What have I been doing with my life?

On October 6th, I had a 9:00am meeting in Northern Virginia, and I offered to drop Husband off at work on my way by. We were passing a federal courthouse when all of a sudden I saw something that made me question what I had been doing with my life for the last seven years. 

In 2007-2008, I spent a year closely connected with a non-profit called Torture Abolition and Survivors' Support Coalition International -- TASSC, for short. And TASSC was closely aligned with both the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, located in Petworth, and another small intentional Christian community called the Assisi House. The people who lived in these houses were teachers or activists, some in religious orders, some not, but all saw the world differently from most people, and for that matter, most Christians. It was here I was introduced to William Stringfellow, to Dorothy Day, to the Berrigan brothers, to Peter Maurin -- a strain of Christianity singing a countermelody to the sleepy protestant mainstream I grew up with. Those who lived in these houses were transformed by the witness of these authors, and they lived lives of witness. 

I loved those quirky folks, and those authors inspired me, too. But after a year of witnessing with them through TASSC, I felt compelled to effect, to plan, to change the world through my own sheer will. In other words, I felt called to do, while their mode of life is organic, to be. I went on to learn fundraising at top ten charity, the most planning-oriented and "effective" mode of helping that I could figure to do. You can't feed or shelter people without resources, or planning, or support staff. You can't make real change without worldly influence. In a nutshell, I was here to do what nearly everyone in Washington comes here to do -- to be smart and to change the world. So I better go about doing it. And I worked my small part. 

But on that Monday morning on October 6th at 8:45am, when I saw that group of Catholic Workers and TASSC people standing outside of the Federal Courthouse, all of that work seemed to be dross. Here they were, this ragtag crew of ten folks or so, holding anti-torture signs long after the national debate about "enhanced interrogation" has moved on. Seven years later, I recognized almost all of them. One wore a "Shut Down Guantanamo" t-shirt. I have that one, too. It's in my drawer, still bright orange. His was faded to the point it wasn't orange anymore, and kind of hard to read. By the way, if you were wondering, we still have prisoners in Guantanamo. 

Seven years of faithfulness. Seven years of steadfastness in the face of the world who at best doesn't care, and at worst despises them. And seven years was the only seven years that I saw -- the Catholic Workers of DC have been at it much, much longer than that. I've been thinking about them for weeks now, what it must take to do the same actions over and over again, never seeing substantial change. At the moment I drove by, I thought to myself, "That's what faithfulness looks like." And then I thought, "What have I been doing with my life?" 

Forty Years

The Rev. Allison Cheek after the first public celebration of the Eucharist by a woman
Nov. 10, 1974 at St. Stephen's and the Incarnation, NW DC
Photo by the Washington Post

Today is a big deal, at least for me, anyway. Today is a big deal, because forty years ago, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church, the Philadelphia Eleven, were ordained at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, PA. They were irregularly ordained, which means they were ordained outside of church law, which only caught up with them two years later. These women, and the male bishops who ordained them, risked their vocations (and, I'm assuming for the bishops, their pensions) in order to live out what they believed to be true -- that God does not discriminate by gender when God calls someone into the sacramental priesthood, and that God was calling each of these women to serve God as a priest in God's church. It's beautiful, and it's true.

I love these stories, these stories about the first women priests in the church. I love hearing about them, I love to read about them. (If you are interested, Grace in Motion by the Rev. Dr. Judith Maxwell McDaniel is a great place to start.) I love these stories because I feel like they are my stories, and because even though I was born eleven years after the Philadelphia Eleven, and even though I began to seek ordination thirty-one years after the Philadelphia Eleven, I was told, when I began my process, that my priest would not be supporting me for ordination because I was a woman, and he did not believe that woman should be priests. This set off a series of chain reactions in my process.

It took me nine years to be ordained to the priesthood.

There are many things I could say about that experience, but what I'm thinking about today is the enormity of the courage, effort, prayer, persistence, tenacity and sheer grit it takes to make a change toward justice in an unjust system. Women and their male allies had been fighting for decades before 1974 to see this change happen, and when women finally were ordained, they had to find jobs that would hire them, deal with belittling, sexual assault, physical violence, death threats, the never-ending balance between family expectations and work, and not to mention the nearly inevitable sacking after becoming pregnant, at least in the early days. I've heard these stories from some of the women who have experienced them.

What astounds me now is how easy it was for all of those decades to be flippantly dismissed with a few offhanded words from one person in authority.  But do you know what? That didn't stop the Eleven. It didn't stop women from becoming professors and deans of schools or cathedrals, from raising families while running churches, from serving the poor or the sick, or from becoming authors and world-renowned preachers and not least, bishops. And with their help, it didn't stop me.

So, today is a big deal. I'm so grateful for those women, and all that they've done, and continue to do. I can't wait to see what the next forty years has in store.

Moving

The worst part about living permanently in DC is dealing with the fact that inevitably most, if not all, of the friends you make will move away. It's part of the fabric of the city -- people come to DC for education, for an administration, for government or non-profit work, but then move on.  Most of the reasons to move to DC have a natural conclusion, either graduation, a lost election, or gaining enough job experience to make good back home. Some not-so-natural conclusions are job cuts or just simply getting fed up and leaving, but they happen, too.

And for me, the DC cycle continues. This month has been particularly hard, with two very dear friends departing to go do really exciting work in the Southwest and Midwest, another beloved friend taking a new job in Philly, and the whole batch of seniors who have left VTS, scattered over the country and globe. I have been a little mopey lately, which must be getting on Husband's nerves, because I'm starting to get on my own nerves. I know no one is further away than a phone call, and the ties we've made won't unravel, but it's not quite the same as melodramatically flopping on someone's couch when you've had a bad day.

But one thing I've learned about living in DC is that while everyone inevitably moves away, every day more people are brought to DC for their own reasons. Those very wonderful friends? I met every single one of them because I moved here, and they moved here. While they have moved on, I'll stay and see who else comes my way.

Fabulous and Fun Clergy Friends -- (I get to keep one of them in NoVA!)
Fourth of July, 2013

Listening is Loving

By nature, I'm a solution-oriented person. When I come across a problem, my Pennsylvania German genes go into overdrive and I analyze, assess and then make a plan. Then I organize resources and people and execute the plan; if it doesn't work, I re-analyze, re-assess, and re-plan, and go at it again. I love this sort of work, and I share that love with my father and three brothers, who, all four of them, are engineers and builders. We're just a solution-oriented family.

Which is why pastoral care, the part of my job where my job is to just be present, is the hardest part of my job. Yesterday morning I found myself sitting across from a woman at a free breakfast in a church basement on Capitol Hill. I was introduced to her as a pastor, and within seconds words started tumbling out of her. I sat and listened to her pain, confusion, her story of abuse and neglect, her anguish as to why a God who was supposed to love her would let what happened to her happen, and witnessed the tears streaming down her face. And her story was truly horrible, a story of evil come to wreak havoc in the world by people who should have loved and protected her. I spent a year at a torture abolition non-profit; I've heard horrific stories. This was up there, and this was a story of SE DC.

As a priest, there is nothing you can do in the face of that sort of pain. There is no plan that can fix the past. You can't repair a broken human soul. There are no action items, there is nothing that you can say, and nothing that can be done. And so, you sit. And pray. And listen. And hope, that in the listening, that you are some sort of representative for the part of humanity that promises not to neglect, abuse, betray or berate, and that you are some sort of representative of a flicker of divine love somewhere, although in this moment, it seems very, very far away.

The only thing that gives me comfort in this situation is something that I heard a few weeks ago at a conference, something that I've been thinking about over and over again, is this claim by pastor Frank Thomas: it's almost impossible to tell the difference between loving and listening. What you do when you listen is so close to that act of loving that the person being listened to can't tell the difference.

I hope that's true, because it's all I've got.

Inundation

Linden Place NE - April 25, 2014 

Late Friday afternoon, I skimmed the surface of the holy while walking to my car. You can call me crazy if you like, but it was sublime -- one of those moments when your senses are so completely overwhelmed they get scrambled.  Somehow, the air itself was shining, the light smelled fresh and clean, the rain felt like grace, and whatever lies beneath all of this was shimmering through to the barely perceptible.

I just stood there in the rain shower, umbrella open but at my side, soaking it all in, until I was honked at because someone wanted my parking spot. 

Interrupted by Joy

Late night texts or calls always fill me with dread. Anytime the phone dings after 11:00pm, I'm immediately worried that something terrible or undoable has happened, and I'm being called to be informed with the news. 

I'm not sure why I always think this, because really, I haven't had that many late night disasters in my life. The few that were, were enough, I guess. My new life as priest to a parish of people that I'm starting to love in a way that I can't even begin to articulate, some of whom I worry about regularly, doesn't help my phone anxiety, either. So despite that most of my post-midnight calls are drunk dials, an insomniac friend who knows that I'm usually up reading because I can't sleep either, or my bank telling me my checking account is emptier than it should be, I have to will myself to see who or what it is. Despite the statistical probabilities for everything being just fine, I still reach for the phone with a quickened pulse and a knot in my stomach. 

On Wednesday at midnight, I got a late night text from a friend. "Can you call me? I need to talk to you." I said my favorite prayer (it has two words and it goes like this: "Fuck! Help!") and called her back immediately, fearing the worst. 

But instead of being ambushed by the catastrophe that I was certain was on the other line, my life was interrupted by joy. Yes, of course, I would love it more than anything I know to come to an ultrasound with you in the morning. 

And in the morning, I woke up early, dropped Husband off at work, and I went with her to see her joy. With fingers, and toes, and a heartbeat, and a nose, a beautiful, perfect little nose. And we laughed for delight and amazement, and for all of the goodness that we saw God working in her, and we even cried a little bit. That morning was bliss and blessing. Bliss and blessing I might have missed if I hadn't picked up the phone. 

Twenty Years

Twenty years ago, yesterday, was the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. I was eight when it happened; I knew Africa existed, but only in a lion, zebra and elephant sort of way. Bill Clinton was the president. But this week, I just can't stop thinking about what happened twenty years ago.

You might not think that this has a lot to do with H Street, but it does. It does because the waves of suffering that systemic violence cause radiate to every corner of the world, and sets off ricochets of suffering for decades, perhaps centuries. So, even though I was an eight year old, blithely living my life when those atrocities happened, as an adult, I've seen the ricochets of the genocide slash through lives here in Washington. And while they are a pale shadow of the immediate violence, they weren't pretty.

After college I worked at an anti-torture non-profit which had two basic tasks: advocate against the use of political torture by the US government, and offer immediate help to survivors of torture. Often, people would just show up at our door with their every possession in a plastic shopping bag. It was a miracle they found us at all, tucked away in a hard to reach spot in NE DC, but they did. TASSC was and still is a small operation, but we did our best to help them find proper psychological care, pro bono lawyers, and a safe place to stay. Petitioning for political asylum is its own sort of hell, as it can take years, and involves telling your story over and over again -- the very story you are trying to move past. Not to mention the difficulties inherent in coming to a new country with nothing. All of a sudden you can't speak the language, the culture makes no sense, and you find yourself impoverished and disempowered, unable to work for fear of being deported back to the country that tortured you.

And so the survivors came, from all around the world. The old-timers who stopped by to check in from time to time were mostly Latin Americans, but we would get new survivors every week, often from different countries in Africa or the Middle East. Most plentiful were those from the horn of Africa, Ethiopians and Eritreans, well connected in DC, and often sent to us by their clergy. There were others from Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, the Congo, the Sudan, speaking of TASSC by word of mouth, each connecting to one another when they somehow made it to DC. 

Every survivors has his or her own story, but each country's violence had its own distinctive stamp on the survivors. Those who shared the same language, who grew up in the same culture, and who endured similar treatment had a bond that went beyond even the deepest trust issues. Again and again I was amazed by the compassion and courage of survivors, especially as they worked to help each other out, listening to each other, offering space in their already crowded apartments. Despite the ugly reason that survivors found themselves at TASSC, the human spirit and grace was palpable. 

The exception to this rule were the Rwandans. Not that they didn't also evince spirit and grace in their own way, but because the violence came from within their own communities, and not from an outside force in the shape of a autocratic government, the devastation of the soul was far more complete. Instead of finding hope and solidarity, these survivors feared other people who shared their culture, who shared their language, who shared their identity. Not only did they have to deal with the "normal" issues survivors face, but they had to deal with that, too. The Rwandans broke my heart. At least to me -- and what do I know?-- it always seemed as though that the genocide survivors were the ones we were least able to help. And these people, and the children of these people, continue to live with the fallout of what happened twenty years ago. Because DC is a city of the world, they live here,  too, among us who never knew such trauma, bearing the scars on their hearts, living with the ricochets of the violence. 

On Being Inexperienced

While working at my “day job” on Sunday, I heard a hit-it-out-of-the-park sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson, who is the bishop-in-residence at St. Thomas Episcopal Parish, Dupont Circle. Sermons are by nature ephemeral events, written in a week and forgotten by the next. But the mark of an effective sermon is a sermon that you think about the way home on Sunday, over breakfast on Monday, and while you lie awake at night on Tuesday. For me, this was one of those sermons. Because I heard that sermon, I will never gloss over Psalm 27 again.

This sermon reflected Bishop Gene’s real experience of grace despite true persecution. (The man probably still gets death threats. He certainly still deals with a lot of hateful BS.) Somehow, he’s come through all of it made stronger in faith and in personhood, and when he was preaching about Psalm 27, you could tell. The image I saw was that of the blacksmith shop: impurities rising to the surface of the metal and being burned and hammered away in the intense heat. There was pain, but there was strength. 

The sermon inspired me. And if I’m being totally honest, the sermon also made me despair. Bishop Gene is a 20-year-old port compared to my Welch’s Grape Juice. I just felt very young, and very small, and very much that compared to people who have been in ministry for decades or have innately better talents than myself, I have no idea whatsoever what I’m doing. I don’t know jack about starting a new community of faith like I long to start on H Street. And yet, here I am. So, exhausted from a long and emotional day on Sunday, I wallowed for most of Monday morning, because for some reason self-pity seemed like a better idea than actually doing something to actualize a goal. I will admit that I do have a weakness for theatrical disconsolateness. And so I found myself dramatically lying on the floor sighing (for the record, I only do this in front of the dog and sometimes Husband who just rolls his eyes, but yes, it does make me feel better) when from somewhere in the cobwebs of the attic of my mind a memory surfaced.

I was sitting in the basement of the Capuchin Monastery at Catholic University, in the makeshift office of the shoestring non-profit TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition), huddled around a space heater with a retired full-time volunteer who lived with some local peace activists. There was something in his demeanor that made me instantly like him, but as I got to know him better, I found a wellspring of integrity despite his failing eyesight and shuffling gait. He was in terrible shape, but his mind was sharp as a tack and he was very, very wise. A leader in the Civil Rights Movement who taught the first integrated class at the University of Alabama, he left teaching after being granted tenure to work for immigration rights in the American Southwest, and he had stories like you would not believe. TASSC was the kind of place where stories were valued, and so I heard many of them. And Wise Friend was gracious enough to listen to me and my I’m-a-22-year-old problems. 

One day at TASSC, I was chatting with a survivor, and I said something really inconsiderate. Painfully inconsiderate. I just wasn’t watching my words, and they flew out of my mouth and hung in the air, and the survivor just gaped at me. I fumbled around for an apology, but even now I cringe at the memory. I was on the verge of tears when I told Wise Friend about it. He chuckled, and then looked at me with utter compassion and said, “That’s the thing about experience, Becky. By definition, you don’t have it until after you need it. Cut yourself a break.”

Oh yeah. So I thought about Wise Friend, decided to cut myself a break, got up off of the floor, and actually did some work, trusting that my willingness could somehow be transformed into experience.

Part One of this essay series can be found here.

How I got to H Street, Part I: On the Insanity of "Calling"

A "calling" is a funny thing. The first funny thing about a "calling" is the term itself; it's the Christian terminology for the idea of a vocation,* but vocation with fangs. I say with fangs, because if it's a calling, it won't leave you alone, it will keep you up at night, it will go away for a little while and then come back with a later and say, at first very sweetly, "Listen. Stop running. You know you were created to do this." If you keep ignoring it, then it gets a little louder. And a little louder. Until one day, you can't ignore it anymore, and you say, "FINE." And despite the pain that comes with change, you wonder why you hadn't been doing it all along.

Everyone has a calling; I believe that firmly, because I've seen what happens when people follow a calling. Callings aren't just for the professionally religious, but are, at heart, a human experience. Some people get their callings young; some people get them when they are middle-aged; some people only find them at the completion of their lives. To believe that people are called to a purpose is audacious because it implies 1) that there is an order to the universe, albeit a creative, creating one and 2) that you were intentionally created the way that you are, because 3) your presence is a gift to the world. To believe in these three premises, and then to believe that what you do really matters, is insane. But I believe it anyway. I believe it because I've seen, in others, a calling that brings love and joy to the world like a ticker tape parade. I believe it because I've seen, in others, a calling that brings love and joy to the world in the quiet of a conversation, a healing touch, an imparted inspiration.

I make no claims about my own ability to bring love or joy in any capacity, but what I can claim is that callings are crazy, and sometimes not at all what you think it would be. I know, because it happened to me. If you would have asked me, going into seminary, what my calling was, I would have told you it was probably not in a church, it was probably going to be in an academic setting. As such, I took New Testament Greek for the whole year. As such, I decided that I would start taking upper-level New Testament classes my first semester of seminary. As such, I took an entire semester class on the letter to the Galatians, reading hundreds of pages weekly on six chapters of scripture. As such, swimming in the Greek and the historicity and the apocalyptic antinomies and the Hebrew Scripture references, my mind was opened in a way it wasn't before. As such, for the first time in a very long time, my tiny black raisin heart (atrophied by intellectualizing everything I touched) cracked open. Just a little bit. But it was enough to let that little bit of a whisper of something new come in.

And so, by the time I graduated, taking more and more Scripture and translation classes, thinking that they were still the answer to my calling, yet every single one nudging me more into a new way to be, my calling had shifted. I had been called, at least for the foreseeable future, into a new adventure that was not more school. I couldn't just read Paul anymore to read Paul, and I couldn't study the Gospels just to study the Gospels, and to sound knowledgeable about theory. What Paul had to say, what the Gospels had to say, is radical and life changing and nothing at all like the namby-pamby Precious Moments pious BS that gets marketed to well-meaning middle America. It's also not merely an intellectual exercise in the history of thought. It's way more than that, and I had been caught up with it.

*Side etymology note: vocation actually comes from the Latin vocare, 'to call,' so this whole thing is more wrapped up in tautology than I had originally intended, but the definition stands.

Craving Stability

Like any other twenty-something who has moved from a small town to a big city, the last ten years of my life have been constant flux. The last year has been particularly acute, which is probably why I've been thinking about it so much, but seriously. I've moved countless times, changed my state residency twice, went to school, graduated from school, transitioned into full-time work, changed jobs, transitioned within the job, went back to school, graduated from school, transitioned back into work, transitioned from single to married, transitioned from a lay person to an ordained person, transitioned in my family relationships, and watched most of my friends move through the same process, just with their own constellations of constant change. 

(As a side note, the Church in general does not do a good job ministering to people who are in constant change. This is another blog post entirely.)

Maybe I'm getting older, but this starting to be exhausting. Not that the flux isn't fun, it is a time of intense personal growth, but I'm ready to inhabit a new way of being now, to find a center in the chaos. I am more than ready for some stability, and weirdly, I've been thinking about monks.

In monastic orders, there are three basic vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. But some orders (orders are specific types of monks or nuns, each order has a different ministry or focus) have additional vows. One of those vows is stability. When a person takes a vow of stability, that person vows to remain with one community for the rest of his or her life, come what may. It doesn't matter if the community gets a bunch of new people that a monk doesn't like, he's staying, and they will grow together. It doesn't matter if a nun is facing uncomfortable truths about herself because of what is happening in that community, she's staying, and she will grow because of it. The vow of stability takes away the autonomy to just move on, and instead fosters a trust that together, a community can flourish. 

While I won't be taking any monastic vows anytime soon, I'm looking forward to being in one place for the foreseeable future, and look to the monastic tradition for assurance that this longer-term transition is really for the best. I do find it odd that I'm finding that "one place" in a place of constant change and motion and businesses opening and closing, a constant and changing tide of people throughout the day and week, but hey. At least I know it won't be boring around here. I'm thinking this experience will be less like laying a foundation, and more like casting an anchor over the side of the boat. But regardless, I hope that 2014 is the beginning of the rest of the twenty-teens for me.