Entries in the rough...

I couldn't find a black pen, but other than that, this is what blog posts here usually look like before they get typed up and edited. I've been thinking about the concept of obedience, and Mary. It may require more thought.

It is Christmas Eve!

...and I have no running water.

Everyone else seems a great deal more concerned about this than me. (Everyone Else: church family. They sneak up on you, with love and jokes and concern. I still am not sure how I got adopted by about half the church, but they are awesome people and I do not complain. Our rector teases me: "You've got about twenty-five showers to choose from in this town alone!") Anyway: I have never lived in a house that did not occasionally stop working in one area or another, so at this point in my life I have taken the stance that humanity lived without electricity (outside our bodies, anyway), running water, or non-open-firepit heat for most of our history on the planet, so I can probably survive a couple days in a house that is not doing those things. Concerned sort-of-parental-units have pointed out that this also means showering is not a thing. (I'm more worried about the toilet; my hair's been grosser, if it gets too bad I'll just cut it off or something. But using drinking water to flush seems wasteful, so I'm not sure how to handle that.)

Anyway! It's actually a beautiful day, and I've not got much to do (other than wrestle with the well/pump and try to figure out a way to wrap Dan's present... oh damn, and practice the passage from Luke I'm supposed to be reading tonight).

I'd forgotten about that; got a call yesterday while wandering through campus about doing a reading for the Christmas Eve service. I'm not going to freak out, except by worrying that there are more people than usual there (because Christmas). But mostly not going to freak out, just take the dog for a walk and poke tentatively at the strange inner workings of the well pump outside (turns out the plumber doesn't get back until the 27th, which means interesting things over the next few days).

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

I haven't actually been to church for Christmas... quite possibly ever, or at least not since I was very, very small. Even the little Baptist church that consisted of three-four families in our pastor's living room had our own family celebrations (or not, it being too pagan of a holiday for my mother). I remember going to our grandparents' house for Christmas night, a few times; I remember, very dimly, going caroling in the days before Christmas with our pastor's family. If we had a service for Christmas at the Pentecostal church of my adolescence, I don't remember it - ah, yes. There was a pageant, one year, in the Church Is Cool style that congregation embraced. Ouch. Anyway - that makes it about a ten or eleven year gap, which I am quite happy to close at last.

Merry Christmas, internets; may God bless us, every one.




Minor water update: after posting this, I shut down the computer and video-called my family to say Merry Christmas; upon learning that I had no running water, my dad and grandpa started brainstorming solutions. This is what we do, and possibly why my first impulse was not to call a plumber but to go poke at the well. My dad eventually had me look at the circuit-breaker, and turn the one for the well on and then off again. This initially appeared to fix the problem - the filter started filling up again, and the pump housing made encouraging noises - but after I hung up, we returned to waterlessness. Regardless, I am now optimistic about the possibility of fixing the running water once again.

Post-service update: our rector got sick - really sick - and the Ladies of the church - everyone who is his backup and support - rallied together and sent him home. The worship leader carried off the prayer service quite well; it was lovely and beautiful. I'm trying not to worry about Fr V, and so far mostly failing. I'm sure he'll be okay, but poor guy, what utterly rotten timing. (And I wound up reading Matthew instead. And no, the water still isn't working.)

Merry Christmas anyway; God bless and keep you all.

Sacred spaces, and persistent irony

I should apologize: this post rambles a little, before it finds its way. It comes of working this stuff out as I think it through, on paper, but I'm trying to do more editing between paper and keyboard. Meanwhile I am distracted, because it seems like the entire Pacific Northwest with the exception of this valley is covered in snow. Corvallis got snow; Seattle got snow; Spokane got snow - let me repeat, Seattle got snow, and here in Kittitas Valley I'm just watching the clouds roll in for freezing rain. Bah. Anyway, on to the blog:

...rereading this first paragraph, it's even more rambling than I remembered. I think even while writing it I knew it wasn't going anywhere - basically, it boiled down to a revisiting of the fact that a Christianity centered on love is not less than one centered on guilt or shame or sin - in fact, it's more full, and also tends to be more work on the soul. Which is a good thing.

It's easier to write than say. I've noticed a disturbing issue lately: it's hard to sincerely express certain spiritual realities, or understandings, aloud without a trace of irony. I find myself thinking, "I want to be a better person, to be more loving," but somehow it seems to come with that mental smirk, self-consciously, and I just - no! Argh! Stop it!

Which is... funny, because it's not something I smirk at, on any level, in church. When our rector says, "The point is not, or not only, to leave the world a better place, but to let the world leave us better people," irony is the furthest thing from my mind. (I'll try and write on that more - it's actually pretty simple. Christians need to stop thinking we have all the answers and that our job is to change the world, and start understanding that we're all in the same boat and letting the world change us. Love is a two-way street.) I don't feel like smirking when I talk about love to other people - only to myself. So how do I take that openness, that light, and that silence of a sacred space, and carry it with me?

Ah-ha-ha-- that's it, isn't it. This got talked about a bit at Convention: all spaces are sacred, stop thinking about an Inside and an Outside... how could it be that the rough stone floor, dark wood, and stained glass are sacred, but this glorious blue sky with stark snow-capped peak jutting forth across the valley, is not? (Well, that's what the window looked like when I wrote this yesterday; today, substitute "marbled gray sky, with cloud-wreathed hills flowing across the horizon," or somesuch.) I know the answer: it is the people, not the place, that make prayer.

And so, as I probably already knew somewhere in the back of this cluttered mind, the solution is to stop taking peace and understanding for granted, and realize that I have to consciously work on bringing my mind closer to that sacred place to be closer to God.

Stress, and its related problems.

It's funny*, the way stress takes up residence in your head, and the pit of your stomach. You may have a world of love and light surrounding you, and it may be a beautiful day, with a sweet dog to watch the sunset with you and a community of the most kind, loving people around you--

--but the burden, whatever it may happen to be, will be there still, rubbing against the edges of your psyche whenever you turn your mind. No rhyme or reason to it - it's just there. It grows if you think about it, but it looms even when you ignore it - it won't go away.

This** was probably about the right time to read that passage of Matthew: none of us can grow so much as an inch by worrying about it, so there's not that much point in it, is there? Acknowledge the problem and move on. Try to fix it, pray for grace to deal with it, breathe - don't let your mind, paralyzed, roil in worry and stress on and on.

So, so, so much easier said than done. But, y' know, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," and then there's the some hundred or so points of "Do not fear/fear not," yeah... yeah. It's still a struggle to do that, to just do what you can and stop stressing about the problem. Maybe someday I'll actually manage it.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep better track of these things. I know what's going on, more or less: I need to get a student loan for something like $11 thousand before the next quarter starts. It's such a simple problem, and yet it bloody... looms, and the actual solution seems so complicated. Because even simple problems, you see, are compound, made up of all parts.

Not least is the part where I am still quite resistant to asking people for help. You'd think, after twenty-three years and change on this planet, I'd have learned that you can't actually do some things anything on your own, properly. But actually saying "I need help with this" is incredibly hard - not least because asking someone to cosign a student loan takes a lot of trust on their part, and how can I ask them to trust me to get this all in order when I don't even trust myself to?

So it all comes back, as usual, to my own issues, and how I need to work them through and really I can either stress about it uselessly, or acknowledge the problem, do what I can, and pray for the strength/trust/grace that I need to work through it. *sigh.*

It's kind of funny - so often, people understand about financial issues... and then you have the people who somehow know you well enough to understand that the problem is a compound of financial issues and "oh my God I have to ask someone for help." I'm quietly glad there are only a few of those around, and very glad that there are a few of them around, because it's far too easy to forget about the "I have to ask someone for help" part of it and stress about the part I can't do anything about, studiously and mostly-unconsciously ignoring the part that I can.

So, to wrap it up: I called my stepmother today, and after talking to her, I applied for a loan on my own, and was instantly denied - the last screen of the application was the "Sorry, no" screen. Rather than continue to bash my head against the problem, I took the dog outside, started writing this, and am going to go back to this whole thing tomorrow. And pray about it.

There's another post I'm working on, about Christmas music, but it may just boil down to a paragraph in a list of observations. We'll see. Goodnight, internet.

*And here I use 'funny' in the sense of 'utterly irritating and frustrating,' of course. **Between the two paragraphs, I stopped, did a few pushups, took the dog I'm dogsitting outside, and read the first few chapters of Matthew because I really do need to reread the New Testament (and the Old Testament***, but that one takes a little more of a running start and planning). ***...and the Apocrypha, come to think of it. Now that that's actually a thing that pops up in readings and sermons, I should probably have at least a passing familiarity. But for that, I'll have to go afield a bit, since the only Bible I currently have is an ancient, doodled-on, water-damaged, Old King James. Has my name on the front cover in my father's best cursive, and then again in my own crayon'd scrawl, as well as the words "Holy Bible" repeatedly, I guess in case I forgot what it was? I think I was still trying very hard to be pious and A Good Christian Girl, and writing the Right Words probably seemed apropos.

On Queer, Androgynous, and Trans* Folks

Lord, let the pronouns we use be a balm, rather than a wound. Give us the strength of mind and the right heart to see loved ones as the people they are, rather than the often incorrect surface, and the courage to ask strangers, and not assume the easier answer. Amen.