Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Four (MAYBE DON’T CALL PEOPLE FREAKS?!)

As I rage-hovered off my pew at the back of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration, Substitute Minister called the children up to the front to join him for the Story for All Ages. On the big screen up front appeared…P.T. Barnum?!

“I never get tired of telling people he was Unitarian,” said the Substitute Minister. I’m skeptical whenever any old-timey (or new-timey, for that matter) white dude’s face is up on the big screen at church, but sheesh-o-rama this was the WORST.

Substitute Minister had seen The Greatest Showman the night before and was inspired to talk with the congregation’s children about it. (For a good accounting of what makes The Greatest Showman so problematic, check out this surprisingly woke episode of The Flop House: https://www.flophousepodcast.com/2018/05/episode-257-the-greatest-showman/) Substitute Minister was impressed with how Barnum had uplifted the “freaks” in the movie and convinced them they were good enough, as if that were up to him.

The. Idea. That this man. Who OWNED AND EXPLOITED HUMAN BEINGS, who called people who looked different “freaks” and CHARGED PEOPLE TO COME LOOK AT THEM was somehow a doer of good, was some white angel there to redeem them?! Was too much. This was the story he was telling the children, and everybody there was just LETTING IT HAPPEN.

This was the day that Trump’s trans erasure memo began circulating, the day we all learned of the impeding registry of genitals, the day my friends across the gender spectrum became even more afraid than they already were. On that day, Substitute Minster thought a song from the “freak” Bearded Lady was what was called for. She was just beginning her song on the big screen as I steamed out the door.

It’s hard to talk about that morning in church without becoming incoherent with rage. The weight and sum of my fear and anger and disgust at the white male entitlement that allowed Substitute Minister to think he had the right to 1. Stifle political announcements and 2. Bestow worth upon those he viewed as beneath him thought his proxy the fictionalized Barnum is heavy to carry and hard to parse. It’s garbage. It’s everything wrong. This kind of institutional white cis male supremacy needs to be stifled at every level, in EVERY edifice, in EVERY way if the rest of us are truly ever going to thrive.

I wrote to the non-substitute minister and heard back pretty quickly. Valid, he said, and offered to talk when he got back from travelling. I headed off, not wearing warm enough clothes, to our local Democrats’ campaign headquarters with my BFF. We picked up our door-knocking lists and settled into our Blue Wave work. But I felt hopeless that afternoon, the things that were wrong and broken seemed so vast and embedded that I worried they could never be healed.

That hopeless feeling would pass, but this brush with Institution, like all others for me, would steal a big swath of time and leave lasting scars.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Three (Singing and Seething)

Not long after I started trying Restoration monthly, they welcomed a new minister. I’d been a fan of McKinley Sims (Okay, full disclosure: He’s super-dreamy. I had a crush. Sometimes the body leads the soul places, what can I say?) since about six years ago when he did some of his seminary work through the Unitarian Society of Germantown. He was always someone I felt like I could learn from, maybe because (as I later learned) he’s from Lubbock, Texas just like my ex-wife/BFF is. Something about that accent just makes explaining go down easy, I guess.

Still, I wondered why a congregation that had a stated goal of inclusivity and a Black Lives Matter banner out front would choose, in 2018, a white, cisgender straight man, albeit a presumably progressive one.

Encouragingly, McKinley’s first sermon as Restoration’s new minister gave me lots of hope. He said “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters,” which suggested that he might be trained in the ways of the gender spectrum. He made it clear that he is committed to immigrants’ rights and his first month’s theme was “sanctuary.” He talked about how building sanctuary takes work, takes facing problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. He even acknowledged those harmed by church-enabled sexual abuse, which I have NEVER EVER heard a preaching minister of any denomination so. NEVER. I’ve been alive for 44 years. That’s a big deal.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, McKinley went out of town. The Substitute Minister, the layperson leading the service, was a slight, middle-aged white guy. He seemed nice enough, so I felt safe to settle in.

Ever in organizing/canvassing/yelling-at-Nazis mode, the Joy I wanted to share that week was a mini book review. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister had saved my life and fired up my soul in the trigger-laden weeks following the Kavanaugh hearings, and I admit I was feeling quite evangelistic about it. I’d brought the book for McKinley because I thought he’d like it, and even though he wasn’t there, I carried it up through the Joys and Sorrows line anyway.

“Joys and Sorrows,” announced the Substitute Minister, “Are for matters of the heart, not for political announcements.”

I was SHOCKED! I had never heard them mention politics during that admonition before—one of the reasons I felt safe at Restoration was because it felt like a break from the politics-shaming of my family and of the world at large. Everyone there seemed political, I hadn’t yet had to feel like I was badly-behaved or a freak.

I SEETHED when it was my turn to share. The Substitute Minister shrugged and rolled his eyes as I said:

“I deeply resent being told that politics are not a matter of the heart so…NO…to that.”

(If I had it to do over, I would 100% say “FUCK that.” Live it, learn it.)

I gave my teensy book review, and the women of the congregation smiled and nodded.

As I sat back down in my pew, nearly shaking with anger, a tall and warmly hippie-ish white man, one of the congregation’s regular musicians, that “Thank you for saying that.”

The next person in the Joys and Sorrows line, an African American man who looked to be in his early twenties, made (YAY!) an announcement about the vigil for immigrants’ rights that his committee was hosting the following Tuesday.

Stoplight Guy wasn’t there that week. I missed him.

I tried to listen to the rest of the Joys and Sorrows of the congregation, but I was seething so badly I felt like I was hovering off my pew. I did the bad-habit thing of planning what I was going to write on the minister’s facebook page after the service. I wanted to start typing then and there, but that seemed beyond the pale. I tried joining in the singing, but everything felt dissonant and out of whack.

SURELY once McKinley knew about this, he would fix it, right? SURELY he would understand what the problem was?

Spoilers:

1.      He SORT OF understood.

2.      The service was about to get even more egregiously fucked up.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Two (Stoplight Guy Forever)

The week that the Unitarian Society of Germantown put “Welcome Pope Francis” on their sign, the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration’s sign said something that made way more sense to me: “Beloved Community.” I also noticed that their minister was a woman, so it seemed like it would be a safe place to be while the rest of the city (and my now-former church friends) fell in love with the pope. They put stones in water for their Joys and Sorrows just like USG did, but the congregation shared aloud if they chose to. One member shared his post-Catholic pain during that time, and that was the ONLY mention of the pope. The sermon, given by a layperson who was a woman of color, was explicitly in favor of LGBT rights (The Q hadn’t been widely added yet.) and ended with something like “Someday maybe I’ll be ready to sit down with Kim Davis and try to understand her. But not. Today.”

Still, for all of Restoration’s wokeness-before-that-was-a-mainstream-thing, it was hard to get past the architecture. Just like all of those cathedrals I’d studied in Art History, it was shaped like a cross. All of the characters on the stain glass were white people. Unitarianism, for an anti-racist post-Catholic, is like trying to break the cycle of abuse and then realizing you’re still abusing and being abused, but gently. It’s like one of those dreams where you know a place is your home, but you also know it isn’t.

But still, this spring when the voice in my Kirtan-blissed mind told me to sing in church, Restoration seemed like a good bet.

There’s a flaw in my personality wherein I’m still sort of looking for a perfectly welcoming, perfectly approving community/family. It probably comes from not having been particularly welcomed as a child, from inherited ancestor-grief in my XX chromosomes, or both. It’s a flaw that has caused me unending sorrow as an adult, to the point where if some group seems perfectly kind and safe, I should probably run for my life before I get too attached/expectant/hurt.

When I went back to try Restoration again, my child-brain started to spin its fantasy of perfect welcome. Here’s why my mistake was both understandable and irresistible:

When it was my turn in the Joys and Sorrows, I told the congregation I was feeling scared because the following weekend I would be headed to D.C. to counterprotest the (DELICIOUSLY FAILED! https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/08/my-wonderful-magical-day-of-yelling-at.html) Unite the Right rally. I said I wanted to honor Heather Heyer’s name. And then, the most intoxicating thing happened: the congregation applauded.

As activists, we are trained not to expect rewards or thanks (derisively called “cookies”) for simply doing the right thing. This is in spite of the fact that doing the right thing takes hundreds of hours of unpaid labor and is often physically and emotionally dangerous. Women are especially policed for this (we especially police EACH OTHER for this) and I think the phrase “performative ally” was one of the phrases most successfully weaponized by Russian trolls in 2016. Though I wouldn’t criticize another activist for being praised, I live in (misogynist) fear of being deemed too proud of myself, of being too happy to be in the struggle.

So when the Restoration congregation applauded my efforts, I felt a deep sense of relief and belonging, of sanctuary. As I sat down, I felt briefly free from the family alienation, the Bernie Bro concern-trolling, the microaggressions, the weaponized phrases. I just felt appreciated for a second—a very wholesome drug.

EVEN BETTER: A few Joys and Sorrows behind me in line, there was Stoplight Guy. Stoplight Guy is everything that is right with democracy, with spirituality, with the world. He was a tall African American man with caring-dad energy. He explained that he lived across the street and was there to update the congregation about the very dangerous intersection the church shares with him. He told us about his efforts to get the city to understand the need for a light. There were SO many accidents, he said. It really needed to stop.

If this church had a place for Stoplight Guy, it had a place for me. We sand “When Your Heart Is in a Holy Place,” one of my favorite hymns. I felt refreshed and energized, ready to let my guard down.

Anger, Faith, and Heart: Part One

It seems very tricky to be writing about how pissed I am at my local Unitarians at a time when every faith community that isn’t white, mainstream, and Christian (Arguably, Unitarianism IS a white, mainstream, Christian religion, but they certainly don’t like to see themselves that way!) must be feeling protective of their congregations and their faith homes. But at the same time, I see ways in which the fear can contract us into something evil, a witchhuntlike distrust of strangers that provides an excuse to prey upon (or at least silence) the marginalized. In religion, nearly everyone who isn’t a pro-colonialist Christian straight white male looks marginalized to me.

Additionally tricky, I’m writing from the position of an outsider. I was raised Catholic and I’m ALWAYS angry about it, I’ve been an on-again off-again (now probably permanently off-again) Unitarian for about ten years, and I’m too frustrated now with forced/performed feminine niceness to even attend yoga classes very often. Religion and organized spirituality are clearly not a fit for me, and I know I should probably just let them go like a would a bad match on OK Cupid. Similar to my need to be self-employed, I guess my spiritual life needs to be self-determined. Whatever is divine within me needs to be expressed freely, in its own way, without millennia of patriarchy, rape, and colonialism to weigh it down.  I may wonder forever if that’s even possible. I probably will keep trying.

I am still deeply, fundamentally angry at the Unitarian Society of Germantown for the abandonment and betrayal what was their welcome and celebration during Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia in 2015.https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2015/09/pope-week-is-all-of-panics-parkway-is.html  It still feels like a FUCK YOU to raped children, to LGBTQ folks, and especially especially ESPECIALLY to those of us who identify as women. I think sometimes of returning just once to have my name taken out of the USG membership book, where it remains like a bad spell.

The loss of the Unitarian Society of Germantown and the brunches, music nights, and other friend fun that went with it (I still ache when I remember that my closest church friend called me a narcissist. My blood still boils when I remember the lady who condescendingly told me she hopes I find peace. WHAT KIND OF MONSTER FINDS PEACE WITH CHILD RAPE!?)  still makes me so sad and angry. I probably should have steered clear of future attempts to join a faith community, but I missed the singing. I drive by the Unitarian Church of the Restoration on the way home from work most nights, and they seemed like they might be less patriarchal than USG.

Then, one night in the spring, in a yoga studio running a Kirtan sing with a friend of mine, a voice came to me: “Go back to church. Go back to singing.”

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Four

            Whenever I noticed one of the hardcore Antifa members, face covered, gas mask, sometimes in a spiky helmet and/or knee and elbow pads suitable for roller derby, I checked my instincts. What I found there was nothing but calm, an eerie-quiet feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together, even though this person would almost surely have called me a shill (or worse) if I’d met them online in 2016. What I felt was trust and compassion. I don’t always feel that way towards the younger, whiter factions of the left, but it was a relief to feel it that day. I felt like they were there to protect those of us who are less fighty, or less able to fight.

            When the contingent of young socialists behind us in the march, diverse and carrying a “Black Trans Lives Matter” banner, began chanting “No hatred, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” I was moved. I was overcome by an almost supernatural joyful sadness, a deep ravaged gratitude that felt like it came from the center of the earth.

            I went ahead and sobbed. I let so much out on that hot, loud, humid street—the years and decades of pain and fear, the children in cages, my childhood trip to the Statue of Liberty during which I took the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem VERY SERIOUSLY, it all streamed out of my face and my throat as I marched down the street with my best friend and thousands of strangers.

            A nice man patted my shoulder and asked if I was okay, and I cry-said “Yes, I’m fine, I’m just so happy that people are SO AMAZING.” He looked a little nonplussed as I thanked him and kept on sob-walking.

            If I could push a button and cry like that for a few minutes every day, I would. As the tears subsided and the chants did not, I felt like I was floating, like I was awash in a sea of empathy and healing. I’m not religious, but I’d call this a religious experience. In those moments of crying I felt myself merging with the crowd, I felt myself filled up with the best name for god I know: love.

            At each intersection, I wondered if this was where it would happen—the confrontation, the violence, the attack, the clash. But from where I was standing, it never was. Though I don’t usually find a police presence comforting, I appreciated the hands-off (from what I saw; I’m sure it looked different for people of color and/or for trans participants) organization of the D.C. police force. Plus, there weren’t huge tanks stationed around like there were at the March for Our Lives—I guess because this wasn’t specifically about guns. From my no-doubt skewed white perspective it felt like we, the left, were the ones who were being protected from the bad guys, but I guess it might just have been comforting that so much effort was being put into facilitating free speech, even if it was the free speech of horrible white nationalist monsters. I’m weirdly patriotic sometimes, and only sort of ashamed to admit it.

            Finally, we made it to Lafayette Square, which was already packed with liberals of every stripe. My body felt tense and pained with the possible proximity to Unite the Right, with the anticipation of confrontation. Determined to confront my fears, I craned my neck over the crowd where the nazis were supposed to be, but I could see nothing but a vast partition and then police.

            The crowd chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

            We could tell by the way the whole crowd tensed up that the other “rally” had arrived. (We later learned that the nazi demonstration was about 25 people, far outnumbered by the number of police) Mounted policemen took their places in front of our side. We all peered over the fence and braced ourselves, though I’m not sure for what.

Next Time: A panic, a rainstorm, a victory.

From “Bi” to “Pan”—Prefixes and Progress

I'm sorry her accent mark is missing!!!!!!!

 “(I) initially identified as bisexual, she clarifies, “but then later I read about pansexuality and was like, ‘Oh, these are things that I identify with, too.’ I’m open to learning more about who I am.” – Janelle Monàe comes out in Rolling Stone, as quoted in this article. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/fans-celebrate-janelle-monae-coming-out-pansexual

Janelle Monàe’s new album is so good I can barely listen to it. Coming from her, the sentiment “I’m not crazy, I’m American” is enough to start me car-sobbing. Hearing The Way You Make Me Feel on the way home from work the other night, on the day she came out and what felt like the first day of spring, led me to an epiphany—it’s way past time to change my prefix.

When I came out as bi (http://indiefeedpp.libsyn.com/jane-cassady-in-1992-all-of-a-sudden-it-got-better) TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO (!!!) (A whole Kurt Cobain lifetime ago!), it felt like such a freeing relief to my sixteen-year-old self. I couldn’t make heads or tails of men (Sorry, sixteen-year-old me, that hasn’t changed AT ALL.) and it made the world seem open and easier now that I had what I thought at the time was one other gender option.

One of the things that gives me the most hope for progress is the difference between my coming out in 1992 and the coming out of my present-day favorite pansexual middle-schooler, an honorary niece. The fact that her adolescence offers a spectrum of options, a vast catalog of identities, and a deeper (but by no means perfect) freedom from assigned gender roles fills me with joy. I think I’m ready to claim some of that freedom, both for my current self and for my sixteen-year-old self who is always still with me and always ready for more hope.

Technically, I could still be bi—by the current definition, it just means you’re attracted to more than one gender. I’ll still attend Bi Visibility Day, (Last year, the mayor came! Reason a million why Philly is the best!) I’ll still do my part to combat bi-erasure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_erasure) in whatever ways I can, I’ll still be mad at Dan Savage for that time he said we’re the only sexual orientation he hates. (That’s when I’m not being mad at him for the hostile work environment he created for Lindy West… https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/02/11/hello-i-am-fat ) (Or being grateful for the beautifulness he created with It Gets Better, which seems to want to be a running theme here…)

ANYWAY, the “bi” prefix hasn’t been sitting right with me. Even though the word doesn’t want to, “bisexual” still sounds like “two” to me, and it’s been a long time since I A. Thought there were two genders or B. Was only attracted to two genders. About ten years ago, a crush on a handsome New York performance poet sent me down a giddy rabbit hole of trans-infatuation (I’m pretty sure I totally fetishized and objectified him, and I’m really, REALLY sorry.) that has lead me into some of my favorite friendships and communities. I am NEVER surprised when someone I am drawn to later transitions—even my favorite writer in the world is headed down that road. (https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/daniel-mallory-ortberg-interview-heather-havrilesky.html )

So it has felt increasingly weird to have a label that sounds like two, even though I know that isn’t what “bisexual” actually means.

I guess it’s total dork-o-rama to change my prefix because Dirty Computer was finally released, but it’s WAAAAY more dignified than choosing the name “Jane” because a character on Blossom said she thought it was cool. (Thanks Jane’s Addiction and Jane Eyre for providing cover all these years, it’s good to let the secret out!) I’m sad to (sort of) let my old category go—twenty-seven years of anything is a long time—but I want my prefix to reflect my heart. Though I tend to go for those who present as masculine these days, I’m not sure assigned gender is an important factor. I want my prefix to reflect the world I want to see, a gorgeous, free spectrum where self-expression and self-determination trump prefabricated roles and expectations.

There’s a mantra that often floats through my head when I’m uneasy, especially in spring: Let Things Change. It feels vulnerable and maybe even silly to have a new word, but I know it’s right.

Next in the process will be figuring out where I am on the asexual spectrum these days, and I expect there’s a prefix to contend with there too. One thing at a time though. One syllable at a time.

In Praise of Anger

I’m on the outs with one of my favorite yoga teachers, and I feel like a monster just for typing that sentence. She’s one of the rotating teachers for the Friday night Recovery Yoga class I’ve enjoyed for about a year. I’m not in capital-R Recovery for anything, but the sharing combined with yoga definitely got me through all the trauma therapy of last year. I’d always meant to try her women-only Trauma Sensitive Yoga classes, and last Sunday, I finally gave it a try.

Though I’m often ill-at-ease in the (Trump supporting) white suburbs of Philly, this particular space has almost always felt safe and welcoming to me, and if you’ve read me at all, you know that’s hard to come by. But when Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher started off the class with a message that was something like “Sometimes you’re called to stand up for what’s right, but make sure you’re calm and nice when doing so.” (I’m paraphrasing, I wish I could remember exactly what she said.) I felt a little betrayed by her and wondered if I should leave.

The Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher apparently didn’t know that women, survivors, LGBT folks, and people of color are CONSTANTLY being admonished to be calm, constantly being blamed for pain, harm, damage that was actually caused by our/their oppressors, who are NEVER asked to be calm, the straight white men whose anger is seen as righteous, romantic, troubled, worthy of compassion.

Still, she might not have known about all this, might not have known that tone policing is a thing, and I might just have been taking her advice the wrong way. I followed her directions though the poses and felt the good balance she’d always provided, tried some new poses and felt very proud of myself.

Then, instead of the usual quite reflection during shavasana, she read this. Fucking. Poem. By Max Ehrmann, a white man, in 1927.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;

Go placidly?! THIS IS AMERICA!

Speak your truth quietly?! When will I know I’m quiet enough for you, dude?!

But worst:

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.

In that moment, I went from feeling like a cared-for member of the class to knowing that deep down what my teacher would feel towards me is fear, maybe even contempt. I was so angry and unbalanced and hurt that I left as quickly and quietly as I could.

To tell women not to be loud, that loud people are bad.

To tell rape survivors they have to be nice to almost everyone, or else they don’t belong.

To tell a room full of survivors who trusted her to guide their bodies and care for their well-being to be quiet, to be careful what they say.

As if women, as if rape survivors, needed someone to tell us to be quiet, someone to tell us to stay under control lest we become vexations.

I went home and wrote her a compliment-sandwiched facebook message, saying this: my voice is one of the most important parts of my body. It has been my safety, my power, and my saving grace. I wouldn't feel welcome or safe in a place where my voice isn't respected and honored. On a wider scale, the idea of telling a room full of survivors to be quiet and polite borders on cultural gaslighting, and is deeply offensive to me.

She was kind and apologetic, but also equated anger with hate, something she was afraid to “poison herself with.” She invoked Dr. King, of course, and intimated that I couldn’t really be a yogi unless I, too, stigmatized anger.

This is where I tend to run into trouble with my spiritual quest, even one as individualized as yoga and meditation. You never know when it’s going to stop being about caring for bodies and souls and start being about controlling each other, about repression and oppression.

This exchange with the Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher might not have upset me so much if it hadn’t been the week of “walk up, not out” backlash/victim blaming and the week after I felt the real cold touch of evil in a facebook conversation. In an otherwise-very-productive conversation about gun control and the power of protest, a young friend of the family, someone I’d known since he was a baby, said this: “Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, it just is.”

Of course, I knew this was a thing people said, but I’d never heard it from someone I knew before. As I typed my pushback comment, I felt cold fear run through me, too horrified to yet be angry. I’ve known all along that racist media coverage and just plain hatred blots out ignorant people’s conscience and empathy, blinding them to the grief, the love, the power, and the strength of Black Lives Matter. I feel heartbroken for anyone who won’t get to feel the power of marching with that movement, or with others, because they have been convinced that protesting is mean.

Anger-shaming is a tool of sexual abusers, sure, but it’s also a tool of white supremacy, and that’s why I felt so deeply disturbed at my yoga teacher’s choice of poem. Even as I write this, I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble for it, that my anger makes me unworthy to be in a family, a community, a yoga class. I’m scared that it means that I’ll never really have a place in the world, but still, when faced with the NRA, with rape culture, with white supremacy, I can’t see anger as anything but a sane response to an insane situation. It’s not the only emotion I feel in my activist life (LOVE being the strongest one) but anger is a cherished and beloved guide.

So, as I look for more yoga classes and more wild and free ways to express my divinity, I just want to say thank you. If your anger is pushing you to call congress, to make beautiful or unbeautiful art or especially vexing art, if your anger helps you sign up for marches or just stay home and treat yourself like a treasure, THANK YOU for your anger. And THANK YOU for your work.

May Checkmarks, Rainbowy June Goals

Very Mediationy April and May Goals

November Checkmarks, Easy December Goals

About Leaving Church and What Comes Next

Before I try and do my best with the spiritual/community questions I’ve been wrestling, I want to spend a little time acknowledging the personal heartbreak that happened around the same time. There was, as I’ve written a couple of times, a guy I really liked, and there was a morning he’d planned to come to church with me. I was so excited and I told all my friends, but we reached a dealbreaker in the night and he couldn’t come. I felt sad at the loss of him and hurt by his rejection, but I also felt ashamed for getting my hopes up so much, for getting so excited, for telling my friends he was coming and then having to tell them I was wrong. It was humiliating, and it goes along with the fear that comes from leaving the church, that every time I feel like I really belong somewhere, every time I go all in and let my guard down, the rug will be pulled out from under me.

Also there is the simple shame of this: I’m embarrassed about how long everyone knows I have been looking for my guy, how wholeheartedly I’ve tried and come up empty, how many OKCupid questions I’ve racked up over the years, how easily everyone else seems to pair up and slot into their lives and how I just never seem to fit. That pain is too much right now, just part of heartbreak, I guess. It’s relevant and not relevant but mostly I just have to get it out.

Every Wednesday at the library we have Lego Club. The only rules are that you have to make something awesome, and you have to take it apart at the end—no KraGl for us. It’s a beautiful way to look at creativity, but sometimes I wonder if my life isn’t a little bit too much like Lego Club—leaving the Unitarian Society that had been my spiritual home on and off for eight years feels like taking apart a beautiful, bright thing that it took time to build, and I don’t know when the next Lego Club of the Soul will come along. (And let’s not even think about the Lego Club of the Heart!)

When I signed the membership book at the Unitarian Society of Germantown in 2009, it was a huge deal to me—I had found a lot of spirituality in secular life, but I’d been without a steady and official faith since the age of ten, at the moment that I sat in Catholic Church and realized that it was just stories, and moreover, that it was stories that didn’t make sense to me. (Side note: My dad once told me that he stopped believing in Catholicism when we kids were born—he just couldn’t see how a baby could be born with sin. Aw, that’s nice.) For a long time, I thought not making it as a Catholic meant that I wasn’t entitled to a relationship with God, that I couldn’t really be safe in a religion, and maybe that is still true.

Every so often, when I felt like I wanted to make more of a commitment to Unitarianism, I even made a monetary pledge, just a token amount, but similar to the way that my wedding ring kept getting not-worn, my pledge checks went unpaid more often than not. Similarly, although we were supposed to wear nametags to be more approachable to the other attendees, I never could bring myself to wear one. You can either see that as keeping things at arms’ length or liking to be free, maybe both are true.

The first time I left the Unitarian Society of Germantown, about three years ago, it was because of something that happened in Small Group Ministry. One of the women in the group had struck up a friendship with a married guy from the congregation, I guess what might be called an emotional affair, and he got a crush on her. The lady felt upset and constrained by this, said it made her not want to come to church anymore. Without the man’s side of the story, the group instantly united against him. They closed ranks in a way that terrified me, the leader even offering to tell the minister on the man.

I got angry all the way down to my guts that they would gang up on him so quickly, that they wouldn’t show him compassion—I mean, who hasn’t had a crush before, for god’s sake? As a poly person, I became deeply aware that though they claimed to welcome all expressions of sexuality, the church still existed for the old reasons: To jealously guard the boundaries of heteronormative marriage, even uniting against errant feelings. My voice came all the way up from my belly and I said “It’s LOVE, the most powerful thing in the universe, and who do you think you are to control it?”

I took that as my cue to leave the group and the church and delve deeply into love research, which was scary and fruitful and well-documented.

I found my way back to USG, though, and though I could never really settle into a Small Group again, I did have long conversations with the minister about love and poly—I felt like I could be a voice for the organic side spirituality and the unpredictable nature of love. Without really noticing, I built an entire circle of friends from the USG community, whom I loved very dearly.

Then the pope came. I’ve already said that the way the pope’s visit impeded traffic felt like a citywide metaphor for the way they’d colonized and oppressed so many bodies, including my own. It felt like there was no place safe from the grip of paternalism, that there wasn’t room to be ourselves and grow. I am so grateful to that feeling for helping me realize how much the Catholic Church still lived in me, and how much I wanted it out.

When USG announced that they would be televising the papal mass, I was at first shocked, but I realized it could be comforting—who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by thoughtful, liberal friends who, like me, believed in fighting for equality and justice?

But then, the Monday morning of Pope Week, I passed my church on the way to work like I always do and saw the sign: “Welcome, Pope Francis.” I sobbed all the way to work. I tried to share my dismay with the pastors and via the church facebook groups, but people’s responses let me know that as a congregation, we were not doing what I thought we were doing. In their rush to embrace this “more liberal” pope, they forgot women. They forgot GLBT equality. They forgot thousands of raped children. They forgot to stand up for those who need it. Just as in that small group meeting, they closed ranks, and the only way for me to stay sane was to walk away.

I was angry, scared, and lonely, but also curious. I got in the car and drove over to the other Unitarian Society in my neighborhood to see what was on their sign. It said “Building Beloved Community.” I took note of the other denominations’ signs around town that week, and no other church said “Welcome Pope Francis”—They had their own sermon topics and their own lives. They had backbone, and I decided that I would too. In that moment, I felt kinship with my Catholic aunts, who were angry at the pope for being too liberal—from waaaaaaay over here other end of the political spectrum, I could see their point—let’s believe in what we believe in.

Just like with the guy, there’s sadness and shame and loss in letting USG go. Just like him, it wasn’t a mistake to try, but it ended up a bad match, and I can only keep trying and keep hoping for something more fitting to come along.

Right at this moment, I can’t really believe there is such a thing as liberal religion, or maybe liberal isn’t good enough. I want radical, wild religion, the Earth’s religion, something deeper that can’t be contained in the same rituals, the same creepy group dynamics that have oppressed us for all of our thinking lives. Maybe that isn’t religion at all, maybe it’s just connection to the deep, sometimes dark, wild spirituality within. I’m going to look for chances to touch that divinity any way I can, mostly by just being here, loving nature, loving love, and making stuff.

Goals: Bye, Sad-But-Productive September, May the Muses Bless October

Love Letter to the Yoko Show

(Some of the pictures are by Amy Lawson, who'll always brave NYC traffic for art adventures.)

When I was little, I was obsessed with the Beatles, and with John Lennon in particular. I loved him so much and I vividly remember that I was dusting behind the piano on the night that he died. So it was with a sense of reverence that I watched Imagine at age twelve, but I don’t remember anything about it but this: The day that John met Yoko, she showed him her art. He climbed up a white ladder to a magnifying glass that hung from the ceiling, held the glass up to the seemingly blank white painting suspended horizontally above the ladder, smiled and said. “It says yes.”

So, John’s meeting Yoko became my little self meeting what art could really be. I don’t think any other piece of art has shaped me the way that the Yes Painting did, as a creative person and as a human. I got to see it once before, in a silent, near deserted basement gallery at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. That day around fifteen years ago I spent probably an hour with it, drawing it, seeing every angle, squinting up to read the “yes,” feeling uplifted to be near this thing that had helped me to understand creativity the way I still do—as acts of love and affirmation, tiny but the strongest thing in the world: yes.

Yesterday, it wasn’t so quiet. The MOMA is free on Friday evenings and it was heartening but overwhelming to see people lined up around the block to get in. Amy considered me her personal hero for having bought tickets in advance so we wouldn’t have to wait. Even in a jangled, crowded room, the ladder brought me such a sense of stillness and joy, and I noticed something I hadn’t seen last time, or had forgotten: On the top step, in yellowed, old-fashioned label tape: Fly.

There was a sign on the ladder’s pedestal that said “Do not touch,” but for me, it should have said “Do not hug.” I love other artworks, but not with this much real, physical affection—it was like seeing a beloved friend after a long time.

In the next room, at the center of the whole exhibition, was “To See The Sky,” a black metal spiral staircase that reached the skylight at the top of the museum. 

I’d had it mildly spoiled by some New Yorker’s Instagram, but it was still breathtaking to realize that after all these years, I could climb Yoko’s art. There were four or five people ahead of me in line, so I watched them climb and saw this:

And this—Glass Keys to Open the Skies:

The folks ahead of me climbed the (gently, it seemed like) swaying stairs to the skylight, took pictures from various angles, and came down. They didn’t give any clues to what they were experiencing. It looked a little scary, but as I said to Amy, Yoko Ono would never hurt me.  Also, I was glad to be wearing leggings, as I was about to climb with an audience.

I’d been dreaming about ascensions and partial ascensions all summer: The glass staircase in the Des Moines Art Museum that always makes me nervous, a steep road to heaven that disappeared near the top into mirage and sky, a plane that was supposed to cross the ocean but instead landed in a beautiful field. Somehow I understood that if I took this staircase all the way up, those dreams would be resolved and I would move forward in some real way.

But it was much harder than I thought. This staircase was engineered to shake and sway as you walked up, and shook more as I went higher. I’d wanted to take pictures, but I had a death grip on both the railing and my phone, too petrified even to put my phone in my pocketbook. My heart was pounding by the time I got halfway up, but I knew that I’d be disappointed if I turned around too soon. I took a deep breath, kept my eyes on the skylight, and kept climbing. 

I shook with the art as I went up and when I got to the second to last step, it took everything I had to take the last one. I looked out of the skylight over the city, smiled down at the bystanders, and braved the descent.

“You can do it!” said a stranger coming in from the Yes Painting room.

“It’s really shaky!” I said.

“You’re almost there!” said the pretty girl who was next.

“That was so much harder than I thought!” I exclaimed once my feet were on the floor. I shook all the way through opening the little door to each “Box of Smile” hidden in the wall beside the staircase:

Back at the original ladder, I understood something I hadn’t before: it’s rickety. It isn’t very high, but to climb up and see the “yes” would be precarious at best. You would have to have a certain amount of trust to climb it. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May posited that creativity is always a little bit of a battle with the gods, and I could feel it in those last steps, in these two ladders—and I could feel myself winning.

There were so many other beautiful things to see. She once sold mornings: (forgive my blurriness)

And there was Grapefruit, the book of conceptual pieces we used in poetry class a few weeks back:

There were lovely Zen-moment poems everywhere:

and a room where everything was in half:

and this, which made us get choked up:

and "Piece to Be Stepped On:"

And "Three Spoons"

and a white chess set, to be played until players can't:

and a button in the gift shop that said this:

And I can, because I'm part of art, and art is invincible. 

Light-ful Viktor Frankl Quote

My friend and I have a tiny book club to read Man's Search for Meaning for 10 minutes a day. It's bringing me a surprising amount of health--once an Existentialist, always an Existentialist, I guess.

This is the quote that has always stuck with me, and I'd like it to stick with me some more:

"In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. In that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"--and the light shineth in the darkeness."

Thanks, Grandmom! And First Thoughts About Leaving the District

The day before yesterday, I got a card from my Grandmom, wishing me better days and enclosing a gift card. (I probably should have saved it for a rainy day, but I already spent some of it on a box of thank you cards and a new purple gratitude journal decorated with the constellations.) When I called to thank and update her, she said this: “I’m so glad to hear that you’re going back to your art.”

I don’t know exactly what it means, going back to my art, other than brainstorming a name for an Etsy store and reading a poem a day from the Learn then Burn poetry-teaching anthologies, but what a ringing endorsement of my entire existence in one short sentence. Throughout the whole breakdown process, my family has been unfailingly supportive, my mom, dad, and Aunt Connie listening to the same (already pretty much decided) decision-making perseverations, my ex-wife watching episodes and bringing pie. Aunt Connie even came to the school to help me pick up the first batch of my stuff a few weeks ago. My family is a work of art in and of itself, making it so much easier to make the self-caring choice.

So yesterday I emailed the principals and the teachers that I like best and today I faxed the form. I just happen to be resigning on the same date on which I left AmeriCorps five years ago—if something’s too sad, it sure can’t survive February, it seems. My closest teacher friend texted right away to send her support, and that’s pretty much all that matters from that building anymore. I’d expected my letter to be a little more flowery-grateful, but I guess I’d written them all the thank you cards I had.

I’m still recovering from the stress and depression, but it’s a good sign that I only took 3 out of the 9 Ativan that the hospital prescribed last month when I went in for chest pains on what would have been my penultimate day in the classroom. I still have freakouts that I’m not good enough, that I’m letting everybody down, that I’m a useless burden on everyone, but those moments pass, and I go back to my notebooks, markers, and Friends episodes until I start to feel like myself again.

In the long run, I’m not sure how the bills will stay paid, but I’m covered for now. While I take a break from teaching, I’m working at a university bookstore, which had been my day-job-job for on and off for about twelve years now. I love the heft of the textbooks, then Zen of the repetitive receiving tasks, the fact that the job asks absolutely nothing of me after I clock out. I get to feel competent for a while, and after two years of rotten struggle (and other things) that will be a relief,

February Goals Mostly Done, March Goals Mostly Not Scary

Pretty productive month, for having contained a breakdown! Time to stop trying to make the gym happen, though.

 And for the one in the middle, I need a lot of luck, strength, and love:

Song of The Week: Good Enough to Reopen the Blog. :)

I've been wondering what to do with my writing self now that I ran out of adventures (or rather, of wanting to have them) for my naughty blog. Then I scrolled past this on my morning facebook dawdling and remembered how much fun it was to be a pop culture blogger. Thank heaven for moments of transcendence in between games of Bejeweled.