkin Donuts in the Bay Area?), I opted for the illogical, the nonsensical.  Hope when there’s no reason to hope.

A few days ago, I posted about the dream-as-the-sign-from-God thing that I’ve been worrying about.  I’ve been stressing about wanting to feel some kind of sacred guidance and feeling sure that if it came in the form of some dream, there’s no way I’d notice it, let alone have the courage to radically change my life because of it.  A close friend and I use the disparaging phrase “Magic Trick Jesus” to refer to silly shit like that.

When I was home in Champaign-Urbana last week, I shared my worry with some loved ones from New Covenant, all of whom seemed to share my skepticism about “signs.”  God probably doesn’t care, we decided, whether we take this job or that job, wear this shirt or that shirt.  But I’m not willing to extrapolate from that that God doesn’t care about the deep depression and anxiety I’ve been living in because of the need to make a difficult decision about my job.  I kept coming back to that in our conversation.  Finally, one of my friends said, “God knows you well enough to know how to get you to listen if God really wants you to.”  I was like, “Oh yeah.”

Last night, I felt for the first time an overwhelming sureness about some of the ideas I’ve been having about what to do now and next.  I won’t get into the details of it because it’s impossible to do so without sounding super cheesy (and also super weird and, like, flighty or dumb or something.)  But I was at Bible study again, and the text that the pastor had chosen for us to read and discuss was Acts 12:1-19.

The sense of calm and peace I felt then is gone this morning, but I still think I’m on to something.