Spiritual Practice

This week for me has been all about exploring spirituality and building a personal spiritual discipline. I have never found traditional Christian spirituality to work for me, especially daily devotion and prayer. In part I just don't find Christian prayer practice to work for me. The idea of sitting and praying to God feels so one-sided; I don't hear God's voice in my head, so how do I know that God has heard me, that God cares, that God is going to respond?

My theology has also never been orthodox. I face a minimal amount of persecution because my understanding of God is less traditional monotheism and more soft polytheism or panentheism. For me, God has always been and always will be Emanu-El, present in and of the world, though God manifests differently to each person and in multiple ways.

With that in mind, I have been reaching out towards other ways of experiencing God. Over the years I have found myself drawn to different types of spirituality. Especially helpful for me has been the practice of mindfulness, which I first learned as a Buddhist meditative practice, and then discovered in the realm of Western Psychotherapy. Now, I am exploring a Pagan approach to meditation and mindfulness.

My connection to God has always been through nature. I feel very strongly that care for the earth is caring for God, and that it is possible to communicate with God through building relationship with the land and with the various nature spirits that are present within the ecosystem. God is just as present within a tree as God is within a church.

Because of that particular belief of mine, I have always felt a connection to Celtic druidry, which has an even deeper spiritual ancestor within proto-Indo-European religious culture. I have decided to build a relationship with my Celtic and Germanic ancestors by exploring druidry, and working druidic spirituality into my own personal faith.

In the Druid Magic Handbook, John Michael Greer says that a Druid's daily spiritual practice should combine three components: ritual, divination, and meditation. Today, I tried this practice for the first time. I began with a simple ritual influenced by the Druidic Elemental Cross and Circling of Light. I laid out a grid on my dining room table. To the right I placed a small glass of water, to my left a small glass of wine. Directly in front of me I put a piece of homemade rosemary bread, and across from me I lit a candle. In the center of this grid I placed an empty bowl.

I said a quick prayer that I wrote which brought together these elements and asked for spiritual guidance and protection from Adonai Elohim, Sophia, Jesus, El, Asherah, and Mary. In the future I will invoke other names of God.

Then, I consumed the ritual elements in order: water, then bread, then wine. Lastly I blew out the candle and asked that the smoke cleanse the house of negative spirits.

Then, I meditated on the blessing of light and envisioned the blessing I received during the ritual spreading to encompass the whole world. I asked especially that the blessing extend to my family: my mother, my dog, my household, my extended family, and especially my Grandmother Katherine who is suffering from an injury that is having difficulty healing.

Next, I laid out a tarot spread for divination. Although many find tarot dangerous, I think that the danger lies in how you ask the questions and what specifically you ask for. I believe that tarot is one of the ways in which God communicates with us. I used a Druid spread, called the Three Rays of Light, which asks the card to reflect the past, the potential future, and the present. My spread was very good. I had two reversed cards, which made me nervous, but where they laid was actually quite fortuitous. My past was represented by a reversed Ace of Wands. When it is upright, the Ace of Wands represents the creative spark and the energy required to keep projects going. Since it was reversed, I read the card as a representation of the spiritual stagnation I've felt throughout the last few years. For me, the card is a sign that my inertia is coming to an end. My future was represented by a reversed Five of Swords. Usually, the Five of Swords represents conflict, deceit, and chicanery. Since it was reversed, I see it as the dissolution of conflict and the heralding of peace or harmony. Finally, the card that represents my present is the Queen of Pentacles. Pentacles is one of my favorite suits. It represents blessings and the fruits of the earth. The Queen is a representation of Mother Earth herself. She represents the nourishment of daily work and application of oneself to one's tasks. She also represents the flow of finances. I read the Queen of Pentacles as a sign that my new approach to achieving my goals is the right path, and that through dedication and daily work I will be able to achieve the things I want to achieve. And perhaps a financial blessing is coming my way...

Finally, I meditated on the question of how I can learn to be more compassionate to myself. I found my inspiration for this meditation in my Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, a guided course of self-therapy for learning to deal with anxiety disorders. I had begun this workbook years ago, but had very little follow-through. I decided that using it as my source of meditation inspiration would be beneficial for me both spiritually and mentally. Taking the new path I have chosen for myself is scary and a source of great anxiety, so meditating on my anxiety and better self-care is, I think, a good spiritual discipline.

Finally, earlier this week I made a complex God's Eye, which Mom has hung in our kitchen. I like making things with my hands. For me, it is a representation of the Sun. I'm hoping it will bring a little light into the darkness of winter.

2015: A Year of (Hopeful) Renewal

I have never liked the concept of New Year's resolutions. They always seem fleeting, and full of good intentions, but it always seems like follow-through is lacking. Nevertheless, the New Year always brings for me the hope of renewal: a symbolic wiping of the slate and the chance to try again this year. I don't want to begin this year full of hope and disappoint myself again, so I'm trying something new.

This year, I want to accomplish concrete, achievable goals.

In the past, my New Year's hopes have been either vague or heavily dependent on my ability to (successfully) build new habits. The problem of vagueness is perhaps evident: how do you know what you've achieved if you don't know what you set out to achieve? The problem of habit-building is perhaps less clear. I am habitually bad at building new habits.

So this year, I've made myself a list of goals: things that I can check off a list and say, hooray, I've done it! And maybe achieving these (not always) small things will help me achieve a larger goal: self-betterment.

Truth is, I have been suffering—mentally, physically, and spiritually—for a long time, and that suffering has shaped the way I view and interact with the world around me. Although I have accomplished great things in the past few years, I feel like I accomplished those things despite myself. I struggled through divinity school; I barely read half of what I was assigned, I took two complete semesters pass/fail (or in div school parlance, credit/no credit), and for several months I was present in name only. Mentally, I was struggling to stay with it. I almost dropped out.

Interestingly, when I graduated, I decided to go on to more school. I believed that I had learned my lesson and would be able to change myself for the better. And in many ways, I did. I read more of what I was assigned, I took classes that created a cohesive course of study, I worked really hard at my thesis. And then I started spring semester, and all of that drive I had in the fall disappeared. Once again I was stuck in that place I had been when I had been at Yale. I barely finished my thesis in time; I took an extension and missed out on walking at graduation. But I did it! I graduated!

Since then, I've felt no relief. I struggle daily with anxiety and depression. My medication doesn't seem to help. I have excellent intentions and no follow-through.

So my goal this year is to achieve that follow-through. I need to get my life back on track with where I want to be. Five years from now? I want to be in a PhD program, studying to be a pastoral/spiritual counselor. My checklist for this year is (hopefully) going to help me with baby steps towards that goal.

I'm writing this here mostly for personal reasons, so I can look back and see where my mind was at the beginning of this year. But I'm also keeping it public for accountability purposes. Maybe with the help of friends and the vast internet community, I can achieve something for myself this year.

Steps I've already taken

• Signed up for a 28-day self-love class
• Emailed NASW-GA about how I might become a peer counselor

Steps I still need to take

• Obtain my health records from Yale Health so that I can prove my qualification for SSDI
• Submit my application appeal for SSDI
• Make a spiritual commitment to myself
• Start going back to church
• Start regular personal spiritual practices
• Apply to be a volunteer with Skyland Trail, ideally under their pastoral counselor
• Apply for CPE
• Grow my O2 business
• Try for at least 1 Jewelry Bar each month, preferably more
• Sign up for a dance, yoga, or martial arts class
• Begin planning weekly meals in advance and shopping accordingly

Bear with me, y'all, and keep me in your prayers.

Featured at Postcolonial Networks

Just thought I'd put a note up here letting you know I've been featured at the Postcolonial Networks blog, Plural Space, talking about the postmodern/postcolonial concept of hybridity in identity.

Check it out!

Invisibility and Silence - my article!
Plural Space
Postcolonial Networks

Spiritual Friendship

Just wanted to draw your attention to an amazing blog on the topic of queerness, sexuality and theology: Spiritual Friendship. Check it out!

Let's talk about X, baby

A little more than a month ago, Mother Jones ran an article titled "The Problem with Men Explaining Things."  Although I do not want to go into too much detail here, the article deals with the issue of "mansplaining," a lovely Portmanteau coined to describe the social phenomena in which a man presumes that a woman does not know anything about some particular subject and then proceeds to explain it to her. In the article, a man unknowingly lectured a woman about a book that she had authored:

Here, let me just say that my life is well sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said—like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen's class on Chaucer—"gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.

I often hate to post topics like this because, inevitably, I end up with well-meaning comments about how this only happens every once in a while, and really women are considered equally, anyway. I have to quash my eyeroll reflex. But I find myself concerned with the phenomena because my lovely friend Jordan had this happen to her last week at a sports bar while she was watching the Texas football game. Not only did said person try to explain the football game to her, he patted her shoulder and asked her what she thought about Erin Andrews' shoes. To quote Amy Poehler, "REALLY?!"

Most of us women have learned to deal with these occasional slights to our intelligence by employing a well-placed comment that signifies our literacy in the subject, or by ignoring them entirely (though for me, this is the road-less-traveled). The more problematic edge to these phenomena, however, is more subversive, and one that I find that I encounter on a regular basis. This occurs when a woman who makes an intellectual claim about a topic in a field in which she has excellent credentials (and not merely knowledge—although the knowledge should be enough), and is automatically disbelieved or presumed not knowledgeable enough about the subject. And this is where it's really damaging.

If you are at all acquainted with me via facebook, you are probably aware that I have strong opinions on many controversial topics. This means that I often end up in debates where, unfortunately, I first have to legitimate my voice before I can successfully contribute to the topic. If I make a claim about a particular topic, I often have responses from others participated in the debate where the responders checked my facebook profile to find out where I went to school and what I majored in before evaluating whether my knowledge on the subject is relevant to the conversation. Even after I establish that I do have a sufficient knowledge base, I find my arguments picked apart based on everything from my vocabulary choices to the presumed tone with which I responded—a particularly frustrating argument since tone cannot be effectively communicated via text-based methods—rather than responding to the content of what I say.

I recently ended up in a surprisingly pleasant debate with a 16-year-old boy, a junior in high school, who kept trying to explain to me why my particular approach to a subject was wrong. While trying to explain my viewpoint and why I thought the way I did, we were interrupted by another male who informed me that my explanations were unpleasant, that I had bad people skills, and that he couldn't believe I wanted to be a pastor. He told me it was not my place to "teach" and that I needed to learn to be "harmless, not helpful." There was no critique of the 16-year-old who kept telling me I was wrong.

I write this post not because I have an answer to the question of what to do in situations like these, but because I want to draw attention to them. What should we, as women, do in response to situations like these? How can we prevent them from happening? Can we even do so?

All I know is I'm tired of the fight to defend my voice.

Triumph?

Today I threw away the mask that I have kept for 13 years as a symbol of Dad's triumph over cancer.  Because radiation treatment requires extreme precision and my dad's skin cancer manifested in the lymph node in his throat, his doctors had to mold a mask that would hold his head still during the treatment. A plastic mesh was heated and stretched over his face until it cooled. Once the form was made, it could be reused daily for as long as the treatment continued.

Dad had two masks made because the doctors made a mistake with the first one. Rather than just throwing it out or melting the plastic down to be recycled, they gave us the mask to keep. My mom and I have always collected interesting scraps for craft projects, and this one had the potential for really interesting projects.

When dad was declared cancer-free, I instead chose to keep the mask as a sort of trophy, something that said "Look at this horrible thing that my dad triumphed over!" When we moved away from Big Bend, the mask ended up pressed against a hot car window, and the nose was smushed, but the resemblance was still there. In my new room, it adorned the top of my bookcase. Certain friends of mine thought it was creepy. 

The night that Dad died, I couldn't look at his face on top of my bookcase, even if it was just a plastic mesh simulacrum. I picked up the mask and took it into the other room so I wouldn't have to see it while I tried to fall asleep. After 13 years, the plastic was brittle, and the mere act of lifting it caused it to crack and break into multiple pieces.

Today, while I was cleaning house, I decided the broken pieces needed to be thrown out. The plastic was too fragile to try to put it back together, and eventually you run out of places to keep every memento. I was trying to be practical.

It's amazing how the tiniest thing can mean so much. The pieces of plastic no longer looked like my dad, but I knew that they did once. Throwing out the pieces felt like throwing out a memory. His triumph over cancer didn't prevent him from coming down with pneumonia. Keeping the mask didn't mean I got to keep my dad.

Reflections on September 11th

Today marks the 11^th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, and I must confess that this is the first year the anniversary has meant something to me. Throughout these 11 years, I have often felt that my emotional response to the attacks was not what it should have been, especially considering my role as a white, middle-class American. But the truth is that the way the world changed on September 11, 2001, did not have direct consequences for my life. I had never lived through wartime, and thus did not comprehend what such an attack might mean for the everyday citizen. I knew no one who had been in New York on that day; I knew no one who had worked in those buildings; I knew no one in the military who faced being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan when Congress and the President declared war on the Middle East. The ramifications of the PATRIOT Act, which were so shocking to others, did not concern me as perhaps they should have—as I look back, I recognize the violations of privacy condoned by the act were obtrusive and mostly unnecessary. I had developed for myself an ethic of free information exchange, so I was not concerned about what might be discovered of me. The aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center interceded in my life at a glacial pace, mostly changing the way I used language and engaged in political rhetoric. I found myself growing numb to the remembrances, days of silence, and mentions of the tragedy. I cared insomuch as the reaction of the United States led us on a path towards perdition; a path which slowly destroyed the sanctity of the ideals for which the country was founded.

This year, though, I am slowly starting to grasp the emotional significance of the event. In some ways, it is because today is the one-month anniversary of my father's death, and I am still dealing with the very real confusion, grief, and heartbreak of that loss. I think about what I am going through, and then I think about how many people faced this same loss because of one unexpected event, how many people lost a father or a mother or a sister or a brother or an aunt, uncle, grandfather, grandmother, cousin, second cousin, friend, enemy, colleague... it is still outrageous that some entity could be so filled with hatred at an idea—in this case, "the American dream"—that he or she or they would choose to cause so much grief and loss.

I mourn those people who died on 2001, and I mourn all those who have died since in the defense of freedom. I mourn that part of the American spirit that the World Trade Center attacks destroyed: an ideal of freedom of differences and the rightness of diversity. We are all of us loved, and not one of us deserves such loss.