Of Pickups, Peace, & Palm Sunday

I need to share that any post I ever write is a collaborative effort -- often unbeknownst to my collaborators. Events of my week, conversations with friends, a word from my pastor, a road war with a fellow driver -- all plays in. The graduate student in me struggles against the instinct to cite every single phrase and nuance. Lucky me, to have so many wonderful opportunities to learn and grow.  

Hosanna! Our sweet kiddos processing with palms.
(photo by our youth minister, Hannah Lampi)

I made a triumphant entry into my old home town today. On my way to church, I got into a dogfight with a massive red pickup that wouldn't let me into traffic. I decided to engage in the power struggle, show him what a Honda CRV is made of, and pulled ahead of him just in time to make it onto the ramp. I came, I conquered, I acted like an ass. And, immediately felt ashamed.

You see, I had been pondering the first Palm Sunday all morning, preparing to deliver the welcome and opening prayer for services. I was thinking about this most publicly triumphant moment of Jesus' ministry, and how remarkably subversive and humble it was. How the Kingdom of God juxtaposes humility to pride, service to conquering, peace to war. How it makes room for humanity to collide with divinity, how it leaves space for grief in the midst of joy. It all seemed meaningless intellectual pursuit in the moment, as my neanderthal brain exerted itself over my spiritual thinking. I engaged in the same imperial, showy, forceful maneuvering -- a Roman procession with Pontius Pilate -- that Marcus Borg says was happening at the West gate of Jerusalem, just as Jesus entered the East gate with his rag-tag band of followers.

Doesn't life keep us honest, if we let it?

Jesus rode into Jerusalem, to fanfare, on a lowly donkey. Famed theologian Wikipedia tells me the donkey was a symbol of peace, while horses symbolized war and subjugation (Prophet Zechariah reinforces this interpretation in chapter 9 of his book). The gospels also tell us that Jesus paused to weep over Jerusalem as he entered.

All these seeming contradictions...

The crowds are celebrating, but in less than a week will be witness to, maybe even participants in, his death. The man is the source of great joy, but pauses to express grief. He's the King of the moment, but he rides in on a donkey colt.

Celebration is complex. We feel it most because we've experienced its opposite. Joy is highlighted because of the sadness we live through. The sting of pain throws the soothing power of grace into greater relief. The suffering brought about by corrupt kingdoms and regimes and religions heightens the hope of the pure, peaceful kingdom of God. The recognition of our sins enriches our gratitude and experience of forgiveness.

My pastor asked us today which procession we will join: the imperial, politically aggressive party on the West, or the band of underdogs, the subversives in the East.

As Christians, we are no longer the underdogs -- at least in America. We hold more power than the Jesus followers of the first Palm Sunday. As my pastor said, we hold the reins to the horses of war. And, that's a dangerous place to be. We risk becoming blind to the practice of violence, of experiencing the truth as a confrontation, and truth-revealers as political threats. It is harder to address our need of Jesus, and to recognize how his message and life embraced weakness, and undermined power. How he specifically questioned the "good enough" religious lives of his day, while hanging out with the "losers."

Jesus lived totally upside down to our expectations, to our American dreams, to our striving for triumph and success.

As we choose our procession, may we fully celebrate his arrival. Let's just party in it. But, not as champions, or conquerors, or victors. Rather, as recipients of grace. As extenders of grace. As people bereft of power, but willing to throw down whatever we have, palms, coats, blankets, hearts, souls, pride to pave the way for his upside down kingdom of peace and humility and grace. May we bravely confront oppression, wage peace, and, as he did, champion the people lost in the shuffle of power and living and sin.

Doubt as Hope

Crisis of faith. Time in the desert. Struggling. Doubt.

I worked hard for a long time to find language and metaphors for my loss of faith. I left a religious culture cemented in certainty to drift, untethered, in a wide ocean of possibilities and fear.

The thing about leaving that culture is, you act exactly the way they tell you you'll act when you're backslidden. Sermons don't move you, and worse, irritate you. You read attempts at proselytizing as an insult to your intelligence and right to self-determination. You forget your religious language fluency, and scrunch your nose in concentration to understand what others mean when they say, "It's my heart to..." or, "The Lord told me..." or, you know, "backslidden." So, I constantly felt one foot in the accusations of the old world, while the toes of the other stretched to pull me toward new thoughts and truths.

El Shaddai & Gender

A couple weeks ago, I posted here about my transformation after learning of God's use of feminine language to describe God's self. I mentioned as a side note a possible translation of God's name, El Shaddai, as "the breasted one." Now, I've got the goods on that, for those of you who like good resources (I know I do).

Reading Rachel Held Evans' Sunday Superlatives (a great source of quality posts and endless new blogs to follow... le sigh), I saw this amazing piece by Susan Pigot titled "El Shaddai and the Gender of God." Susan takes a scholarly approach into the original Hebrew to contextually and linguistically reveal the meaning of "the breasted one."

So often, we live limited lives. More abominably, we enforce limitations on others' lives. In my experience, the use of purely masculine language to discuss God, and the priority placed on male leadership, cut my sex, my story, and my talents out of the narrative. I felt I was left holding a bag with potential that could never be realized.

Now, this language resonates more than ever. I already tore down the walls keeping me from living my whole, gendered life and capacity. But as a mother, I live the power of this imagery every time I breastfeed my daughter.

This name of God weaves with the other names of God. I don't want to take it out of context and prioritize it above the others. When we elevate it INTO context we see how God teaches us about God, how we consequently learn about ourselves, and paradoxically, how that in turn teaches us more about God.

If I ever I think of a pithy title for this cycle, I'll feel like a true wordsmith. Anyone ever heard of one?

Paradox: Now and Forever

Honestly, I'm not certain in all my beliefs right now. One of the reasons I want this blog is to push myself into talking. I learned to hide my questions early (though my parents encouraged us to think for ourselves, the religious environment often counteracted that), but seminary reinforced this. So, if you ask me if I believe in heaven and hell, and pinned me down to an answer, I'd say maybe, but with lots of caveats. More likely, I'd run like hell because I'm tired of being pinned down.

I started to lose my belief in a traditional heaven when I started to consider what makes a human being. The big controversy at school divided over tripartite or bipartite (body/soul/spirit or body/soul). Actually, my nursing experience and training led me away from both.

I tried describing my view to my brother George (almost done with his doctorate in psychology!). "I think we're all one thing. Like, God moves us and works with us through the very nerves, hormones, and synapses he created." (I talk like a Valley girl in deep discussions.) "Oh, that's like non-reductive physicalism," he said. Let's keep it real, I had to practice that term for weeks, just to get it right.

Non-reductive physicalism posits that humans are material--but not reducible to parts. Parts work in systems, and systems show levels of complexity that can't be merely boiled back down to parts/chemistry/atoms. Nancy Murphy's book Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism talks a bit about this. She rejects the notion that all things, including behavior, reduce to atoms or chemicals. She quotes Roy Wood Sellars (a smart guy with a sense of humor): "The ontological imagination was stultified at the start by the pictures of microscopic billiard balls." Pithy.

When I owned up to this view in class a girl asked "Haven't you ever been present for a death? Something definitely leaves." She didn't know about my experience with hospice/palliative care nursing. Don't know how many deaths I have attended. While the personality of that person is distinctly gone after death, I never felt a "spirit" leave, or connected with the supernatural. (Perhaps I'm just unlucky. Another book, The Art of Dying, records many supernatural sounding experiences. Not saying they don't happen. Just don't think this is a watershed for proving the existence of the soul.)

Where was I? Oh yeah--not knowing about heaven. So I believe that God created one whole messy package in this body. I don't believe in extra-physical, invisible parts. Rather, God is interested in this matter; enough to make it and talk a whole log about redeeming it. So, how does this body get to heaven? I gave up trying to answer the question as I became convinced that the gospel is not merely a ticket out of this life, but hope for this life.

But, let me tell you two stories that keep me from losing interest in a future beyond death. The first is selfish and mildly embarrassing. So if I bury it in this paragraph, you might not see it... My husband. I like/love this guy so much that I hope I get to know him for every possible moment, temporal or eternal. But there's another story that still breaks me in a million pieces.

A palliative care nurse helps families deal with the reality of death. Sometimes as a future knowable with chronic disease, sometimes imminently. A lady had her first baby, and a few days later experienced unforeseeable complications. She slipped into a type of brain death, held together by burdensome and invasive medical interventions. I held her husband as he told me about his best friend. As he grappled with the pride of fatherhood and intense, life-crushing grief. As he scanned her face for anything that looked like his mischievous Love. It never came.

As a newlywed, I could not set up clinical boundaries to protect me from the flood of this story. I drowned in it. And all of my theorizing, big words, theologizing, and intellectualizing disintegrated.

I called my brother--who just gets me, and thinks so much like me--again. And I shared my ache with him. "What is this body of a person?," I asked. If the person is in the body, then why is what we consider a person--her personality, smile, vivacity--gone? Please help me, because I need to know it's ok to let her go, and I have to, I have to, know that when she does, she's got something better than these tubes and this non-existence.

He talked to Warren Brown, a neuropsychologist at the Travis Research Institute, working with the idea of non-reductive physicalism. And together, their words and thoughtfulness ministered to my real crisis. They didn't try to convince me of simplistic answers, or encourage me to employ denial. I'm not here to proselytize for the philosophy. I don't think it's the answer, and I don't trust my own output, if I go to a subject so invested in the answer I need, that I'll manipulate everything to get it. (Read Cognitive Discopants' post about distrust along these lines here.)

Life is paradox. It's now, and it's forever. It's parts and more than parts. My heart and mind don't believe this life is wasted time and space. Rather, it's imminently important. But, my heart and mind crave hope for the future. Like most things, I think what I believe is most important for how it impacts my behavior, and helps me cope and minister in messy, real life. Focusing too narrowly on now or the future loses the fullness of human experience and meaning.

She passed away, this lady I never met, but whose body and family I lived and breathed with. I saw a picture of her, from before her death. Beautiful. I don't think that workmanship was, or is, wasted.


Sources you might find interesting:
Nancy Murphy: Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda.

Nancy Murphy: Bodies and Souls, Or Spirited Bodies.

Nancy Murphy, Warren Brown, H. Newton: Whatever Happened to the Soul?

Rob Moll: The Art of Dying: Living Fully in the the Life to Come.

Cognitive Discopants' discussion of a 3 year old's near-death experience with heaven here and here.