Category Archives: Uncategorized

Between Despair and Hope

A Gracious Heresy, activism, everyday theology, progressive christianity, progressive politics, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

 As we wander through the tangled landscape of the coming election, if you are anything like me, you totter between despair and hope.

I dare not let go of hope because the possibility of a Trump presidency, a clear turn to autocracy, demagoguery, and authoritarianism, terrify me. All I hold dear: freedom, an arc bending toward justice, kindness, diversity, inclusion, equality and so much more, stand threatened by others’ fears and hatred. 

One thing I know is that when people are afraid of me, for whatever reason, the feeling easily and readily, transmutes to anger and then to hate. And while I think I’m immune to internalizing self-hatred I fear for the many who will be vulnerable to that.

And then I remember Paul saying that ‘love casts out fear’ (1 John 4:18a 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear;)

How in the hell am I supposed to love?

I have come to believe that first, and perhaps most important, we must love ourselves and claim ourselves. to be beloved children of Godde. It is an immutable truth from which we must internalize our infinite value. Loving oneself and claiming Godde’s love secures our sense of self in the face of the hatred, vitriol, and self-righteous prejudice of others. 

Second, is that we love one another. As we join in resistance from disparate places by shared oppression, exclusion, rights denied,  and resistance to fascism, we must never collude with those in power referring to ‘good negroes’ or ‘good gays’ or ‘good women’ ad infinitum. Instead, we must challenge the threat of a dystopian future by embracing one another in the entirety of our spectrum. We all matter. We are all children of Godde. Not just those deemed acceptable or agreeable to those in power. 

We will know Sophia active in us as we live into a world where we embrace each one as a child of Godde. Regardless of age, race, culture, class, gender, religion, or expressed sexuality. Regardless.

And finally there’s the love your enemy bit. The one I resist most. But I know hate dehumanizes not only my ‘enemy’ but hatred dehumanizes me. We cannot, must not,  participate in dehumanizing either ourselves or others and still be able to bring a different reality into being.

So how in the hell do I love my enemy?

I’m certain love of my ‘enemy’ is NOT a warm, fuzzy feeling. Loving my enemy means that I must be willing to invite mutuality and refuse power differentials. We must be willing to acknowledge that both the oppressed and the oppressor need to be freed to a new reality. I am also certain that my hatred will only demean me and preclude any chance of systemic change.  

Let us march through the tangled landscape of the coming election and lean into hope. 

Let us lean into the difficult tasks of loving ourselves, loving others, loving our enemies.

Let me close sharing this song of hope – please take a moment to listen:

Where There is no Vision

A Gracious Heresy, everyday theology, progressive politics, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Proverbs 29:18a

One of my favorite scripture quotes. It feels so visceral, so challenging, so immediate. For those of us it speaks to, it challenges to us is to dream. To hope.  To imagine a world worth working toward.

When decency seems to fail, when violence is commonplace, and when the ascendence of white masculinity is viewed as the norm, we must dream powerful dreams. We must dream to survive.

The question for us is: how do a terrified and sometimes broken people dream?
Let our visions be informed but not driven by our anger.
Let our visions be informed but not driven by our pain.
Let our visions, instead, be informed and driven by hope. 
Now is the time we need to dream big. We need to risk daring a largeness. The seemingly impossible.

We are heirs to visionaries throughout time, including the dreamers who founded this nation. We will be no more perfect than they were, but we stand on their shoulders and can move what we share of the vision forward. Our imperfections do not reflect on the vision, but on our ability to bring it fully to fruition. It is okay to be imperfect. It is not okay to let our imperfections keep us from doing the work. We are farther along because of the many who went before us.  Let the work continue.
Now is our time.  

New Chapter. New Book.

A Gracious Heresy, Circle of Grace, Uncategorized,

I tell my story because I want to understand how the pieces fit together. But there is another part – looking for others who may have shared my experiences or enough similar ones to see to what conclusions they have come, how they were shaped, what wisdom they gleaned that I missed. And in some ways, to find people who are home to me.  Did they ask the same questions? Are there questions I can explore I haven’t considered? 

            Always beneath those questions are the questions: no matter how different we are, how do our lives intersect? where do we connect? Or can we? 

            I often talk about backing up and taking the long view. In those moments I see the connections: the way humanity is woven together and with creation. What seems disparate has tendrils of connection curling beneath the surface. 

            So today I begin to tell another part of my story. The passion that drives me is a gift from Godde. The call to pastor Circle of Grace is a gift and challenge of the Spirit. The struggle to live into the passion is both the gift and curse of community. I cannot tell more of my story without telling the story of Circle of Grace.

While this is my story it is also the story of many people who passed through our metaphorical doors. Some came to stay, some came for a while, some left angry and hurt. I hope to structure the tale to include the telling of others as well as my own.

The truth is sometimes difficult to share. Or even admit. I claim here and now that my truth is only a facet of our shared experiences. I heard a word the other day that that sums up my anxiety, joy, and trepidation of this leg of my journey: “flawsome.” 

            Thank you for listening. This is the beginning of my next book. Ask me questions. Challenge my assumptions. I see a bumpy road ahead and, I hope, will see a few more pieces of the puzzle of me fit together.

Is There No Balm in Gilead?

everyday theology, progressive christianity, resistance, Uncategorized

 

We do not need to be cured.
We need to be healed.
Healed from the grief
and despair
of all that has been lost.
But mostly we need to heal
into hope
into believing
that what is to come
can be better.

To heal
we must give up privilege
but refuse to release it
to those who use their
white privilege
to spew hate.
We must use
whatever privilege we have
to end privilege.

To heal from fear
our souls need
the balm of forgiveness
even though
there is much
we may not yet
be able to forgive.

We need to be healed
from the betrayal
of  our nation
and  our neighbors.
Healed from the betrayal of
those who choose
alienation and hatred,
over values
we once sought to share.

We need to heal
from despair.
into hope.
Hope empowers
us to make change
and to love our neighbors,
seeming enemies, all.

The balm we seek
may be the balm we reject.
Love, the life-giving intention
for all creation,
doesn’t fuel our fear.
Love casts out
the fear to act
to stand
to speak
to keep on keeping on.

Love is the balm that heals us.
Damn it.

 

 

 

 

Making a Way: the Power of Connection

A Gracious Heresy, activism, everyday theology, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

Sometimes, when I am hurting or scared, I am like a wounded elephant. I want to go off by myself to die. And yet.
And yet I yearn for connection. I want others to care but I am afraid my grief or pain is  too much.
There are times I  cried for days, weeks, months even, sitting in my pain with a friend who listens. Not tears leaking down my cheeks but full on sobbing with snot and hiccoughs and incoherent babbling. It is then I am at my most vulnerable. I fear rejection. I’m afraid  my feelings will alienate the ones reaching out to me. And the sad thing is that my feelings have alienated people. I have hurt so bad at times that the animal instinct to protect myself morphed my pain into rage. Anger at the unfairness of it all. Anger at my hopelessness. Anger at my powerlessness. Anger that there was no comfort, however lovingly offered.

It was, finally, the power of those who persevered that created the space for me to heal. It was those who maintained connection when I withdrew. And those who did not, would not, take my pain and anger personally who helped me retrieve myself.  Otherwise, I think one of a few things could have happened:
– I could have isolated, withdrawn from life, and lived on half alive.
–  I could have returned to the larger world, isolated from myself and others by living inauthenticity.
– I could have become hateful, distrusting, and hopeless, diminishing my ability to be more fully human.

But I didn’t. And I’m telling this story as a cautionary tale. So many of us are in pain, grieving, hopeless, angry… with our neighbors, fellow citizens, politicians, – even friends. The political landscape can seem hopeless. The fast-moving train of racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and climate change denial barrels toward our uncertain future. I don’t think I’m alone in mourning the loss of the progress we were making or being enraged at the our seeming powerlessness to protect people of color or a woman’s right to choose or our planet’s health.
I’m not referring to fleeting feelings but the ones that, when reading the news, sends electrical shocks through your chest. Or the times before drifting off to sleep a sadness settles over you like a blanket of hopelessness. Or when rage rises up and you fight off secret desires for another to die.

And you wonder, is there any way to get to the other side.

Here is my tentative and small suggestion. Let us sit with one another. Stay connected. Keep reaching out. When one is weak another can be strong. When one is hopeless, another may be able to see a path more clearly. When one rages, the other can make space for that truth. When you have the strength to reach out, do it. If you should be tempted to withdraw from life, allow the touch of others. My experience tell me  that we can only make our way together. Together we help one another remain authentic. We can refuse to disavow what we value deeply. We may not see the path out of our current failure/challenge/disaster… but together let us make a way out of what seems like no way.

“I Am Still Learning”

musings, spiritual practice, Uncategorized, writing



People who are utterly and completely sure of themselves confound me-
whether it be about theology, Godde, politics, history, science… or any discipline.
What if more information becomes available?
What if that information contradicts one’s assumptions?
What if differing perspectives challenge old facts?
What if we need to acknowledge two conflicting truths exist at the same time?

Can you imagine how fun, exciting, scary, and wonderful that would be?

When I star gaze, especially when I am alone, listening to a cacophony of insects flutter and chirp and water splashing over stones in the nearby creek… I experience a bone deep connection with all that  is and was and will come. I am flush with the awareness that what  I do not know is so much greater than I do know. Scholars of every discipline only grapple with the edges knowledge. The Mystery is greater than our ability to comprehend in its entirety. Is it possible for the finite can comprehend the infinite?

Not that I want to stop trying to understand more deeply, but the older I get the more in sync I am with Michelangelo who, at considerable age of 87,  said, “I am still learning.”

There is something essential in accepting both our desire and our limitations in the search for truth. And, if we are honest, the moment we claim to possess an absolute truth, some sneaky contradiction up-ends it.  If we are honest.
It’s why I am suspicious of politicians and preachers who claim absolute fealty to one truth or one idea and reject ideas and  information that contradict. I am suspicious when they impose circular thinking on their followers  and reject critical examination of their ‘truth’.

Questions are one of the beginning points of human development. Who hasn’t spent time with a toddler’s incessant questioning?  There is nothing like the pummeling one takes from a two year old’s “What’s that?” and “Why?” – that push us to the limits of our ability to explain.
In the best of all worlds we never stop asking those profoundly human questions.
In the best of all worlds, we never stop growing in our quest to understand ourselves and the world around us.
In the best of all worlds,  answers  become more and more complex and less and less absolute.

What if we could wrap our minds around the idea that contradictory things can be true?  What if,  rather than clinging to absolutes, we find other ways to confront our fear of the unknown?
What if the fear of the unknown is an invitation to unending questions?
What if  our questions don’t lead us absolute answers but  to ever deepening questions?
What if we seek  answers not as fixed points but as open doors?

What if we all admit that we are still learning?
What if a collective will to question made change less threatening?
What if, in our embrace of uncertainty, we became more and more human?

I wonder.

Fear and Hope

A Gracious Heresy, activism, everyday theology, progressive christianity, progressive politics, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

In these times I wrestle with abject fear.

Fear of people who no longer share the vision of the idea and ideals on which this nation was founded.
Fear of those in power being invested in power rather than service.
Fear of the ‘religious’ right.
Fear of armed violence.

And then there all the people I am afraid for, including myself:
Fear for women.
Fear for people of color.
Fear for immigrants.
Fear for Asia-Americans and African-Americans and Latinx-Americans.
Fear for the LGBTQAI community.

We have spent decades bending the arc of history toward justice, as Dr. King proclaimed.
And now.
And now the backlash.
And now the hysteria.
And now the fear.
And now the hatred unleashed in thousands of different ways
in our churches
in our legal system
In our laws

And I am very afraid.

Add to that that I am a pastor and called to speak hope.
How do we hope in the face of terror?
How do we sing in a land that has become strange to us?
How do we stand against a mighty storm?

Parts of Psalm 137 float in my head:

                 4 How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
               5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
              6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you…

Part of hope is remembering who we are called to be,
to not forget who we are, no matter how short we have fallen.

And sometimes hope is the beacon toward which we strive in apocalyptic times.

The writers of biblical apocalyptic literature faced the threat of death, annihilation and, what seemed to be, overwhelming odds. Many were tortured. Many were killed. Many hid away in underground caves. Demonized and dismissed. Who could speak hope in those times? And what was hope? It seems to me that in some ways hope was holding on to the vision, believing that something greater than the current evil not only exists but will triumph.

I think of the hope of  the apocalyptic writers of a holy city, of a place where every tear is dried, where the table is open to all, and groaning under the lovely burden of more than enough.  Jessie Jackson taught me something about preaching hope in dark times.

I think of his chant “Keep hope alive!” and his call to us:
“You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes, but don’t stop with the way things             are. Dream of things as they ought to be. Dream. Face pain, but love, hope, faith and   dreams will help you rise above the pain. Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress, but you keep on dreaming, young America.”

He offered hope as a pastor and has taught me the value and the courage it takes to speak hope in the midst of terror. I leave you with the close to his speech given in Atlanta in 1988 during the Democratic National Convention:
” Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high; stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender!
Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not    disappoint. You must not surrender! You may or may not get there but just know that you’re qualified! And you hold on, and hold out! We must never surrender!! America will get better and better.  Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!”

 

Dear Friends… stand up

activism, Georgia Politics, progressive politics, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

Dear Friends,

Well, there’s 19 days to go before the election
and we are holding our collective breath.
It looks good but we must persist.
Vote early if you can.
I worry about disrupters at the polls on Election Day.
Make sure your friends are voting.
Offer rides.
Take water to those waiting in line.
Phone bank.
Pray.
Now is the time to stand up
to do all we can however we can wherever we can.

It cannot be said too often:
this is the most important election of our lifetimes.
Be a hero for our time.
Do the best you can with what you have and who you are.

Together, let us stand
to make a country that insists on justice
and relies on science
a country that celebrates differences
protects the weak
frees children
fights systemic racism and sexism
feeds the hungry
a country where we tell ourselves difficult truths

Now is the time
if ever there was one.
Stand up.

Connie

Dear Friends… I’m so sorry for your loss

everyday theology, progressive politics, resistance, spiritual practice, Uncategorized

Dear Friends,

In times like these words seem hollow.  I am sorry for your loss. Our loss.
Sorry beyond words. We stand before the mystery of death and try to comfort one another – not with the certainty of belief  but by holding one other in the pain of our grief.

We grieve  for this majestic woman who championed and embodied ideals that so many of us live and breathe. Let us enfold one another in care. In any other time her death would be a great loss, these times make who and what we mourn even more difficult.
We grieve the loss of a bright light who fought for justice.
We grieve for a woman who changed our world in so many ways for the better.
We grieve not only our loss of advocate and judge but of one who was a protector of the marginalized.

We need to grieve. We need to grieve and to give thanks for her life well-lived, for her voice lifted, for the witness and tenacity of her stands for justice.

For me, the loss of Justice Ginsberg mirrors the apparent loss of so much else in the nation:
civility
human decency
shared values
and who we can aspire to be as a democratic nation.

I wish that we could gather and lift our candles to the sky along with our fists, defying the darkness. I wish I could tell you everything will be alright and that we are passing through a storm. That joy comes in the morning.
Actually, I will tell you that.
Ruth Bator Ginsberg did not give up, not to her dying breath.
How can we honor her and do any less?

What we cannot grieve is the loss of hope.
To do so would disrespect not only her memory but the memories of all who fought for the principles of justice, equality, and shared power.
We can grieve but we must not despair.

I am sorry for our loss. So deeply sorry that it brought me to my knees.
But we are her legacy. Our task is to continue the work she has done.
As it says in the Talmud:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now,       walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

I am so sorry for our loss. May our tears cleanse our vision and create a tsunami that will clear a way to a new day.

peace, my friends,
Connie

Dear Friends… turn your socks inside out

activism, musings, progressive politics, resistance, Uncategorized

Dear Friends,

I want to tell you a story about my Dad. He was career military and in active combat  both in  World War II and the Korean War. He was also a story teller. As a child, I sat on his knee and listened to him weave what I now recognize as self-deprecating stories of survival and courage. I loved his stories. They were stories of deep friendships told in an offhand way and moments of belly laugh humor.

In these times I recognize the need to tell our stories with the absurdity of dark humor.
We are living through our own horrors, fighting for our lives and for justice against an enemy within the fabric of our nation.
We are fighting for a vigorous, committed response to climate change.
We are fighting for justice for people of color and for a real, committed response to systemic racism.
We are fighting for science.
We are fighting for women’s reproductive rights.
We are fighting for truth over lies, love over hate, community over tribalism.
… and we are fighting desperation and fear.

In the Korean War men were told to change socks every day to prevent trench foot. It was a ludicrous command to men sleeping in tents, marching miles a day in rain and snow, with no possible way of doing laundry, much less of the laundry drying. To follow the order in letter, though clearly not spirit, the men had a ritual after they set up camp to ‘change socks’ by turning them inside out and putting them on again. Okay, I can’t tell it like my dad. He had a way of recounting  the story with a twinkle and a chuckle so you saw how ridiculous both the order and the action were .

The thing is, those guys would have loved to have clean, dry socks. They rebuked their misery by laughing at the circumstances and poking fun at the stupidity of the order. We can learn something from them. It’s awful right now. Tribalism is so  virulent that it’s hard to imagine how or if we can ever bridge our differences. The possibility of another term for 45 looms. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything I can do to make a difference. But I get up every day and do the tedious work of making change. It is easy to be overwhelmed. It is reasonable to get depressed.

But let us end our days by adopting the ritual of ‘changing our socks’.
Find the absurdity of the day, the news, the man and laugh.
Remember that we are in this together, clustered around the same campfire, impelled by the same passion for justice. Laugh at the absurdity of where we find ourselves and at what we must do to survive.
My dad’s stories taught me that connection and laughter are absolutely necessary for survival when in the thick of a battle.

So laugh with me over some smarmy lie, some absurd policy, some ridiculous assertion then sit down and turn your socks inside out, get some rest, we fight again tomorrow.

love and blessings,
Connie