From Gross to Grace

I go to the kitchen to pull some meat off chicken bones for dinner. NOT one of my favorite tasks! The chicken is cold, there's little bits of bone and skin that you have to be careful to get off the chicken, and I am not a detail person. But, I am a good cook, and I like to eat -- aand who likes to find little grainy bits of chicken bones or pieces of cartilage in a chicken dish? So, I dutifully go about my So I dutifully set about my task.

But first, I am moved to open the windows. It's cold in the house from the night, and the gorgeous day is begging me to enjoy it. I open these great casement windows that you crank open, and I let the warmth, the sunshine, and the sound of birds and breeze pour in.

I go back and get my chicken out, not looking forward to this distasteful task. I take the lid off my blue Le Creuset French oven --- a little bit of pleasure, grace, right there, good cookware -- and wow! The two chicken quarters I boiled yesterday gave off a thick layer of wonderful clear gelatinous protein base for soup. I expected watery broth, but there is none of that. Only this rich, nutritious stuff. Now I am a little more excited. The presence of that good stuff makes the work of pulling chicken off bones a bit more palatable. Now I am off to a start, thinking about what I am going to do with this glorious gelatinous goodness to serve my family a nutritious meal. Will it be simple chicken soup, or tortilla soup? Or is there something new I can think of? My family does not always find "new" to be an occasion of grace, so maybe not this time.

I get down to the nitty gritty of the chicken, separating the good from what I now think of as great. I hear the birds and the breeze, I feel the warmth and see the sun, and there I have heaven in my kitchen. God's bounty outdoors and indoors, all for me just to enjoy -- just for the paltry price of some chicken-picking.

GRACE.

UPDATE ON STIR-CRAZY GRACE

I need to tackle the name of this blog again.  It started when I was overseas but I never really wrote about cooking and grace in Lagos, Nigeria! (see earlier post on this subject)

There are a couple of things about me that I love.  I love to cook and bake, and I see Grace everywhere. 

I am an incorrigible baker and a compulsive cook.  I could spend days reading recipes, writing changes to recipes, trying recipes -- my biggest problem is who to feed?   I have got a question for my Creator:  why make me want to cook constantly and only give me a family of 3?  Maybe there's someone I am supposed to be cooking for and just haven't met my match yet.

So, you could think that Stir Crazy is about me stirring up some bread dough, or some cinnamon rolls, or a pot of soup -- all of which I have done just these past few days.

But Stir Crazy to me is a riff on being in this world but not of this world.  I have always felt like I didn't quite belong here, or at least, that I was tuned in a little differently.  Don't we all feel this way, if we get right down to it? 

Stir-crazy conjures up a cabin in the woods in the winter, cold outside, and you're getting a little gritchy with your family.  And stir-crazy is what I feel sometimes, not gritchy with the neighbors or family so much as needing to grow, needing to breathe bigger, needing to love bigger -- needing to let the love and the me that is inside me get outside me.  How to let my heart be fed and grow and share it?  How to share the me that is inside with the world that is outside?  How to be the person I was made to be?  How to be my highest self?  How to be the woman God made me?

It's not so much discomfort here; it's about the stirring up that spurs me to growth, that pushes me.  Life is constant exodus, and it's that stirring within me that propels me to that.  And that stirring means I can never be completely "at rest".  It's a "crazy" but a good crazy -- it's grace stirring me.

Not only is there grace stirring in me; it's in every one of us.  We have to be still enough -- still the external stirring up that is done to us from the outside so much -- to sense that grace. 

There is grace in each of us, and grace in every bit of this world.  It's grace that made the world and keeps the world.  It is "given"; that's what grace is.  Grace is all the beauty around us; the laughter of children, the cycle of life and death and life; grace is beauty and love and truth.  It is in the beauty, but it is in the seemingly ugly too.  At the bottom of the ugly is always the opportunity for grace to be made visible.  It depends on your vision.  You have to claim grace to see grace.

So, Stir-Crazy Grace!

ATHEIST AWARENESS

I am always fascinated by stories of faith or the apparent lack of faith.

NPR recently ran a series on how people are losing religion, and coping without it.   It things agot me thinking.  

One is that underlying  the story is a confusion of terms:  faith is not the same thing as religion.  Atheists have a certain kind of faith:  they have faith in the proposition that there is nothing beyond human beings; that human beings represent the highest pinnacle of power.  This is as unproven as the hypothesis that there is a power greater than human beings themselves in this world and thus is a tenet of faith.  Not an original thought with me, but so obvious to me.

Islamic thinkers in the Middle Ages solved the problem of the definition of God simply.  Averroes stated that God is “that than which there is nothing greater”.   On this definition of what the word "God" means at root, it seems we could all agree.  That's because truth is truth, no matter what you call it!  Christianity calls this God; the atheist calls this man, this "that than which there is nothing greater".  Maybe we could start a more effective discussion from the first point, of agreement,  instead of from the second one, which is where people just start polarizing. 

My second observation is that religion is a set of practices that link us to this “that than which nothing is greater”.  “Linking back” is the Latin meaning of “re” and “ligio”.  In the absence of practices of religion, the atheist “must forge one’s own path” as the atheist does not have comforting rituals or prayers.  The NPR story one day was about how atheists have managed to find some comfort in the absence of traditional God-centered rituals. 

NPR in this story made itself the link between the atheists; the stories provided communication between the atheists, it “linked” them to each other,  and the story itself included two main characters, each of whom found that forming community based on their needs and beliefs was what helped them to cope with the death of a loved one. 

So the story shows two women creating community based on belief in man as the greatest being, and NPR disseminated their coping strategies and the beliefs that grew out of their original beliefs and questioning.  Sounds like the women are working out their "religion" - practices that link them to their beliefs, and that NPR functioned somewhat like "church" linking the atheists and their way of practicing, acting on their beliefs, to each other.  The story promulgated information to and for atheists with the result that they can be strengthened to work out how to live with and in their belief system and to act out of it in forming their world. 

Sounds like "church" to me!  And that is a good thing.  The Christian God is nothing if not "community", right?  I mean, the Trinity is three persons right there.

What is interesting here is that believers and non-believers would come to the same solution: reach out to others.  Turn grief and difficulty into something good for someone else.  What is true, is true, whether you believe it as the result of being steeped in the story of the transformation of the crucifixion/resurrection cycle, the transformation stories of other religions, or whether you come to it through your own experience of what works.

Lest it seems I am criticizing, rather than observing, let me add that I do not object to the NPR story, and while I have different language about God, I think thoughtful atheists might be on to something.  The atheists in the story acted in congruence with Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). 

Would that we would all do the same!

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

If the Christians can't get it across -- to ourselves much less to others -- that God is in action and community, He is the Living God, then who can fault the atheists who do get it, painfully and slowly and largely one by one constructing their path,  that we are called in this way?

CONTROL OR CREATION?

I am hungry as if I am pregnant. So hungry I can hardly believe it, and I need to eat every two hours or so. My last menstrual cycle was 2 1/2 years ago! I couldn't be pregnant could I? At 50 years old? It can happen.

My first reaction is to feel like a wayward teenager. What business does a 50 year old have getting pregnant? I'd be 72 before the child got out of college! And getting out of college is no guarantee that a person is completely ready to be on their own. They still need their moms and dads.

And next, what about the higher likelihood that a child born to a 50 year old mom would not even be capable of college? The rate for birth defects and Down's Syndrome is huge for mothers in their late 30's and early 40's. What would it be for a 50 year old?

I was mortified thinking about all the people who know my age and who view life from a more Protestant, American, "I am in control of my destiny" and I don't let anything happen that I don't want -- point of view. I realize I have plenty of those people in my life.  Perhaps because I share this view at least on some level.

However, what I really think is that even at 50, to be able to participate in creation at this most amazing, crucial level, is a huge gift! Sure, it's a responsibility, but I think, even when 20 and 30 somethings have children, our culture views their responsibility as much greater than it has to be. I believe in a loving God and I believe that we all have the ability to deal with whatever comes our way. Even the 30 somthings don't have all the responsibility that their world, this world, would heap on them.

The single most valuable piece of wisdom I received when I had my son was that I was not 100% responsible for him. Neither were my husband and I together, 100% responsible. There are events and circumstances in this world that we can not only not foresee, but certainly cannot manage to avoid. We cannot manage well enough to make everything all right for our children. Nor do I believe we are supposed to. I believe my role as a parent is to respect the dignity of my child's personhood. I am not to control his actions, beyond a certain level of teaching and training, I am not to sweep obstacles or consequences out of his way. I believe that when I parent in this way, I create an atmosphere in which my son has the opportunity to become aware of his qualities, strengths, characteristics, the good and the bad, . This is where his strength of character and self-esteem will come from. Not from having a good life, not from having material things, not even from having a young and energetic mother.

I hope that I am around for my child, or children, well into grandparenthood. I welcome any chance at creating and loving a family. I welcome and am honored by the opportunity to co-create with the God of the universe, this universe and the people within it. God creates with wild abandon. Looking out my window I see trees and vines and grass and sunflowers -- yes, sunflowers even in the drought! -- I see agapanthus and iron plant, palms and oak trees, kumquat trees.  I see God as continually creating our ever expanding universe, giving us an image of himself as infinite love and creation. I would be honored to have another chance to participate in that awesome, wild, fruitful creation.


P.S. I WAS NOT PREGNANT - probably just menopausal hormone surges!

Blessed are the Meek

Now this one really gives me pause as I am sure it does many of you. Blessed are the meek? For they shall inherit the earth? No way that can be true! In this world you have to give it all you have got; you have to go out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You only get what you work for. You only get what you deserve.

As you know if you have surrendered to God, however you conceive that power, what you thought was the right way of being in the world is not. "Our old ideas were nil until we let go absolutely".

Being meek does not mean not speaking up for ourselves or not taking action on our own behalf. Some synonyms for meek include: humble, down-to-earth, unassuming, unpretentious. When we are meek, or humble, we do not pretend to be what we are not. We do not pretend to be God. Alcoholics and members of Al-anon often hear in meetings about the real meaning of the word "humble". It means knowing who you really are, and knowing this in relation to God, to the supreme power that is in the universe. We claim who who we really are. We come to know ourselves as creatures; we did not create ourselves. A power greater than ourselves is responsible for our being here. Through the 4th and 5th steps we can claim who we really are and confides (confesses) that awareness to himself, to God, and to another human being. This is a great leveler of human beings. It is the only thing that will bring an ego-driven human being down to size, to proper, right-size.

This sort of meekness is about letting go of the ego. In 12 Step circles, EGO stands for Edging God Out. We are not meek when we are trying to run the show, and so it is suggested in the Big Book that an alcoholic ask many times a day "thy will be done". This is meekness; this is humbleness of heart.

No one gets to this point purely by themselves. That is a spiritual truth. We were made for relationship, for community. We can know ourselves fully only in relationship to each other and to God. We must let go of ego and become humble, sharing our secrets and shameful, sinful behaviors with others.

The Beatitude says that in doing this we "shall inherit the earth". How can we relate this to our experiences as fallen people?

The "inheritance" is the spiritual experience and much of it is described in the Promises of AA. Those who are rightly disposed toward a higher power, toward God, knowing that God is in charge and not they, can get comfortable with the world and all that is in it. What alcoholics inherit, when they are at their "right-size", meek in relation to God, are: a new freedom and happiness; they will not regret the past; they will know peace. They will see how their experiences can benefit others. They will lose the feeling of self-pity. This sense that we get when we work the steps, that we can go anywhere and look anyone in the eye, and have deep peace --- perhaps this is a bit of what Jesus meant when He said these words. Isn't this in a way "inheriting the earth"? The feeling that we are a part of this world and humanity, neither above it nor below it, but fully a part of it. We can go anywhere, as if "we owned the place". We inherit the world when we see ourselves in true relation to God and our fellows.

Mercy and Forgiveness

Someone close to me recently suggested that I work on forgiving my mother. I really thought I had. I have great compassion for my mother. I am certain that she had a very hard early life and that meeting and marrying my father only compounded the difficulties, until she found she was completely unable to extricate herself from the situation.

I get it that somehow I have been the recipient of great grace, over and over and over again. Somehow, I have been able to avail myself of that grace. I believe that grace is always available, but that we have to be able to receive it, for it to be available to us. I have no idea why some people are able to receive healing grace and others do not receive it.

I can't judge another person's receptivity to grace. I cannot judge my own. I can only look into my own heart and ask "how am I doing in relationship to another person?" Is my heart soft or hard? Am I open to that other person? Am I open to that other person in the way that God remains open, in his infinite mercy, to me?

On this, I can pray for the openness and the willingness for that path between my mother and I to be open. At this time, I think the path is open. In my prayer, I have said, I am ready if that is what you want, Lord. I don't know whether I should be creating a road to my mother, that is, setting out to meet her somewhere, somehow. What I have been thinking is that I sense that I have compassion for her, and that I am not afraid she can hurt me in any substantive way any more; I don't expect her to behave like a nurturing mother, though I am still sad sometimes for the girl in me that did not get that. But I am now giving myself that.

In fact, recently, my disordered eating has come to a head. Somehow it has happened that I can see that I have been undereating and then overeating to compensate, for my entire life. It's as though the scales have fallen from my eyes (no pun intended) and I am able to feed myself when I am hungry, relying on my own body to tell me what and when I need to eat. I have not binged for 2 weeks now or so. I have eaten 3 meals and one or two snacks each day. I am not as tired, and I sleep through the night. I am calmer overall.

I asked myself, why have I had this pattern? My first thought was, "because my mother didn't feed me". I thought about that. It's true that my mother didn't feed me; at an early age I started feeding myself, feeding my brother and sisters, and doing lots of the cooking for the family. I cooked dinner and made lunch, and I got breakfast for the kids of the family, and made my parents coffee. So the nurturing there came from me. But why didn't I nurture with more rather than less? I ate sweets in secret even as a child at home. I made brownies just for myself while everyone was out of the house and then ate them.

When I cooked, I didn't make balanced meals. I wouldn't make a starch. I would serve meat and vegetables. I don't know why. If I had to take a stab at it I would say that my mom was always on a diet and she thought sweets and starches were bad, so I followed suit. Kept me skinny in high school.

This part is about my control and perfectionism. My mom thought sweets and motherliness, and nurturing were bad. They were all quite suspect to her. She thought it was perfectly rational to not want anyone to know her very well, and I can see her point in her case -- she had secrets, even from herself. But I internalized this: receiving love, laughter, eating good things -- these are all somehow indulgent and for people who can't take life as it really is. Harsh and cold and stingy: that's life and any trying to get out of that marks a person as a fool.

I always wanted to please my mom, so I adopted this view too. I was competitive, strong, driven, to prove that I was tough and would merit her attention. This created a huge conflict in me because on another level I knew that what she proposed was opposite of what I wanted: I wanted to be a nurturing mom, I knew that God loved me and I had a relationship with Him -- that made me some kind of a weakling in her eyes, an irrational weakling -- I became a baker, and always had this vision of giving children good things to eat as a way to show them they were loved. Thank goodness I haven't carried that attitude to its full blown conclusion. But still I have been loyal to that reality that giving yourself good things is a sign of weakness.

This is all so skewed, this negative stingy reality. But it's the one I grew up with. It's the one my mother lived in for as long as I was growing up around her. Her mother behaved in quite anorexic ways; perhaps it starts generations back. I suppose it had to have.

Today, I am nurturing myself. I don't need my mother to do that. I still have feelings of sadness for what I have missed by my carrying on that stinginess with myself, and not even being able to allow others to give to me in that very nurturing way. It has cost me some friends, one in particular I can think of. As I am healing in this area of food, my relationship to a couple of my overeating friends has shifted.

I have realized lately that all the terrible things that happened to me have not subtracted from me, not really, in the end. They have added to me, to my experiences. I am a person who hold this particular type of experience and can say with all certainty, that God's grace is bigger than this. God's grace is bigger than any kind of abuse or pain and God's grace can bring pain to a new conclusion. God's grace can bring my pain and suffering to the place where it can become a fruitful offering to others, to show them God's healing power and love.

Am I going to share that with my mother? That is the question of forgiveness.

AA's 12 Promises and Jesus' 8 Promises

Some people see, and have a need to experience the God of their understanding as a rule-giving God. I have always understood God as showing us the way things work: if you do this, then this will happen. You are human and these are the things that are going to work for you to be peaceful and supremely happy. So rather than rules, I have seen God as giving a prescription for a good life, for the best life, in which I fulfill who I am made to be. 

So, the Beatitudes don't grab me as rules. When I have thought of them as rules, I hear it like this: If you do this, then I will bless you. If you do this, then I will be good to you. The God of my understanding doesn't work that way -- he's not a tit for tat or quid pro quo kind of guy, or gal. He's neither guy nor gal, but that's not a subject for now.

The second beatitude, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted" can be bothersome. Why should I mourn just so I can be comforted! Let's just get on with the good stuff, and cut out this pain part!

I take this in another way: Mourning here refers to the acknowledgement of sin and suffering. Acknowledgement, rather than denial, is the way of God, the way that will bring peace. As long as we do not acknowledge the realities of our lives, and the things that do cause us pain, we cannot live our lives with any depth. Further, the Lord tells us here that we are assured of His comfort if we venture forth to embrace all of reality. He will be with us when we deal with the truth, and sometimes the truth is painful and so we will mourn. Whenever we deal with truth we are close to God and can be comforted.

How does this relate to the 12 Steps? Anyone that has ever done a first step or a fourth step can tell you that mourning is involved! To admit powerlessness over a substance; this is a blow to ego, a blow to pride. There is a loss, a death, in admitting that I cannot do something on my own. When I work the steps in Al-Anon, this mourning is all too clear: I cannot control my loved ones and they may choose self-destructive paths. For this I will mourn, finally, when I give up trying to keep them from themselves. Control is my favorite coping mechanism. Why? Because I want to avoid pain. I would not turn to control if everything in my life were hunky-dory, if I lived in a paradise. Paradise by definition would be a place without sadness, without crying or tears. For Paradise, I don't need mourning. But to live in the reality of my daily world, I will be deeply happy only if I can let go and let the world, and the people in it, be as they are, even though this may cause me sorrow. I can be blessed in this sorrow of really seeing things as they are, and not as I would have them, because I am therefore participating in the reality of God's universe and I will be closer to Him when I deal with truth, even though sometimes, truth hurts. Truth can hurt; and I will comfort you says God. This is the path to peace.

This is not to say that deep happiness is quickly found or instantaneous when I begin to deal with reality as it stands. There is pain; that is the mourning part. The way to the comfort is through that pain, that mourning. There is no life without death; no resurrection without crucifixion.  But there is no cruxifixion without resurrection!

This second beatitude seems to me to relate to the second of the twelve steps. That is, "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity". When I am trying to wrest some order out of reality, some order that I want it to have that it does not, I am wrestling with truth, trying to change things so that I do not have to feel pain. This is insanity. I can't change anything about reality. It is when I can look at this fight and begin to believe that a Power greater than myself can restore me to a right order vis a vis some hard reality, that I can begin to find comfort. The comfort begins in knowing that there is a Power greater than myself whose job it is to handle these things. When I let go and mourn the loss of the illusion of control and the mess that I have made of things, I can be assured that a Higher Power than I can take care of things. Blessed are we when we mourn in this way: mourn that things are not as I would have them, give up fighting with them in whatever ways we fight, and begin to believe that there is a saner way to live.

The comfort does not end there. The third step tells us that the way forward in a spiritual experience is to make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God. If we have the belief, the faith that God can restore us to sanity, and we can surrender to His grace, His providence, doesn't that sound comforting? We can be as children in this regard, going to a loving parent who can take care of things that we are not capable of, and we can have the certainty that all will be well. We don't have to manage well, be better than we are, or strive. We can turn everything over to a Higher Power and rest.

Jesus says in another place: "Come to me all who are heavily burdened.... Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me... and you shall find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11: 28-30)

And what are we surrendering, what are we mourning? What are our burdens? These are our sins, those ways in which we fall short of the mark that we are made for, those ways in which we hurt others, and hurt ourselves. It is those ways in which we are less than our best selves, less than the potential we come equipped with. We know when we fall short of the mark and it pains us. It is when we acknowledge this shortfall that we can be comforted.

With God there is no giving up, no surrendering, even the surrender of the uglier realities of ourselves and our lives without reward, without comfort. Supremely happy, deeply fulfilled will be those who mourn their participation in the evil of the world, for they shall be closer to God and comforted by that God.