Souls First

Yesterday at St. James, our rector, Judith, reminded us that we are souls first and it got me wondering. What would happen to us, to our relationships, to our culture, to our society, if we really believed that?

Imagine the impact on:

-the cosmetics industry

-the cosmetic plastic surgery industry

-the fashion industry

-the diet industry

Imagine the impact on prejudice and racial profiling and viewing people as the “other.”

Imagine how we would view our own accomplishments and those of others.

What would happen if all those things that we think make us who we are, make us impressive, popular, wanted, valuable…what if all those things were taken away?

In her TED talk “You Are Not Your Body,” former champion cross country skier Janine Shepherd describes life in the spinal ward after a devastating and life-altering bike accident. The patients were flat on their backs, unable to see one another. Their lives forever changed. They were there together, souls sharing their deepest thoughts and feelings, with one another. One day a nurse brought in straws and had the patients work the straws together, end on end, into a string. That nurse then formed a circle with the straws and each patient held on. Souls connected by tragedy and plastic straws.

What would happen if the playing field was leveled and all we had was each other, without all the things that we believe give us an advantage in life? What if all we are is a collection of souls, connected to one another by a circle of straws?

How would we treat each other then? How would we value each other? How would we value ourselves when we aren’t clambering to the top of the social ladder, seeking approval, proving our significance, or failing in comparison?

We’ve been sold a lie. We have bought into the idea that that which is visible is that which is valuable.

Some of us need to be reminded, perhaps others of us need to be told for the first time, that we are souls first.

That weird kid in algebra class is a soul first. That the homeless person standing at the bottom of the exit ramp, begging for food or money or a job, is a soul first. That the tired looking disheveled woman wandering the aisles of Walmart in her pajama bottoms, looking like she could use a good night’s sleep, some personal discipline, and a fitness plan, is a soul first.

The gay neighbor is a soul first. The gender fluid kid behind the counter is a soul first. The immigrant suffering in an ICE facility is a soul first. The old guy with a MAGA hat is a soul first.

That person who doesn’t look like you, act like you, vote like you, or value the same things you do, is a soul first.

And you, when you look in the mirror, stand on the scale, try on the dress that doesn’t fit, peek at your bank account, count up your professional successes or failures, assess your storehouse of knowledge or your stockpile of skills…you must, must remember that you are a soul first.

This morning my granddaughter started her first day of eighth grade. She was as dolled up as I have ever seen her, having told me that her goal for today was to look good. I want so badly to let her know, to get through to her hormone rattled, developmentally restructuring teen brain and her tender heart that, as beautiful as she is, she is and always will be, a soul first. 

When Preferences Become Mandates

 Anybody who is part of the evangelical church or a conservative congregation of other

stripes knows that it is relatively common to encounter someone who has decided that

doing things a certain way is the "biblical" way to do it. Whether it's how you parent, how you

run your family (and who's in it), how you teach your kids, what kind of church you attend

and how that church goes about worship and engaging with the community, all the way to

how you dress or who you vote for or whether you vote. It is not hard to find someone who

has a certain opinion or has made a specific choice and then spells out the case that that is

THE biblical way, and they can often expertly lob diced up chunks of Bible at anybody within

throwing distance just to prove their point.

Years ago there were the Worship Wars, wherein people would sit around and debate,

whether in person or on the interwebs, the value of hymns vs praise songs, traditional

worship vs contemporary. And each side had their talking points, all effectively ignoring

Ephesians 5:19, which mentions "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs," so it's all included.

But people were very opinionated about these things. They could get testy.

Then there’s schooling. Home school vs Christian school vs public school. There was some

bizarre pecking order to it all, as if this was an intensely spiritual choice (though some had

no choice at all). This issue could ruin friendships and split churches and crush the spirits

of many an overwhelmed mother.

I've done it, too. I've had convictions, or maybe just preferences but I called them

convictions, and decided I was doing something the way God wanted. And then I changed

or grew or something happened to force me out of my bubble or to see things differently or,

at times, I was left with no choice in the matter, and realized that what I really wanted was a

biblical rationalization for what was my preference. I wanted someone to back me up so I

wouldn’t have to fight so hard for what I really wanted.

Because it wasn’t ok to just want something and then go for it.

Maybe it is because people, especially in the more authoritarian churches, families, and

cultures, aren't ever given the freedom to have their own opinions and preferences to begin

with. We learn to do and say as we are told. So what do we do? Our only way to rationalize

our preferences is to say that this is God's preference, no, God's mandate, to do it this way.

When wants are not ok and when children are taught obedience above all else, they don’t get to

develop a sense of agency. Because when parents’ choices and dictates matter most, and

matter above all else, and come with the authority of God, a child doesn’t get to be her own

person with her own wants and desires. When everything is spiritual, then our wants have to be

spiritual, too. Our preferences have to have the spiritual stamp of approval.

So what if all of this pontificating really is just a way of getting validation for a preference

you don't feel you have a right to have outside of some divine ordinance?

What if we gave kids, women, and people of all shapes, sizes, ages, and genders, the agency

to make decisions and like and not like things and use their gifts and or make use of other

people's gifts in the ways that they best see fit without having to wrap everything in spiritual

packaging?

What if we were able to see someone else's choices as just that, choices made based on

their situation and the factors that play in their lives, and not some spiritual failing.

Maybe we should back off with the Divine Mandate Heavy Hammer and let people be

people. Not right. Not wrong. Just people being people, doing things people do.

God gives us the freedom to do that.

Seeing Color

 When George Floyd was so tragically murdered in May 2020 at the hands of his local law enforcement, turning the spotlight yet again on the hideous history of racism in our country, I heard over and over the phrase, “But I don’t see color.”

It is, in many ways, a hopeful sentiment and, on some level, one to be respected. Of course we are to afford one another equal treatment, regardless of color of one’s skin. Isn’t that what Martin Luther King, Jr. longed for? That one day his children would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.

But the problem is that when we say, “I don’t see color,” what we are really saying is, “I don’t see YOU.”

We cannot divorce a person’s color(or gender or ethnic identity) from the experiences that have formed them. It is naive, at best.

When I say that I don’t see color, then I say that I don’t see that you are Black. And if I say I don’t see that you are Black, then I am free to dismiss your life experience, your culture, your world. I can live in my vacuum, seeing things only from my perspective, without ever having to step into your shoes and see through your eyes.

Which got me thinking about DEI...

This is one of the reasons that embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion is so important.

What if…what if DEI is less about giving someone an opportunity and more about recognizing that that person brings something valuable to the table that we don’t have.

When we think of DEI we think of us doing them a favor, with us being the dominant demographic. The one with the power. In our country with our culture and our history, "us" has been the white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied person.

We think that we are being nice and lowering the bar so that those who don’t fit the mold can have a chance. And I’m sure that perhaps that has happened in some instances because sometimes somebody does need a more gradual entrance ramp, sometimes literally.

But I have also heard that DEI hires have to work harder. And I can certainly see this being the case what with perceptions and all. (I certainly know how hard it can be for a woman to be heard and taken seriously in a space dominated by men.)

But, what if….what if there’s more to DEI. What if the real point of DEI has less to do with giving the marginalized a chance and more to do with welcoming and embracing and even needing what they bring to the table.

You may see yourself as a hero for opening the job to a minority, but without the viewpoint of that particular person, your team might be handicapped.

If every employee within a workplace, be it military or civilian, is of the same demographic…white, straight, male…it is likely that each employee is bringing a very similar life experience to the table. One that may be shared by other straight, white men but one very foreign to the rest of the population.

A home inspector once told me about a situation where he and a pest inspector were in a very tight crawlspace under a house. They were both looking for signs of pest damage, mold, or anything else of particular concern. Because the space was so tight, they could look ahead at the floor joists in front of you, but couldn’t look behind them to see the other side of the joists. So the inspector crawled through the space clockwise and the pest inspector crawled counterclockwise and that way they were able to inspect both sides of the floor joists.

We need people who have seen life from a different perspective. We need people who have experienced life crawling counterclockwise, if you will.

If you think about it, the whole anti-DEI thing is pretty arrogant. You are saying, “I don’t need that perspective.”

Yes, you do. We all do. We all need the perspective of someone not like us. And that starts with seeing that they are not like us (seeing their color) and valuing that.

Wendell Berry said, “You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.”

What better way to do that than to give them a seat at the table.

Room to Breathe

A while back, I’m not sure how much of a while back, whether it was before or after Helene, but a while back my husband came home from the grocery store with food and milk and something else: a plant.

It was a small plant in a small plastic pot. I set it in the window where it sat over the winter, surviving frigid blasts through our poorly insulated windows and stretches of drought from my own negligence. It sat and it grew, a little, but not much.

Last month I decided to move it outside. I pulled out a large, clay pot that already had old soil in it and plunked the plant down in the crumbly dirt. Within a couple of weeks it had grown three times in size. I was stunned. Not that it grew, but that it grew so much.

Who knew that a little plastic pot could be so limiting?

Maybe I did.

I know what it’s like to be in an environment, a system, that supports me and holds me up but also holds me back and doesn’t allow me to grow.

Some people like rigid rules and structure that tells them what to do and when to do it, what to believe and just when your belief has slid off the edge into unacceptable (if not heresy). They like a world filled with black and white, yes and no, good and bad. Where there is a right and there is a wrong and it is up to you to tow the right line. It is a life of calculus, an engineer’s dream. Fit inside the formula and it works. Get one digit off and the whole house of cards comes down.

But while bridges and skyscrapers and rockets to the moon rely on precision in both calculation and application, plants are different. And people are different. Well, at least, I’m different.

Throw a formula at me and I panic. Expect precision, perfection, and performance out of me and I crumble. Stifle me with a strident set of “shoulds” and I wither and die.

A few years ago, after decades within the conservative evangelical church, I articulated this: that I think I might actually do better somewhere with looser rules and expectations and beliefs, where I am free to add the structure I need to my relationship with God without the suffocating blanket of somebody else’s definition of “right” and without the expectation that I can and should have all the answers.

For the past two years I have been in that place of freedom. I got here the hard way but perhaps, for me, the only way. I got here through pain. Then again, not many of us leave faith communities for the sheer fun of it.

But it has been good. So good. God is no longer The Great ‘You Must’ in the sky. He’s bigger and wider and broader and totally capable of handling me with all my questions and pathologies and doubts and insecurities and quirky ideas and maybe even turn all those things into something good, something useful, maybe even something beautiful.

I finally have the space to grow at my own pace and into my own person.

I have room to breathe.

Here's hoping that my growth can be as fruitful as that of my little plant who just needed a bigger pot to thrive.

It's Getting Personal

 It's getting personal, people.

So far, as I have watched in horror the dismantling of the democracy we’ve known for 250 years, it has been as someone who isn’t directly affected. Not yet, anyway. And, as I’ve said before, l don’t have personal expertise or experience in foreign policy or economics or budgetary cuts or the rule of law.

But with the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we are now moving into my territory. Things are getting personal.

I’m deeply concerned that a man with no medical training and with a penchant for pseudoscience is in charge of our nation’s health.

I’ve read the Executive Order “Establishing The President’s Make America Healthy Again Commision” and, quite frankly, there is language in that order that is alarming. In Section 5, the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, paragraph (iii) states: “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;”

Assess the prevalence of and THREAT. It’s the word threat that is alarming. It is the fact that the use of medications for the management of mental health conditions and neurodivergence is of such concern that it is put into an executive order. And it is coming at the hands of a man who claims that SSRIs are “more addictive than heroin.”

I’ve been watching this administration for 31 days now. Navigating complex issues and gray areas is not their forte. Or their MO. They take a scorched earth approach to pretty much everything they touch. Black and white. All or nothing. And they don’t back down.

So when I see various psych meds being mentioned as a potential threat I know what is likely coming. A vilification of psych med use and a potential ban altogether (I'll talk about the implication for us adults in another post).

And this is where I can talk with confidence from experience. I say this as a person who, at age 11 was diagnosed with anxiety and depression (and would have been diagnosed with OCD had it been a diagnosis in 1975). I say this as a person who was put on her first antidepressant at age 12.

I say this as the mother whose various children struggled with anxiety, depression. OCD, and ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder. I say this as the mother who had to fight to get them help. I say this as the mother who regrets not fighting harder. I say this as the mother who did too little, too late. I say this as the mother who saw the vast difference an SSRI made in one child’s ability to “unstick” from an obsession and the way a stimulant enabled another child to focus in school and quit believing himself to be stupid.

I say this as the grandmother of a child with an anxiety disorder, ADHD, and dyslexia and a heap of trauma and all the complexities that go with that.

I know meds are considered bad. I know that Big Pharma is the boogie man that we all love to hate. But there is a time and a place for medication.

Psych meds are a tool, not the only tool, but sometimes a necessary tool, when addressing mental health challenges. Sure, it would be great if kids got therapy of various and all sorts. But have you ever had to find a therapist for a child? The process is long and hard and maddening and so damn expensive, even if you have insurance. (In some areas, a therapist who works with children is nonexistent.) It can take months to get in with a therapist only to discover she is going out on maternity leave. Or moving away. Or will no longer take your insurance. The good ones are "no longer accepting clients."

Have the use of these meds increased over the years? Absolutely! But so has the diagnosis of various mental health conditions, thanks to our better understanding of the brain and neurodivergence and how these conditions present themselves (especially in females). And I am thankful for this. In the “good old days” so many of these kids would have been labeled as bad or disobedient or rebellious or just plain weird. Today we know better.

So, should RFK, Jr. and his posse decide that children should no longer be prescribed SSRIs, stimulants, and the like, what are we going to do?

How are we going to support these kids who are anxious or depressed or obsessing or so scattered mentally that they can’t focus on school? How are we going to let them know that they aren’t broken? How are we going to accommodate them?

And how are we going to support their parents? Because it is a hard, HARD road. No parent should be scorned for getting their child the help that’s needed. And no parent should be villainized for having a child who needs help in the first place.

I had so hoped this younger generation would not have to suffer the stigma of mental health conditions. I’m afraid they will. Perhaps worse.

Medication is a tool. Sometimes a good tool. Sometimes the ONLY tool available. Taking that away is going to cause a lot of harm.

On Suffering and Entitlement

 Over the past few months I’ve had a nagging thought that has gradually taken shape and come to fruition at a time when I have desperately needed it. 

It all started back when Helene blasted her way through our community and so many of us were just in this space of getting through to the next thing. And it made sense. There is certainly part of a natural disaster that really is nothing short of survival, hoping upon hope that things will indeed get better. 

And yet I realized how often we are holding out and holding on for dear life. Take parenthood, for instance. We hold on in the newborn stage, hoping upon hope that one day we’ll sleep again. Then we get to toddlers and can’t imagine being able to grocery shop in peace, minus the adorable octopus of a child who makes mad grabs at anything within reach. Eventually we get to adolescence, that stage where we truly think that there is such a thing as Death by Parenthood and they tell us that we just have to make it until they are out the door. And then, per one local rector, we receive this little nugget of parenthood wisdom: “The first forty years are the hardest.” 

Do we ever get there? 

We are so often holding out for better days ahead, just white knuckling our way through. But those better days are not a guarantee. Sometimes one kind of hard replaces another. And sometimes it just lands on top of the already hard and we start dealing with layer upon layer of hard, an existential parfait of life’s little and big challenges.

So a while back I realized that maybe, just maybe, we would be better off accepting the hard as the normal and not some blip on the radar that will disappear when the life we want, the life we think we are owed, shows up. 

Last month I listened to Kate Bowler’s interview with Rev. Sam Wells, vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. He talks of his mother’s very hard life, as a refugee of the Holocaust, as a mother who lost two children shortly after birth, and then as a woman battled cancer for 14 years before her death at age 53. 

As Kate spoke with him she said: “...I realized that so much of your tenderness in your personality comes from this place of knowing where I don’t have to explain to you that sometimes life is difficult and people go through personal tragedy because it’s a part, it’s life woven into who you are.”

His response was what got me: “..I think when people approach something like suffering… it’s all about what you think the normal story is…I’m firmly convinced we live our lives in stories and the story of suffering for somebody who thinks they are born with some sort of entitlement to a life of a certain security and well-being and health and modest success…If that’s their implied story, then suffering is made of up of why me? This is a terrible scar…So the default in our household was never, you know, why doesn’t it work out for us?”

The word ‘entitlement’ stuck with me. 

One definition of entitlement from Oxford Languages is “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.” 

Fast forward to the election, the inauguration, and the past two weeks of executive order upon executive order and news stories and developments coming so fast it’s like trying to drink out of a fire hose to keep up. And everywhere I see the dismantling of our national government and the very real possibility of the loss of our democracy, our freedom, and life as we know it. 

And part of me, at times all of me, wants to panic or cry or flee the country altogether. But there’s another thought that comes to mind. 

Who am I to believe that I am entitled to a life free of suffering and oppression? 

Well, let me backtrack…I would be the first to say that there is certainly a lot of suffering that can and does happen within the bounds of a free society and I have had my share (and probably written about it ad nauseam). And I will also be the first to say we should do everything in our power to protect our free society and fight oppression in any and all forms. 

But I also recognize that I have not experienced oppression the way so many have throughout the whole of human history. I have not personally encountered pogroms or massacres, slavery or feudalism. I have not had to watch my own husband or son go off to war or had my home burned by the enemy forces. I have not, as some of Matt’s ancestors did, buried nine of my twelve children before they reached adulthood. And I have not, as all four of my great grandmothers did, died prematurely due to lack of vaccines or basic antibiotics. I, and those I know and love, have not spent time in prison for my political or theological beliefs and I have not been attacked for the color of my skin. 

I have not had to run. I have not had to hide. And while I certainly know what it is like to be dismissed and ignored, patronized and even scorned because of my gender; I am a white, Anglo-Saxon (with some German, Dutch, and a hair of some other things mixed in for variety’s sake), Protestant, middle-class, straight, educated person, I have never been discriminated against based on my color, ethnicity, education, orientation,  or socioeconomic status.   

Perhaps it has all been too easy. Perhaps we are about to learn what so many others throughout time have known, that there are no guarantees on freedom or safety. That at any time and in any place we could come face to face with oppression. Maybe it is time for us to learn the lessons that our Black brothers and sisters have learned, passed down, generation to generation, from their ancestors in shackles at the hands of mine, or at least those who looked like me. Maybe it is time to learn from my Jewish brothers and sisters, who learned from their parents and grandparent, great grandparents and aunts and uncles what it is like to be in hiding, to depend on the kindness of neighbors for a hope of safety and a life ahead. Maybe it is time to learn from my indigenous brothers and sisters what it is like to have what is rightfully theirs taken from them, and done so, as it often was, in the name of God. 

Maybe it is time to stop hoping for better days to come and start embracing the days that are now. Maybe the good days made us lazy and entitled, leaving us with the expectation that life owed us something. Maybe the good times led to too much independence from each other and reliance on all the things that our driven, white, middle class, American culture values: money, stuff, success, and a house worthy of HGTV. 

So this is what I’m thinking: We aren’t guaranteed anything. We shouldn’t be surprised when the hard times come.

Should we do what we can when we can to push back against oppression and seek to have a free and just society for all? 

ABSOLUTELY!

But there may be times when all we see is the hard and in that hard we are called, per Micah 6:8,  to do the most basic of things: Do justice. Love mercy. And walk humbly with our God.