Swampoodle

I've made a huge mistake. I could have been the Vicar of Swampoodle! What a missed opportunity.

Seriously, though, I was looking up a restaurant that I had a Groupon to (which, btw, is now closed, and I have no idea if I can get my money back) when I noticed something peculiar.

Right there, in the middle. Swampoodle. Swampoodle? What the heck is Swampoodle? 

So, I do what any self-respecting person does, and I google it. Turns out that it's a real neighborhood in DC, although it's not at all what it once was. According to Wikipedia, anyway, it was an Irish neighborhood of slums that had Tiber Creek (a whole creek! where did the creek go?) running through it that would overflow and create huge puddles. In case you haven't already, this is the point where you should try to say "puddle" with an Irish accent. Anyway, the neighborhood was rife with crime, but still a busy and vibrant neighborhood (with a baseball stadium that seated 6,000!) until it was cut in two by the construction of Union Station in 1907, after which the residents dispersed into the city. Now nothing is left except a few original houses on the outskirts of the neighborhood and a mostly-forgotten name. It reminds me of how easily distinct and multi-generational communities can fade away, even if it is in the name of "progress."

And so, Swampoodle is now "NoMa." I guess living North of Massachusettes Avenue is better than saying you live in a Swamp Puddle, but NoMa sounds so sterile in comparison.

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. 

Wilderness New Year

Happy New Year! I hope that everyone had a fun and joyous ringing in of 2014. My family celebrated in the way it usually does: packing up our gear and heading deep into state forest, hoping that there will be snow in the mountains. 

A snapshot near camp -- Potter County, PA -- Jan. 1, 2014

That far in, there is no phone or internet connection. The time spent in the woods, cut off from how we usually communicate and by necessity aware of safety protocol (Going for a walk? Where are you going? How long do you plan to be gone? Do you have matches, a compass, a map, and a whistle with you?) is always a good reminder of our own fragility in the beautiful, cold and vast wilderness that is not only the woods but the city. And after a long, solitary walk in the forest, there is nothing like being greeted by a warm stove and dinner on the table.

My wish for the new year is that whatever wilderness you find yourself in, you will also find warmth, love, and belonging. Happy New Year.

True Blue Christmas

True Blue, Yorgos Papadopoulos, Icon in Shattered Glass
 St. Thomas Parish, Dupont Circle

Out of brokenness comes light and love. 

Merry Christmas!

The Facebook Christmas Trap

This is a public service reminder about Christmas time on Facebook. I'll use my own house as an example.

What people show is this:

The Vicar's Christmas Tree, 2013

Pretty good, huh? Looks cozy perfect, all ready for Santa.

But what they don't show is this:

The same room that the Vicar's Christmas tree is in. FML.

Chaos. Same room, just a different perspective. It'll be together by the time people come over. Hopefully. And if not, they're just going to have to deal with it. Sorry guys.

Because you know what? No one's perfect, even if they look perfect on Facebook, so don't sit there freaking out about how your life doesn't look like their life. I do it too. I see the life milestones (weddings, babies) the professional milestones (ordinations, in my case, or new jobs) and I sit there and get in a spin because everyone's life is moving along, but mine seems stuck in the everyday mundanity of existence. It's not really stuck, because everyone's day to day life is mundane. That's the definition of mundane, actually: it comes from the Latin, mundus, world. It's your every day world. 

So, if it helps, here's my messy living room. Don't beat yourself up. Get ready for Christmas the best way that you can, but if it falls short of your wild expectations and is instead mundane, that's okay. It's okay because Christmas is when Christians celebrate the day God came to be mundane with us, in all the messiness that mundanity entails. 

The American Dream is dead. And that's okay.

The American dream of our parents is dead. And I’m okay with that.

I mean, I wouldn’t have been the one to kill it myself, it’s nice and all. Go to college. Get a stable job. Buy a house. Have kids. Save carefully and travel when you retire. It’s a good dream, a nice goal. It’s just that I’m not convinced it works like that anymore. 

The reality I see around me is different: go to college, realize you can’t get a job with a bachelors, get a masters, realize everyone else has a masters so you still can’t find a job, work several part-time jobs while paying mountains of student loan debt, pay out of pocket for health insurance, live with roommates way longer than you would ever want to live with roommates, and claw yourself back to zero by the time you’re forty. A down payment? Are you kidding me? And this is the situation you’re in if you’re lucky enough to have the wherewithal to get to college in the first place. 

But there is a bright side to the undignified trashing of the previous generations’ American dream. The bright side is that, in the act if rejecting, we are forced to consciously choose the next American dream. And with the old dream dead, we can dream bigger (and smaller) at the same time.

We can dream something up that’s more interconnected and based on relationships, instead of possessions. We could dream up a way to exist that wouldn’t destroy the environment. We could dream up a new way of living, in which one’s passions and interests wouldn’t be forever relegated to hobby status, never to be pursued due to overwhelming exhaustion. We could have the time and space to figure out who we were created to be. We could dream up ways to embrace the situation that we’re in,  and we could realize that the life we’ve been forced into has actually been embraced by creative types over the span of centuries: writers, artists and performers have all cobbled together a living out of piecemeal work. Creative types, for the most part, have chosen freedom over security, flexibility over rigidity. Time, freedom, and desperation are needed to be able to create. We’ve got plenty of time, even though a third (or fourth) job wouldn’t hurt the bottom line. We’ve got so much freedom it’s scary. And there’s lots of desperation lying around. 

If we have been unwillingly forced into the lifestyle of artists, why couldn’t we also create like artists? If we’ve got nothing to lose, what is there to lose by trying? If we’ve been coerced into a second adolescence, why can’t we take that time to mature into a wiser and kinder generation?

Living like an artist is no cakewalk. Struggling to make ends meet sucks. But the flip side of this lifestyle is space for vision, and creativity, and passion, and love for what you’re doing. Courage, chutzpah, and saltiness will be required, as well as great faith. 

The American dream can be resuscitated, or, if you prefer, resurrected. But it has to be made into something new. Luckily for us, we’ve got desperation, freedom, and time. In spades.

Krampusnacht 2013

Fröhliche Sankt Nikolaus Tag!

Husband and I just got back from visiting Husband's family in Seattle, but were in time to see the second annual DC Krampusnacht.

First observation about Krampusnacht: If I had been a child, I would have been terrified. I mean, I was afraid of Santa, so if I was afraid of Santa, than this:

Krampusnacht 2013

or this:

Krampusnacht 2013

would have been the end of me.

Second observation about Krampusnacht: I loved the weird amalgamation of people who paraded down the street. People who had no idea this was happening, but joined in, people who had been planning elaborate costumes for months, some RennFaire kids, some Comicon kids, some Goth-looking kids, a drunk sousaphone player blatting Christmas carols, people promoting Santa's Cause DC, others just giving out candy. There was also some kind of dance troupe who were hitting each other with sticks, as well as some actual Germans (or Swiss, or Austrians, I couldn't tell.) Others just stood by and laughed at the crazy fun of it all. But no one in the crowd seemed to mind the differences, and rather, a dare I say festive? mood won the day. Even the cops seemed bemused.

Third (and mildly theological) observation on Krampusnacht: In the places where Krampusnacht is traditionally observed, the Krampus accompanies St. Nicolas on the eve of St. Nicolas's feast day, December 6th. St. Nicolas rewards the good children, while the Krampus gives out sticks or coal, or beats (really, threatens or pretends to beat) the bad children. The Krampus carries chains, noisemakers, and sometimes a basket on his back to cart bad children off to his lair so he can eat them.
        This idea really appeals to me. Not the eating/beating children part, but the part where the entire community recognizes -- literally, re-cognize, re-thinks-- not just the existence of good, but the existence of evil. It's standing right in front of them, albeit in a cartoonish form, but the chains that bind and the teeth that gnash are reminders of the how evil, even at its most banal, is a force that destroys. Evil rarely looks outwardly like a Krampus. Mostly, it looks like violence behind closed doors, grinding systemic oppression, the rippling effects of poverty, or the crippling indifference to those around us. And if that's not scary, I don't know what is.