Learning from hunger

Dear readers,

Today I've been fasting for Good Friday. No food at all, and nothing but water, tea and lemon juice to drink.
I wanted to deepen my experience of the day by replicating some of the suffering of Christ, even though part of me thinks it silly to impose suffering to grow in faith. Part of me equates fasting with self-flagellation, vows of silence, celibacy and other restrictive disciplines we impose on ourselves to get closer to God. I have an instinctive resistance to that brand of religion. Jesus spent his life simply yes, but he enjoyed life amongst the sinners, doing good in the public square, not hiding away in asceticism burying his appetite for life.
Another part of my resistance to fasting is that I've seen it used to get attention. One weekend when I was in college in the late 90s, a student group set up shop outside the student center to protest the U.S. embargo against Iraq, citing the deaths of children.
Their form of protest was to sit out on the steps of the center for three days, fasting. There was singing and giving out information, but their biggest signs declared that it was a "Fast for Iraq." For some reason, I thought it ridiculous that their form of building awareness was to make themselves suffer.
I'd think anybody who didn't give a damn about the issue would just look at them and say, "Ha! Let 'em starve! Those self-righteous bozos!"
Looking back at it, it wasn't the fast itself I was opposed to, but the demonstrative nature of it. Perhaps the advocacy statements made sense, but the fact that they made their fasting so public got to me. Perhaps I have been affected by that old advice, "Do your good works in secret."
Initially today, I wasn't sure if my little fast would have any effect on me. I moved through the day a little grumpy, but clearheaded. Then came the evening and a test: forgetting my fast, my roommate invited me out to dinner with his friend. Should I deny myself the pleasure and stay home, or take it as a sign to go enjoy the company of friends and break bread? WWJD?
I decided to combine my two interests: I went to dinner but denied myself food, and this was when the fast got interesting. My roommate and friends got a prix fixe three-course meal, appetizers, entrees, beers and dessert. I sat there with a cup of green tea and watched.
First, I felt like an outsider, and that's when the fast first began to hurt. I was going through the day just fine in my own private discipline, but discipline becomes less enjoyable in the midst of those enjoying freedom. In the same way, I think it's easier to be poor when you're not right next to wealth: you may not be aware of how bad you've got it and see the little that you've got as enough.
But when you're poor and surrounded by the well-off, the same drive that could help you survive could turn to resentment, and perhaps then violence.
This came to mind, and other things popped up as they moved from appetizers to entrees. I began thinking about how hard it must be for somebody on a strict diet to be in group situations, the discipline to be out with people who can eat whatever they want, the control it must take. I imagine family and friends try to be considerate, but when a group goes to an Italian restaurant, I'm sure a dieter sees stuff going around the table that they ache to eat. No wonder so many fall off.
As they moved towards the end of the meal, I thought about that old weird piece of advice every mom used to give their kids to make them finish dinner, that guilt-laden news flash "There are children starving in Africa." What was the logic of that? I guess if children are starving in Africa, then I should shut up and be grateful I have any food at all, and should eat every bit?
I never got this: if I have extra food and there are children starving in Africa, then shouldn't they be the ones eating it? Why am I overfilling my belly while these kids starve? And furthermore, if you're really concerned about me understanding starvation in Africa, wouldn't it be better to DENY me an occasional meal, rather than guilt-trip me into eating more?
By that logic, it's like filling the belly is a salute to the fact that by the grace of God, I'm not like them. I guess for any family that's escaped poverty, that's a natural thing to enjoy. But it's also rather hedonistic and self-centered. "I'm going to eat up, because I thankfully am not in your shoes." If I heard that and was on the other side of the equation, I'd want to cut you open and enjoy my meal.
As I recall, Jesus rarely complained about being hungry. He got tired and angry, and even thirsty on the Cross. However, he didn't complain a lot about poverty and hunger. Sometimes, I almost think that that lack of complaints, combined with his love for the poor, has made it easier for us to excuse the existence of poverty.
We do charity like Jesus did, but I think fewer of us see starvation, especially when others are feasting, as the same intolerable hell as genocide or the AIDS epidemic.
I wonder if Jesus had talked more about the cruelty of poverty, maybe things would be different. But then again, we've selectively ignored and heeded Jesus' words for centuries.
The fast has clearly done me good, since it's got me thinking, but I don't quite feel like I've hit rock bottom yet. I wonder how far I should go. Should I take myself to the point of physical pain, or stop now that some awareness has come of it? Your opinions would be welcome.

Going where the spirit leads you

"The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So is it with every one who has been born of the Spirit." John 3:8 (Weymouth New Testament)

Sometimes I just don't feel called to going to church on Sunday. For years, I thought that was just laziness or depression, and that I had to force myself to get out the door and go. Somedays, I turned out to be right, and getting out helped me escape a rut of some kind by seeing friends and finding solace in a lively worship.

However, when I woke up today, my resistance to going to church was less about depression than exuberance. I woke up with the sun today (completely by chance, having fallen asleep at 10 last night) and then sat on my rooftop enjoying the wind at 7. I began looking along the Brooklyn horizon and thought of going to Prospect Park. I've been living in New York over a year now and I'd wanted to see it for sometime.

I knew though that I'd likely to miss the 11 am service at the Unitarian church, so I was torn. Then I read my spiritual passage for the day, from Garry Wills' "What Jesus Meant." The passage spoke of how Jesus cared far more about the state of our spirits than our rituals. I could tell my spirit, which I usually equate with my greatest joy, wanted to visit the park.

After a relaxing long walk, I made my way back to NYU and stopped in a new church, Judson Memorial, for their Palm Sunday mass. The service was nearly over when I got there, but I at least had the chance to rest in the house of the Lord for a few minutes. It was a great relief.

Now over the last months, I've spent my Sundays at several different parishes, and so far I haven't settled on one. Some people might fault this: my mother used to have a school of thought that you go to the parish you have, not the parish you want. I think she took going to our local parish even with boring sermons and funereal music as a selfless way of putting her faith before her own tastes. There's definitely a praiseworthy commitment there.

But to me that kind of forced parish loyalty goes against how Jesus moved through the world, how he encouraged us in John to follow our nomadic spirits. Jesus was a wanderer, always on the move. So to make sticking to your parish part of being a good Christian seems a bit off to me.

There are some weeks when the Spirit calls me to services, and others to fellowship, or some kind of journey like today. I may seem irregular or erratic, but I am constantly, consistently working to listen to the Spirit. And to me the most organic encounters with the divine are when we go beyond our routine.

Would love to hear from you.

Making myself vulnerable

It's been a tough week for me. In a meeting with my supervisor at my part-time internship, I was given some tough critiques. As he went on, I began feeling insecure, a bit humiliated and quite vulnerable, like a child being disciplined by his father.

This kind of vulnerability can be a very physical experience for me. My pulse quickens, and sometimes I tremble or get cold. In some cases, my eyes water up. And at these moments, I lose the guards I've put up to efficiently tackle the mad crowds of New York and the search for success. Of course, that loss feels awful.

But I also believe that vulnerability is something God wants for us. I used to go to a Wednesday night service at Manhattan's Riverside Church, a Gospel-style service called "Space for Grace," with gospel hymns and clapping, frequent cries to God, and tons of "YES, JESUS!" shouts and "MM-HMMs!" coming from the Harlem audience.

On several Wednesdays, I would come in tired and irritable. I would read the program and sit there watching, usually impatient for the sermon.

Usually, though, I arrived when the ministers were passing mikes out to the crowd for them to offer praises and prayers to God. Sometimes a member gave praise for a marriage or a graduation, but more often it was a prayer for the sick, the dead, or the mistreated. I would get irritated after hearing a few of these, perhaps with the thought that the ministers were letting the crowd take over the show: when were we going to get back on schedule? But usually the ministers went on until every raised hand had been given a mike.

Now I had nowhere I had to be after the service was over. What was really happening was a resistance to being vulnerable to these people's experiences, especially to their pain. I came in wanting learning and inspiration, but not wanting to be vulnerable.

And yet I don't think we can get too far in our maturation without allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, and I believe God treasures vulnerability. I believe vulnerability is divine.

In fact, that is for me the height of sexual intimacy: the moments where you and your partner are completely vulnerable to each other, literally naked and staring each other in the face, with no place to hide. And hopefully no reason to either.

Last night, I was reading one of my current self-help books, Taming Your Gremlin, by Rick Carson. In it, he has a 15-minute meditation where I was supposed to sit silently and imagine a person I loved deeply and a conversation we would have about our opinions of each other.

As I began, my mind was off in other places, and part of me was thinking the exercise a waste. Carson's book was asking me to be vulnerable, to open myself up to possible pain. And the part of me that's learned to protect myself from feeling weak and vulnerable was trying to blow him off.

However, I managed to do it: I imagined a conversation with my father in which we talked about how we really felt about each other deep down. It made me sad and grateful and ultimately very at peace. Afterwards, I saw my Dad had called me and on my call back, I told him about the exercise. He laughed and we had a great chat. None of that would have happened if I hadn't let myself be vulnerable.

We're taught that only the strong survive, but to me, true growth in life demands we learn to be vulnerable. I don't even like the word "weak" here: to me, it takes strength to put your guard down and be open. Our daily lives can feel like a boxing match, where we face an opponent and have to dance around danger and keep our fists up in order to succeed.

But to thrive as children of God demands a different approach at times. Though it may seem foolhardy or dangerous, we've got to learn how to stop dancing, take off our gear and be open to punches. After all, as they say in the fitness world, "No pain...no gain."

A notion on faith

I read a quote yesterday on Sacred Space, the Jesuit daily prayer site I often visit, that said something akin to faith is more God's contribution to us than our contribution to God. It's by His grace that we're able to stay faithful, and he doesn't really need our faith or our praise. One thing I remembered in the Grand Canyon was how small I am in the vast scheme of things, seeing rock formations that have been there for a million years, reflecting the power of nature and the antlike smallness of our individual lives. Not to say that our lives are not important, but it's hard to boast about my life before sights like the Grand Canyon.
I had another divine inspiration in the Canyon: I was inspired to dance. I woke up at 5 am my last morning there and went to see the sunrise with a tour group. At first, I listened to our folksy tour guide telling about Canyon lore, but as the sun rose, I wanted quiet...or so I thought. I left the tour group and walked along the rim, and as the morning wind hit my arms, I felt this wave of joy rush inside me. So I turned on my IPod and jammed: the song was "I Grieve," by Peter Gabriel, which has an excellent upbeat jam at the end about life's richness in spite of our mortality. It was perfect for gettin' down at the Canyon.
I promise I'll have photos up soon. Hope to hear from you all. God bless.

READINGS AND RELAXATION

Dear friends,

Nothing much to report this week on the religious end. Last night my roommate took me out for a night of African dj dancing, so I missed the Unitarian service this morning. And unfortunately with spring break now going on, there were no services going on. However, that did give me a chance to apply to the International Women's Health Coalition for communications work with them.
In the meantime, I finished reading Shane Claiborne's book Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, which I thoroughly recommend for any Christians who have a burning desire to put their faith to action. Too many times we're encouraged to concentrate on our own lives: Claiborne examines well how our faith calls us to do justice in the world. And thankfully he does so with a focus on justice for the poor above all else.
I'm now reading Amy Orr-Ewing's Is believing in God irrational? which may be the first apologetics text I've ever looked at. I'm not so sure how I'll like it, but the intro certainly spoke to me, with the author talking about her changing attitude towards God in the years she struggled with cancer as an adolescent. She's an emotional reader: we'll see about her arguments.
I welcome any recommendations from you-basically, I try to start off my day with about 10 minutes of spiritual reading, so as long as it's the kind of book you CAN read in bits, I'm into it.
I wish you all the best this week. I'm off to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon: I'll make sure to put together an online photo album and provide a link. Take care!

MADNESS IN GOD’S NAME

A nine year old girl complains to her mother of stomach pains. Mom takes her daughter to the hospital, and they find out she's 4 months pregnant with twins. How? The girl reveals that her stepfather has been sexually abusing her for years, along with her 14-year-old sister. The stepfather is arrested, while trying to get out of the city. The hospital says that as the girl weighs only 80 pounds, the pregnancy could be dangerous. As it's a case of both health risks and rape, it's a perfectly legal abortion, and Mom decides to let the doctors abort the twins.

Somehow word gets out to the local Catholic church. The next day, the mother and the two doctors she worked with are excommunicated. The stepfather though is not excommunicated. The local archbishop says that even though the stepfather committed a heinous crime, "the abortion- the elimination of an innocent life – was more serious."

This happened in Brazil this week, but it feels like it could have happened anywhere. The Vatican got involved yesterday and affirmed the decision of the archbishop. Cardinal Giovanni Re said, "It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," he said.

The real problem. It boggles my mind and infuriates me as a former Catholic to see my church now so focused on abortion that the rape of a 9-year-old girl by her stepfather is less of a problem than the removal of his seed from her body. His rape is less of a sin than allowing her to return to her childhood without his children inside her.

The Catholic Church doctrine on dangerous pregnancies is that a Caesarean section is always an alternative to abortion. However, C-sections are healthiest at full-term pregnancy. So, in effect, the church was suggesting that the nine-year-old should have borne her father's seed for another half a year, and for having not chosen that, the mother and doctors are greater condemned than the father.

The church's decision is madness shrouded in logic, absent of any compassion for human beings dealing with horror.

It's not clear how far this case will go. No article I've read so far speaks to the nuances of excommunication. In one story, one of the doctors said that he would continue going to mass afterwards, but going to mass is usually not forbidden by an excommunication. Usually, excommunication forbids you from taking part in sacraments except for Reconciliation, but you can still attend Mass. In fact, it's encouraged. Only in its more extreme versions does the church completely shun the excommunicated.

The next question becomes what kind of reconciliation the church will demand. Should these people say that what they did was wrong? That they should have allowed the nine-year-old to carry twins for another five months? And what of the father? What will be demanded of him by the church? The Vatican says that rape is inherently evil and incest even more so. Yet the father will be welcomed to Communion in his Brazilian jail cell, and the mother turned away.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Here the threat is not only to justice, but to common sense and compassion. What happened in Brazil was the destruction of both a family and a child's innocence, and the church's actions have only made matters worse. Our duty is to heal the broken before we judge them.

ASH WEDNESDAY PART 2

I talked to my counselor this morning about how it felt having Luv with me at the ceremony. Here was a guy who had no experience with Christianity, barely any experience with New York at all, and it was my opportunity to introduce him. I was thrilled, and he was wide eyed asking all sorts of questions. When I told him, "Well, the priest puts the ashes over your forehead with his finger and makes a sign of the cross, much like in baptism," he looked at me and said, "What's baptism?"

Then there was the church. The place seemed like an exact replica of Holy Trinity.
Here's St. Joseph's outside:................then Holy Trinity:



St. Joseph's inside.................then Holy Trinity:



I felt like I'd come back home.

And the service was just the same as Holy Trinity, a young choir, a hopeful and eloquent priest, great songs, and a sense of peace. Luv sat there and asked if he should come down with me when I went for ashes, but I said they preferred you at least be Christian before you do so. I wonder if that was the right thing to do, but I suppose it'd be better if he at least knew what the ceremony meant before he joined me. As it was, he was only just beginning to understand.

I gave up something for Lent that I've been wanting to give up, which is looking at little YouTube clips for the over-18 crowd, clips of actresses like Alyssa Milano or Drew Barrymore in some B-movie about the naughty babysitter or the innocent art student seduced by vampires. Though I'd only watch this schlock for 10 minutes or so on a given night, it hasn't felt right, and shedding that for Lent feels like a step in the right direction.

I pray that you are also stepping in the right direction wherever it is you wish to go.