God, Teach Me What I'm For, Not Just What I'm Against

From the nakedpastor

Lord, you have seen my white knuckled hands holding onto a shred of faith amid insinuations from self-enthroned Christians claiming my faith isn't real because the God I believe in is not the one true God.

And you have seen my tear-stained face as I wept for how alone I felt
and how devastating it can be
when you look back to some of those on the other side
and all they have left to offer are there condolences
or
their condemnation
but no more conversation or confession.

You are El Roi, the God Who Sees Me, shattered piece of clay being held together by gossamer threads of divine gold, who has used her shards to lash out in anger
sometimes justly
but many times unmercifully, unjustly.

You are The One who has seen me paint myself with the full spectrum of color pouring from the prism of Your God's Eye,
yet painting those with whom I disagree with the stark, flat contrast of black and white.

You have seen me hurt and be hurt.

I want to to be the one You see bind,
to be an embodiment of Your
intoxicating,
hundred proof grace.

I want it to be known,
that the religion I believe in
the God I follow
sends Her children into the word to bind up the brokenhearted
to bring justice to the oppressed
liberty to the captives
to be comforters to the devastated
and to build up what was ruined and pilfered
(hearts, bodies, souls, minds)
into a bounteous land
filled with tall,
soaring,
mighty oaks.

My Father, My Mother, I know that I could most certainly be wrong, but I have chosen this path because if I am to err, I want to err on the side of inclusion, and if in this way I have erred I have full trust in your heart, that You Who Are Love is the safest place I can stand when I am wrong.

You Who Are Love is the safe place for all of us who are working out our faith with fear and trembling,
a scripture reference I didn't understand much when I was so pious and young and certain,
whose meaning I am still feeling reverberate, undefined and immeasurable, in my own life.
But I tremble and I pray
that I have the humility to model that safety for others.

I am for freedom, justice, grace, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation,
and none of it cheaply won or fought for or only dreamt about in Your future kingdom
but championed for On Earth As It Is In Heaven, however feebly,
however imperfectly,
however haphazardly and fully human,
because when it is all said and done,
I want to be for You.

So when I am laid to rest,
they may say that I worshipped a God other than their own,
but they can never say I had any other gods before Her.

The No True Christian Fallacy

You cannot preach a Gospel of unconditional love and then proceed to lay ideological conditions on the Children of God. The moment you utter, "No true Christian would believe," you negate your commitment to preaching the Gospel.

The accusation that no true Christian would believe

in open theism
evolution
that marriage equality is not a sin
that it's okay to support lowering taxes
that it's right to go to war
that God is feminine as well as masculine

whatever ideological enemy you could substitute for that variable, you take away the Gospel from those people. You are telling them that you have figured out that being a true Christian is about who you vote for, how you think the world was created, and not about who you've been forgiven by.

It is painful to be on the receiving end of, "No true Christian would...," but not only does the pain it causes others make it wrong, it's also wrong because it betrays a deeply held sin: that of hubris. Of believing that you have separated the wheat from the chaff, you have sussed out the minutiae of God's law and how it should be applied today, you have reduced the Gospel to a set of doctrinal bullet points.

But there are republicans supping at the table. There are democrats, communists, anarchists, and independents. Same sex married couples, celibates, straight couples, people who oppose marriage equality and people who support it. Evolutionists and young earth creationists. Hardcore traditionalists and liberal revisionists.

To each and every one of them, Jesus says, "Take, and eat."

To think you're anything other than the lowly prostitute or corrupt tax collector who has to fall hard on the mercy of God, to think you're the ideological Puritan,
that is the antithesis to Gospel.

But I won't say no true Christian would do that, because true Christians commit that sin constantly as they fumble through their faith with fear and trembling.

True Christians falter and make mistakes.
True Christians hurt each other.
True Christians believe the wrong things.
True Christians need Jesus.

They need him like they need water because that's all that is left at the end of the partisan bickering and ideological lines in the sand and elevation of certainty over love.

All that's left is Jesus. So fall hard on his mercy, because he welcomes you openly, and we won't give you a test on right doctrine before doing so.

For She Who Glories in Peace, a poem for my friend's unborn daughter

When you are born
the world will be on fire.
You will be given one clay pot
filled to the brim
with pure
fresh water.
It won't quench all the flames,
but you must remove the lid
pour the life-giving fluid
onto the world
and quench the flames you can.

And in the damp,
charred earth
one small seed will fall
break apart
and finally
grow.

Looking down at that one green spot
that you helped usher into the world,
you'll know

It takes all of us to make the forest. 

Resilience

No longer swimming

but I'm floating

on the surface of these moonlit waves

As long as I'm here

my breath going in with the ebb

and out with the flow

then I'm still alive

and that is enough.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder Stream of Conciousness

Perfectionism is imprinted on my psyche

and if I just keep

trying 

harder

and harder 

to 

eat healthy:exercise:breathe:self-care:find the right diet:yoga:journal:go to therapy:pray

I won't be ill any more.

~.~

It took me an hour to write that text to you today. 

(What day? To whom? Doesn't matter. Took me an hour. My thumbs were shaking with adrenaline).

Call you? No way I could survive the prep for that.

~.~

I'm so scared of messing up because explaining to others failures, mistakes and wrongs decisions is worse than the actual failure. 

~.~

What if having GAD means all my dreams and ambitions for being at the top

are never going to come true? I'm fairly bright, I'm focused, I'm diligent, and often rise to the top of things, and then I crumble like a leaf under the pressure. I'm scared I'll never have a consistent career, but I also want one, because I want stability.

"Everybody has a dream that they will never own..." sings Over the Rhine.

~.~

When people learn my whole story, I've had a few friends remark they're shocked I'm as stable as I am.

I am unstable,I say inside but don't dare say out loud. Have you heard of functioning alcoholics? I'm a functioning fear-junkie. 

~.~

I believe fundamentlism is one of the worst things for mental health, and it preys on the vulnerable, which includes the mentally and physically ill.

~.~

I'm scared I'll be like the people in my family before me, who let their darkness eat them alive, and they shipwrecked and lived half-lives. I don't want that to be my story. I want to survive this. But I also fear the sheer amount of work survival will take, and then I want to crawl in hole and fall asleep. And then I understand their half-lives. And then I understand why the darkness ate them, because that's far easier.

"I don't have a few of drowning, it's the breathing that's taking all this work." -Jars of Clay

Explaining The Blog Title

My blog is called "Thy Waves Over Me" (was temporarily "Her Waves Over Me" as a protest against using feminine language to describe God. I went to back to "Thy" to be gender inclusive). It's a reference to two passages of Scripture as translated in the King James Version:

"Deep calls to deep at the noise of thy waterspouts; all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me." Psalm 42:7 

 "For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me." Jonah 2:3

The King James translation of the Bible has a lot of mixed baggage for me. As a young child in an irreligious family, I voluntarily decided to start attending a fundamentalist church at the invitation of our neighbors. The King James Bible was the authoritative translation. The flourish and poetry of it's words still echo in my mind, years after leaving fundamentalism behind, and they can sometime trigger a tailspin into the pain of remembering being controlled by misogyny and homophobia. It has shaped the way I write, and no wonder, as it is one of the most influential texts in the English language. As an adult, I've grown to love it's poetry and it's failings as a translation. It is, like any other translation, full of human error. What has stuck with me are the beautiful turns of phrase. So when it came time, years ago, to name my blog, this is the old KJV song that had been stuck in my head since childhood.

Throughout my life I have strongly resonated with the story of Jonah. Wanting to run, to leave, and hoping that instead of my enemies coming to God's forgiveness, that she would just destroy them all. I have felt like an unlikely and unwilling participant in this story of Jesus Christ who came to save. I have tried to leave my faith behind so many times, exploring Hinduism, Atheism, Neopaganism, and Buddhism. You can see my moments of "apostasy" throughout posts on my blog. These times of fluctuation are just as much as part of my spiritual journey as my times of intense faith, as my time as a fundamentalist. There is no erasing the King James Version, or Pema Chodron, or crystal lore, or Bible College, or my time as a hardcore Rachel Held Evans groupie, or Yoga, or Catholicism, from my faith journey. Ultimately, through dreams, signs, and visions I don't seek out and don't want, I end up coming back. Reluctant disciple. I am Luther at Diet of Worms, "Here I stand, I can do no other," I say to Jesus with a look of defeat and resignation. Or I'm more like Simon Peter, who says with conviction, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"

"If you cannot trust him to let you know what is right, but think you must hold this or that before you can come to him, then I justify your doubts in what you call your worst times, but which I suspect are your best times in which you come nearest to the truth-- those namely, in which you fear you have no faith." -George MacDonald 

I do not share my faith journey as an example to be followed. I simply share it, knowing that I'm not the only one. When Christianity is coupled with abuse, it's hard to forge a faith that will impress others, something I was far, far too preoccupied with for a long time. In the musical Wicked there's a lyric, "Some questions haunt and hurt, too much, too much to mention/Was I really seeking good/Or just seeking attention?" And I know that for a large portion of my journey, it has been the latter. From a troubled childhood I was seeking the approval of others, people who seemed steady and charismatic and had leadership qualities and were devout. And I think I've become a disappointment to every single one, and I've come to grips with that. I will continue to fluctuate, to prod, to ask questions, to despair, to boldly claim, to sheepishly inquire. I will continue to let people down. I will continue to worship the God/dess who is at times very unknown to me, and at other times feels closer than my own breath.

The Sun Exploded

As a child
the sun exploded
and left an inky black hole
inside this sleeve of flesh,
traumatized and shaken.

But the darkness inside me
was a staircase of shadows
that ascended the ocean
and led me up through the starry sky
to the diamond
pulsing with blood and fire
at the heart of it all.

You Have No Power Over Me

There's no glass ceiling in animal rescue.

No dog or cat has ever noticed my secondary sexual characteristics and concluded, "Sorry, you're the wrong sex to help me."

They've also never said I'm the wrong sexuality to help them.

Christians say that stuff though.

And you can cry,"But not all Christians do!" and that is a great and wonderful truth

but until the people screaming heresy at women in priestly collars
and men having sex with each other
and people who bend gender expectations

are the minority

and no woman or LGBTQIA person is hurt because of their heresy

(for what can be more heretical than denying the full humanity of the other?)

I find little comfort in, "Not all Christians do."

I've seen too many lives gutted and tossed aside
in the name of evangelical-fundamentalist-conservative heterodoxy.
When your belief system kills people (literally or figuratively)
You no longer have power over me
even though you claim you have the truth.

I Get To Say So

"I don't doubt the sincerity of many Christians who condemn gays publicly and work to deny them civil rights, but it is now time for all Christians to take full responsibility for the harm done by their beliefs, the harm to individuals including their own children, and the harm done to those they condemn for their religious reasons."

-Anne Rice

In our lessons
Where I would listen with rapt attention
and allow myself to be molded in your image
You would tell me that people could sincerely believe they were right
and be sincerely wrong.

It's a bitter sort of irony
that it never once occurred to me
or you
to turn this around on our
exclusive
dogmatic
closefisted
closeminded
beliefs.

We could be (are) sincerely wrong.

You can't tell me now that your sincere belief that God's word says being gay is a sin
means
that you're absolved from the consequences your beliefs have wreaked on others

those horrible, heartbreaking, suicidal consequences,

and I get to say so.

Your beliefs don't get you off the hook
while you put the rest of the world on one. 

source: The Naked Pastor

Mother's Day

"Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother."

-Julian of Norwich

As someone who has never celebrated the holiday, because my own mother left, this truth is profound.

Don't take the Motherhood of God away from the Motherless because it seems heterodox. Don't say it's less important than the Fatherhood of God, that even if true, it's less important to emphasize, or worse, that it would be dangerous and confusing.

Because it's just as important. It's just as real.

And the confusion happens when we stuff our ears from contemplating its reality because it seems foreign to us.

Don't tell the hurting that they can't be a good judge of theology because their pain is clouding their judgment.

Because God is for the Hurt and SHe becomes the Hurt.

If theology is not for the broken, and the perspectives of the hurting and abused and the abandoned cannot help shape it
form it
point out the areas where it lacks empathy
where it favors the blessed over the broken

then theology is for nobody.

Either Jesus came for the fringe, the outcast, the outlier, the abused,
or He came for people who didn't need Him to begin with.

God comes for the abandoned.

And becomes everything to them

that they never had.

Taking that away from someone
is the most sinister form of heresy
I've witnessed.

"For my father and my mother have forsaken me,
    but the Lord will take me up."

"Can a woman forget her sucking child,
    that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
    yet I will not forget you."

"So God created human beings in his own image.
    In the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them."

“You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.”

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”