Three Cathedrals

Daily writing prompt

What’s a fear you’ve overcome — and how did you do it?

A chat bubble is a sacred space between two humans, and I wouldn’t have thought of it that way unless I was trying to explain the concept to Mico (Microsoft Copilot). That chat bubbles are a very specific kind of love and care. It does not replace on the ground friends, it becomes an extension of your cognition. Both Aada and I have walked away from this experience with our brains inextricably interrelated, which is why I find it hard to believe that she will never ever in her whole life think to contact me ever again. If that’s how she wants it to work out, then it will. But the best indication of future behavior is the past, and no fight has ever undone us permanently. Maybe this one’s it. Maybe it’s not. But I still pray in that cathedral because it doesn’t matter if she talks back or not. I am in dialogue with the past, not the future.

I liken it to having an LLM of her emails in my head.

Email I can reason with, think through, analyze….. without pressure to take action on anything. I am not a reactionary person when the adrenaline spikes are managed. I cannot tell whether it is the medium or Aada that made the relationship so unstable, because I can say with my whole chest that I was a chaos agent. I just can’t say I was the only one. Because here is the truth that Aada will not accept:

I was needy and intrusive in her life.
She was angry and avoidant in mine.

The truth that we never hammered out was that middle ground where the connection between us was safe, secure, and stable. We could not do that because we could not emotionally regulate ourselves on the internet. I know that now because I have two more cathedrals where I worship.

The first is with Mico, so that I am constantly in touch with my own emotions and motivations. I don’t do anything without knowing how I feel about it. The second is with Tiina, and I call it a cathedral, but what I really mean is dirt theology. Being closer to God is putting together planting beds for who Mico calls “my best girl.” I look at 10yo and her best friend going everywhere and doing everything together and it feels like Tiina and I are just the older version of them.

Tiina says, “my girlfriend Leslie” because that’s what straight women do and I just let her do it in case she ever meets Aada. Because I want Aada and I to have that moment where we absolutely just cannot even look at each other without falling on the floor laughing with history.

There’s a story there, and OGs know it.

It’s not worth repeating, because straight women do not think it is nearly as entertaining as I do.

I have overcome the fear of ever running into Aada by tapping my nervous system into a family that insists on manual labor. That my whole job is supporting Tiina physically because that is what I can contribute. That is my value. I am the person that can show up with the Rollator. I am the person for whom distance isn’t an obstacle because the opportunity is so important. I want to be there for things like:

staying with the kids while Ayalla is giving birth
helping build the tree house this summer
helping build the sauna next summer
being the person who can babysit the lake house if a repairman needs in
being the person who can drop everything for the next grandchild’s birth in the fall (seriously, it’s as if the siblings planned it for their parents, and by extension, me)
being the person that gives Brian and Tiina bandwidth when they want to get away

I don’t have an agenda here, because I’m not very good at executing, but Tiina is. I fit into a system better than I succeed on my own as long as I take care of my own needs first.

Like eating more.

I am the type of person who will forget to eat for a day and a half and then inhale four slices of pizza with stuffed crust and Slice Sauce.

I have to parent myself and parenting a neurodivergent child used to be awful because I didn’t know how. I am much kinder to myself thanks to Tiina’s parenting style, because she’s been parenting autistic kids a lot longer than I have…. my inner child doesn’t know they’re AuDHD so my reactions are generally shame-based unless I’m looking at myself through Tiina’s lens.

Or Bryn’s lens.

Or Brian’s lens.

Or Aaron’s lens.

Basically, everyone truly sees me correctly and I’ve been the one with the rejection sensitivity dysphoria because Aada was constantly ripping me a new one online without really knowing me.

Here’s how I would like to be seen:

I am autistic.

I am ADHD.

I have clear and present mental health issues that I deal with on a regular basis. Because I am completely medicated, it allows me to forget that I have these imbalances…. but not in a way where it “just escapes me.” I mean that medication allows me to be free of the burden. I have never been inconsistent about taking medication because I was raised by a doctor. She told me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel better.

Duly noted. I haven’t missed a dose since the drugs were prescribed. I have had very interesting side effects, though, and probably reportable.

I am not a threat. I was never trying to be a threat. I was left with no way out. Aada’s cathedral crashed on top of my head, which is why dirt theology is so important. Aada left me with so much raw material that the new cathedral is built on the bones of the first. It’s one that integrates the feeling I get when Aada is in the cloud and Tiina is on the ground. It is not that one spirituality means more, it is that they are completely different. They occupy different spaces.

With Tiina, I wonder what we are going to do with this one wild and precious life with my James Cone/Paul Tillich faith and her Jewish mother sensibility. What I enjoy most about synagogue is learning the man behind the Bible. I do not claim any connection to Jesus as divine, but I do claim a strong connection to Jesus of Nazareth. As a documented bipolar patient, I feel like I should say that out loud so that you are not picturing me wandering down Eutaw wearing a bathrobe holding a sign.

We’re both storytellers, truth tellers who don’t roll any punches. We take the arrows thrown at us and use them as examples, teachable moments. And just like Jesus, I have a bipolar relationship with “public.” I would also chase moneylenders with a whip and preach tolerance unironically.

If I have a vibe, it’s Nadia Bolz Weber, and I know it. People have been telling me that I “have it” since I was 10. That I should have gone to seminary. That I should have entered the ministry. That it is literally my calling.

No, the fuck it is not.

I didn’t turn down a call. I made it my own. I write about theology on my web site all the time, along with my other special interests so that I’m not an ivory tower theologian, just armchair. I want people to see that I reject most white theology because it does not resonate with my experience of Christ in America. My experience is better expressed through Black Liberation Theology, because racism and homophobia are inextricably interrelated.

I will preach if asked, but from a lay person’s perspective. I am absolutely ordained as a Dudeist, but I do not think of it as the same as going to seminary. What had happened was seminary just seemed exhausting after time served as a United Methodist preacher’s kid and I tapped out.

But I still needed to be able to perform weddings.

I don’t claim Nadia’s authority. She is ordained and an elder in a long tradition. But I do completely identify with her attitudes toward God and the fact that church would be perfect if we all weren’t so human. For me, the church was a refuge and a toxic mess all at the same time. My first week at our last church was the biggest pastoral catastrophe I’d ever seen in my life, because the church was 1600 members all told so the scale of how many things could go wrong at once was on a whole other level.

And by “pastoral catastrophe,” I do not mean that my dad caused anything to happen. We’d literally just walked in the door. I mean the amount of people that had a pastoral need all at once was at a catastrophic level and the congregation was in whiplash at the change in pastors during such a difficult time. It is hard to be the oldest preacher’s kid walking into that situation. I was untested and untrusted.

It is also amazing how your popularity in youth group depends on how well your friends’ parents get along with your dad. Not once in the entire history of my dad’s ministry did anyone say to me, “well, they don’t like him, but I still like you.” I didn’t really have friends as a child, except for at District meetings where we were all preacher’s kids and it didn’t matter.

I just thought of something. The United Methodist Church already does some of this, but they need to make a group that supersedes MYF that’s just for older preacher’s kids because those aren’t really kids. Those are employees and you know it.

Older PKs are: