This is not the kind of day in which I would normally post anything to a weblog, a place where at least the offchance that someone might read it seems to make it obligatory to call forth a modicum of optimism. This is the kind of day when I chose as my screen saver a view of Waikiki Beach. Standard tourism shot. I chose it because: been there, done that; safe as houses, and what you see is what you get. What you see is fairly easily summed up, too. I wouldn't expect any change or much complexity from the place even if the sky should fall.

Well, it does have the advantage of looking bigger in photos than it is, and a person could sit down at Duke's and order drinks with salt around the rim. There's my optimism for the day.

This is the kind of day when I had to drag myself downtown. As I walked up Fifth, I thought: this is a day when I don't have much to offer but my body, just standing there, not a glow or an energy or a great deal of hope. But I also thought that my body might make a difference. I expected, at the most, forty people at the peace gathering organized by the Interfaith Alliance. When I turned the corner, I saw at least 200 people, and, by eleven o'clock when the President was supposed to arrive, there must have been close to 400. I stood with two of my graduate students, two of my wonderful storytellers, who'd never heard the songs they were asked to sing. One even asked me the title of "We Shall Not Be Moved' and wrote it down in her notebook. There are so many things I could mention; so many of the people I admire most were there. My beloved Pat McGeahey, crushing me in his bear hug. Naomi Tutu. My colleagues, other students. People from all three of my churches. Businessmen too, and old hippies, and Belle Meade ladies and African-Americans and members of the Islamic League. Signs of all kinds and a yapping pomeranian that most of us peace-niks wanted to strangle. This diversity impressed me most. I mentioned it aloud and a woman said to me, "Just like the Dylan song."

Of course, they routed Mr. Bush in through the back and, when we began to march, the police made us go three blocks out of the way of the Convention Center. As we walked by the TV cameras, I thought of how I must look by then, rain-bedraggled, hood over my head. Rain and mugginess are the worst combination for asthma and by the time we rounded 6th and Broadway, I needed to leave, my chest almost gurgling and really tight.

I stilll wore my armband, and I walked alone the two blocks to the car. Halfway down the first block I heard a man yell behind me: "Where's your god-damned American flag, you ungrateful bastards?" he was turned toward the street, but then he wheeled around and walked that block behind me. There were two others across the street who stepped over the curb as if to join him. I was afraid, but I didn't run and, even though sorely tempted, I left the armband on.

I tell my students that, like Wordsworth and others, I gave up on political activism as making much real difference long ago. But some things are too important. As I crawled down Demonbreun on my way home, I wondered if I will spend my entire life pleading for hopeless causes. Maybe. I know only this; sometimes, even if you only have your standing-there body to give, it makes some kind of difference that you do.
posted by Sandy at 10:54 AM

I don't know why I continue to be surprised about sources of wisdom, about the ways God speaks to me from bushes just when I need it. I met this morning with one of my students, a first-semester sophomore, to talk about minor proposals and other mundane matters. But this young woman has awed me more than once, and she did it again today. She said things about writing that I usually hear only from those much older than she, and she said things about faith that took me right into the fire, where I needed to be.

She said her mother had always been her spiritual touchstone, the kind of mother who told her, even during her freshman struggles, to embrace her sorrow because it would do her good. Then she told me that she'd gone to her mother with her questions of doubt: the usual not-sure-about-this-Christianity-stuff that a mother might expect to hear at such a time. Her mother told her, as some would, that it was time to find her own faith. What she thought was faith in the past was merely a parroting of her mother's, the way the young do with convictions about society and politics in areas in which they have no knowledge of their own. Normal enough so far. But here's what followed. Her mother told her than when she found it, when she found real truth and faith of her own, it would not be what she wanted it to be. It would not be neat or certain or pretty; it would be more like a cloud with ragged edges, as ready to storm as not.

That wisdom--it has taken me so long to get there, and still I resist it. Even now, I try to run back to places where faith seems safe, where truth can be labeled. It's likely the real reason I stayed away from St. A's as long as I did. I played outdoors all the time when I was a child (forbidden to keep my nose in a book), but I never liked to get really dirty. Playing in the rain, okay. In the mud, a different story. I'm still that way. I know, to the depths of my soul, how muddy I have to get for my faith to be at all real. I know it won't be comfortable, more like hopping on hot coals, some of the time but, thank God, nothing in the way of guilt and retribution that I was taught as a child..

This helps me to think about how my mother clings to her church, one I simply can't abide any more. I laugh about the hate rags she leaves around on tables for us to read, especially one with the shouting title: "Hell is part of the good news too." But, for her, it is. She wants a religion of law and certainty; black and white, in or out, sheep or goats. She wants to know she's earned heaven because she hasn't committed certain sins; she doesn't need grace and has no time for weakness, tolerance, fogvieness. She especially has no use for the relative "liberalism" that her own church is moving toward, so she's withdrawn from three churches to find one narrow enough, so that she can be reassured from the week's services that she's never done that so she's all right and to gossip about people who have, who, justly, will not be all right.

You know, the Church of Christ reached the height of its membership in the 50's, during a time that such "knowing where you are" must have been very attractive. But I think further back than that to the way my great-grandparents chose this faith, even to how it arose in the Kentucky backwoods of the 19th Century. It's not just Scottish influence that has made it a "thou shalt not" sect that wants to separate itself completely from factosrs like emotion. It's not just lack of education that causes its members, even to this day, to pray exactly the same memorized prayers, to answer questions in a Bible class in exactly the same way.

My great-grandparents lived on a Mississippii depression farm, and until my grandparents went to the city at age 50 and the whole family became wealthy, my mother's family did too. She has told me they couldn't afford to keep the eggs that their hens laid but had to trade them at the store. Couldn't afford for her mother to stay home with small infants, so she breast-fed them when she came to the end of field rows. I wonder how they were able to afford the insulin to keep my uncle Dennis alive or to send my mother and her sister away to boarding school so that they could finish high school. Maybe, with a life like that, you'll find certainty any way you can; maybe they felt they couldn't afford a messy faith, one that left them in the shifting sands on Sunday as well as every other day of the week. Perhaps, somehow, my mother has never been able to afford it.

Thank God that I can afford to have an iota of courage, that Julie sang "Jesus is my man" and "James" at church yesterday, that a woman I don't know sang, too, causing Julie to hold her head in her hands, that Becca preached a sermon about forgiveness that landed everyone there in the quicksand of struggle. So real, so hard, so right, so understanding, so forgiving, so acknowledging of how divided we are--but nothing at all like faith would be had I designed it. I don't know when I came to understand that "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief' is the truest statement of faith, but I know that, had I not, I would have given up on faiith as I came to honesty and self-knowledge. It cost me so much to leave behind the way I had been taught things were, the get off the path and into the briars. But, until I did, I had no idea, no more a clue than when I was five and thought religion was wearing a ruffly dress and trying to keep it spotless.

I pray for help to embrace the chaos.


"it is probably not correct to speak of the soul's path. It is more a meandering and wandering. . . The soul becomes greater and deeper through the living out of the messes and the gaps. . . To the soul, this is the 'negative way' of the mystics, an opening into divinity only made possible by giving up the pursuit of perfection." (Thomas Moore)

posted by Sandy at 11:40 AM