What the Refrigerator Said

When you live in a 100-year-old house, you're not just living in your house—you're living in the house built and re-built over the years by the people who lived there before you. You'll find little quirks everywhere. In our house, for example, there are notes written on the basement support beams from an apparently absent-minded carpenter who built a table in 1954. (He dated his notes. Maybe thinking of the moment I would find them?) I found a bag of pipe cleaners and a very strange antique key taped under a shelf in my butler's pantry. I found a strange little poem wadded up and stuffed in the door. At one point, I think we even shared the house with the original owners, but that's another post. What I want to write about now is the refrigerator.  When we bought this house (our first) we were thrilled that it came with a REFRIGERATOR! We didn't have any extra money and didn't want to have to buy one for ourselves. Well, six years and two babies later, we're still living in our little house and we're still living with our little fridge. But she isn't the hard-working help meet she used to be. Now, she's more like a cranky grandma who likes to freeze your kale or let your cream get glumpy depending on what direction you shoved the milk jug. So, I start to wonder if refrigerators, like cocker spaniels, take on the personalities of their original owners. I start to wonder if this particular refrigerator had an abusive childhood.

Yesterday, as I got myself geared up to make a delicious Orange-Banana-Wheat Germ smoothie, I realized that my delicious Greek yogurt was frozen solid. (And I have no doubt that this was caused by a less-than-precise restocking of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, but that too is another post.) Dammit. I said. Dammit yogurt. Dammit fridge. Dammit real-estate market. Dammit President Obama. (But, I didn't of course, blame Wall Street. That would be silly. It isn't their fault.) Suddenly, I heard in my spirit, the voice of Jesus whispering to the tempest of my emotions and I complied to His suggestion. Thank you fridge. I said out loud.  Thank you for this opportunity to be inconvenienced. Thank you for this speed bump.  In my heart I said, Thank you for this opportunity to learn. What do you have to teach me refrigerator? I am willing to hear. 


I think the point that Jesus was making is that all of those little sandpapery inconveniences we experience on any given day (my cable is out! my tire is flat!) are opportunities for refinement. And we need to submit to them. Yeah, like face them head-on and ask what they have to offer. Because I believe, I really believe, that they have lessons to teach. So I shouldn't gloss them over. I should give them an opportunity to re-direct and refocus. I'm going to try and do that from now on. But I warn you now, it's probably going to make me late sometimes. And through this, I start to see what a truly pernicious sin it is to complain. It's rejecting the teacher of your circumstances. I'm going to try and stop complaining, even to myself. And, after all, those of you who know me know I don't have much to complain about anyway.

I'm going to take this posture of learning into my study of scriptures, too. Yesterday, the suggestion was planted in my mind by a radio program to really spend some time wading through Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Sounds great, right? But it is an incredibly difficult text. (And this from a lover of difficult texts.) For me, the problem of reading scripture is always compounded by these simple facts: 1) I'm reading in translation 2) I'm reading completely out of cultural context and 3) thematically, well, Jesus is just kind of all over the place.  If I were reading Scripture to teach or write about, I would be scared. But I'm reading it as a map for life, so that's not scary—it's terrifying. As I do my first reading this morning, I think of myself flinging the bulk of my body against a hard metal grate. I may pass through this grate into understanding, but I ain't gonna do it in one piece. You see what I mean? My worldview is going to be fragmented when I'm finished. Yet, there is Jesus peeping from the corners coaxing me like a mama coaxing a baby off the first step of the swimming pool ladder. Come on, He says. You can do it. I'm right here. The water is warm. You've just never done it before.

So, I think I'm going to try. I hope you'll read my rambles as I continue to struggle with this passage and with my household appliances. For each struggle has it's purpose in Life and Godliness. And Home Economics, I'm sure.

May the Lord of Peace Himself give you peace in every way,

susan

Seventy times Seven

Christ and the Penitent Sinners. Peter Paul Rubens.

Then Peter came up to him and said "Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As may as seven times?" Jesus said to him "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven." Matthew 18:21&22

Peter might have thought he was being generous by being willing to forgive his brother seven times, but it seems that Jesus had more in mind. As always. Jesus has more.

For years I've prayed that God would help me understand what it really means to forgive someone. I've never heard a definition that sounded right to my soul. But I think it has something to do with being willing to follow Christ into and through his process of redemption. Maybe it has something to do with taking metaphorical hands off the wheel and allowing redemption to happen. Like grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. And knowing, really knowing, that Christ is redeeming the world. And being glad that love doesn't have to do with punishment or fear. 

So, today, I ask Jesus "Lord, how many times to I have to say I'm sorry to my brother? As many as seven times?" And Jesus says to me, "I do not say to you seven times. But seventy times seven." 

I've long prided myself on my ability to admit when I'm wrong and apologize (I hope you can read the irony in that idea). But I don't like to apologize more than once. Once should do. If I apologize once and you don't forgive me, that's your problem. And if you ask me to apologize twice, I might beat the snot out of you. Well, not really, but metaphorically. Unless I haven't had my coffee. 

But the proverbial rub seems to lie in the fact that sometimes it needs to be said more than once because it needs to be heard more than once. And sometimes, I've got to suck it up and apologize. Once. Twice. Three times. One hundred and forty-four times.  It feels like dying. And it is. It's dying to the belief that I deserve forgiveness. That I am capable of doing it right. I don't and I can't. And sometimes, I need to be sorry about it and say so. More than once.

I think about the Christian life and how it often feels like the Christian death. Death to what feels like living, but is really leading me to spiritual death. I wonder if at the end of my life, I'll think "This is death? I've done this a hundred times." I hope so.

Mystic Chickens

Chickens on the Porch Kristen Reitz-Green

                                                      

The summer we left Red Mountain Church, I hauled one of our dining room chairs out on the back porch and sat in the shade eating Girl Scout cookies and reading every single cult-escape narrative in the Social Sciences section of the Birmingham Public Library. One day, months later, if finally dawned on me what the heck I was doing. It's funny how our brains and emotions team up like that but keep the conscious part of our minds from understanding until we can handle it. Maybe, that's what denial really is. (Or, maybe it IS a river in Egypt.) 

Evelyn Underhill writes that one of the most important aspects of the mystical life is drawing every shard of our fragmented identities together into One Unified Whole and then learning how to focus the mental energies of that singular identity on the contemplation of one overarching Other. I picture myself, leaning off the porch, calling "Chick Chick Chick! Come home, chickens!" And seeing every birdbrained aspect of my identity come rolling out from under the porch, off the doghouse, around the side of the barn looking at me with  little red combs a-jangle like "what now, pops?" It's a daunting proposition.

I am feeling especially fragmented. And when I feel like this, I want to look at something wise and knowing and I want to pull myself together with someone else's string. I want to hear someone tell me what to do when A happens to B and yields C.  The jumbled prose of my life clunks along and drags like the fiddle in a Hank Williams song and I want it to SNAP to attention like a Marine Recruit and transmogrify itself into some kind of mathematical equation. It's funny that the more my brain gets like that the more I want some kind of Totality to tell me what to do. Ironic I suppose, because when I look back on those times I almost hear the buzz of the real potentiality of my naked identity hopping out of the self-crafted crate of conformity I've stuffed it in and running around the yard (with it's head off?).

And the problem I invariably encounter—whether it be with Catholic theology or Quiverfull ideas of submission and family or even the Holy Bible itself—is that I connect all the dots and still can't quite tell what the picture is supposed to be. No one, I think, is in my tree. So sometimes I just sit and look at one leaf of the White Oak tree outside my window and I call hard to that overarching Other and I wait for him to tell me what to do. And sometimes he does. But sometimes, I make that mystical connection that we've all made by accident around the fire at camp or on the front porch with friends or listening to music or contemplating the nature of a really good dog, and I do feel transported to some kind of liminal place between the earth and where He is. And it's then, if I can be bold enough to say it without being accused of deifying myself, (God forbid!) that I'm really at home inside my soul. 

Body & Blood...and one flesh to reconcile

Rebellion is a very serious sin. If you disobey your husband, you are indirectly shaking your fist at God. …When you rebel against your husband’s authority, you are grieviously sinning. It is a frightening thing." Martha Peace

I posted this quote on Facebook last night and received some really funny responses. But it became a little serious when it lodged in my think-space, though.  I have been chewing on it all night.  It's disturbing to me, and I haven't been able to understand why. At first, I thought it was because it so clearly crosses the meridian into that familiar "Authority of the Husband" territory that has so addled me these many years. But that's not it. 

When I wrote about that topic before, I received e-mails from concerned people. They say things like "I feel sad for you." And "You don't believe the Bible."  Some say that I've got two conflicting philosophies that I'm trying to reconcile and that's what's causing my angst—"one foot in the world" so to speak. All of my life some folks have been labeling me as rebellious and pig-headed. For me, they've been labels with tangible life-altering consequences. I'm not going to put a shine on the fact that it's been painful.  Finally, after all these years, all of those hurts became hard to carry, so Jesus came. They did that to me, too. He said. And if you are going to be any use to me, you're going to have to endure it. But I know you. And you know me. And that's all that matters.  (If perchance, you're reading this blog and you aren't a Christian, I'll tell you a secret. People don't convert to Christianity because it makes sense. People don't convert because they're scared of hell. People follow Jesus because Jesus steps right down out of heaven and speaks to them. I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm not making some kind of allusion. It's just like it is in the Bible. It's shocking and exposing and sweet. Jesus is winsome and beautiful. The secret of the Eucharist is that Jesus is present in that wine and bread. And not only symbolically.)

Back to the matter at hand: The reality of this quote is that it's elementally irrelevant. I think that most marriages are true partnerships. My husband isn't inclined to do something that I'm completely opposed to. And vice versa. Because we're friends. So if you find yourself in the kind of polarizing situation that would incite a fist-shaking, nose-thumbing rebellion, you've got to wonder if "submitting to your husband's authority" is your only problem.  And isn't all sin a fundamental rebellion against God? I believe that to boil sin down to its fundamental elements is to see that all sin is unbelief. Unbelief that God tells the truth and unbelief that God is good. And you see what kind of problem that unbelief is? It's the kind of problem that only unravels under the merciful hand of Jesus.  

And that's all I have to say about that.

Easter in the Curling Flower Spaces

There's a scene in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury that I love more than any other. Benjy is peering out on to a golf course from a safe and green little cubby of weeds and flowers. All of the action he sees occurs "between the curling flower spaces." Between the Curling Flower Spaces. I love the juxtaposition of silence and fluid action. I love that Benjy's whole world is framed by a kind of haphazard twirling of nature.  It's the serene safety of an eternal child. Nothing is brewing under the surface. Nothing is weighed down by connotation.  It's just quiet and it Is, simply, what it Is.  And he looks through the flower spaces not with fear or frustration at being separated but with an innocent anticipation of impending discovery.  He knows that eventually, he's going to push right through those spaces and join the game.  And maybe that's what I like.

There's a bridge that runs over the Cahaba River just as it bends. It runs silver (and green) under an ancient canopy of Sycamore trees. And I've never seen what lies up around the bend. But I once had a dream that it was a kind of crucible of red and orange and pink light with mosquito hawks darting off the surface of the water and green moss blanketing the rocks that lead right up to the edge. And lilies, of course. I can't explain it, but something primal says this is what happens when you die. And I think of those who have gone ahead who I can't touch and those who are going now (even as I type!) and wonder if maybe my sorrow isn't a little bit of jealous after all.

I feel myself falling backward into infancy. Into the darkness of what was Before. And yet something entirely atavistic and strong moves forward. Not with fear or fury, but with great anticipation as if the veil between Heaven and Earth is—right at this moment— thinner than the surface tension on the Cahaba River. I feel the plans he has for me. And when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.

This year, as the stone rolls away from the tomb, I come forth with Christ. I can't explain it other than to say I have been made alive in a way I can't explain with a power I can't explain. And I don't feel hurt over things that used to hurt and I don't feel bound by things that used to bind. All of the Shut Up! voices are still and murmuring and planted somewhere as deep as time and I can't really make them out anymore. I see the faces, but I can't hear the words. The Dead Marshes no longer woo. And I'm free.

Watershed

Well, I've had a Watershed Moment.  As I look back over my journals, I'll see an inviolable barrier between the Then and the Now. A religious experience, an epiphany. A psychotic break?  Either way, can't go back.  Someday, I'll elucidate what happened. But not just yet.  Looking for the Old? Look no further.

Last night, the wind kicked up around the house like some kind of Oklahoma fancy dance. I felt (more than heard) it wrap around the house like a bullwhip from the west to the east and back across the mountain. And then, followed the thunder—a fracture in the sky. A deep rumble of...discontent? No. A cleansing. The Holy Spirit rumbling deep and primal. A weeping. A lament. The babes cried out in the night. Mama! I went. 

Four police cars turned off their lights and moved up the street. The ambulance was long gone. I hung up the phone with my neighbor and new friend. Two doors down, a young man shot himself in the face. A moment of blackness and despair. As I made the dinner and drew the bathwater. He died. This is the fourth time I've been here to see an untimely death. Each time, I've been shaken by the sheer logistics of it. Ambulance (always with firetruck) maybe police. Maybe not. I'm not talking about violence or drug use or anything else you might mistakenly associate with this neighborhood. Just a cycle of life. But there's something profoundly disturbing and unnatural about the business (not of being born) but of dying. There's a system, you know. The wheels don't fall off the bus of civilization like they should. 

All day, I've been gripped with a profound sadness that has the potential to change my heart forever.  And it's not for one man, it's for all of the men. I guess that's another precipice we negotiate when something like this happens. Do I let the suffering come in and settle or do I sweep it out the door with a new straw broom?