Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

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how to quit without giving up

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There’s the textbook definition of a word, and then there’s the story of it. Theology degrees or no—you say the word “sanctified” and you take me right back to seven years old, potlucks and Bible quizzing at the big brick Church of the Nazarene.

I was small and the word seemed big, heavy and important—but also nice and kind of glowy. Legs dangling off the ugly greenish-bluish chair in that wide sanctuary, I learned “sanctification” meant the Holy Spirit and many, many years could make you sinless—could make you perfect.

Who knows? Maybe the day I learned such a word was the day I got myself hooked on religion.

I wanted to know what it was like to be Sanctified, but they said perfect people are too humble to know they’re perfect, so there was no one to ask. I probably asked God sometimes: would you just forget how to sin? Or at least never really consider doing it? How perfect is perfect? Like, if someone near you was about to sin, and you failed to stop them, would you lose your Sanctified badge? Also, wouldn’t it be just a little boring to be Sanctified? Like you’d beat the final level of a video game, or read all the books on your shelf?

Those concerns aside, I figured that if getting Sanctified took so many years, me and the Holy Spirit had better get started.

I didn’t obsess over sanctification as much as I internalized the idea at my core, where it had snapped perfectly into place next to my tiny perfectionist soul. In fact, I hardly thought about Sanctification at all after we moved away from the Church of the Nazarene, and I even learned that plenty of Christians think the whole idea of Entire Sanctification is pretty wacky. It didn’t matter; I didn’t need to think about Sanctification anymore. The pursuit of perfection was a part of me.

And I’m not sure it will ever go away.

No matter how far I travel away from those Nazarene potlucks, it will remain. The part of me that, had I been born in the Middle Ages, most definitely would’ve become a nun. There will always be this vision of a better self, who gives generously and looooooves praying and says astoundingly wise things to people on buses and laughs at herself all the time, and who is loved by babies and animals and smiles beatifically at people and makes them feel like they’ve been visited by Oprah herself.

Maybe tomorrow I can be a little bit more like her.

And the thing is, I don’t even know if I believe in Entire Sanctification at all anymore; I’m pretty sure I don’t. I’m pretty sure if anyone has ever made it to some sort of mountaintop of sinlessness, they fell right off as soon as their husband left his dirty socks in some weird-ass place again. I’m pretty sure the mountaintop of sinlessness would be a lonely place to dwell.

But whatever I believe about theology, I definitely believe in that better, beatified me.

Only now, after all my church and studying, she’s gotten even better. Now she’s not only saying wise things and radiating internal beauty, but also carrying a picket sign and growing organic produce for homeless people and patiently explaining whiteness to white people because she remembers the old days, back before she solved all her own riddles of racism. And classism. And homophobia. And ageism. She also exercised today, didn’t forget to email you back, never lets anyone get away with catcalling her, and writes every day whether she feels like it or not. And she edits with fervor, too.

It turns out, Better Me long ago morphed into a monster—but only lately have I begun to realize it. Only lately have I seen her for the obnoxious, unattainable, plastic tyrant that she is. Because it’s hard to see your idols for what they are.

Even before Better Me turned grotesque, she’d been an innocent-looking but greedy little god. That vision of myself consumed all of me and demanded more, then more, and more.

I’d gotten the impression that more and more and more was what it meant to be Sanctified. That of course no one could ever achieve everything the Best Good version of ourselves would do; but getting Sanctified would mean you’d tried.

Because of Jesus’ infinite power and love, the argument went, you can be and do it all. Therefore you should be and do it all. For everyone. Today.

It has its own internal logic; only the harder I ran, the farther away that finish line seemed. The more I helped the world, the worse it got. The more I tried to do the right thing, the worse I got. Perfection promised me peace; but in reality, there was never any rest.

Meanwhile, with so much work to do and Bible to read, there was hardly ever any time for Holy Spirit. Not until Better Me and Better World had become a menace, an unbearable burden, a constant drain on that light and kindness I thought I was trying to shed to the world—not until then did I finally ask Spirit to give me some hope. And here is what She said:

Because of Jesus’ infinite power and love, there is nothing you have to be or do before you and this world can be fully redeemed.

Nothing.

And as I enter into an unfamiliar stillness, the practice of receiving this mad, scandalous outrage of grace, Spirit gives me back that childhood dream of being simple, humble, good, and kind. Only the fulfillment of that dream, she whispers, isn’t a matter of striving and puzzling and discipline that tries to substitute itself for love. No, the fruits of the Spirit wait on the other side of rest; they’re borne by discipline that shows itself as gift; they’re found along the way, walking out a calling in confidence—not driven by a fear of inadequacy.

Only months ago it would have seemed foolish, but now I’m in the midst of an experiment: I have erred long enough on the side of doing things myself. It’s time to make room for Spirit to work—maybe in secret, maybe unglamorous. It’s time to do more and more and more nothing. More delighting. More waiting. More playing. More of the restful rhythms of love, as strong and sure and inevitable as the mountains, who neither strive nor strain; and yet I know, somehow, they give and pray and laugh at themselves with all of Spirit’s might.

Theology Girl Gets Churched

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I’ve made this admission in many times and places, but here it is again:

Over the last three or four years, my church attendance has been…sporadic, at best.

It’s been a long time now since I lost my church during seminary over the excommunication of a friend. After that, I sort of lost the will to live as a church person; I moved, traveled, and got married over the next couple of years; and I started actually looking forward to Sunday mornings—lazy breakfasts and beach trips.

Once I got out of the habit of going, I saw the churches I did visit through new eyes. It seemed that few congregations could have really answered the question—what are we doing here?

As a kid, I would’ve said that church is a place to learn about God and sing. But those are things I can do on my own, or in the car, or with my family.

Later church came to mean communion; but I got used to participating in that ritual without belonging to a particular organization.

And along the way, the words and actions of these church people around the country came to seem weirder and weirder, like I had accidentally stepped, uninitiated, into a clubhouse—and it was too often immediately apparent that I wouldn’t fit in as a member of the club. I cuss too much; Nate and I don’t wear boots and boat shoes; I don’t treat the right people with suspicion; I ask too many questions; I talk about Jesus too much; I’m not impressed by the right things.

Belonging to that club wasn’t exactly a compelling reason to give up my Sunday mornings.

After all this, I’m more aware than ever that our language can serve as a dividing line: if you know the code, you’re in. If church words make you groan, scratch your head, tune out, or panic—you’re out.

Even though that fact sometimes makes me want to start over from square zero—no church words allowed—I also realize that many of the words we flippantly use once had deep meaning for people. If we got rid of them, eventually we’d build up a whole new vocabulary to name the same experiences.

Now that I’m helping to start a church, what I really want to do is turn these words from dividing lines into meeting places. Maybe we can pull some things apart and find a way to recover the truth, the feeling, the richness hidden inside. Those who can’t stand to go to church and those who can’t imagine leaving it could both be surprised.

Like some others before me, I want to go word by word through my own journey as I navigate this whole returning-to-church thing. The (Un)Systematic Theology Project will shape and inform it all.

I had to start with my own job title. Hop over to the Two Rivers blog to poke at discipleship with me?

And tell me in the comments—what’s the worst church word? what’s your favorite word to describe God?

How to talk about God after theology falls apart: an introduction to the (Un)Systematic Theology Project

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There was a time when being a theologian meant admitting weakness and uncertainty, then nailing down as many answers and definitions as possible anyway. You might use philosophy to ‘prove’ something about creation or Scripture, then build on what you said to make some assertion about God or humanity, go from there to outline everything you thought you knew about salvation, and then talk about church or politics or what happens when you die or, most likely, all of the above.

A lot of us learned to think about God this way: doctrines as building blocks or puzzle pieces that all fit together and ultimately explain life, the universe, and everything. We called it ‘systematic theology.’

There’s not exactly a problem with reasoning like this, in itself, but if you encounter evidence that contradicts some element of your theory of life, the universe, and everything, the whole thing has a nasty habit of crumbling. Archaeological data, or your own life experience, or the observations of science, or just the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in life and the universe (and the Bible) eventually poke holes in every system.

Then those clever people who had everything nailed down suddenly appear as conspiracy theorists with pins in the wall, trapped by internal logics and unable to face the outside world.

There are circles where it’s fashionable to point out such vulnerabilities in theological systems as if they were themselves victories for nihilism (or, sillier yet, for other systems explaining the world). Of course, most of us who’ve enjoyed lobbing these grenades at other people’s systems are, ourselves, standing in the pile of rubbish that was once our own system. I suppose it’s natural enough to make an enemy of systematic theology, or Christians, or Almighty God himself after a letdown like that.

But there are others of us who’ve shuffled about in the shambles of our systems long enough to make a certain peace with chaos; yet, after a while, we find ourselves compelled to try and say something about God. We may even start to string together two or three of these thoughts—with fear and trembling, and we hope, with humility—not so much to explain the world, as to maybe describe something we saw.

We discover we’ve begun again to build; but this time we’re aware we will never construct a system, a machine, or a tower to the sky. No, what we’re building is simply an artwork—a pile of metaphors, a bundle of better questions, a sculpture or a good meal, maybe a story or maybe a garden, that shares and shows more than it tells. It doesn’t have to ‘fit’ or ‘function’ as much as it has to bear witness, to bear repeating, to bear dialogue, and to gracefully let go of what doesn’t bear scrutiny. We know we may come to stand, again and again, in piles of dust—but like fools, like artists, like lovers, we dare to speak again and again of what we know, what we’ve seen and heard, what we love, of the truth, of God.

We know we’re doing something like systematic theology. But in the academy, these days, we call it constructive theology. For my own little bit that I’m cobbling together, I’ve landed on (un)systematic theology.

Constructive theologians tend to get a little weird with our building materials. Yes, we take starting points from the Bible, but also from new stories, from poetry, from the world around us. While scientific theories or stories from our own lives do fall into the centuries-old framework of ways we learn about God—the classic sources of reason, experience, scripture, and tradition—constructivists usually sprinkle in such ‘indirect’ revelations (God-sightings) more liberally than your average Bible-preaching pastor.

It’s not because we don’t like the Bible. Most of us love the Bible! It’s more that we’re not interested in fighting the world ‘outside’ scripture and tradition or forcing it to assimilate with our foregone conclusions. Or maybe our foregone conclusions are these: there’s room in the story of God for every truth and every good thing. And the remix can show you things you never noticed about the original. And God is still speaking.

Now, before this starts to sound like everything is true and no one disagrees, let me assure you that constructivists love to disagree. We do understand that affirming one statement or argument often means negating another; and we make conscious choices about how to interpret and prioritize our sources of truth. But we also understand that our goal isn’t just ‘to never be wrong,’ and many of us are as willing to end our arguments with a question, parable, lament, silence, or song as we are with a statement of fact.

For my own part, I’ve been standing in a pile of dust for a long long time, and I’ve been stirring and stuttering toward construction for a while now, too. In 2018 I want to string some things together, play some riffs and make some starts. I want to go straight back to my Sunday school roots sometimes and other times, get a little weird. In fact, I’ve set up a little project for myself. It’s almost like the Julie/Julia project only with less butter and more convoluted terms for abstract concepts. Here’s the plan, God willing:
– read the Bible and pray every day of 2018
– research and practice one spiritual discipline every month of 2018
– read one work of constructive theology every month
– read one book each month from another academic discipline

Along the way, I’ll share with you what I’m learning, and try sometimes to say where I’ve seen God. (Half of these field notes will be here on the blog, but the other half will only go out to my email list! Sign up at the bottom of this post.)

Whatever this stunt or journey or exercise turns out to be, I hope you’ll come along. I hope you’ll gather up your doubts and your dust and see, with me, whether there might not be a place for them to fit, after all.

What questions are you questioning this year? What should I read, do, or study over the course of this project?

the prosperity gospel hidden in social justice church

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God isn't an argument or a twelve step plan.I am all about self-help. 

One of the many things I inherited from my mother is an unabashed love of self-help books. (OK, maybe I’ve been a little abashed in the past, but these days I’m here to own it.) As someone who’s always trying to perfect my life (and remains eternally optimistic about my chances of actually doing so), I can devour a self-help book in an hour or two.

Even if a whole entire book turns out to be crap, I still can usually glean at least one question, nugget, exercise, or homework assignment worth using—and besides, discarding crappy books still has the advantage of making me feel superior.

It’s true, though, that I rarely spend more than a couple hours on any particular book—because they all tend to say the same thing: you have to change your paradigm. If you want to change or achieve something in your life, you have to interrupt the excuses and take action. You have to set yourself up for success by changing something about your usual patterns—then follow through with the new mindset, habit, choice, or system you’ve set up.

I also like self-help books because they say what they are. It’s usually on the cover somewhere: SELF-HELP. People can make fun of the category all they want, but those people are assholes and disparaging others certainly isn’t measurably improving their lives. There’s an optimism and a straightforwardness to the whole self-help section of the bookstore.

My appreciation for that honesty might explain why I have the opposite reaction to self-help books masquerading as Christian books. The ones that say a couple of simplistic sentences about why God supports their system, then leave God out of the entire rest of the book; or worse, the ones about how to manipulate God into helping you get what you want. They offer a step-by-step plan to fix your money, fix your marriage, or get your dream life, with a sprinkling of cherry-picked Bible verses calculated to wedge the book into the lucrative Christian target market.

 

Self-help is not Christianity.

When I go to the self-help section of the bookstore, I know I’m getting someone’s idea about how I should live my life; but I still have to make a decision about whether I’m going to trust them. I read the book with a shrewd eye: what is the new paradigm this person wants me to adopt? Do I agree with it?

Even if I do adopt a self-help book’s paradigm, it won’t usually claim to deal with the ultimate things in life. It may offer to revolutionize my eating habits or increase my productivity 1000%, but I don’t link those changes to the meaning of life, my eternal destiny, or ultimate peace and joy.

The Christian bookstore, on the other hand, can have an aura of authority around it. I run the risk of taking the author at their word just because they used a Greek word or threw in a story about church. Too often, they end up saying things that appeal to me—putting a chirpy, churchy seal of approval on the Pinterest board of my life—when what I need is an invitation to real transformation. I’m getting a budgeting system when what I need is God’s generosity, discipline, and trust. I learn five ways to try and control my dating relationship when what I need is God’s courage and love.

 

Christianity is not self-help.

If I say Christianity isn’t self-help, I can imagine a chorus of agreement from two distinct sides. One side would cheer because of course what I’m saying is that only God can help us. Another would expect that of course I mean Christianity is about helping others.

Of course I really mean neither of those things in particular, and if they’ve leapt so quickly to those conclusions, I’d have to ask them whether there isn’t an element of the self-help mindset in their definition of Christianity. If your Christianity boils down so easily to one thing, a step-by-step life plan (whether it’s find meaning and purpose by helping others or accept Jesus to fix your sin problems), maybe you don’t worship a God of mystery; maybe you worship the life plan.

If God is just the facilitator of a system for getting out of hell or having a nice family or dealing with the problem of evil, then God’s not really the ultimate thing in your life; heaven, or family, or peace of mind is.

I wince as I write this. It sounds harsh to me, and a little impossible. How could we ever untangle our love for an invisible God from every single one of God’s gifts? We all need family and peace and purpose, and God wants us to have them. And doesn’t the Bible offer plenty of wisdom about how to get what you want? Well, yes and yes.

All I mean by my accusations is that we are too quick to declare ourselves innocent of idolatry. I mean that I constantly forget to let those good gifts point me on farther to the good presence of God. I am distracted by the toy and oblivious to the giver—then when the toy breaks, I either blame the giver or demand a replacement, even though God is right there, grieving with me for the lost thing and so often, patiently offering something better in its place.

For so, so long I studied theology earnestly, taking every opportunity to scorn Joel Osteen, while at the root I was still just asking the question, how do I live my best life now? What will make the world make sense? Who will show me how to fix things? I claimed to study theology, but my question was rarely, Who is God? 

The classic definition of theology is faith seeking understanding—but mine was bewilderment seeking control. I wanted a paradigm that explained the world more than I wanted a relationship with the mysterious One who holds it in their hand.

 

Christianity isn’t justice

I’m afraid I’m diminishing those self-help, world-help questions a little too much. We cannot all sit and contemplate the divine all day, and it is vital that our religion come to bear on the practical aspects of life; in fact, God is often calling us to do something to change circumstances, in our own lives or in society.

But I also think it’s far past time for a moment of clarity about what we really mean when we say Christian or theology or God wants _____. Because so often, when we think we’re defending Jesus, he’s not really what we’re attached to at all. So often we’ve tangled Jesus up into our program for the world, wrestled love onto our side of a debate, and turned God’s story into our argument.

Yesterday when I told someone about our church, she exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a social justice church!” I nodded along, but what part of me wanted to say was this:

Justice is part of who we are, but we don’t worship justice. We worship a God who brings justice, and freedom and beauty and light and life, but always and only through love. We work for social justice when we donate and vote, but also when we sing and play and wash dishes and make art, because God is more than a well-functioning system, more than the absence of poverty or the tolerance of outsiders. God is abundance and peace, care and attention, humility and courage and joy, and God is transforming us (in God’s own time) to participate in those things as well.

We don’t worship social justice; frankly that’s an easy, comfortable thing to do. We worship and wrestle this wild God who has died of injustice and risen again of love.

So we live in an invisible kingdom, coming of love; we work for justice but we worship One far beyond justice, beyond all we hope for and all we fear, who does not only help but transforms, redeems, resurrects, who loves us into an existence we hardly fathomed when we lived only for the hope of better circumstances.

We’re a social justice church and a family church and a fire church and a silence church and a dirt church. We’re a God-in-the-world-here-and-now church, and somehow justice is growing in hidden places along the way of our churching; and though this answer must hardly satisfy a right-minded person, perhaps if it could be perfectly explained, it couldn’t possibly be true.

a politics of hope (when you’d rather be done with it all)

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Do you think I can be allowed to believe in a politics of this audacious love? Will we find a way to be joyful, though we've considered all the facts?

This week Twitter feel like a minefield, every arrogant or vitriolic one-liner like a punch in the gut. After reading Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, it feels like witnessing the breakdown of society.

I read the book in two days; in that sense it was an easy read. But it was also a hard read—hard to hear her plea for a kinder and a less comfortable world—because that world is a place where we are open to each other’s pain. I have been much more conscious, in the week since that read, of the layers of pride and fear under everyone’s rhetoric; not because I want to diagnose, blame or dismiss, but just because when you’re really hearing people it’s all right there, right on the surface. It hurts.

Brown tells us about the dangers of using this rhetoric and letting that pain and anger run rampant. She reminds us that dehumanizing language is the breeding ground for dehumanizing behavior. She tells us what every revenge myth has already said: anger is a catalyst, pine needles on a fire, good for self-preservation and jolting into action and sometimes, just knowing you’re alive. But pine needles won’t actually keep you warm. They’ll burn themselves right up in a flash—and if anger is all you have to stoke your own fire with, you’ll run yourself straight to death in no time.

It has only deepened my eternal weariness of politics—even though Brown’s book itself is ultimately about the importance of taking a stand. I can hardly see a way to keep on caring about issue after issue when someone is constantly insisting that this is the one that’s life or death; this proves our enemies are trying to kill us. Even when I know it’s sort of true—each one is life or death to someone, somewhere—I don’t have the expertise or the energy to get involved with the government’s every move.

I refuse, especially, to pitch a tent in rage and call that home, just for the thrill of adrenaline it offers, while I slowly forget how to belong to civilization.

Still, I can’t just walk away from it all, because I do know life and death are at stake: they’re dealt by the budget, by harassers and protectors, by conservers and destroyers of national land. Policies, systems, and attitudes can treat people as subhuman, and I don’t get to check out, to simply wait on that dehumanization to occur.

There must be some way between fear and rage, and apathy.

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann offers us more words for that pain Dr. Brown asks us to witness. He doesn’t look away from the ugly in the world, but he stands firmly in the camp of hope; and he shows us how Jesus saves from fear and rage and apathy. Christ doesn’t save us all in the same way; salvation looks different for the oppressed (the dehumanized) and the oppressor—the inhuman. The inhuman need to be freed from their own will to power which has stripped them of compassion and peace. The dehumanized receive freedom from the inevitability of their circumstances and the probability that they’ll be turned inhuman themselves; they find dignity in God’s solidarity with their suffering, and there lies the courage and strength to carry on in the struggle to escape oppression.

Billionaires who demand tax cuts at the expense of children’s healthcare: how can Brene Brown ask me to dignify them with civilized language? Because their very inhumanity is so obviously a prison to them, they should rightly be objects of pity. And why shouldn’t I fear the foreigners pouring into my country at all sides? Because it is that very fear that dehumanizes, that backs people into inhuman corners, that fulfills its own prophecy, unless the courage and compassion of Christ flips the script.

Only when we hand our own pain and fear over to Jesus, and take on the terrible task of seeing others’, can we hope to make anything right.

Of course, the world isn’t divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed. Most of us could fit into both categories in some aspect of our lives or another. As much as those categories help me think about specific situations, the point is only this: love proclaims freedom for all. Love invites us to the level places to look each other in the eye. Love says come out of your fear and let go of your greed. Yes, it is a narrow path. Yes, the brave way hurts. But it hurts more to be apart, says God. All this pain, I’ve already borne for you. All that is broken has broken me…Yet I live again.

Do you think I can be allowed to believe in a politics of this audacious love? Will we find a way to be joyful, though we’ve considered all the facts?* Can we look beyond the horizon of today’s breaking news and act, from that far-seeing viewpoint, upon today’s issues—but most importantly, for today’s and tomorrow’s people? Will we believe, not only that God is with us in the suffering of today, but also in every step we take toward grace and peace and justice for all? Can we pray that the oppressor will be crushed—not by vengeance, but by the weight of conviction, before their own hopelessness and helplessness leach away their humanity entirely?

Hope did not live and die with Barack Obama’s presidency, friends. Hope is a clear, steady fire in the night; not a naive wish, but a simple knowing. Hope can be dramatic, but more often it’s a stack of books, a circle of friends, groundedness: those unsexy things that make your fire sustainable so you no longer fear the cold. Hope has to be met after pain has failed to kill you. Hope has always looked more than eight years out—to the life beyond death, the victory beyond defeat, to the kingdom coming and the savior who bears still the scars of love.

What’s feeding your hope-fire these days?

*Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

When Tidying Up isn’t So Tidy: How to Pare Down Old Mementos

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Should we keep childhood memorabilia because it helps us remember the past and reminds us of how we came to be who we are? Or do these things weigh us down?

Dear Lyndsey,

Should we keep childhood memorabilia because it helps us remember the past and reminds us of how we came to be who we are? Or do these things weigh us down (physically, spiritually, etc) and prevent us from living more fully in the present? I know it’s about balance, and will be different for each of us…

L

Dear L,

Have you ever read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up?

It’s that book where Marie Kondo explains that you can clear all the clutter in your house by holding every item in your hand and asking: does this bring me joy?

It’s like the old William Morris quote—”Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—taken to an extreme. And honestly, I never put down the book and started maniacally paring down my closet. I think joy alone is an odd metric for these decisions; I’m not really sure it’s wise to throw out my potato peeler just because it doesn’t give me toe-tingling thrills. There are other reasons to keep things.

Still, I do believe the book has changed lives, because it gets at a truth we know from another great teacher: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Often I let my things hold onto my past (or my beliefs about the future) because I’m not willing to really process it and make it part of me. I just want to be able to visit the past, to know that it’s near, to cozy up to old selves and milestone events without actually deciding what they mean to me; but by leaving the past in limbo, I end up dividing my heart.

When I moved to a new house this summer, I knew I didn’t want a lot of stuff crammed into it. Cramming takes time and space and mental energy. So I did my own little version of the Kondo experiment: I held each item in my hands and asked, does this deserve to take up any more of the space and time in my life?

In the process, I found the things asking questions back to me.

Why have I kept this reminder of a painful school year until now? Because I think I’m supposed to?
Am I really going to pick up this hobby again? Why do I want to believe that?
Is this bringing me joy—or just reminding me that it used to do so? Might a photo of it or essay about it do the same?

I know I’ve faced some of these questions before, but in the past, I defaulted to keeping the thing so I could avoid answering the question. This time, I put a higher value on the space and time in my life—so I made myself come up with an answer.

Maybe I thought the pain could somehow be fixed—or maybe I hadn’t even acknowledged that year was really that painful.
Maybe I’d like to think of myself as someone who does this hobby—but maybe it would feel even better to finally admit that I’m not.
Maybe by now I’ve held this in my hands and smiled enough times that I won’t forget loving it.

In a lot of cases, once I answered the question, the stuff lost its gloss. It became an exercise in letting go.

In the Hebrew Bible, of course, some things are kept for the same reasons: because their questions must be answered over and over. The Israelites had rituals, altars, buildings, and decorations that existed solely for the purpose of inviting children to ask: why is this here? What does it mean?

Because everyone needs reminders of the simple answers to children’s questions, these objects deserved the time and space they took up. The questions they held could be answered with stories—stories of God’s faithfulness, stories that told the people who they were, stories that invited them to live as God’s children.

Of course, the stories and the storytellers were really more sacred than the objects; but those reminders were still precious. The stories were too important to plan to tell them “someday”; so the objects made an occasion to stop. Stop what you’re doing and gather round. We’re remembering together.

If you’re like me, you start looking for the “balance” when you don’t want to admit that something is a both/and, neither/nor, sometimes-this-and-sometimes-that situation. Wouldn’t it be more comforting to lay down some more straightforward rules? How will we measure our righteousness (or our productivity/happiness/health) without some ideal to shoot for, some Platonian form of “balance”? It would be nice if some authority could tell us, “every adult should have five or fewer childhood items in their house!”

But you already know that, in this case, there’s no easy standard. It just depends. What are the things? Might someone else need them, or might they be causing you harm? Could you do something with them that would make them more useful or beautiful? Are you saving them for your children? How much space do you have in your house? How many stories do you have to tell?

Marie Kondo would stand behind you and whisper, throw it all away. But she might be just a wee bit…unbalanced.

For my part, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t come and tell you what to do with each thing. But maybe I could help you listen to the questions and the stories each object holds. Maybe I could remind you that when you keep the best and let go of the merely good, you usually end up with a feeling of greater abundance. I’d repeat a few mantras to you:

Place a high value on your time and space.
Be honest with yourself.
Never keep something just because you’re afraid to let it go.
Don’t get rid of things when you’re in a bad mood.
Be kind to your past self.

Treasure things because they represent stories told—not because they harbor stories untold.

Taking stock of your things can help you take stock of your life; so have nothing in your life which you do not know to be useful or believe, somehow, to be beautiful.

 

Have you encountered this problem? Share with us: any tidying-up mantras you’ve discovered over the years?

what we want from those privileged men

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As the stories of sexual harassment pile up, I wonder if men are reading them. I wonder if they can imagine doing any of these things, or enduring any of these things. Over and over I think, “I can’t imagine believing for one second I’m entitled to behavior like this.” Over and over, I realize we live in different worlds.

I find myself increasingly suspicious, or even resentful, of men in power—people I don’t know, people I’ve long assumed to be respectable, good at heart. Now I’m not so sure. Even men who think they have good intentions can cover up for offenders and blame victims. Even those men who are usually generous and humble live, sometimes, with an entitlement they can’t see.

I don’t want to think this way, but it’s not a mindset to be overcome; it’s the truth. I remember, for example, the first time I went to a lecture and stretched out my arms across the backs of the chairs next to me, just as an experiment, imitating hundreds of men I’ve seen throughout my life casually taking up the space of three people in churches, lecture halls, and trains. I feel arm and back muscles pulling out of confinement, my chest thrust open in an alert, confident pose. Adopting this posture is like seeing through someone else’s eyes—someone with little to fear from the world, who can expect others to accommodate him, who can sit this way and project a casual, capable demeanor, and not feel himself ridiculous or overlarge.

I wonder if some of the jokes we make about the differences between the sexes mostly serve to paper over the vast chasm between our ways of seeing the world—or, more accurately, between the ways the world teaches us to be treated. I wonder if we’d rather banter over silly stereotypes than sit for a minute in each other’s worlds. How many men have ever sat like a woman sits? Managing their personal space; apologetic for possessing limbs; wondering if we have offended, overstepped, invited harassment or violence?

I was recently catcalled by a couple of kids, maybe seven and ten years old. It stung in the moment as I tried to ignore the whole episode, but my sorrow and rage have grown since then. The problem is exactly that they were just kids; just practicing how to be men. They were only imitating the men they knew. They giggled and hid, betraying nervousness; getting the script down for when they are old enough to truly assert dominance.

I think it would be easier to write an article where we all simply understand that I’m angry about this. But sometimes anger is little more than a reflex to avoid overwhelm when the political gets personal.

The truth is, I’m angry, but I’m also scared, and constantly flummoxed, and deeply, increasingly sad. The truth is I don’t want to be angry. I want to believe in the decency of men and the empowerment of women. I would rather just leave it at “we all have something to learn from each other.” It would be nice if I could envision a neat scenario where grown men calmly recognize their privilege and share it with women; where we all know how to raise girls who easily take up their own space and boys who easily keep their hands to themselves.

There is this, too: in everything I’m saying I recognize, word for word, the pleas of black and brown brothers and sisters to white people. And I, who have always sought connection and harmony and bright visions for the future, have to accept that before there can be bright visions, there is already a vast gulf between my experiences of the world and theirs. I have to understand that I don’t simply get to master a vocabulary and collect a pat on the back. I have to commit myself to a lifetime of listening and learning, humility and counterintuitive choices, constant questioning of the status quo and deep unpopularity with those who uphold it. And these things are exhausting. And I don’t always want to do them. And they will still not simply fix things for my friends who experience racism daily.

So why should I expect men to do the same things for women?

Maybe some of them will start out like me: so invested in their perception of themselves as decent people that they’ll listen when we say decency means believing us. Please, just try to inhabit our world.

Or maybe some are truly such caring, empathetic people that our stories will inspire them to help make the world a better place—even if the process is grueling and the rewards come slow.

Maybe they will find their own anger over injustice, and let it propel them to action.

And I suppose I’m hoping that if they start—if they will crack open a little bit, and make our pain theirs, and take the time, not to dismiss, but to really see us, and see that painful chasm dividing our worlds from theirs—they could find themselves coming beautifully undone. Not that they would be filled with self-loathing or eternal regret; but that they might begin to understand how limited their own vision has been. Not that they would walk on eggshells around us because of our demands, but that they would actually learn from our experiences how to be in the world with more gentleness, courtesy, and respect.

Maybe if our stories were heard and believed, and our bodies protected, women would slowly find ourselves healing and our resentment lessening. If men really believed that our well-being is essential to theirs, that our worldview is worthwhile, that sharing their spaces with us makes those spaces better; we could wrap up the work of anger and carry on to other tasks.

But we know that the men who choose this path will first be overwhelmed by grief, because breaking out of their own perceptions to see things as we see them means entering into our fear and pain. Our courage and strength, too, for sure, but first, the danger and hardship that lurk everywhere for us. We’re not watching this grief with glee, but with simple relief and guarded hope that it could lead to change.

We’re asking men to see what it could be like to try taking up less space. Or to consider that interpersonal dynamics could be as important as productivity hacks. Or to listen extra carefully to women in meetings—as women do for each other—to make sure they get credit for their contributions.

Yes, we want to see ourselves more highly valued and more free. But mostly, we want our daughters to grow up without fear and disadvantage.

Of course we know that life is hard for everybody, that the privileged do not escape trouble altogether. But isn’t that the point? Life is hard for everybody—but maybe someday we won’t insist on adding to the hardship of some. Life is hard for everybody—and maybe someday that will be a fact that doesn’t divide, but unites us in care for each exquisite, fragile, breathtakingly brave, unrepeatable other.

how to love when you’re secretly scared

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Even churches that claim to include everyone can make people feel like misfits. For so many of us, it takes gumption just to walk into a service, senses on alert, fidgeting in the back, wanting to whisper to someone: I’ve heard a rumor God shows up here sometimes.

There are lots of long-winded, super-precise definitions of faith, but for me sometimes faith is just expecting God to show up—even when it seems unlikely. Even when the world is dark. Even when church people scare the crap out of me. Even when I’m nowhere near holy enough to approach God; I believe God is drawing near to me. And maybe if God shows up for me, I can show up for someone else. Maybe I can invest in this hopeful, sinful, righteous, ragtag, still-coalescing group called Two Rivers Church, with all its beautiful dreams and all the inevitability that it will sometimes fall short of them.

 

Read the rest here at my new church’s blog.