Lessons from the Three Year Olds...

This month in Sunday School we are studying parables. A very difficult concept for three year olds! Try to explain how the kingdom of God is like yeast… Try to explain yeast! Generally the more abstract concepts prove the most difficult, but last week it was a very basic concept that threw them off.

We were studying Matthew 20:1-16. It is the parable in which the landowner goes out early in the morning to hire workers. He offers to pay them a fair wage and they agree. Later in the day, the landowner goes out to recruit more workers… and offers them the same amount of money even though they are only working part of the day. At the last hour, the landowner goes out to recruit a final group of workers and again pays them the same amount as those recruited early in the morning. Generally this is an easy parable to explain. We are acutely aware of the injustice inherent in the parable. How could the landowner not see that it was unfair to pay so much to those who had worked so little! Those recruited early in the morning had worked hard! They deserved to be paid more! Isn’t that how our society works? If you work hard you will be rewarded? There are no free handouts in our society.

The three year olds, unfortunately, do not have this same concept of fairness. They do not understand working hard and being rewarded. Imagine us trying to convince them how unfair the parable was! Especially when they immediately grasped what Jesus was trying to teach. For these little ones, fair was each one receiving an equal share. They understood receiving and wanted all to receive. Now, I am not arguing that three year olds are perfect or are not selfish. They want things just as much as the rest of us. But they are able to receive freely. Actually, they often have no other choice. Everything they have has been freely received.

When do we forget that? The fact that everything we have has also been freely received. Everything we have has been graciously given to us by God. We did not earn it. We did not do anything to deserve it. Yet we do deserve it… we deserve it because we are beloved children of God. We all deserve it. We all deserve the grace of God. Those who worked hard from early in the morning and those who received grace late in the day. This is not an excuse to reward yourself. It is not an excuse to justify over-consumption arguing that all we have is free gift of God. It is not a call to those who do not have to live patiently waiting for God to provide. Rather, it is a call to fight against the jealousy that can so easily entangle us. The desire to have what all those around us have.

This parable becomes even more difficult for us to grasp when we fall into the trap of believing the all-American myth that if you work hard you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded if you do the things that are valued by our society… and from what I have observed, we value athletes, movies stars, pop musicians, and wealthy people. The reality is that those who have often are able to gain more much more easily than those who do not have. You can work hard all of your life and never make it. That is not to say that the American dream does not come true at times for some. And it is more likely to come true in this country than it is in many other places in the world. But we all know people who work extremely hard and are not paid nearly enough… school teachers, janitors, social workers, secretaries, housecleaners.

But, back to the parable. Back to the lesson from those little three year olds. God offers us a gracious gift. The same gift is offered to all. God offers us the kingdom. God offers us the chance to become children of God, to stand side by side as equals before the Lord. Perhaps this is what it means to become like little children.

Machu Picchu

I wish I had a bit more time to reflect in my blog on this trip, but that will have to come later. Internet access has been limited by slow computers and long days of travel and sightseeing.

We arrived in Aguas Calientes (now Machu Picchu Pueblo) on Thursday, a town nestled in a little valley up and down a river just outside of and several steep switchbacks down from the ruins of Machu Picchu. After dropping our bags, we headed out to the ruins at about 11:00 am.
As the bus climbed up the mountainside I was struck again by how crazy this all is.
I never would have dreamt that the little girl I was would be the woman who has been trekking around Peru this fall.

It still doesnt seem real to me. As you near the sight, suddenly, sitting on the side of the mountain you see terraces with rock walls and then the walls of several small buildings clustered together. You catch glimpses of this over and over, building your anticipation until you finally pull into the parking lot. Then, through the gates, and a hike up to the funerary hut that provides a panoramic view of the ruins laid out on the mesa before you.
A central plaza with a few llamas grazing.








A few small temples along the ridge. A quarry of stone.








And my favorite, the hitching post of the sun.


If ever you believed that colonists were civilizing the world... or that the world continues to evolve, a sight like Machu Picchu or Tikal (Mayan ruins in Northern Guatemala that we visited last year), a sight like this gives you pause.

Apparently there is a sundial set within the ruins that can point not just to north, but also to magnetic north. As much as the people of Peru might have learned from Spanish Colonists, that much knowledge was probably lost in the process as well.

Advanced civilizations have arisen throughout time. Most have fallen or disappeared in mysterious circumstances or in the midst of war. If ever we felt that we were indestructible as a nation, a sight like this gives you pause. They had conquered much of South America. Ruled a tremendous, wealthy empire. And with the might of foreign germs going before them, they fell to the Spanish Colonists. An entire civilization was "civilized".

There are signs of the culture hidden within the Catholic Cathedrals and in many of the festivals and rituals of the people. There is a desire to restore and recover what was lost. One can never go back and recreate from the old. One can only rebuild from what one has been given, seeking to reclaim what was lost and allow it to be more fully intergrated into what has become.

I guess I had a little time for reflection after all...

A Gendered Society

This past week I have been reading Julie Ingersoll’s Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. The title betrays Ingersoll’s bias… one I probably share a bit more than I’d like to admit. I have my own war stories to tell. Much of the sociological information was familiar to me, but the analysis was interesting… and challenging. Ingersoll explores how gender is constructed in the evangelical world. Now before you start arguing about gender, creation, and biological differences between men and women, let me state that I agree that there are differences. I also believe that gender is more than our biological differences. It is also a social construction… the way we live out and interpret those differences. The values we place on them. How we structure economies and societies around them.

Ingersoll describes the gendered nature of the evangelical world… the segregated small groups, the men’s and women’s ministries, the gender-specific social events. She goes into great detail describing a Christian bookstore with its Victorian knick-knacks designed to harken back to an imaginary time when gender roles were so much clearer. With its “Jesus loves Me” plaques with sports figures for the boys and angels for the girls. The books for women that deal with relationships, healing the pasts, building friendships. The books for men that talk about leadership and servanthood. Ingersoll argues that within the evangelical culture, the gendered body has become something symbolic. And the pressure to conform to gender roles, both explicit and subtle, can been extremely powerful and at times extremely wounding.

How does this gendered-society impact women clergy? We can see from other studies (ie. Clergy Women by Zikmund. Lummis and Chang) the pressure clergy women are under to be good Christians by fulfilling traditional roles as a wife and mother as well as fulfilling their duties as a pastor. And that these expectations are significantly different than that of clergy men. We also see differences in how congregations expect women to lead and how they interpret the ways they leave. While a majority of male and female clergy feel that they are democratic rather than directive leaders, congregations feel that their male clergy are more directive and female clergy are more democratic.

I am raising questions that I don’t have answers to. One’s I’ll probably continue to explore in this blog in the next few months. But for now, that will have to wait. You can anticipate the next blogs to take a turn in another direction… reflections on my upcoming trip to Peru. Maybe when I return you’ll have some additional insights into all of this to help guide my way.

Reflections on a Mammogram

Turning 40… it brings all sorts of new experiences. Not the least of which was my first mammogram. All I have to say is clearly men invented this device and if you want proof that there is not sufficient funding going towards women’s health issues, consider the process of getting a mammogram. Your breast is treated like an object… okay, that may not be new for women in our society… perhaps the difference is that suddenly your breast has no sexual or social implications whatsoever. The doctor pokes and prods it. The nurse lifts it up and pushes it this way and that. Then this contraption squeezes it harder than you ever imagined was possible. And they take a picture. As one who has never really had anyone poking or prodding my breasts, it was a bit of an uncomfortable experience. I imagine that pregnant women go through similar experiences with various parts of their bodies suddenly assuming different roles and/or significance in the world. I knew that our bodies were culturally as well as physically constructed, but this brought that understanding to a whole new level. It is amazing how our culture has shaped the significance of various body parts. How that construction is related to issues of power, race, and gender. How a body part can have a different meaning in a variety of contexts. As someone interested in art and photography, how can you tell the difference between art and pornography? Who gets to draw that line? Is it the person begin filmed, painted, or photographed? Is it the “artist”? The government and its laws and legislations? Our various cultures? The cultural construction of the body is significant theological discussion in feminist and womanist circles as well as among black theologians and others who reflect on issues of slavery and abuse. We tend to devalue the bodies that we want to use for our own benefit or pleasure. Perhaps we do the same to individual parts of our bodies. Perhaps we do it to ourselves as well as others. It seems clear that God values us as material beings, created with bodies that are to reflect the image of God. It seems clear that we are to treat others, and their bodies, as if they are bearers of God’s image. It seems clear, too, that I must be concerned about how we have constructed our world in such a way that others bodies don’t seem as valuable as mine. When traveling outside of the United States, I am constantly aware of the fact that my body is often more protected than the bodies of people from other countries who don’t have the power and influence to demand that their bodies be treated with respect. I am also aware that my body can become symbolic… one United States Citizen… or one Iraqi… or one Mexican… treated in such a way as to communicate something to the whole… in such a way that the individual body, the individual person disappears… All that from a simple mammogram.

Quote of the Day

“We tend to repeat customary actions unaware that when we do today what we did yesterday we actually do something different since in the interval both we and our environment have changed; unaware also that we now do without conscious definition of purpose and method what was done yesterday with specific ends in view and by relatively precise means."

From the forward to H. Richard Niebuhr's The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, 1956

Outdoor Education

When I moved to Chicago seven years ago, I felt like I was losing something. For those of you used to the outdoors, you might understand what I am talking about. I knew that nature was important to me, but I don’t think of myself as an outdoor woman. I don’t do a lot of hiking or camping or fishing. I don’t own hardly any outdoor gear. But there are little clues around my house… the vases full of shells from California and Florida. Another full of rocks from the north shore of Lake Superior. The plants that fill my dining room. And, of course, the jeep I own.

The wilderness and faith trip allowed me to reclaim some of the outdoor in me… and to explore some of the reasons why nature is such a part of my soul. A lot of it has to do with where I grew up. Our house was surrounded by untouched hills filled with oak trees, poison ivy, and deer… Deer everywhere. So many that they spilled over into our streets and gardens. Less than a mile from our house was the San Francisco Bay. We’d climb the rocks that protected the roadway. My brother would fish out on the points. For a few years we had a boat in the harbor.

My school nurtured this love of nature. One of the benefits of growing up in Northern California. There was a salt marsh out back we would explore. Several times a year we would go on field trips to see Mrs. Terwilliger, a local naturalist who would gather us kids in a circle and teach us to flap our wings like the various birds from the area. We’d explore Ducksbury Reef, wandering through the tidal pools looking at anemones, mussels, and small fish. I still remember when the bee keeper came to school and I was the one who got to dress up and attempt to smoke the bees out of their hives (there weren’t really any bees, but I didn’t know that at the time!) And there were the trips to the aquarium, wandering along the ledge that allowed us to be eye level with the fish. I was sure I wanted to be an oceanographer. I even did one of my junior high reports on Jacques Cousteau.

And my parents added to this love of the outdoors. Some of my favorite memories are camping with the family. They were always short trips… but my family would drive down a dirt road in the midst of nowhere and park alongside a stream. Trout fishing. Campfires. And projects. I remember gathering leaves and making them into a book. Each page labeled with the name of the tree. We also used to go on an annual hike to see the Salmon spawning in Samuel P. Taylor State Park. It was almost always a misty or rainy day. We would pull off on the side of the road and start hiking up the trail along the stream. Back into the damp woods.

My mom had nature projects for us all the time. Collecting driftwood and making them into little creatures. Digging molds for sand candles. Making sun catchers with leaves, melted crayons and wax paper. Spray painting spider webs and mounting them on paper. She may have gotten some of her love of nature from her parents who do a fair share of birdwatching.

It is a heritage I am very grateful for. This love of nature. It is part of my culturally constructed understanding of the wilderness. It is part of the privilege of growing up in a world where wilderness is for beauty and recreation, not an entity to struggle with for survival. Those who struggle with wilderness may also have a love of nature, but it will be different, formed in a different context.

I wonder how Israel’s understanding of the wilderness was formed? Certainly witnessing to the plagues in Egypt, experiencing God as a pillar of fire, wandering for years in the wilderness shaped a generation’s understanding of nature. And their understanding of God. Jesus carried with him this heritage and then added his own experiences of the temptation and a life on the Sea of Galilee. Where do my understandings of nature and God intersect with those of Israel? And how does that change or enhance my reading of scripture?

It is this attempt to read context that I think is so vital to our understanding of scripture and theology. By examining my own context and that of those who are different than me, my own understanding of God is enhanced, widened, deepened. My own perceptions are questioned and I am able to consider and question the perceptions of others. And together, perhaps, we can come to understand more of this vast God that we worship and serve.

Constructing Wilderness

One of the first articles we read for the Wilderness and Faith class was “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” by William Cronon. The article explores how the idea of “wilderness” has been constructed by our culture. Cronon argues that while as late as the late eighteenth century wilderness as seen as “deserted, savage, desolate, barren, -- in short, a waste” by the late 1800’s wilderness was romanticized as a part of the foundation of the United States. With the frontier disappearing, with the development of urbanization, the wilderness became a place where white men (primarily) “rediscovered their primitive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and thereby reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character.”

Many people think Cronon was challenging or weakening the environmental movement. They believed that he was arguing against conservation. I disagree. I think Cronon was simply exploring how our culture has shaped our idea of wilderness and how that can, at times, distort our relationship to it. He writes of how the ideal wilderness was a place without people, pristine, untouched. To romanticize the wilderness and frontier allowed us to pretend that we didn’t drive the Native American people from the land. To assume that wilderness is most ideal when not in relationship to humanity allows gives us no place to explore ways of healthy interaction with nature and reclaiming our tie to the land. Wilderness in isolation allows us to continue to take land from the poor and those we devalue for a “higher good.”

I am not arguing against the need to preserve pristine landscapes. I think it is valuable for us to recognize our limits in this world and our place sharing this planet with all of creation. Cronon points out, though, that our concept of wilderness was tied to an idealized beauty, a sense of the sublime. Early on, this meant that we preserved spectacular landscapes before attending to the less striking. Yosemite becomes a national treasure, but the desert Central Valley of California only a few miles away is turned into one big irrigated, farmland.

I think this idea has changed in the last few decades. I grew up with an appreciation of a variety of types of wilderness. California is full of striking national parts, but surrounding our house were rolling brown (years of drought) hills covered in oak trees and poison ivy, full of deer and chipmunks. They had been set aside by the utility company and full of fire trails. Behind our elementary school was the marsh, a salt-water wetlands that was part of our educational experience. I remember how ugly I though it was. Yet I learned to look for the red wing blackbirds that would try to lure us away from their nests by feigning injury. I remember the smell of the fennel and the fuzz of the cattails. I remember how out of place it looked when the built a tennis court right in the middle of it all. I was taught early on to appreciate a variety of wildernesses.
This seems quite biblical. Recognizing the value of all of creation. Not valuing those who seems more valuable or beautiful on the surface. But recognizing that we are all connected, the body of Christ. In the same way, all of creation is related to one another. One great organism. At times we have overlooked the parts that have seemed less valuable, but as God reminds us, often those parts that look the least valuable are to be valued the most.

Below are a few of my attempts to find beauty in the "less spetacular" parts of nature:

Another 40 Year Old Virgin

I have hesitated writing this post… it’s embarrassing. It’s vulnerable. It’s about sex. It is not like I want to announce to everyone that I am now a 40 year old virgin… but it seems like someone needs to. I remember a few years ago a woman writing a book on the subject of her virginity at a relatively late age. I also remember the jokes on Letterman and Leno about it. I won’t go into those here. Then, of course, there was the recent movie with the title “The 40 Year Old Virgin.” It is not the first time I have been the stereotypical geek of a movie. You might remember the movie “Sixteen Candles.” Classic teen romance. Geek meets jock. Molly Ringwold. Joan Cusack plays the girl with the back brace they ride the bus with. If you can picture it… in junior high I was the girl with the back brace, braces on my teeth (the big silver ones… not the clear ones they have now!), carrying the cello with her on and off the school bus.

Okay, so this is a little different. Yet it evokes some of the same feelings. I feel like I must be the only 40 year old virgin in the world. Though I know it is not true. I have friends in a similar situation. A few. It is such a joke that I wonder if something is wrong with me. Okay, granted, I have trouble with relationships and there is something a bit messed up about me. Yet, from what I have observed, perfection has not been a requirement for most people to start having sex.

The reason it disturbs me the most is that I feel the same way in the midst of the church as I do in the rest of the world. Lauren Winner recently spoke about sex at North Park. She has a fairly recent book about chastity. I’ve heard it is a great book. I also know that it was written by someone discovering chastity as a new Christian, a renewed virginity. I’ve decided I should write a book about virginity… what it is really like to wait for 40 years. (I hate to admit it… while it might be frustrating, it hasn’t been that difficult. I don’t have guys falling at my feet begging me for sex everyday… or ever).

I have found that most people assume that someone who is single and my age has had sex. If we haven’t had sex, we must have found some outlet for our sexuality. And most of the outlets people can imagine are not condoned by the church. So, we must be doing something sinful. But it is easier to assume that I am doing something sinful than to imagine that I might actually have been faithful. Now don’t let your mind wander too far at this point… stick to the point of the post….
I am not writing to condemn those who have not followed this path. I know it is a hard road for many. I don’t know why God has not placed me in a situation where my conviction has been seriously tested. Mostly I am grateful for that...I suppose I wanted to write this to encourage others who have remained chaste their whole life… and have done it as an act of faith and obedience. It is not something we should be ashamed of. It is not something that people should whisper about or make jokes about… especially in the church. It does not mean that we are undesirable or unattractive. It is simply the path that God has called us to… may the church come alongside and support us as we strive to be faithful.

Blood Diamond

Last night I watched the movie Blood Diamond, a story about conflict diamonds in Africa. The story follows the lives of a diamond smuggler from Zimbabwe and a fisherman from Sierra Leone that weave together over a giant pink diamond found in the mines. It was an excellent movie with a social and political message as well as a story of personal redemption.

The movie centers on the civil war raging in Sierra Leone… there are scenes of villages being overtaken, the rebels taking the capital city, captives in the mining camps, children forced into the army, a refugee camp of over a million people, and a foreign corporation that is profiting from it all. I remember thinking how grateful I was that I don’t live in that world. I can’t imagine being dragged out of my home and forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on my back. Living with the constant threat of violence.

Two things came to mind… first, could that sort of violence one day make its way here to the United States. What makes me think that this country or my home is immune to such a possibility? Perhaps it won’t be the violence of war. Perhaps it will be a natural disaster or an economic crash. Some in this country have lived with this reality. Would my life be different if I lived with the reality that all of this is transitory?

Second, how is it that this country has avoided civil war and/or genocide for so long? We are so often the ones that profit from the wars taking place overseas. How do I contribute to these wars by demanding an unlimited supply of oil, diamonds, or other natural resources? By refusing to carpool or take public transportation. By not recycling. By wanting everything new, fast, and convenient. Like having a DVD delivered to my home each week by mail so I can watch a movie such as Blood Diamond.

Will watching this movie change my life? Not as much as it should. But perhaps it will nudge me a little.