My Loosened Rule of Life

Loosened Rule of Life - {Literate Theology}

I was first asked to write a Personal Rule of Life in seminary. I researched various instructions on how to write a Personal Rule, I looked up examples. I struggled with the assignment. None of the formats I had seen seemed to fit what I needed, and I was determined that my Rule wouldn’t be a spiritual to-do list.

The Temptation of Achievement

I’m achievement-oriented as a symptom of my deepest brokenness. Some brokenness is manifested in substance abuse, in anger, or in sloth; mine is manifested in achievement. This has the added difficulty in that it’s seen as virtuous; achievement is heavily rewarded in our culture. But I can tell it’s feeding something poisonous living inside me.

Running parallel to my understanding that my achievement is unhealthy in some ways is the knowledge that the achievement doesn’t have a destination; it’s a road without end and no rest stops. No amount of achievement will ever satisfy the emptiness that is at the core of me that keeps trying to be filled. David Foster Wallace put it this way:

“The face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff.”

Achievement a temptation particularly heightened in our time in which there is so much we’re told we must achieve. Any single issue of any magazine may contain workouts for a perfect body, 9 foods to eat daily for a variety of vitamins (but beware they don’t push you over a strict calorie limit), advice on being the most attentive friend and lover, 5 steps to the perfect smoky eye, a list of activity suggestions to be the best parent ever, and 3 ways to get ahead at work. The cultural pressure to achieve in the realms of health, beauty, relationships, and career is staggering, if not crushing.

Too often, church is a place that piles on one more area of achievement: the spiritual. It’s yet another list of to-do’s in a world that is burdening us with perfection. We’re told to pray constantly, read scripture and devotions daily, attend church weekly, volunteer monthly, fill out the pledge card annually. Too often, the Church fails to be a sanctuary from the world and becomes another perpetuator of our world’s deepest brokenness.

Grace Frees from Achievement

My struggle with developing a Rule of Life finally came to this: I can’t imagine God wanting me to achieve even more as a way to draw closer to God.

So I threw out the formats of daily prayers and weekly rhythms. What I needed was a way to keep me from sacrificing myself on the Altar of High Achievement. I kept format is loose. Rather than prayers and habits to be done daily or weekly, it’s a way to go through life, a way to be shaped into a person of agency unto goodness, a way to learn to speak to myself as I would a loved child. I read it regularly so that its wisdom gathered from many mentors can become a voice in my self in daily interactions.

I share it with hope that it aids and frees others to have a loosened rule of life, to abandon legalism in favor of grace, to shift a body’s orientation away from achievement and towards communion.

My Loosened Rule of Life

Ways of Being & Relating

Have a voice.
- Use your voice for others and yourself; the strength that is in you can be for you.
- It is not sufficient to be a self that only exists in relation to others.
- Know yourself, and know that the self you know is not the entirety of your self. Know that the self others narrate to you is not the entirety of your self.
- Follow your joy. Follow your own calling, not others’ callings for you.
- Commit to living out the image of God that is within you, to allowing identity to overflow into agency.
- You are valuable. Don’t stay where you are not valued. Go to where you are valued.
- Note: This piece stems from a time in seminary when my words had become primarily for the good of others and I took a year of silence in class in order to learn that the power of my voice can be for myself.

Have courage.
- The courage to say no, the courage to say yes. Remember that saying yes “to will the one thing” means saying no to lots of other things.
- Remember that we all suffer. Keep going.
- Lean into the pain, find what it has to teach you.
- When you despair, lament until you find hope.
- Believe in and seek out the holy contour of life.
- Think and speak in categories other than good/bad, or find ways to define those terms.
- Note: As someone who knows narrative and is intuitive, I often suspect where a trajectory will take me before I get there. I must remind myself that all good stories require conflict and that the work that must be accomplished requires leaning into the pain of my story. It’s in the moments that I want to stop that I must find courage to keep going into the discomfort and hurt.

Be vulnerable.
- Risk emotionally.
- Laugh, loudly.
- Cry, openly and without shame.
- Allow events and moments to impact and change you.
- Pursue relationships and form communities that might not work out.
- Show hospitality that will likely never be returned.
- Be interested in growth, knowing that stretching muscles can be tender.
- Ask basic, stupid questions, and find unexpected answers.
- Ask complex, interesting questions, and delve into research for the most satisfying answers.
- Note: Relationships are vital. My life is not only about my work but about being with others. Intimacy requires some level of risk. I know I can be dismissive when I feel hurt, especially with my family. This reminds me to stay engaged.

Live with simplicity.
- Look for more livable ways to define and live the good life.
- Know kinship with creation. Garden. What you do to the earth, you do to yourself.
- Don’t be cool.
- You don’t need more clothes, items, social media presence, or anything else trying to sell a false version of the good life. Consume less.
- Live into rhythms of work and rest, each day, week, year.
- Keep a daily routine… but don’t be rigid. Stay up late when ideas are happening. Get out of bed when they wake you up. And keep human! See people, go places.
- Spend less. Or spend more for items of good quality, ethically sold, at rare intervals.
- Note: I’m concerned about the consumer-driven narrative of today’s culture; there are other ways to live that have been livable and well lived for centuries and centuries.

Prayer

Be grounded in physicality; know your embodiment.
- Sweat often. Sweat is your prayer.
- Walk. Run. Practice yoga. Practice krav maga.
- Breathe deeply and mindfully. Breath is your prayer, too.
- Drink lots of water and tea. Eat colorful plants that died just recently.
- Do the things that call you to mindful embodiment: hike, sail, garden, play violin, craft, sing.
- Note: I tell people with complete sincerity that I became a Christian through a secular yoga practice. Yet as an pretty typical ENTJ, I know that I tend to neglect the physical, even knowing that engaging my body is the very thing that can restore me in times of stress.

Creation / Re-Creation / Recreation

Value the increments and explosions of re/creation.
- Practice writing daily pages. Remember. Carry a notebook and pen. Write things down. Revisit journals.
- Listen attentively and carefully.
- Take field trips and artist dates.
- Practice the gentle art of domesticity so long as it feels gentle. Cultivate home.
- Say yes to preaching, teaching, speaking, and writing opportunities, even (especially) if they feel slightly beyond my qualifications.
- Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Fail faster.
- Collaborate. Everyone has something to offer.
- There is nothing new under the sun; keep a swipe file.
- You are powerful enough to create: apply words in a new way and make symbols relevant to a new day.
- Note: I (hesitatingly) believe that writing is a task I am meant to be working at. At the same time, there is something rewarding and necessary about creating tangible items, whether a knit washcloth or a watercolor daffodil.

December 24, 2015June 8, 2019

Conjuring the Spirit of the Season

The absence of Christmas spirit is a presence in my home. I skipped out on the normal mantel decorations. I didn’t even take the stockings out of storage. My gift wrapping is minimal and sloppy. I just haven’t been able to tap into the spirit of the season. In a world celebrating a season of merriment, music, and memory-making, my internal experience has not been able to align.

My first response was to “fake it til I make it” — to go through the motions of Christmas cheer and observe the rituals in order to make the warm fuzzy feelings follow. That did not work.

A few voices in my life have suggested prayer practices. I’ve sat in my office and settled into the quietness of prayer, only to find that my prayers are laments. My prayers are calling God to do better, to intervene more strongly. A wonderful woman gifted me a gratitude journal, nudging me to acknowledge the goodnesses, no matter how small, that my daily life holds. And while it does keep away full blown depression and does orient me toward gratitude, the practice also highlights that there are many who do not have what I do: a loving spouse, stable housing, warm meals.

It strikes me that my concern has been my inability to tap into the spirit of the season, but perhaps I’ve been overwhelmed by advent: a season in which we hope for light while surrounded by darkness.

The darkness is literal in a solstice sense, in a lack of daylight hours, but darkness is also metaphorical and spiritual.

In advent, Christ — the light of the world — has not yet begun to shine. All we have to guide our steps is faint, distant starlight, traveling lightyears to get to us.

In advent, we remember that Mary carried in her self something divine that was growing and waiting to enter the world. We remember that carrying and birthing the divine is a marathon labor: it can feel like walking miles on swollen ankles only to find there is no rest to be had at the end of the journey.

This is Mary’s story, and the Christmas story, and it’s also our story, it’s a creation story. The work of allowing a message to cultivate inside one’s self, the labor of bringing it forth, the frail hope that it will be received by others. We each have a gift that is waiting to be birthed.

So perhaps my sorrow and failure of Christmas spirit are right where I am meant to be this advent season in which darkness has many manifestations.

And tomorrow is Christmas, and I have the starting place of hope: not that tomorrow the world will be different, but that tomorrow I may feel differently, which could alter the world.

December 18, 2015June 8, 2019

Christian (Anti-)Materialism

‘Tis the season for decking the halls, listening to carols, and trying to manage the expectations and social norms of gift-giving.

In recent years, I’ve noticed increasing discussion on wanting Christmas to be less materialistic and more focused on Jesus, most often applied to gift-giving. One trend is this gifting rhyme: “One thing they want, One thing they need, One thing to Wear, One thing to read.” Another method is that each person receives 3 gifts, representing the ones given by the wise men. Others write of themselves as anti-materialistic and advocate for a “gift-free Christmas,” spending time and money on those in most desperate need.

In a society where citizens are viewed primarily as consumers, the choice to consume less is a laudable defiance of cultural norms. And yet the language of becoming less materialistic or anti-materialism somehow chafes.

I think it chafes because Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. Christmas is about God becoming incarnate. God valued the material world so highly that God became fleshy, substantial, material. Throughout his life, Jesus seems to deeply understand the importance of the material. He understands the necessity of the material category we call food, and he fed people. He understands that a host’s social standing is deeply effected by the material stuff of drink, and he turned water into wine. God in Jesus understood that the material stuff of a having a body matters in one’s ability to be in relationship with humans, and Jesus was resurrected.

One way to orient the birthing moment of Christianity is the moment in which spirit became flesh. The good news of Christianity is that the God of love and blessing and peace came to earth to show us that the values of love and blessing and peace are most visibly manifested when they are embodied. Our values are niceties until we live them. Our values are most powerful when they show up in our material life.

Everything in the gospel texts points me to the conviction that we Christians are called to be more materialistic, called to be better materialists — even as we are called to resist consumerism. So while I’m an advocate for consuming less, in order to do so I think we need take materialism more seriously. We need to become a better materialists.

I’m certain that many who state the desire for less materialistic Christmases are actually aiming for less consumeristic Christmases, but it’s important to accurately name our concern, especially when representing our religion to children or outsiders. If we position Christianity as being against the material world, it can convey that the very worldly concerns of hunger and shelter and wound-tending don’t matter to Christians, when nothing could be further from the truth. If we teach anti-materialism we are too easily teaching contempt for the material world. When such contempt is taught, we should not be surprised by those who profess Christ while lacking compassion or urgency in caring for the poor: the body and its needs are themselves material, and so in that system of thinking, the body and its needs are worthy of contempt.

Perhaps the greatest response to the Christmas story in which God becomes material is to listen deeply to the call to be more materialistic, wildly materialistic, sincerely and passionately and deeply materialistic.

And by deepening our materialism, we must become more seriously anti-consumerism, for the material world becomes far too precious and valuable to simply use and dispose.

In following Jesus, may we follow in his embodied awareness that matter matters. May not only our Christmases but also our lives be distinct in that we passionately and sincerely value the material. May we hear the word “materialistic” not as a curse or insult, but as a blessing, a compliment, and as a call.

May your Christmas season be filled with love, joy, and peace, outpoured in beautiful, delicious, comforting material goodness for you and your loved ones.

December 1, 2015June 8, 2019

Gratitude for Hidden Things

As we transition into the advent season, I find myself full of gratitude and grief for the hidden things — the emotions, experiences, remembrances, and hopes that are invisibly working and growing inside myself.

I am grateful for the rhythms and rituals of the season. Many of my rituals are familiar across the country: a Thanksgiving meal with gathered friends, a trip outside the city to fuss over finding the perfect Christmas tree, crafting perfectly chosen (though less-than-perfectly made) gifts.

These weeks in anticipation of Christmas remind me of how embodied my life is, remind me that my most meaningful experiences are my most physical ones. The texture of a certain sweater; the scent of pine in the living room; the taste of white peppermint mochas in vibrant red cups. The concepts of the holiday season are hidden things — joy, charity, patience, faith. And these virtues only become invisibly manifest in my inner experience through their cultivation expressed in the tangible.

I forget that too quickly.

It’s been strung-together months of having forgotten to remember that my body needs to be inhabited in order for my heart to be warmed. Which underlies a lot of the grief I mentioned earlier; I have been in a season of depression. Depression is another hidden thing, an experience that is real and powerful despite being invisible.

It seems to me that, whereas the warming hidden things are cultivated by embodiment, my depression is cultivated by disembodiment. By overly-indwelling the intellect, by seeking an orienting goal for my vocational pursuits, by getting lost in explorations through possible futures.

I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, about Mary. I find it comforting that Mary must have also felt this tension between gratitude and grief. Even as she felt her fiancee withdraw from the promise of marriage, even as she wondered how she would provide for herself and her child if abandoned, even as she encountered the stigma of a pregnancy out of wedlock, even as her family (I imagine) shamed or shunned her — in the midst of these griefs, God was becoming flesh in her womb, God was becoming flesh from her own flesh.

My body follows the rituals and rhythms. My body is faithful to the actions I associate with advent, in hope that such faithfulness might cultivate some of the hidden virtues and lessen my hidden sorrow.

Though, if my past is any indication of my future, I will likely always have at least some measure of that sorrow with me. But if Mary felt this grief-gratitude tension as I do, then Mary is already with me, even as her womb works in the early stages of the process to bring God with us.

November 24, 2015June 8, 2019

Thanksgiving Presence

My friend Jen was recently lamenting that she had accepted an invitation to Thanksgiving before having received Nancy’s invitation. “Maybe if you keep the party going until 8 or 9, I could join you then!” she half-exclaimed an implied question.

“No.” The inquiry had actually been directed at Nancy, but it was my voice that responded with firm immediacy. I took in Jen’s raised eyebrows and was about to sheepishly backpedal when Nancy burst out laughing, saving my shame by declaring how glad she was to have friends who think just like her, but out loud.

Fortunately, my stance on party hopping wasn’t a secret to either of my friends. A few years ago, I wrote a post on the practice of Thanksgiving hopping. Ok, it was more of a rant than a post, but I still stand by what I wrote (even though it has resulted in a couple of under-attended Thanksgivings).

Our culture seems to believe that everything is a consumable commodity. The logic seems to be that the more we consume of something, the more we will have of what it offers, which seems to be true at first glance. More skin product use means more youthful appearance. More guns means more safety and security. More books means more knowledge.

By this logic, more Thanksgivings (more servings of more dishes, more people, more places, more events) could mean more of the promise of Thanksgiving – joy and gratitude. And party hopping may fulfill that promise, I suppose; my experience and observation is that it often doesn’t.

I wonder if the striving for more joy is the very thing that prevents joy from deepening. I wonder if the attempt to gain a deeper feeling of gratitude keeps gratitude from wholly forming. I wonder if rushing to achieve the next thing is what keeps us from noticing God’s activity right where we are. I wonder if celebrating Thanksgivings-in-the-plural blocks the experience of truly feeling thankful.

An achievement-orientation demands that we always strive for more, but joy and gratitude and love seem to have no concern for achievement. They seem more willing to flourish when we let go of needing anything beyond what’s immediately available to us, more present when events and busyness slow down, more deeply experienced when we deeply notice what is already presently in our midst.

So if slowness isn’t part of your regular practice, I’d encourage you to consider trying it. Even for just one day – and Thanksgiving seems like a pretty appropriate day for a slowness experiment. Many of us spend most days of the year rushing from event to event, meeting to meeting, party to party. Perhaps we could dedicate one day to slowing down, to noticing where we are, to being with our loved ones, to considering the goodness that is already happening in our midst.

May you trust that you need not go anywhere for goodness to manifest. May you seek the goodness that is present right where you already are.

*All names changed.

October 20, 2015June 8, 2019

Writing

Here’s my confession: I don’t love to write. Finding the right words with the proper connotations is tedious. Moving those words into a linear order to convey non-linear thoughts and emotions is frustrating. Constructing a piece so that the reader has all the needed information before arriving at the next point and the next point and, eventually, the conclusion, requires an out-of-myself-ness that’s draining. My thoughts, I find, are unwieldy. They are animals, some angry, fighting, blood-thirsty; others weak, starving, simply thirsty.

And yet, here I am. At my desk, as I aim to be every morning (but truthfully, after checking emails, I only manage to keep myself here about half my mornings). I have a mug of tea, or maybe it’s just a glass of water, my phone is face down, my everything notebook at my side in order to refer to my scribbles about my life and try to make some sense of them. I swivel in the chair, I look out the window. I wonder when the dog will interrupt me to be loved. I manage to get a sentence or two out. Swivel, stare. Where is that dog? I hope he comes by soon, to check on me, to be loved.

I’m here because, while I may not absolutely love the process of writing, I do love reading. Everything is arranged in a logical way, and after going through a well-written paper I understand the conclusions and it’s all so simple; I could explain the universe, or at least this fraction of it. For a few minutes, I feel secure in some new knowledge. Then the information gets admitted into my inner jungle of a world where it interacts with lurking creatures who live there, and this new piece quickly mutates into another unwieldy beast.

So I write something, I wrestle, I struggle, I re-phrase and re-order. I hate the piece. I hate my poor writing. I boil. This is shit!, I inwardly yell. Eventually, I decide I can’t take any more of that topic, or, as a godsend, the deadline approaches, and I stop. I call it good enough.

Some weeks go by.

Then, my hatred calmed, cooled, and stilled, I revisit the work. Perhaps I decide I’m able to work on it again, perhaps it was just returned to me from an editor. I read my own thoughts, but on paper they’re more clearly explained. The wild beasts are tamed, the fledglings are cared for. I realize, this is really good. I second-guess myself, check the header, Did I really write this? It all seems so much more manageable in this black-and-white linear space. It seems, even, hopeful.

And I move back to my desk, ready to tame the next portion of the jungle.

October 6, 2015June 8, 2019

Imago

A young girl rolls in the cool fountain water some distance from where our feet dabble. She calls over to us: “What does God look like?”

Her mom smiles and whispers to me, “She likes the light and easy questions lately.”

“Mom! What does God look like?” the daughter insists.

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Do you know?” her sincere eyes turn to me.

Well… God looks a little bit like your mom. And God looks a little bit like those ballerinas practicing in the grass. And a little bit like that man playing the saxophone. And a little bit like each person walking by and driving by. God looks a little bit like me. God looks a little bit like you.

I want to say that, but I hesitate, attempting to gauge what the mother’s reaction might be, and before I can resolve to risk it, the mother answers her again: “No one knows. God can’t be seen.”

The mother and I look to the girl, the girl looks down into the rippling water, and the moment is gone — but for the whisper in my head: Everyone who has eyes to see knows just what God looks like.

January 23, 2015June 8, 2019

Eulogy for Karen Campbell

The only time in my life I was certain I was dying was when I was eight years old.

I had been running up Maxwell Street when I tripped. Most of my weight landed on my knee, which landed on a corner of a stair – Larry’s stair, actually. And it was Larry’s towels that were wrapped around my knee as I was placed into the back seat of Pete’s car, but not before I had seen the damage. The cut went to the bone. I had never seen so much blood before; there was no question in my eight-year-old mind that this was the end of my life.

Pete drove; Karen insisted on coming along. In fact, she insisted on sitting with me in the back seat. She squeezed beside me and peeled back the towels to see my injury and said, “Well, shit,” and I knew it was serious because she didn’t apologize to me for swearing.

She had run out of the house without grabbing a thing, and as Pete drove around town trying to contact my parents, Karen searched her pockets for something to give me, and offered me the only thing she had on her: a peppermint.

When Pete managed to get my mom on the car phone, I heard her voice and started sobbing: this, I thought to myself, would the last time I heard my mother’s voice. As I sobbed, Karen patted my arm and told me how brave I am. As I shook, she told me how strong I am. My breathing slowed; we made it the hospital; I grew into a well-adjusted adult who realizes her life was never in danger.

I tell this story as a testament to Karen’s character. Crises, fortunately, don’t happen all that often, but when they do, they have a way of revealing our identity, of illuminating the best and the worst in each of us.

I tell this story because in the midst of my young crisis, Karen joined me, came beside me. There was no question, for her, that she would be in that car, and that she would be immediately beside the person in need. And this was always true of Karen: no matter what I was going through, I could be certain that she would be in it with me. I could trust that she would recognize and name a situation for the shittiness it is.

I tell this story because it illustrates Karen’s generosity. A woman who wasn’t happy until everyone in her home had a full, cold drink in hand – of course she offered me a found mint. Even at the time, I’m pretty certain I laughed through my tears at the absurdity and helplessness of her offering a mint to an injured child. But that’s who she was: offering comfort and hospitality in the most tangible ways.

I tell this story because Karen always had a gift of narrating my best self — back to me. That day, while I was still sobbing uncontrollably, she told me I was strong. While I was terrified and trembling, she told me I was brave. Karen had a gift of sight, a gift that enabled her to see beyond behavior and into the heart of the person. She saw each of us as our best self, and told us who we are, with such certainty that we believed her – and moved toward becoming our best selves in response.

It’s true she offered this narration to me on that day I fell, but was equally true each and every time I saw Karen. Every time she saw me, she told me I was more beautiful than when she had last seen me – even when I was a gangly child and an awkward adolescent. When I was yet uncomfortable in my own skin, she saw me as beautiful.

As a child I was shy, quiet; I easily went unnoticed. But Karen noticed me, and exclaimed that I was smart and bright and brilliant; when I was easily overlooked, she saw me as shiny.

I wonder how she saw each of you, gathered here, the people she loved. I wonder about the too-easily unnoticed people that, in her eyes, are surrounded by light. I wonder who you understand yourself to be and who she believed you to be, and I wonder if you can believe that you really are as strong, smart, brave, brilliant, and beautiful, as Karen told you are.

And I hope you continue to become that person, that you continue to become yourself. I hope we all continue to become as lovely as Karen told us we are.

Because that, I think, is perhaps the greatest gift of Karen’s love: When we were yet unlovable, she loved us, and in doing so made us lovely.

I am indebted to her, to some degree, for calling me to become who I am, but it is not a debt that can be repaid. Rather, it is a gift that can only be passed on. May we go into the world and see others through the borrowed vision of Karen’s eyes. Through Karen’s eyes, may we notice the scared and see their strength. Through Karen’s eyes, may we look behind brokenness and see beauty. Through Karen’s eyes, may we look past the unlovable and encounter someone truly lovely.