Tag: Christianity

Every Minute of Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When do you feel most productive?

There will never be another moment in which I think I’m not productive. If anything, I am prolific. My ideas about writing flow through me, and I am just standing by the river. Speaking of which, I thought of another fictional character that is just like me. Literally the spitting image. It’s Norman McClean from “A River Runs Through It.” Never have I wanted to marry a fictional character (in terms of the movie, not the person) as bad as him. Most people love Brad Pitt. I love Craig Sheffer, because he explained me to me in such a deep and profound way. Norman McClain is the Mr. Darcy of my life, because every woman I’ve ever known who reads literature has told me they pine for him on a spiritual level.

Norman’s dad was a minister, caring for people and me with a liberal perspective. He had the same idyllic childhood I did, but with the same pressures. He was also the oldest, and the bag that comes with. They literally acted out all the “my brother’s keeper” plays. Norman’s ideas, and his father’s, flowed out of them best when they were fly fishing. I chose to believe it’s because rivers talk.

The best preaching advice I’ve gotten has always come from my dad, but I had to adapt it to my own style and not his… for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to be fierce about establishing my own thing. That I was doing it because I wanted it, not because I was jumping for his approval. The second is that we couldn’t be the same preacher because my perspective was so wildly different from mine. He didn’t wrestle liberation theology to the ground like I did because he didn’t need it. He didn’t need to believe that “the cross and the lynching tree” extended to him… that I would be rescued from horrible oppression by setting my sights on the one who came to liberate me. That is very much the best of what the black church has been able to do for its people, and James Cone criticism is where I start any sermon ever. I want to take being responsible and mindful to the next level, freeing you from your bonds so that you can love yourself. That you have strength to move on, because your prayer life is telling you what to do. You can trust your intuition, because your brain will do everything it can to protect you from harm. You just won’t allow that protection in if you can’t sit with yourself long enough to contemplate letting it in.

It is when you become God, to let in that protection so your intuition is accurate. But in order to receive it, you have to look at your emotions in third person. If you don’t, ego gets in the way. You’ll just run on lizard brain because you’re surviving and not thriving. Praying is a way to clear the obstruction. In your prayer life, when you are asking God to give you relief, you find that you already have it because you prayed about it. It doesn’t matter if God is listening. What matters is whether you are.

I’ve talked a lot about God on this web site, but I rarely talk about what I believe. Here is my creed.

Heaven and hell were created to keep people in line. The resurrection could have been literal or a marketing campaign, and there’s no way to know that because there are no eyewitness accounts. The gospels were written down long after Jesus was crucified. But to take the Bible seriously is to pick up the lessons we can learn from those stories whether they’re factually accurate or not.

In my prayer life, I use a person as an image so that God feels like a literal person instead of a green screen. That was the moment I connected to David Morse’s character in Contact. Incidentally, I also loved that movie because Matthew McConaughey played me in a movie. That connection is very, very deep. My dad was Matt’s pastor and my mom was Matt’s middle school choir director. If you ask Matt’s mom, she’ll say my dad was amazing because he was the first one to pronounce their names right before she told him how…. and according to my dad, Matt’s dad was a mess, in that Texas way- completely affectionate the way good ol’ boys talk.

When we lived in Longview, I was a toddler. He wouldn’t remember me from Adam, but he’d remember my parents in a heartbeat. My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit.” Then, when everyone expressed excitement, she’d say “of course, he was 12 at the time.” Sometimes I wonder what kind of interactions we had. Whether he’d ever asked to hold me or joked with me in a memory I can’t recall. That’s because if my mom went to a pool party at all, I was also there.

Swimming has always been where I experience God the most, and my dad reminded me of it the day I preached my first sermon. He said “it’s a river. When you get up there, just step into the flow.” Here’s the even bigger part. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so he called the church. I wasn’t the one who answered it, so when I was sitting there borderline panicking because I couldn’t ask for a blessing, someone came up to me and said, “Leslie…. it’s your dad.” I’m crying right now just feeling that relief.

Some of you may not know that when I preach in person, I do a pastoral prayer before I get rolling. It’s not for them. It’s for me. I need to know that I have the confidence to lead people by being humble. That opening up won’t hurt, because I might be able to help people more than hurt. It is asking God to work through me so that hopefully, my words resonate instead of making them feel like they have to listen to me to be polite. I want to be worth their time, because nothing is more precious to me than time. To waste other people’s makes me feel terrible toward myself. Letting myself suck until I got better was a necessary evil, and I apologize for ever misstep ever made.

Here’s the most intimate moment that has ever happened to me with a parishioner. At our church, we only did communion once a month. One of the Sundays when the senior pastor was going to be out of town fell on it accidentally. Before the service, I was so nervous I could have thrown up, because I’d grown up in a church that had very strict requirements on who could and could not do communion, and the United Church of Christ doesn’t have any to my knowledge. But it didn’t matter. Someone I wasn’t close to gave me the biggest moment I think I’ve ever had.

I was on the Worship Team, and we were the people gathering before the service to make sure it was going to run smoothly. The question at hand was whether we should skip over communion, because it was already in the bulletin and I was freaking out. It was something I wanted to do because I knew I could, and knowing that it was not a moment I could take. I needed it to be given. I needed someone else to tell me I was worthy before I launched into something that shouldn’t have been done in the first place according to the tapes in my head.

I was standing next to a full length mirror when a woman came up behind me and placed a rainbow stole on my shoulders. She said I should look like a minister, but holy God. In that moment, she became my only ordination to date. It was worth getting raked over the coals by the senior minister when she got home, because I didn’t ask to do communion, I just hoped I would be allowed it. I was, because my support team said that it was more important to follow the bulletin than it was to leave something out. I had my moment not because I asked for it, but because said pastor didn’t proofread…. so she couldn’t take it away from me even if she was going to beat a dead horse for all eternity. She couldn’t steal the gift that I’d been given…. self confidence.

The United Church of Christ is not what’s called a “creedal church,” one that sets in stone what should be said for every occasion… see “Book of Common Prayer” for details. ๐Ÿ˜› Since there wasn’t a template, the United Methodist words of institution floated off like I’d been doing it my whole life, completely comfortable in my skin because I knew I wasn’t stealing anything. I was serving everything. I held he literal body and blood of Christ in some traditions, an honorarium in others, right in my own hands. My faith allowed me the strength to believe that I was worthy enough to give people that gift of resolution and redemption that comes with believing in the risen Christ. That rainbow stole was everything when it came to believing that I was both the Moses that killed the teenager in the desert and the one that led the Canadian houseguests out of Iran. I wanted to know if I had enough strength to take on the mantle of being able to lead people rather than follow. I didn’t.

But Brenda did.

She let me know in 60 seconds that my words had value. The table had been laid. I was present in an intentional way. The river was flowing beside me, and all I had to do was step in.

Be Jesus Somewhere Else

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

That’s the short answer.

Bryn gave me the writing prompt of “if you could go back in time and change anything without revealing the future, what would it be?” Her example was Claire Fraser not being able to tell everyone she was from the future, but she could treat sick people with homegrown antibiotics, or tell them when to plant the correct crops, or magically knowing that she and the fam don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here.

Because she was thinking world events, so was I. It became a Doctor Who moment for me, because I realized that no matter where I went, I’d be Jesus somewhere else. I’d be that person who tried to change things by taking care of people on a large scale, saying things that would upset people but also make them think. But I’d do it through someone else. I don’t want power, but I’m great as a backup singer/spin doctor. All it would take would be getting close to someone in actual power early on so that I can get in before the wire; many, many, many factors go into how people behave and I do not want to be the one standing there without any heuristics on mood and behavior when bad things happen. I don’t want to go back in time and start CIA during the Civil War, I want to go back to the meeting where everyone decided that Africans weren’t people. I would encourage people who actually asked themselves why they thought skin color mattered. I’d check out who was willing to talk and who wasn’t, and pick someone who I knew could change things and I’d help them. It’s the way Jesus did it. He focused on himself and the Disciples and it translated into helping the world in both tangible and intangible ways. He prayed to God, but he wasn’t ivory tower. He was sandals.

The emotional strength he portrayed wasn’t all him. He was preparing the way for something bigger.

Jesus is the main character in the story right now, but who knows whether the Disciples were better or worse at preaching than him? Was Peter better than Jesus when he was having a bad day? Who knows. All I mean is that I do not have a Messianic complex. It’s that of all those people, Jesus and I have the most in common. It has nothing to do with me wanting to be a Christ figure. If I was more like Thomas, I would tell you that instead. I don’t just know Christ, I know them all. That’s what you get from years and years of new criticism. Personalities emerge and you absolutely know that it’s fiction because you can’t infer that much about their mannerisms and habits. You read every single time with new ideas coming at you because several authors have disagreed with each other and you had to go and look it up. Very few people study Biblical geography when the setting is one of the main characters. It’s a very dry humor. They’re desert people.

I would have been happy with any character in that story, hoping not to deny that I was his friend and standing tall through my own ministry and crucifixion or being boiled in oil or whatever. Anywhere anyone is challenging the system, I’d want to be there.

I would try to change world events by becoming close to the right people at the right time so that I could counsel them away from the thing that they’re about to do…. A Doctor Who moment because I’d have an inner TARDIS that knew which problem needed me most.

The trick would be showing up early enough in a person’s life to make a massive difference in their personalities. I’m not the kind of person that will solve all your problems in five minutes. I’m the person that genuinely cares and wants what’s best for you, but it takes time to build that relationship. It’s peeling away our public armor when we talk if we’ve known each other a hundred years. By then, we have our own language because we’ve probably already been through all the ways it can be misinterpreted once or twice.

Jesus got power by influencing those in office, particularly Saul (Paul) and Joseph of Arimethea, yet quietly. Even Pontious Pilate got rattled and knew he was wrong. They heard his message and just happened to be in office. It was never about that for them. It was never about that for him, either. I’d do the same thing with the world’s most advanced intelligence agency. What it would be like to start CIA and keep it up from the time that kind of travel was possible. so that we as a country didn’t bomb the shit out of people? Because war hawks aren’t made overnight. We’ve had a long history of getting what we want. We’d be the Doctor Who of the world instead of the colonizers. They fight enemies by collating dossiers on every race they encounter and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. They don’t even have a gun.

I would want that for the US or for whatever country I was in. Just to be able to affect change with information and not violence. I’m the medium smart anti-hero who actively knows they’re too smart for some and too dumb for others. I want to find other people on that wavelength people are actually counting on, and have a mechanism that tells me to go where I am needed the most. The more emotionally safe people feel, the more you can direct change. That’s because it happens when you’re doing something else.

She Stopped the Tape

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a positive thing a family member has done for you.

Bryn stopped the tape that I was worth nothing.

She didn’t do it with her words, although she did that, too. It was more than that. She told me I had something to say, and is perfectly fine with me going big or going home. We have had so many moments of just going home, my favorite thing in life. I was kidding her the other day that I loved being at her house, because I spend a lot of time there on Facebook Messenger video calls that are inordinately long because we’re both talkers (to each other, not so much in a crowd), and we don’t discuss people so much as concepts.

The biggest is that if you experience childhood trauma, and ours comes from many different sources, you are navigating the world with third degree burns and it changes everything around you. This is not a slam on either one of my parents, because my childhood trauma is not rooted in them, but in coming out privately at 13 and publicly just before I was 15. Coming out privately was the wrong tack, because I trusted the wrong person. It went from something sweet to a disaster very, very quickly.

This is because I lost myself in that relationship.

Like a lot of other women, I would imagine. She was a singer, and everyone was awed by her voice and treated her with that reverence all the time. Who even was I next to all that? Yes, she was gorgeous and I noticed. The problem came in where I was never sure whether she noticed or not. I feel like she noticed all of it, and before we could even have that conversation in an open and honest way, she’d already done things by inference that would have made being honest feel like a lie.

If you know, you know. She treats every friend like that. I was just the youngest. She has a tape in her that says you can’t be intimate with someone unless you’re romantic with them. And, of course, she’s never told me any of this, I’ve just watched it for decades. THAT’s why I freaked out at being told I was a woman she’d like to know.

Moving to Portland was enlightening as I watched several adults go through the same spectrum of emotions I did starting three months before I turned 13. In the very beginning, love was the type of excitement I felt at seeing my parents after a long day at school. Within a year, my hormones had kicked in, and at that moment, she moved away. Back then, Dallas and Portland were both long-distance calls. So I’d sneak off to talk to her when my parents weren’t looking and became the girl that sat by the mailbox, because if I didn’t and something came for me, my mother would confiscate it. Looking back, this is exactly what she should have done. I am just not the sort of person that backs away from large emotions, and the tape within me was “she needs me.”

In that time and in that place, I can believe it was true. I would like to believe that she couldn’t be honest with anyone else, because in order to function, she had to be her singer personality all the time. She didn’t want anyone to know her problems, either, because I was also very quiet about my struggle with being queer at all, much less a relationship with this woman on top of it.

I remember one friend being completely objective and shooting the shit out of all my assumptions, likening it to battered wife syndrome because there’s no way in hell I should have been responsible for being the keeper of those secrets at 14. I don’t keep them now. I will talk about what it was like, but only with Bryn, because she was there. It means a lot to me that someone who knows me that intimately is now my biggest cheerleader.

What Dana (ex-wife, beloved in my memory, no chance we’ll reconcile for those just joining us) failed to understand was why she couldn’t help me. She’d been roped into those people and that situation for as long as she’d known me. I never would have believed it was emotional abuse coming from her because to me, she had just picked a side, like everyone else when I started talking about what happened. I feel like she played all 90 minutes, but the score was equal until someone objective who didn’t know anyone in the situation at all won it for us on a penalty kick. I would have run from anyone who looked at the situation in a subjective manner, and we lived in the same house.

I know it was devastating for her that I believed someone else so easily, and you can’t imagine how much empathy I had for that. At the same time, I had never backed away from the situation so hardcore that I could look at what happened as it being in the past. I couldn’t be objective about any of our friends, including the women that came after me in the bubble that felt illicit. Her behavior didn’t stop, she just changed people, either dumping them so that they felt like they lost everything because they’d become just as suckered in as me…. or walking away when they realized their own sanity was being tested.

It surprised me when I laid all this out that people believed her charming, lovebombing personality and chose to ignore what had happened not only to me, but to their other friends. They watched all the fallout from every relationship this woman torched, and were so eager to be the chosen one that my words didn’t even matter. It wasn’t that I was right, it was that I couldn’t hack it. There was nothing wrong with what she was doing, there was a failure in me emotionally.

I could never explain to people who weren’t really listening that I’d been watching her do this to people since before I turned 13. That I knew what she was doing to her friends from decades of experience watching her do it. That me coming to Portland was the last thing that happened, not the first thing I saw.

The most fucked up thing ever is that she would do this in the congregation in her partner’s church, energies changing all the time between friends so that no one could ever be objective about anything. The more rocky it got, the more she asked of the church, like making her Minister of Music instead of the choir director when no pastoral care ever came from her at all. She was not the kind of person that cared about anyone else’s feelings. She was the type of person that wanted to put on a show about how much she cared. If the person that needed something wasn’t in her direct circle, their needs went unmet. I didn’t realize the extent of the show until it happened to me.

We stopped talking about anything important. She’d dumped me long ago because of course, she never did anything wrong. I was a problem. The biggest sleight of hand that she ever pulled was twofold. The first was when I went and told her about a conversation that I’d had with her friends where I was FNG (fucking new guy). They were very protective of her, and it devolved into them trying to prove to me that they knew her better than I did. That was a game I didn’t want to play, because the way I would “win” wouldn’t look good and would only anger them more. So, again, I told her about this because it was hurting me.

Then, several days later her partner confronted me and told me that she’d said that I was starting fights with her friends and she didn’t want to see that out of me anymore. So, I just took on all the emotions of these women who didn’t have a fucking clue and I was the bad guy, even though it was a game in which I’d already tapped out. I was done.

Then, years later, she picked me as a soloist for a requiem we were doing with a community orchestra. It was a big damn deal, my first time on a fairly large stage. She waited until dress rehearsal to have her moment in which she said that I was the closest thing she’d ever had to a daughter, and hearing me sing was like watching her little girl grow up… when that relationship had been gone for both of us from the moment I bothered to call her on her bullshit. Because no one does that. Ever.

I am sure that people believed the show, and I wasn’t going to embarrass her in front of everyone. I was just trapped in utter and complete bullshit…. which is why I married Dana and didn’t even bother telling her. I wanted to destroy her dreams of doing the same thing to me at my wedding…. which Dana and I never had. We got all the paperwork done and would have probably gotten married at Episcopal Church of the Epiphany if we’d put any effort into doing such a thing. I remember Dana asking her priest if we could get married there, and our priest asking us how long we’d been together. Dana said, “seven years,” and our priest said, “so it’s serious.” But laughing about it was as far as we got.

This is because by that time, I was vomiting up emotions I’d been keeping hidden for years on end. I was not very lovable at this point, which is why memories of Dana are so precious to me. Even when I was at my worst, she tried so hard. Because our relationship heated up to a physical fight, I knew I could never in a million years go back. But I don’t mistake the part for the whole, either.

During that time in my life, I was screwed up with love. It was coming at me from two directions, hers and the woman who gave me back to myself. Because I was close to both of them, I felt the pull between them all of the time, because I wanted to give them both everything in the world and it was hard to navigate.

I fell in love with honesty on both sides. It’s just that PK girl wasn’t gay and it quickly turned into a clusterfuck. In what world would I not fall for a white knight who loved me to the very best of her ability, even when I was completely unlovable? Love for her didn’t come out of nowhere. At that point, I hadn’t even really seen many pictures of her, so I knew at that point that I would take the whole package, sight unseen.

I had a keen awareness that it was never going to happen, but that didn’t stop those feelings from coming. I never wanted to act in a way that would alienate anyone, but I lost who I was and did, anyway… in a pattern that should seem familiar by now. I was tasked with turning off that trauma reflex, that I would live with unrequited love forever.

Putting on my big girl pants and acknowledging it was the height of my stupidity, but in retrospect I didn’t need her response. I could have gone a lifetime without knowing what would have happened. It was way more about me, and how I wanted to be different than the woman who abused me. To say open and honestly I have these feelings and I don’t know what to do with them, rather than roping her into a game she didn’t want to play. I asked for patience from her and Dana, and I got it up and to a point.

Dana’s patience with me ran out, and in some sense, I applaud her for that. Letting me deal with my shit on my own was the right answer. I wish that our relationship hadn’t ended the way it did, because I am back to my old self and have been for years. I wish she could see who I am now instead of who I was then, lost and confused.

“Lost and confused” had its limits, though. I was never jealous of the men in PK girl’s life. I wanted her to be all of her, and me to be all of me. Then I stepped over the line and our relationship crashed and burned…. but not entirely. It just became a shadow of itself, when I wanted there to be a time when I was her white knight as well.

The only thing I could do was close the door on both relationships, because at that point, there was no going back. It was just moving forward, acknowledging that I’d been an asshole but that I wasn’t one. That it was my behavior in the moment, not the sum total of who I was.

The reason the second relationship was so painful is that PK girl saw it, too, that it wasn’t the sum total of my being. That she wouldn’t hold me to my worst mistake….. sometimes. At others, her anger showed toward me in full force because she would skip over all the parts where I showed her I loved her the way she loved me, and go for the jugular.

I had to stop that pattern as well, because I tried to let her know how I felt so we could move past all that, and it was not well-received.

I chose to focus on the family member who knew everything PK girl did, but could hear things like “I think this could become trouble. What do you want to do about it?” And maybe it’s just that my tone of voice seems so different with Bryn and not my actual words, because I don’t think I’ve consciously been a different person with anyone. I’m just me.

So now we’re the lockboxes for each other and it feels right, because we both struggle with the same “stuff” left over from childhood. It’s just that I can’t tell her story for her and she’s a tremendous writer.

But make no mistake. She knows what you did. ๐Ÿ˜›

…..and the tape has stopped recording.

Preacher’s Kids

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you are an empath and a preacher’s kid, you will hear everything they ever say about anything going on at work; you will take on the entire congregation’s pain as your own. How generally depends on which parent is the pastor, because of the way our filters for each parent are used to create a picture of what’s really going on. I have never done a day’s work as a pastor, and I never will in some sense. That’s because I did it by proxy for 17 years. I worried about every single one of you all the time. I listened in on every single conversation I possibly could to run it through the heuristics created by listening to my father’s end of talking someone through trauma in the moment. It was a manual on what to do when other people are in trouble. It’s the reason he got into medicine, that he was frustrated at not being able to fix people. That thoughts and prayers weren’t enough. He was that phrase before it was cool.

So, I’ve approached every church and every pastor I’ve ever known with the same recognition that part of them is totally full of crap. There’s only so much of your real self you can show in front of other people before your weird gets on them and the church crashes and burns. I have watched it happen over and over because I’ve stayed active in different churches as an observer to the same behavior I experienced in all the others. I could often predict how a church would vote on something because I’d been a preacher’s kid in a system with a Bishop and active in Congregational churches, seeing both systems and knowing the inherent advantages and disadvantages.

In a church, I’m generally the person that knows what’s about to happen and I don’t say anything because it isn’t worth it. People on committees get all up in their feelings when everything starts going down and it’s too much emotion to take on from too many people when I am standing in the room, absorbing it all and unable to shake it off. I also don’t think there’s a pastor alive that likes getting notes, so I’m much better off in every area if I pretend that no sausage is being made.

It’s why there are things that irritate the shit out of me about going to church and also why I still do it a little bit. It’s not shame or regret. It’s “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” I made a conscious decision to step away from ministry so that my crazy spatter doesn’t get on anyone else. I feel that way about belonging to a congregation sometimes, too, because I can’t turn off that tape that I don’t deserve pastoral care, like doctors don’t often take care of themselves. They think they can take care of themselves and they’re the best doctor they’ve got. It’s the difference between surviving and thriving. Power with rather than power over. Not only that, being the best doctor you’ve got isn’t a ringing endorsement sometimes, because you won’t call for a consult (get a second opinion from the patient’s perspective).

I have heard a lot of my stepmom’s conversations with patients and because I was also bound to HIPPA (I worked there at times and didn’t retain the information otherwise. I basically just called your pharmacy, don’t freak.), I learned how to take care of a patient population as well, not from a clinical standpoint, but emotional. Here’s how you tell someone they have something. Here’s how you take a history and physical. Here are the questions that are above your pay grade.

I never stopped being a preacher’s kid, it just added a different dimension reinforcing the same thing. It’s like INFJ on the job training. Just bleed out emotionally for everyone because they deserve it so much more than you. It’s knowing you need to protect your energy; that will save you from a lot of harm, not knowing you can’t literally pour everything out for other people and expect to maintain normalcy in your own world. I have a very live and let live with this. Stay in my life or go, because I’ll handle it whether you take five minutes for me to grieve or decades. I am strong enough to know that no matter what, I’ll be okay. I have an emotional toolbox and the willpower to use it.

I only need to focus on what I have to write that day to understand me. I can’t think of anyone else who needs it more, on both the medical and pastoral spectrum. Comprehension of another person is key, so why am I not giving this kindness to myself? I have myself permission to stand up. To at least apologize if I couldn’t do more to ask for forgiveness, and at the same time, knowing when it was wasted energy. People only hear you through the filter of what they understand, so if the same fight keeps coming up over and over and over, you know that the person isn’t hearing you and you need to change gears or it will never resolve.

I think of every relationship I have in that pastoral way, which is why my gift is helping other people. I have had an example of what to say when people are in crisis since I could talk. I am often not as gentle as I could be about it because I am not a patient person after a certain amount of time. I give much, and keep my hopes up, It serves neither of us in a relationship…. because you constantly waffle between asking for things and apologizing for your existence. Only the words “I’m sorry” mean that someone is. Adding or subtracting anything, as well as never saying them, are both issues. I do not mean that you do not mean an apology. It’s that people don’t naturally infer them. Saying that you’re not perfect isn’t the same as I’m sorry even if you mean it that way. It makes the other person do too much work trying to figure out what is even happening.

There’s also a difference between “I’m sorry I behaved that way” and “I’m sorry your reaction was so large.” There are very few problems in the universe that are black and white. The former is a genuine apology. The latter is caring more about how you felt in the moment than they did. It doesn’t make the other person feel acknowledged, like you recognize the gravity of the situation even if you can’t change a thing.

With preacher’s kids, they hear these patterns described so they see them coming a mile off because their sample size for heuristics is the size of the congregation. My father’s last church was approximately 1600-2000 people depending on whether it was Ordinary Time, Christmas, or Easter.

It helps when I’m in any relaxed group to know how they work, because church is more relaxed than the office right up until someone’s in trouble. The larger the congregation, the more times this can happen. It was hell week at my dad’s largest church, but it didn’t affect me as much as the people involved. Seriously, the week we got there, a teenage boy’s father (also a member) died in a boating accident, another teenager found out her father was keeping her away from his other family, and the youth group had been caught at camp playing strip poker. That’s what I was walking into as a preacher’s kid. An intruder on all kinds of grief, especially if they didn’t know my dad and thought the last one was better until proven otherwise. He had no trust capital, so neither did I.

I carried that around with me, too. People think preacher’s kids are supposed to somehow be better than everyone else, judging them harshly for falling from any height at all. There’s very little gray area between perfectly perfect and “the one we don’t talk about.”

There’s not really a point to this except character study. To show why I do understand people and groups because I’ve been doing it the whole time, even when I wasn’t actively looking.

Chapter and Verse

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What book could you read over and over again?

Just one book? Forever? If I only get to have one, itโ€™s a Bible. Not because Iโ€™m a religious zealot. I enjoy theology and reading criticismโ€ฆ but in the absence of other books, Iโ€™d have to make my own. Very, very hard without the source material. Over time, I would absolutely entertain myself by writing both First and Second SpongeBob to see if anyone noticed.

The Bible isnโ€™t an answer. Itโ€™s a lens through which I see everything else. By taking these stories seriously and not literally, I can tap into something usefulโ€ฆ the power of me. When I look at the historical Jesus, Iโ€™m looking in a mirror. I feel like every Christian says this, but Iโ€™m never sure if they mean it. They leave out the โ€œhistoricalโ€ part and thatโ€™s what creates problems. Theyโ€™re not connecting to him, but the marketing campaign that tried to rebrand him as white. Theyโ€™re connecting themselves to something that has never even existed.

The โ€œprosperity gospelโ€ people drive me up the wall, and it is extremely important to understand why. Jesus is all about setting priorities, and money wasnโ€™t on the list. I am angry that so many people think Christianity is *only* mega churches so that small communities engaging in social justice are also thought of as suspect.

Meanwhile, the income disparity just gets more intense as people want church that looks like a rock concert, when to me itโ€™s the very worst of both. Itโ€™s pedantic to preach to people on an eighth grade level. Assume your audience is smarter than you are, because it is true.

Moving what is basically my textbook out of the way, you guys already know I love Argo, but itโ€™s not my favorite book by Team Mendez. Thatโ€™s Spy Dust, the love story between Jonna and Tony. I read it shortly after I met Jonna in person, and it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. Theyโ€™d both been married before. It was their second act after facing lots of hardship, and it was beautiful (both their relationship and the prose that came out of it).

Fiction changes by the hour. It would be impossible to list all the novels I love. When push comes to shove, I still canโ€™t pick one.

Catcher in the Rye comes up quite frequently. People love it because of the foul language (for the time) and the โ€œHolden Caulfied is just coolโ€ factor. I also love those things, but itโ€™s more than that. Itโ€™s written from my favorite perspective, probably because Iโ€™m a blogger. Itโ€™s first person with an unreliable narrator. Holdenโ€™s were stories that were all true and God knows if any of them happened.

I am also very impressed with my own writing, but not in the moment. It takes about five years for me to be proud of an entry because I have to be a different person than I was when I wrote said piece. Iโ€™m proud when I look at it with a more objective eyeโ€ฆ I feel like Iโ€™m connecting to another writer and critiquing their work because at that point, Iโ€™m not emotionally attached to it. I also have to be my own biggest fan, because to make my blog dependent on external validation is crazy. Itโ€™s a journal and youโ€™re invited, both to read and talk back. To need your love and adoration is to handicap myself, because itโ€™s letting the audience become my boss, writing what they want to read rather than this space actually being useful for my own growth and development.

I absolutely do go back and read what Iโ€™ve written, because again, thatโ€™s whatโ€™s useful to me. I read my entries and look at what I was trying to accomplish and ask myself if Iโ€™ve done it. Most of the time, I am not sure. What I do know is that people donโ€™t think I know how I come across, and they are very worried. To me, thatโ€™s caring about what other people think more than I care about myself.

Iโ€™m not being cruel and callous about hurting people with fallout. I am saying that I canโ€™t think about the outside world. I have to let the audience find me because I need this web site more than everyone else.

My personality type says there are callbacks and patterns, so I go back and find them. I throw things back in my face. I get angry at myself. And somehow, good writing comes out of it sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes Iโ€™m an angry, judgmental dickhead. I like the bumper sticker wisdom of โ€œwhen you ask yourself โ€˜what would Jesus do,โ€™ remember that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is a viable option.โ€

This is why Iโ€™d take a Bible over anything else. People worried over him the exact same way that people worry over me. They even say some of the same things. It is enough to make me shut down this whole site at times, and I have to force myself not to do it; Iโ€™ve done it once before and it really screwed up my future.

It screwed me up inside when the same people that tried to force my hand were so outraged in the moment, then months later said, โ€œyou were always such a great writer. Why donโ€™t you do it anymore?โ€ Notice I said that they tried to force my hand. It didnโ€™t work. What did work was feeling so terrible about anything and everything Iโ€™d done that my poor self esteem cased and trashed everything Iโ€™d built in less than 20 seconds. At the height of my popularity, I was up there with Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. Dooce had only started a couple of years before me, when she actually talked about things that got her in trouble. She built her entire audience off of brutal truthโ€ฆโ€ฆ and thenโ€ฆ.. didnโ€™t.

I canโ€™t be bitter, because it was my decision. I am just telling you the cost of shame that comes with having readers. As a writer, you only fear two things. The first is that no one will read your work. The second is that everyone will.

Over the years, people start to appreciate my writing more and more, and Iโ€™m not talking about strangers. Iโ€™m talking about my friends who donโ€™t remember what happened when and Iโ€™m the only one that remembered to write it down. Thatโ€™s why Iโ€™m so careful to talk about people in a three dimensional way. Once the subject removes themselves from the equation and starts reading about themselves as if they were a different person, โ€œall of a suddenโ€ Iโ€™m the greatest writer who ever lived because mine was the story that stuck.

You can look it up in First SpongeBob.

Stories That Stick

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Link to audio for Easter, Year A, 2023

Editor’s Note:

I posted the audio yesterday as well, but here is a transcript if you’d like to read instead of listen.

I know you guys generally don’t know or care about the Revised Common Lectionary OR the Book of Common Prayer, but the people who steal my sermons DO and I let them because I don’t care. I want my words heard all over the world whether I get credit for my ideas or not. If I hit a home run, it’s always because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants- Jesus, most notably. Use all my stuff and forget about the brand on the ball. Also, I post late in the day so you can’t use it this year. The Bible is put together by the Church universal so that you go through the whole thing in a cycle, complete every three years.

Here is the gospel on which I am basing this entry/sermon. It’s one of my two big holidays, just roll with it.

John 20:1-18

Every sermon I preach, when I am preparing I realize that Jesus and I are the same person (within reason). He was Jewish, I am Christian. He chased tax collectors from the temple with a whip, and I feel that way about anyone who excludes anyone. I’m also older than Jesus now, so I know that had he lived longer, we would have been more alike. We are both judgmental dickheads, and not because we’re not correct. We just get angrier than everyone elseโ€ฆ ok, maybe not everyone. Jesus is the kind of empath that I feel he popped off and regretted a lot, another hallmark of people who know you’re not doing life right, because that’s what our personality does. We don’t want to rag on you. We want to build you up. We want you to join us in our utopia, and you will get there if you listen to us. But if you’re going after people with a whip to do it, I’m guessing there had to be a game of “Let’s Be an Asshole” somewhere.

I do what he does with language. My words are often harsh because I don’t feel heard, and neither did he among his family and friends. Nothing good could come out of Nazareth because they couldn’t see him for what he was and isโ€ฆ. an INFJ with anger management issues. Tell me that’s not me sitting on a Ritz, because nothing good has come out of DC, either.

If you’re lost right now in terms of the phrase “nothing good can come out of Nazareth,” it’s emotional shorthand for strangers listening to you easier than your own family and friends when you have big ideas that seem crazy. According to a Chiat/Day commercial, the only people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.

Jesus was insane. Just batshit.

He thought he could take on everyone who would listen, and like me, if you miss the message, he will flat school you. To me, he is also very funny. Anyone who can make a fig tree die just by yelling at it is familiar with my workโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆ #shatnerellipsis

For me, the message has always been his. Widen the net. It’s the biggest message there is. For God’s sakes (literally), the symbol that best represents him IS A FISH. Here’s why. Wearing a crucifix is focusing on his death and not his life. It’s skipping over everything he was trying to accomplish and focusing on everything he didn’t. Do you think it really mattered to Jesus that he was sent to die? He ALREADY KNEW it would happen. So he made the best of it. Out, loud, and proud in terms of knowing what he was here to doโ€ฆ.. “I’m here to help the shit out of you. Roll with it or don’t. I don’t have time to want people who don’t want me.”

Tell me THAT’s not me sitting on a Ritz.

If you think that I am trying to say that I am also literally the child of God, remember that I have always said that I do not identify with his divinity. I empathize with his humanity. My heart is continually broken that he didn’t get to live out his entire life naturally, speaking in plain language so that people could understand (Aramaic rather than Hebrew). He was an Idealist painted as someone trying to overthrow the government when he just wanted to feed people.

Besides, God might not be my father, but I was born to upper management. My street creds are solid without any letters. I don’t need them because I’ve been steeped in these stories since I was born, and when I’m preaching, I do every bit as much research as can be done from one Sunday to the nextโ€ฆ. the interminable march of Sundays back through the ages and forwards towards our own deaths and resurrections. It’s just that we don’t take resurrection literally, and it’s the one thing we should. If you take nothing else away from the Easter story, it’s this one. Your story matters. You are every bit as capable of telling it as Jesus was. I got a line from an Atheist that I’ll use today, on the most holy of days, because I find absolute truth anywhere I can get it.

At the time, there were lots of people claiming to be the Messiah. His is the story that stuck.

Holy God. “His is the story that stuck.” I went dumb and mute (dumb being a double entendre, for the record).

I was talking about how the Bible is an ancient blog at best, the story of how Christianity was born according to the people who lived it. We can argue all day over whether it’s real, or we could stick to the story that stuck.

Today’s gospel is the story of Mary Magdalene running to tell Simon Peter that Jesus is gone.

Skipping over the OUTRIGHT AND TOTAL MISOGYNY of this passage to focus on other things (this might be a clue we’ll use again later), both Mary and Simon Peter walked into a tomb and saw that their best friend’s body had been stolen. Let’s leave Jesus’ resurrection out of this. Imagine the horror of losing your friend/possible husband to death and not being able to bury him. Imagine the sheer panic of finding out that the grave of their loved one had been robbed, the logical conclusion. Some of the disciples went home. They didn’t stick around long enough (no guilt, they couldn’t have known) for the rest of the story and had to endure that shock. In this moment, the resurrection doesn’t even matter. I wonder how long they sat there and kicked themselves over Jesus saying that they had to walk with the light while they had it. The Disciples are often portrayed as dumb guys, but here’s what I’ve learned in my 45 years. It’s not that anyone is stupid. It’s that the message doesn’t mean anything until you’re ready to hear it.

They did not hear “you have to walk with me, because my life isn’t going to be very long.” At this point, I start wondering what messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.

Even The Book of Acts reads like “holy shit, what do we do now? I know there were instructions.”

Their best friend has just died. In that moment, I’m surprised they were capable of any complete thoughtโ€ฆ.. and then his body was stolen.

It’s a miracle that Jesus even ended up in a tomb in the first place. He was poor and the Romans wouldn’t have cared about burying any of the people they crucified. The only reason that Jesus was buried is that he had a very powerful friend that the government needed, so he could ask for something large and actually receive it.

Here’s the moment that judgmental dickhead became divine.

He told you that. He told you that you could ask for something large and be powerful enough to actually receive it. Grace and mercy are free of charge. So is forgiveness. You can let go of anything that is keeping your body in a tomb, graduating into the promise of new hope.

Let yours be the story that sticks.

Morning Choices

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

This particular morning is thinking about Easter. Not only that there are a million metaphors for resurrection, but that you can choose them. You are capable of telling your energy which resurrections are necessary. Sometimes, you have to decide which hurts worse. Living with the idea that a situation is dead or overindulging the fact that it is alive and nourishing because you are wishing it into being. Itโ€™s a bubble. What happens when it pops and it doesnโ€™t even resemble reality? What if the resurrection is metaphor for changing the story youโ€™re telling yourself?

For me, itโ€™s looking at relationships. For you, the thing thatโ€™s โ€œaliveโ€ might be that youโ€™re happy at your job. Itโ€™s up to you to decide if death and resurrection is worth more than life limping along. And yes, I will use death and resurrection because anyone who has ever attempted to change careers knows thatโ€™s exactly how hard it feels some days.

Which brings me right back around to morning routines. Morning is when my mind naturally works the best and most efficiently. In my world, mornings are absolute quiet, because I cannot think and do anything else. I dedicate myself to an idea completely and donโ€™t move until I am capable of a complete thought, which leads to me either getting out a tablet and keyboard or Moleskine that already has a pen attached because Lord knows if I donโ€™t keep it attached Iโ€™ll never see it again.

I start writing (or talking into the microphone, or making a video) between 0530 and 0700. The variance comes from my medication. I take a mood stabilizer which sometimes keeps me awake, therefore I sleep a little later some days to compensate. Truly, though, my best work is at 5:00 AM. It doesnโ€™t matter if I got up or stayed up. If I notice my edge is slipping, Iโ€™ll take sleeping medication during the evening news because I know that myelin on my nerves and getting up when Iโ€™m naturally the most fighting fit in terms of writing will do me a world of good with self esteem.

For instance, in doing the post-mortem on this friend breakup, I realized that Iโ€™d lost myself before it even began and these problems predated anything I ever did to sexually harass her, which I absolutely did and for which I take complete responsibility. I was a mess, but my damage didnโ€™t have to become hers and Iโ€™ll always be sorry for it. What I wonโ€™t miss is her blunt assessment of everything because it made her sound like such a hardass all the time, and because I loved her, I ignored how it made me feel. When I said something about it, I was abruptly invited to go to hell. I can point to that fight less than a week after we met.

I knew when I broke trust that it would be an uphill battle based on not just the original fight, but every fight after that. We had a fundamental issue with communication from the beginning, and I wish Iโ€™d kept her as a fan who wanted access and otherwise just left well enough alone. Iโ€™m just not smart enough to ignore that much dopamine in one place. I am also not the type of person that can squeeze my feelings back into a smaller container. I would much rather you just take your leave because youโ€™ll pull back, but my feelings wonโ€™t. I will just put too much energy where it isnโ€™t wanted for *years* because I believe that scar tissue is stronger, that our relationship will be better once weโ€™ve actually talked through something big.

If your whole idea of relationships is that they deserve to die a horrible death once trust is broken, thereโ€™s not a lot of hope for me in that equation. I am so, so human. I will never live a life free of sin, and I forgive just as easily during the phase where weโ€™re fighting it out in hopes of a better outcome. But I wonโ€™t yield until I hear something that rings *true.* One sentence is all it takes. One moment of real vulnerability.

The part of realizing that resurrection shouldnโ€™t happen in this case is that my friend said she didnโ€™t hold anything over my head, that we were all good, while at the same time treating me completely differently. A decade ago I knew things about her no one knew, and vice versaโ€ฆ compared with not mentioning that the guy she started dating but hadnโ€™t met her kids yet was now her husband. If you want that marked a change in our relationship, itโ€™s fine, but donโ€™t pretend that everything is the same. Itโ€™s not and it never will be. Things being the same is just a story youโ€™re telling yourself, or more accurately, the story I told me.

Her reaction was not trusting that I do love her for absolutely everything she is, not trusting that my love for her would extend to her husband as well. I would step in front of a bus for him, no questions asked, simply because she loves him. Everything that matters to her matters to me. Besides, if heโ€™s any smart at all he already knows sheโ€™s too good for him. I donโ€™t have to remind himโ€ฆ

I also know that her trauma reflexes caused her to react that way, because they told her that once I screwed up, I was always going to screw up. Opening her heart to me was always going to end badly. Itโ€™s true I needed time to recover. You donโ€™t get hit in the face with that much fantastic every day. I took my leave, tail slung between my legs, and she kept reading.

I thought we were done for life and then I wondered how in the hell she knew my dad was going in for heart surgery (I really do think of this blog as letters to myself in the future and sometimes forget that looking up what Iโ€™m doing currently is a thing that people do). I should have known we were done when my mother died two or three days later and her response was an e-mail when she lived a half hour from me. Nothing was the same because we were both scared of each other. I got over it and eventually started letting her see everything again.

She continued to be shut down like a steel trap unless she was laying out her feelings about my other love interests/friends/reptiles of some sort. I am not devaluing this aspect of our relationship, because it made me feel guarded and protected. Not being able to see herself as clearly as she saw others made it feel as if I was on the outside of that protection in those instances, because I didnโ€™t have anything helpful to say anymore. My rights had been revoked. It was a credentials fail all the way around.

Speaking of credentials, thatโ€™s one of the funniest conversations weโ€™ve ever had. Her not knowing jack shit about computers and me teaching her how to irritate the fuck out of her IT Guys at work. Their misery is my happy place.

Iโ€™m processing out all this pain because hurt people hurt people. I donโ€™t want to be capable of losing myself this way anymore, hoping against hope and trying not to breathe wrong. Remembering making her laugh is the best I can do right now, otherwise my rage takes my breath away. I donโ€™t feel emotions at half-strength. I find that if I get as angry as I need to get and grieve as hard as I need to while itโ€™s happening, it wonโ€™t come back in five years and bite me.

I am letting the death and resurrection occur within me as we speak, because I chose it. This one matters, and it is necessary. I know Iโ€™m lost, and Iโ€™m trying to get found because amazing grace does have a sweet, sweet sound. Youโ€™ll just never hear that hymn out of me if I can help it because Iโ€™ve sung it enough now for four lifetimesโ€ฆ most especially irritating at the tempo of a funeral dirge.

Itโ€™s not time for thatโ€ฆ. Well, I suppose it is until Sunday morning. But the point is that come Sunday morning, itโ€™s time for lilies and a pipe organ and a brass quintet and the Widor Toccata with the all the stops pulled out. I want to feel the bass in my chest. I want resurrection to burst forth as new as it ever has been.

Even though it is thousands of years old.

Now the morning routine is switching to making a cup of tea and regathering the strength to resurrect something else.

Strength and Helsinki

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling

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Show Tunes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now I’ve Done It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Once the Facebook scanners find you, it’s all over but the crying. Like I said, there is no recourse because “there aren’t enough people to manage content.” So, an Evangelical Christian came at me like the brain dead idiot into which she has willingly transformed. It was epic in terms of how close she was to getting the point. It was smacking her in the face the whole time. It was like my hand was on her head and she was windmilling her arms. The entire thread has been taken down, but ended with “you go and learn everything by rote…. come back to me when you have an original thought.” She came back with “is that the best you’ve got?”

Oh dear God.

I thought I was safe because my words were originally a bumper sticker. I said, “No. Jesus loves you, but I think you’re a bitch.” #bumperstickerwisdom And that’s how I got banned for a month less than two days after I got banned for a week. Between this and trying to win a cooking contest, I really feel like I’m getting my full use of the words “inciting violence.” But maybe not as much as I want, because if I’d come back at her with an original thought, I would have been in hell, not Facebook Jail. I am so mad at being cut off from my family and friends for that long, but I have absolutely no choice in the matter.

Aaaaaaanyway, these people drive me insane. They think the Bible is all about learning facts. Facts and the Bible are not really compatible after 2,000 years. Not only is it leaving science and medicine to their own devices by taking it literally, they’re missing out on a wealth of information spiritually by not taking it seriously. No true Jesus scholar would agree that learning your faith by memorizing scripture is a good ideea. It’s better to learn concepts.

My analogy for this is cooking (again).

I am a professional cook, yet I have only one true recipe. Even that was a wild guess at how much spice to put in the dish as I worked backwards. That’s because I understood the concept, but didn’t write down the facts. I innately know that fat supports heat, acid cuts fat, sugar neutralizes acid, acid neutralizes salt. Witth those combinations, you can make damn near anything. It’s all about choices. Let’s take one. Acid. Are you going to use citrus or vinegar? Well, how much fat are you trying to balance?

It is directly akin to my reading of the Bible. It comes in bites, I chew on it until I can swallow, and then I pass on my understanding, just like I did with the whole “concepts” thing. I had to cook thousands of times until I rose above the facts… so as it goes with the meticulous study of a book…… and it’s amazing how much The Bible and Le Guide Culinaire (Escoffier) have in common. The take home message in a professional kitchen is Old Testament “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” RAGE. Way, way before that, in order to become the best of the best, you work your way through the Luncheon Lectionary (yes, I did just make that up). You don’t read Le Guide from cover to cover, although you can. You skip around depending on what you need.

There are two types of people in the world. Those that can extrapolate assumptions from incomplete data…. #bumperstickerwisdom

Dear Black People,

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I hope that you are not offended by my opening salvo, but one of my favorite shows on Netflix is โ€œDear White People,โ€ and it seems rude not to write back. However, I am not here to be as flip and funny as that show. For instance, there will be no take-downs of shows that made me laugh so hard there were tears and snot running down my face. I hope and pray there will be no โ€œwhite people are weirdโ€ moments, because I agree with you. Iโ€™m just here to talk about yesterday, and what it means for our collective futures.

I have said many times that no minority has the capability to be racist. Prejudiced, sure, but not racist. This is because racism is clearly a top-down, systematic, institution. No minority has the kind of power to create such a thing.

Though I would never compare my own struggle to yours, I feel so much empathy and sympathy toward it. Even though Iโ€™m as white and nerdy as they come, I am a woman and a lesbian, two things that have worked against me my entire career.

The one shining moment of equality that Iโ€™ve ever experienced was in Texas, of all places. I needed two forms of ID to get my driverโ€™s license renewed, and I realized that I only had one… my old driverโ€™s license. And then I remembered that I had a copy of Danaโ€™s and my domestic partnership license from Oregon in my backpack, and I asked if they would take that. There was the usual โ€œlet me ask my manager,โ€ but then they said โ€œyes.โ€

Iโ€™ve also experienced some truly cringeworthy moments, the white people are awful moments that we share- the difference being that people can immediately tell that youโ€™re black. They can almost immediately tell that Iโ€™m female. But knowing Iโ€™m a lesbian is just conjecture until I come out to them. It is not the same, but I hope that we can share some common ground.

For instance, when I was in high school, I told one person that I was a lesbian and two hours later, the entire school knew. One of the percussionists in my orchestra used to hold up Playboy centerfolds where the conductor couldnโ€™t see them and whisper at me to look in his direction. It was mortifying, and it went on for days.

Later in life, I had a boss who spent 30 minutes talking about her children. She said, โ€œI know youโ€™re not going to have any, so I guess you can talk to us about your cat like that.โ€ She also forced me to wear make-up because she said that I always looked like โ€œI didnโ€™t feel good.โ€ Believe me, I was much more comfortable in my own skin without makeup, because while I am not androgynous, Iโ€™m not a girly girl, either.

When I was a teenager, I worked at an early childhood daycare center. They didnโ€™t know that I heard them say I shouldnโ€™t be around children, but they didnโ€™t know if they could fire me for that. Over the next few weeks, there was a concerted effort to make me look incompetent instead.

Another story from my junior year in high school was that I had who I thought was a fantastic English teacher, and she would ask me to do things like help her with bulletin boards. I felt safe enough to come out to her, and after that, she had me transferred into a different class.

I realize that the last few paragraphs seem like Iโ€™m trying to make this entry all about me, but that is not my intent. I am trying to say that I will always be a part of the Black Lives Matter movement, because if I have had these experiences, you have stories that are 80 times worse.

Yesterday, while the verdict was being read on Derek Chauvinโ€™s case, police shot and killed a 15-year-old girl. She had a knife and was not only lunging at another girl, she lunged toward the police. What I will never understand is why lethal force was necessary in that instance. Perhaps the police could have used defensive moves to take away the knife. Perhaps they could have used a taser to get her to drop the knife altogether so that they could get her into custody alive. She would have stood trial and probably done some time in juvie, but at the end of it, she would have been able to come home to her parents. Shooting four bullets at her was not, and should never, be the answer.

It should be known that the police are also trigger happy with white people, but the reason the Black Lives Matter protests are so important is that the police act as judge and jury in the moment and decide the punishment is death at a rate far greater than they have ever done when white people commit a crime.

Timothy McVeigh is a prime example. He blew up an entire building in Oklahoma and was taken alive to jail. The important part here is that though he died at the hands of the state, it was a juryโ€™s decision. No police officers decided to kill him in that moment, at the site.

We can also add Dylann Roof to the mix. He killed nine people at a Charleston AME church, and was taken alive- even given Burger King on the way to the police station after a manhunt that lasted two days. He did not receive the death penalty, but life imprisonment. So, even though he will never live with his family again, they will get to come and visit. And again, he got to stand trial. No one in that manhunt decided that they were responsible for punishing him.

Getting caught stabbing someone is the least of our worries. Letโ€™s start with the idea that black kids and adults can apparently be killed for holding anything. A toy gun (Tamir Rice), snacks (Trayvon Martin), and it was a cigarette that provoked the white copโ€™s ire in the Sandra Bland case. Worse, black people donโ€™t even have to be holding anything. Ahmaud Arbery was killed while jogging through a park, though not by the police- by white supremacists in Georgia.

So now weโ€™ve arrived at the part where itโ€™s not just the police. It is all white people, clearly some more extreme than others. Most white people would not identify themselves as racists because they arenโ€™t physically or emotionally violent towards minorities, particularly black people.

Or are they?

I get that most people arenโ€™t physically violent, but the emotional piece is ever-present and pervasive. Believe me when I say that most of the time, white people do not even realize what theyโ€™re doing. They have grown up in a racist system that they canโ€™t even see because itโ€™s always been there. White supremacy is still a problem; extremists still exist. But every white person in America has committed the sin of blindness. I am including myself in that crowd, because the color of my skin still allows me privileges it doesnโ€™t give you.

I can buy a car or a house easier than you. If you buy a nice car or house, the police are more likely to believe it isnโ€™t yours.

Remember when Henry Louis Gates was arrested in front of his own house because when he came back from a trip to China, he found that his front door was jammed, so he and his driver tried to pry it open? The neighbors called 911 and claimed someone was breaking into the house. Gates is one of my favorite authors and has been on TV for interviews plenty. (โ€œFinding Your Rootsโ€ hadnโ€™t started yet.) Yet, no one recognized him or believed him in the moment.

If it can happen to a respected scholar, it can happen to any black person in America….. like Amanda Gorman, who had literally just been on TV a few weeks before, and if I remember right, it was a national broadcast (thatโ€™s the one joke youโ€™ll get in this piece).

I am heartened by the election of Rev. Raphael Warnock, for a very particular reason. He went to Union Theological Seminary after he graduated from Morehouse. At Union, he went all the way to a doctoral degree. He is the antithesis of everything the Religious Right (which is neither) has done to the Republican Party. Instead of living in a comfort zone thisbig by emphasizing fear of hell and damnation, he is letting his votes be inspired by what the historical Christ would have wanted. He is bringing the kindom of God through the soul of politics, which I would support even if I was an atheist…. because his theology is one of civil rights for all, feeding and caring for the least of us, and changing our racial identity as a country, which for a long time has been rightly compared to South African apartheid. He is not trying to convert people to his religious beliefs, just using them to ask himself the important questions.

In โ€œThe Black Churchโ€ on PBS, Henry Louis Gates paraphrases James Coneโ€™s work in โ€œThe Cross and the Lynching Tree.โ€ I had heard of Cone and the title of his book, but Iโ€™d never read it in depth. It struck me where I live.

Gates said that when Africans were first brought to the United States, slave owners forced Christianity on them because there was a lot in it about how slaves should behave (that is a whole different story for another day, but sufficed to say, that interpretation is abominable…. and at the very least, the slave owners should have paid more attention to the masterโ€™s responsibilities, the bare minimum for people that misunderstood those scriptures so badly). The slave owners didnโ€™t anticipate that the slaves wouldnโ€™t identify with those scriptures at all, but the man who was beaten and crucified, someone they could indeed understand.

To take it a step further, there is no such thing as competitive suffering. Jesus did not suffer more than American slaves, and to say he did is to undermine you both. Howard Thurman said it best when he entitled his magnum opus โ€œJesus and the Disinherited.โ€ Martin Luther King, Jr. carried a copy of that book everywhere he went, and he kept it close to his heart- literally in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Thereโ€™s probably nothing that I, a nerdy white lady, can offer you in the way of comfort. However, I believe that these two books might become important to you, even if you are not religious. I will also add a second book by James Cone called โ€œBlack Theology and Black Power,โ€ which argues that Jesusโ€™ liberation of both Jews and Gentiles alike was the same message that Black Power was preaching. In fact, youโ€™ll read that it was Malcolm X who shook Cone out of his complacency….. Malcolm said that โ€œChristianity was a white manโ€™s religion,โ€ and it stuck with Cone long enough for him to realize that Malcolm was right. The church universal has a lot of work to do in terms of widening the net and dissociating itself from white supremacy…… going back to ancient missionaries trying to bring white European Christian culture to people who already had civilizations older than theirs.

White, heterosexual, cisgender supremacy has become inextricably interrelated with white church. Itโ€™s just more polite. Hidden behind smiles and โ€œbless your hearts.โ€ If there is anything the Trump administration showed me, it is that there are still so many people who would treat you as lesser than just because your skin looks different, and treat me as if I am sin personified. I donโ€™t go to a church like that, but I am wary of walking into any of them with which I am not familiar…. or if Iโ€™ve heard the things that go on there.

Any church that looks at the Bible as if God literally had a pen in their hand and wrote it all down is ridiculous to me. It was written in a time and place that has no bearing on our own, in addition to being inspired by many, many people…. some of whom made it into the canon, and some who did not. I look at theology as a lens through which I see everything else, and I have to admit, I did not write that sentence. Marcus Borg did. The best analogy I can bring to the table is a scene from โ€œShadowlands:โ€

Harry: I know how hard you’ve been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.

Jack: That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesnโ€™t change God, it changes me.

I can only hope that the reverse is true with the Black Lives Matter movement… that through the fog, we will carry the light together, bringing along everyone else.

Love,

Leslie

ProChristianation

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have so much to do today that is banal, therefore I am sitting at my desk hoping to come up with something brilliant instead. Maybe if I have a creative flash, it will make taking care of the small stuff easier. I try to go from least desirable to most, because if I start with the thing I want to do most, the rest of my to-do list goes into “I can do it tomorrow” status, which generally runs ad infinitum amen.

I need to do some stuff around the house, and I also need to go to the pharmacy and grocery store. I should have thought ahead on this one and used the pharmacy at the grocery store from the beginning, but luckily, CVS and Giant are practically next door to each other. It takes about two minutes to walk between them if I’m feeling lazy, 45 seconds if I’m booking it…. usually dependent on how much I have to carry from one store to the other. I feel like taking this break to write is justified, because I don’t like to go anywhere without my phone, watch, and headphones completely charged. It helps me to be in crowds if everyone feels further away, so I’m usually listening to music or a podcast.

I never leave my watch at home because I have cerebral palsy and monocular vision. If my monocular vision is guilty, I have missed a step down (sometimes a step up) or a crack in the sidewalk. If it’s the CP, I have taken a spill a propos of nothing. My watch has fall detection, and if I don’t move in a certain amount of time, alerts 911. I’ve never needed it, but I am genuinely afraid of hitting my head, because in 90% of cases, the falls happen so fast I don’t have time to react. I’ve only had three falls in the last five years that have resulted in bruising or bleeding, but that’s enough, especially since I ripped my favorite pants at the knee…. khakis that would have looked horrible with patching even if I could have gotten all the blood out. No, wait. I have ripped two pairs of pants at $50 a pop. In one case, I thought I broke my hip. Luckily, I did not. The bone ached for days as I recovered, though.

While I was in more pain than worrying about my pants, I am reminded of an old Ryan Darlington story. He wrecked his bike and walked it back home because he was scraped up, road rash, bleeding, all the things. His dad took one look at him and, completely deadpan, said “geez…. is the bike okay? There’s nothing like the love of a parent for a child.

It helps to have a friend to help me watch out for that stuff, but mostly I just tumble ass over teakettle because I won’t say anything up front. I need to get to a place where it just is, and doesn’t make me feel embarrassed. It’s difficult, though, especially with new people in my life. If I fall once in front of them, it’s just an accident. Three or four times? Not so much.

What helped me the most was meeting Tracy Walder (link is to my question at her Q&A after her book talk- The Unexpected Spywe had a conversation when she signed my book), and learning that even with all she’s accomplished professionally, she still has her own body issues and doesn’t talk about it, either. Her hypotonia didn’t develop into CP, so our cases are different, but our internal monologues are the same.

I didn’t mean to put her on the spot, but I’d read a few pages of the book while I was waiting for her, and she mentions it, so I thought it was fair game.

I kicked myself later that I didn’t take her aside privately, because I think talking about it to an audience might have made her uncomfortable. I hope I was able to diffuse it by saying I had it, too, so she wouldn’t feel alone…. or maybe it was that I didn’t want to feel alone. Either way, it worked out.

I’d never met anyone with hypotonia before, so one of the best moments of my life was learning that there’s another person in the world that has the same feelings I do. I am sure there are plenty more, but neither of us know them. In fact, she says that she doesn’t think she’s ever met anyone outside her family that has it.

She gave me such a gift by opening up, because it raised my self-esteem when I realized that it was okay to feel how I feel, and just to let them come and go. Perhaps in the future I will feel more comfortable getting out of the house because of it. I tend to hole up (quarantine or not), because the layout of the house is familiar and safe. I purposely put off going to the grocery store and pharmacy until social interaction is needed to maintain isolation, because I don’t have to guess whether I’ll trip. I don’t have to guess that I’ll run into something. I don’t have to guess whether or not my shoulder will bang on a door frame unless it’s doubly wide. I just know.

It makes meeting people doubly hard, but during the quarantine, I did have one woman reach out to me that I managed to piss off in one day flat. That’s a record. However, I wasn’t upset about it because it was a conversation I knew was going to be way more trouble than it was worth. She grew up non-denominational/Pentecostal and still trying to live out her faith in that vein, which made me cringe because that framework is designed to keep people inside the fear of going to hell when they die………. and she can try until Jesus comes to fit in as a queer fundamentalist, but people will still talk behind her back if not directly to her face.

She spoke fluent “Christianese,” which is a language that I hear so much that I can understand it, but I won’t engage. People who take the Bible literally and those of us who take the Bible seriously are so different that there’s really no mesh. You will never catch me using the phrases “looking for a Godly marriage” or “raising kids in His word.” What pissed her off was me saying “I hear those words a lot, but I have no idea what they actually mean.”

Having spent a lot of time in the Bible Belt, I know to keep my views to myself (she was originally from Beaumont, TX). For that crowd, the resurrection is more important than anything Jesus ever did while he was alive…. and I do not enjoy the “sticky, sticky blood” interpretation.

Also, nothing in the Bible to literalists is a story from an ancient civilization trying to understand the world around them, but absolute truth- as if God sat down and wrote it all in pen. Don’t even mention to them that stories of Jesus were oral traditions not written down until 90 years after his death. No one had an eyewitness account, but literalists skip over that, as well, and will fight you in a way that you’ll always lose, because they go pretty quickly into righteousness- they follow Jesus and they have no idea what the hell you’re doing. They’re Christians, and you’re faking it…. as if no time has passed and thousands of years of exegesis and criticism are fake as well. My alarm bell went off when she said she went to Bible College. Here’s what I mean by alarm bell, taken from Wikipedia:

Many were established as a reaction against established theological colleges and seminaries, which conservatives believed were becoming increasingly liberal and undermining traditional Christian teachings, such as Biblical inerrancy [emphasis mine].

There’s a big difference between Bible College and say, getting into the divinity schools at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Emory, etc…. this is because the error is that seminaries were getting too liberal. It’s that the more they pieced history together, they could no longer support the idea that every single sentence in the Bible is a hundred percent factually accurate and needs no translation from then to now.

I am sure that my treatise on “inerrancy” could have been an entry all on its own, but everything ties together in terms of getting over myself and meeting new people, and knowing within a conversation or two whether it’s a relationship I’d like to continue. I know I’ll keep tripping and falling, but I’d like to know whether I’m going to land in the right hands.

For me, that person could be a different (non-literalist) denomination, a different religion altogether, or agnostic/atheist as long as they respect that I’m not going to change.

My beliefs about the Bible can be summed up in one sentence. I believe that all 66 books are stories that are all true, and some of them actually happened.

Nothing Stays the Same

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wanted to wait to post my next entry until I actually had something to say. I know that not updating my blog reduces traffic, thus dampening my quest for world domination. On the other hand, I don’t want to be one of those people who doesn’t take time to think before writing…. anything will do, because it’s not about craft, it’s about attracting views, visits, likes, and followers. I feel like I have enough already. Not believing I have enough just leads to verbal vomit for its own sake… and to me, that just doesn’t cut it.

I mean, I’ve always been the type to just lay out everything on this web site and let people make their own decisions about what they read, and when I post often, it’s because having something to say comes along that frequently. It’s organic, never forced. Lately, I’ve realized that most of my ruminations are just continuations of things I’ve already said, probably more than three or four times. I promise that I am not regurgitating content. It’s the way my brain works.

I think about a problem right up until I don’t. The interesting part (or, at least, it’s interesting to me) is that I tend to start a couple of steps back and rehash, but when I’m thinking about something a second (third, fourth, fifth, 17th……) time, the overall arc is the same and different small details jump out, often changing the course of the dialogue… conversations that happen between me and me. Though Shakespeare was not talking about discourse with oneself, he might as well have been. The play’s the thing… especially in moments where I’ve caught myself red-handed…. infinitely more scary than feeling caught by anyone else. I’m better at kicking my ass than you are. Write it down.

I’ve scared myself for the past couple of weeks because I make it a point to look at my Facebook memories, and along with all of my funny memes is this mountain range of emotions. Note to self: more peaks, less valleys.

WordPress propagates to my author page, which means that I am equally stupid and brave enough to post things to my own profile. If I skipped doing so, old entries wouldn’t appear at all. It isn’t about torturing myself- many, many more readers click through from my profile because I’ve been on Facebook for 10 years. The “Stories” page has only existed since 2015, and as of right this moment, only has about 100 followers. After a decade, I have 745 friends and 38 followers. The platform is exponentially larger. My Facebook profile propagates to @ldlanagan on Twitter, and my author page to @lesliecology. Again, I have more followers on my own Twitter feed than the feed for my web site… the difference is that @lesliecology is nothing but a WordPress feed, and @ldlanagan is everything I post on Facebook, period. My profile is public, and my Facebook statuses are generally longer than Tweets, so anyone can click through to the original post.

So there’s the setup as to why I wanted to separate out my blog entries from my Facebook profile/Twitter feed, and why it hasn’t worked out.

Scaring myself the last couple of weeks has been about entries from four years ago, starting with PTSD as a teenager and it unraveling my thirties into divorce, losing a good friend, and so much compounded mental instability that I needed more help than my friends and family could give. Poet Mary Karr gave me the phrase “checking into the Mental Mariott,” and I’ve used it relentlessly since.

Joking about it covers up deep wounds, and that’s why I write about them instead of speaking. When I am writing, I have a bit of clinical separation. I can look at the land mines without detonation. I cannot say the same is always true for reading. Occasionally, I feel the distance of having grown as a person, so that the entry feels like it was written by someone else. More often, I am remembering every tiny detail about the setting and the arc of the story. Then body memory kicks in, and if my heart and brain were racing in the moment, I feel it again; it doesn’t matter how much time has passed.

It isn’t all bad, though, because I write in equal measure about how good I’m feeling, and those excited butterflies also return…. sometimes, but not often, in the same entry. The other plus is getting to decide if what was true at that time is still true today, and as a rule with some exceptions, it’s not. There are truth bombs that hit me just as hard now as the day I wrote them, but for the most part, this blog has been dynamic, and has changed just as often as I have (which is, like, the point).

Whether I’m reading an up day or a down, it is exhilarating to see that few things stay the same.

I will always have the regular, boring adult problems… and at the same time, my life is bigger than that. Managing Bipolar II, remnants of PTSD (anxiety, mostly) and ADHD so that I am not a ball of negative crazy keeps it interesting. I emphasize “negative crazy” because I don’t know anyone who isn’t crazy in a positive way. I am not attracted on any level to the mundane. Regular people with big dreams are often lumped in with “crazy,” because most people don’t dream big.

Even my dreams have been adjusted. I am still dreaming big, but the focus is not on starting my own church anymore. Perhaps in the distant future, I’ll think about it again. But right now, when I enter into any church building, consecrated or not, “my mother is dead” becomes an ostinato.

From Google Dictionary:

Ostinato

osยทtiยทnaยทto
/รคstษ™หˆnรคdล/

noun: ostinato; plural noun: ostinati; plural noun: ostinatos

a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm.

“The cellos have the tune, above an ostinato bass figure.”

Even the sentence used to illustrate the word is appropriate, because you don’t just hear bass. You feel it.

I have written before that she’s everywhere I look, because over our lives together, I cannot think of an element within church life where she was absent. I cannot think of a single thing that was all mine until I moved to Portland and began preaching at Bridgeport UCC.

I have always been the Mary. She was the Martha.

There was no judgment on her part. I just mean that I have always been the thinker and she has always been the actor…. Actually, I take that back. My mother was one of the few people I’ve met in this life that had extraordinarily creative ideas and the ability to execute them, which is rare.

Few people manage to live on the ground and in the air at the same time (it’s a miracle I can tie my own shoes).

In Luke 10:41-42, Jesus is speaking to Martha, who has complained to him that (I’m paraphrasing) “Mary’s just sitting on her ass while I’m doing all the work. Can’t you go rattle her cage?” And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her.” He actually says this to the woman that invited him and his entire crew into her house and wants to feed everyone. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve ever cooked and served for 16 (fairly certain Lazarus was there- unclear), but I can see Martha’s point and I get a little bit irritated with Jesus. It’s not that one part is better than the other. Thinking is not better than doing. Doing is not better than thinking. They’re just different mindsets, and the evening wouldn’t have been possible without both.

I am certain that Mary and Martha need each other. Martha is grounded, and keeps Mary from floating away. Mary reminds Martha to look at the stars once in a while.

So when I think about the work I did to investigate starting a homeless ministry in Silver Spring, what comes up for me is that my Martha is no longer with us. It rends the mental tapestry I created, and I descend into darkness.

I am still excited by theology of all types- Abrahamic, Eastern, you name it. But right at this very minute, I’d rather spend my time thinking and writing, sometimes posting sermons on this web site rather than waxing philosophic in front of a physical crowd.

What I do not know is whether I will always feel the same, or whether my time is not yet here.

What I do know is that the fight has left me. I am too mired in grief to get passionate enough to affect change. In fact, I wouldn’t say that I’m extraordinarily passionate about anything at all. When my mother died, so did several pieces of me. I know for certain that it would have been easier had I gotten to see my mother live a long life and there was no aspect of “dear God, they took her too soon.” I knew I would be sad when she died, but I was completely caught off guard by the rage at getting robbed.

Embolisms make great thieves who never need getaway cars.

I am still grieving the future that I thought I would get, and piecing together a new normal. It’s a good thing that on this day next year, I’ll read this again, and perhaps that new normal will have some structure. The concrete has been mixed, but I think I added a little too much water, because it just. Won’t. Set.

The Molotov Cocktail

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t believe that people don’t listen when someone throws a Molotov cocktail at their own preconceived notions of how wonderful they are.

This quote is from an e-mail reply sent to me when I was explaining a particular problem with which I am internally wrestling to the ground… like I do, in a “hold on, I have to overthink about it” sort of way. It was so astounding in its clarity, such a succinct rocket propelled truth grenade, that I felt it deserved top billing. This is because yes, I can apply it to this situation, but moreover, I can apply it to myself and the journey I’ve taken over the years to become a better version of myself.

I’ve mentioned before that being panicked all the time allowed things to come out of my mouth that never would’ve otherwise, and when someone threw that Molotov cocktail at me, at first I was angry and popped off even more, because in the moment, that’s all I could think to do. But once the cortisol wore off, I did indeed take those words away and think about them, making them a part of my heartbeat and using them as fuel, onwards and upwards.

Things calmed down somewhat naturally, but when I started taking Klonopin,โ„ข the adrenaline I felt during conflict all but went away. It allowed me to shoot water at the (very, very tall) flames. I could sit back and remember the day I wrote that the fire inside me could not be contained with water. I had to bring in a much bigger fire, and then rest and relax in the ash-enriched earth. Before that, anxiety kept my own fire burning, and those words got lost in the middle of the mess. It was a wonderful day when they came back.

In case you’re wondering, I do read my own blog like a stalker ex-girlfriend at 2:00 AM. Mostly because after time has passed, I am so divorced from my own words that they seem as if someone else wrote them. It’s deeper than that, though. It’s about learning to rely on myself and, God forbid, take my own advice. There are some entries where I legitimately say, “that’s so wise. I wish I had written it.” It’s a shock to my system to realize that it was me, just a different iteration.

The truth bomb for me was learning that my anger at the world was rubbing off on people in ways that I both didn’t intend and indeed wanted to inflict the pain I was experiencing. This is because sometimes there were innocent bystanders, and sometimes my yard felt threatened and I went off like a rat dog with a Napoleon complex (at 5’4 and barely 125, the description is apt). I still occasionally say things that have consequences I don’t understand, but so does everyone else. There is no way to predict or be responsible for someone else’s perception of reality. The difference now is that I don’t feel threatened, because most of the threat was my own perception of reality and not external stimuli. It’s my medication, though, that I credit with allowing the anger within me to dissipate, because without the suppression of anxiety’s physical symptoms, I didn’t have time to coolly and calmly calculate my next move. There was no, “I could say this, or I could say that.” It was just the “think it, say it” plan. Sometimes it worked well for me, because for all its faults, it was definitely authentic. I didn’t have time to put on the mask of “everything’s fine.” What really forced me to examine my thought processes was the old axiom that hurt people hurt people… something I knew logically, but hadn’t instituted emotionally. Making the connection between heart and mind had previously eluded me. And while I am still intensely cerebral, I feel that now I am using more parts of my heart than I used to be capable.

This is because once I “relaxed in the ash-enriched earth,” some of the dead spots left by years of emotional abuse as a teenager started to grow back… and I won’t lie, those neurons were at first part of the problem, raising my threat level to DEFCON “OH MY FUCK!.” Though I take full responsibility for my thoughts and actions, I also can’t ignore the context… because as I say often, I won’t make excuses, but I hope I can provide understanding of why something happened, because nothing happens in a vacuum. And that is where writing really helps me, because I don’t generally lay out that context for the people themselves, but on my own. It is not their responsibility to understand. It’s mine.

It is amazing, though, how much pleasure and happiness have come back into my life via self-reflection. People have seen me heal and have drawn their own conclusions, just from trying to explain me to me. I am no longer a tight knot of fear ALL THE TIME, which was my modus operandi for a number of years. Seeing how it was failing me allowed my life to expand, taking a detour when my mother died, but not stopping progress altogether. I just had to find different sources of unconditional love, because it’s the one thing my mother was capable of doing that no one else did (though they do now, because with my friends, there’s a recognition that it needed to be replaced somewhere). My mother was the only person in my life that was constantly on my side, never ever saying “what did you do?,” but “what have they done to my baby?” And this was even after I reassured her I was being a right tool and I deserved every bit of the karma coming around. It just never mattered to her. She was always on my side, no matter how I behaved, and I think that’s a mother’s love in a nutshell.

For instance, I think she’d hate that I don’t go to church anymore, because it’s not a comforting experience. However, I think she would understand, because it’s me. My belief that God is the source of every story ever told, that we are all subtractions of the divine, has never faltered. But when I walk into a church, all I see is her. She’s at the organ. She’s in the choir. She’s sitting in the congregation. She’s pinching my hand hard enough to draw blood when I’m laughing so hard I just cannot keep it together… and if she’s in the alto section and I’m far enough away with the sopranos, she’s giving me the death stare instead. If you’ve never seen my mother’s death stare, you just won’t even know the half of how…… effective it could be. Therefore, every single church service I attend doesn’t feel uplifting. It feels like a knife in my front.

I am sure that as time passes, so this will, also. But I’m not there yet, and if there is indeed a heaven and she is watching, I hope she realizes this… that life is always in forward motion, and belonging to a faith community (or starting one) will happen in its own time.

My theology dictates that there is no heaven or hell, just which one we’re bringing to the life we’re living right now. But that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine it. I can also imagine, as I do in all things, that I could be wrong. It has been known to happen…..

…which often leads to the examination of how wonderful I think I am, and adjusting as necessary, because I listen.