Clergy women

Another Way to Look at It

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Willie Green was driving as we headed toward the truck-stop for dinner after church. It was my first Sunday back at my Student Pastorate in rural Kentucky after being away for my wedding and honeymoon in 1983. Seeing a political poster stapled to a telephone pole, I asked Willie,

“who won the election for Governor while I was away?”

In her tobacco-thickened bluegrass drawl she grumbled, “Oh, that Martha Layne Collins, did.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.” I replied.

“I just don’t think it’s right, her being a woman and all.”

It was quiet in the car for a little while. Then Willie said,

“But then, I didn’t think it was right having you be our pastor, either.”

A little nervous, I asked, “So how’s that working out?” She laughed and said,

“It’s working out great! I guess maybe that Martha Layne won’t be too bad a Governor after all.” 

Five years or so later, I was sitting at the kitchen table back home in Omaha visiting my parents. My Dad, who had always been my champion, encouraging me every step along the way in my education and preparation for ministry was reading the World Herald and said something about “that’s the problem with the economy these days, all these women going to work.”

“Um. Dad,” I ventured. “I thought you are really proud of me and the work I do.”

Dad put down the paper. I could see the cogs turning in his brain.

“Maybe the problem,” I said, “isn’t that women are working, maybe the problem is that the economy isn’t.”

“Well, that is another way to look at it.” Said Dad.

Last week I was at the county jail where I meet with some of the women for Bible study and discussion a couple times each week. “Any results yet on the election?” someone asked. It was Friday afternoon. I told them it was still not called for either candidate, but it looked like Biden and Harris were pulling ahead. The reaction among the women was mixed. What surprised me was two of the women, one young, one older, both said they didn’t want Biden and Harris because Harris is a woman, and “women shouldn’t be doing jobs like that.” I checked my watch, hoping it would tell me what year it is.  When it didn’t, I told the women the story of me and Willie Green and the election of Martha Layne Collins in Kentucky thirty-five years ago.

It turns out the women had discussed it with a man who did some other ministry in the jail, and decided they agreed with him that women aren’t fit for leadership, that women need to know their place and stay in it. Why? Maybe because they, like so many of the women I meet at the jail, have known nothing but abuse from men for most of their lives. Instead of having the gift of parents, teachers, pastors and professors, male and female alike, who cheered them on and encouraged them to aim higher, these women have been put down and pushed around and told they don’t count. But they do. I told them they do. I told them being a woman in no way makes them less than a man, and, in my opinion, Senator Harris being a woman in no way disqualifies her from office.

Women, like men, can and should do all that God has given them the gifts to do. God created all of us in God’s image, and God said, “that’s good.”

The day after I was at the jail, on Saturday, the election was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I wasn’t particularly a Harris fan through the primaries, but when she spoke on Saturday as the Vice-President elect of our nation I broke down and sobbed great big, racking unexpected sobs. I think it’s right. I think it’s just right, her being a woman and all. And I suspect on Saturday afternoon God said something like, “it’s about time!” before saying, “now that’s really, really good.”

Getting by with a Little Help from our Friends

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My column for The Elgin Review 5.24.2020

“Each of us is just one tragedy away from needing to rely on the goodness of others to get by.”

I was raised on good conservative values of hard work and self-sufficiency. I was a good student, I worked hard, I waited to marry until I had my college degree, I completed two more degrees, I waited to have children until I’d been married several years so we could provide for the kids, I lived within my means, I put money into savings, I drove carefully, I abided by the law, I voted, I saw the dentist twice a year, brushed my teeth twice a day and flossed (more often than not). Yet there I was in my therapist’s office wrestling with the truth that, for the sake of my sons, and myself, I had no choice but divorce. “I can’t possibly divorce.” I said. “I can’t earn enough money on my own to pay all the bills and he isn’t earning enough to rent a place of his own and then pay child-support on top. I can’t work full-time and take care of the boys. I live far from my family. I just can’t. I can’t stay married but I can’t divorce, either.”

That’s when my therapist said my sense of self-sufficiency was really only an illusion. We all need each other to get by. Maybe if we’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett we’re not one tragedy away from needing the goodness of others to survive, but since most of us aren’t either of those two gentlemen, the truth is, despite all our hard work and good planning, life sometimes throws curve balls that leave us unable to do it all ourselves. That’s part of being human.

This past week I helped a friend who suffered a cascade of calamities. A job didn’t work out in a town she moved to just to take the job. Without the job she couldn’t afford her house. In the middle of looking for work she suffered a serious health problem—without health insurance, because that had been tied to her job. The health condition means she can’t drive the car she has a lease on that she can’t pay for because she no longer has a job, and she can’t get a job right now because of the health condition and so on. She found herself needing a ride to her home state to apply for housing assistance and to see if she can figure out a way to get on her feet closer to home.

She reached out to me out of the blue. I hadn’t heard about her cascading calamities. Why did I drive as far as I drove, wearing an N-95 mask for hours on end (because she couldn’t survive COVID-19 on top of everything else) to help a friend I hadn’t heard from for over a year? Because she needed help. Just like I needed help years ago when I had no choice but to divorce my husband and raise our boys on my own. Except, I didn’t raise them on my own. I raised them in a community with great neighbors and great friends and a congregation and my brother and a whole host of others who helped us. Helping each other is part of being human, too.

During these difficult COVID-19 days, let’s all look for ways to help our neighbors. And, when we need it, let’s not be afraid to reach out for some help for ourselves. Chances are, anyone you ask for help has needed help themselves, too.

**

Park Church is still worshipping via Zoom. You are welcome to join us for worship at 9:15 on Sunday mornings. Contact me for the connection information at beckyzmcneil@gmail.com or 402.540.5615

Snow Angels and other prayers

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They shuffle in, the first two with hair disheveled and bad dye-jobs, locks matted from too much time in their bunks. Faded florescent pink sweats hang baggy on their tattooed frames. Younger than my boys, I guess. Twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps. Another, older, rounder, with a short-auburn bob finds her place at the end of the table, quietly pulling out her chair. The fourth carries a thick red-leather, red-letter Bible in her willowy hands and wears her hair piled on top of her head. Her granny-glasses have lenses so thick her eyes precede her into the room, reminding me of a grasshopper–a very pregnant pink grasshopper. Her stomach swells taut against her sweatshirt, revealing her inside-out belly button below. She talks without stopping to breathe. At the end of this short parade comes a slim, tall woman with curly dark hair cropped like Peter Pan’s, slouching. There’s an energy of anger pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. A thin blue vein beneath her eye twitches in time to her heart beat. Intelligent eyes silently claim, “I don’t belong here” as she curls, like a fetus onto the rolling chair.

The women of the county jail are a motley crew.

I carry with me, on my coat and in my hair, the crisp, fresh smell of snow.

“We have snow!” I say, with the delight of the first blanketing of a season, when the crisp, cold freshness is still novel and exciting, and driving on ice and through snirt (snow mixed with dirt) hasn’t yet grown wearisome and disgusting. “It’s so pretty out there.”

Without windows, the women were unaware of the hushed beauty pillowing the landscape on the other side of the cinder blocks surrounding them.

“I love snow!”

“I wish I could see it!”

“The men may get to go outside to shovel it.”

“I’d love to see it falling from the sky.”

“I’d make a snow angel if I could.”

Five of the six of us laugh.

It is my first visit to the jail to share Bible study with the women. I didn’t know they couldn’t see the snow.

Around an oval conference table in a nondescript interior room, they tell me their stories. Meth and Crack and a parole violation. Dealing in several counties, and jail time awaiting in each one.

Grasshopper starts talking. Five babies taken away, but this one, this one, she is determined, this one, her sixth, (is she even twenty-five?) this one will be born drug-free. She’s going to give this baby the life he deserves. She knows God is with her always has been always will be she just needs to trust in Jesus and get back to church and doing what the Gospels teach and not listen to the people who are always trying to lead her astray and she may have had the other kiddos taken from her because of drugs but not this one because this time she’s getting into the Word and following the Way and she’s not messing up again no way and if the baby daddy doesn’t want to support her and wants her to get messed up again she’ll just leave this time that’s all there is to it because she knows she’s God’s precious child and so is this baby and this time it’s all going to be alright so she’s actually happy to be in jail because it means less time to be tempted to backslide and turn her back on God which she isn’t going to do this time. No way.

Bonnie weeps. When she finds her voice she says she misses her fourteen-year-old boy. She feels so guilty. She really messed up and he’s the one who’s paying the price. “A boy needs his mother. Mine really loves me.” She says. “I really messed up this time” and again she weeps.

Five of the six of us weep.

Stoney silence from Peter Pan.

We feast on stories shared from our lives and from God’s good book. Grasshopper sings, “Jesus Loves me.”

Five of the six of us sing.

Our hour draws to a close. Teeth are starting to chatter and blue goose bumps have risen on the bare thighs of the bleached blonde girl wearing prison issue pink shorts instead of sweats.

I ask how we can pray for each other. “For my boy.” “For this baby” “For my boyfriend” “For me and my court date on Wednesday.”  I ask them to pray for me and my churches and for my six kids.

Peter Pan unfolds her long limbs and uncurls her lips and for the first time speaks very quietly saying, “Pray for my daughters, they’re 16 and 17 and live in Detroit where I am a social worker with a Master’s degree. Oxycontin got me here and I want out.”

Six of the six of us pray.

I step into the blinding brightness of sunlight bouncing off freshly fallen snow.

A holy dance of longing and liberty moving me.

Unlimited Calling

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, NE published 11.13.19

“Ah ain’t never seen nuthin’ like that before!” said the scraggly-looking fellow I found standing inside my study at the church when I got back from lunch. It was years ago in a county-seat town in Illinois where the church building was on the highway just off the town square. We got a lot of transient folk stopping by looking for assistance with food or a night’s stay in a motel, or money for gas to get them a little further on down the road. Startled by the man standing stock-still and silently dripping rain water onto the carpet, I asked, “May I help you, sir?” “Uh. Uh. Well, uh, I’m lookin’ for the pastor.” He said.  I extended my hand to shake his and said, “I’m Becky Brown, I’m the pastor here. How may I help you?” And, instead of shaking my offered hand, like a character from a looney-tunes cartoon he hit himself on the forehead and shook his head like he was rattling rocks inside, blinked his eyes wildly and said it, “Ah ain’t never seen nuthin’ like that before!”

The man had been to a lot of churches asking for help, but apparently, I was the first female pastor he encountered.  My gender, though shocking to him, did not interfere with his mission. Gladly, he accepted the help I offered and went on his way, still shaking his head like he’d seen some sort of apparition.

In the thirty-plus years I’ve served in ministry since that rainy afternoon in Illinois, I’ve encountered a good deal of sexism in the church, rarely so unmasked. Often it comes cloaked in subtle ways; the ministerial colleague who keeps standing up to assert his dominance in the middle of a casual conversation over a cup of coffee, the dismissive “I can tell you are emotional about this” response from a male leader to a clearly stated concern, the, “well, I knew you were a strong woman the first time I met you” backhanded questioning of my femininity as an excuse for the bad behavior of another man by a male church leader, introducing me by my first-name while at the same occasion calling my male colleagues, “Reverend” or “Doctor” or “Pastor” as appropriate, and so on.

It’s curious how such diminishment of women occurs in the church when it was women who first proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning. It’s time, past time, for the church to repent of sexism—overt and over the top, and covert, subtle and masked.

The United Church of Christ, of which Park Church, where I serve here in Elgin, and First Congregational Church where I serve in Neligh are part, was the first Mainline Protestant denomination in the United States to ordain women to ministry in 1853. In the United Church of Christ, women in leadership are not novelties.

If you are looking to be part of a church where your gender does not determine nor limit your calling maybe Park Church is the right church for you. We worship at 9:15 every Sunday morning. Ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south. No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome in the United Church of Christ. I love to hear from you. Beckyzmcneil@gmail.com

 

My Voice

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There was a large hand mashed against my chest and another against my face and I strained to yell, though muzzled, until finally, the night erupted into noise as I mustered a loud cry into the darkness, “Dad!”

My sweet husband Mike rolled over and comforted me. The nightmare was so vivid it took a while for me to remember—I am a grown, 58 year old woman, sleeping in my safe, comfortable bed, next to the love of my life, who never, not in ten million years, would ever hurt me.

I’m not usually a sleep talker. I sleep like a log. Maybe I snore (there are those who tell me I do) but I sure couldn’t testify to it. Most nights I remember nothing from the time my head hits my pillow until the alarm rings in the morning.  If I remember a dream, it’s a dream I was having as I was awakening for the day, not one I had well before midnight. That’s not the case with the nightmare that interrupted our night’s sleep a couple weeks ago. When my yell woke us up, the digital clock read 11:20. I rolled over and managed to fall back to sleep quickly, and if I dreamed more through the night, my dreams were not a continuation of the one that had thoroughly awakened us both.

In the morning the panic I felt in my sleep, the will and determination and strength it had taken to cry out to my Dad for help, left me feeling weak in my knees and emotionally weary. Over coffee I played Freud with my dream. Of course, the origin of the dream was the news reports of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations in regard to her teen-aged experience with Supreme Court nominee Brent Kavanagh, how he covered her mouth when she tried to cry out for help as he pinned her to a bed and groped her. In my dream it wasn’t clear I was being sexually assaulted. All I remember is being held down, with a strong male hand over my face muting me. Dr. Becky Freud asked herself over her coffee, “Why do you suppose you called out for your Dad when he’s been dead for almost a decade?” I replied to myself, “He always listened to you and believed in you. Your Dad encouraged you to use your voice and to speak the truth.” “And why,” Dr. Me-Freud persisted, “was this experience of being muzzled so vivid as to cause you to yell out in your sleep?” And my coffee began to quiver in its mug.

I am being silenced by men who do not like what I say. The assault I am experiencing is not against my body, but against my being. It is against my being a woman with words.

I am a woman with a clear, true voice. I am a minister gifted and called by God to preach and teach and care and lead. I speak words of love and passion and conviction. On occasion, called and ordained as I am to be a minister of the Christian Gospel I am also a prophet, speaking truth to power. Truth that the last shall be first, and we are all refugees and foreigners and black lives do matter and Jesus was a brown-skinned man and he died at the hands of an ungodly empire run amok. Truth like Jesus listened to women and gave them full voice in a world that worked devilishly hard to keep them silent and in their place. Truth that Jesus loves all the children, and so must we.

This past spring I spoke the truth to a man who could not bear to hear the truth. I spoke it to him in private to protect and preserve his dignity. I spoke in hope he would take heed and take action and take care of what only he could do. But the words I said cut too close and in a couple weeks’ time he figured out a way to silence me.

Complicit in the assault against me are other men quick to agree, “A strong woman is, by her very nature, a threat.”  Strong, as in I see things clearly and tell the truth about what I see.

Complicit in the assault against me are also women, like the contrary octogenarian who two years ago cautioned me against being so passionate about the Gospel. “Some of us just want to come to church, have a little communion with God and go on home, dear.” Complicit in the assault against me are women like the woman trained to take orders without question, because the orders of a man of higher rank supersede written policies and procedures. Complicit in the assault against me are the women who look the other way and pretend they cannot see, because if they see they’d have to speak, and if they speak, they too, may have to pay. Good girls keep quiet.

Complicit in the assault against me is a system that allows one man the power to insist I be quiet and good and keep my thoughts to myself –just roll over now, and act as if this didn’t happen, if you want a good reference, if you want to be able to work again. Don’t tell. Don’t complain. Don’t raise a fuss. Just let us sweep this under the rug and move on, because I’m busy with more important things.

Male things.

Wearing the robes and reciting the verses, like armor. Protecting the church, protecting the powers that be, protecting the “just want a little communion with God” and then go golfing crowd from gospel truth that might discomfort them and keep their pocketbooks closed when the offering plates circulate in the sanctuary. “Protecting” but not healing, not helping, not holding the church to the church’s true calling. Allowing the church to rot from within. Sick in self-serving sin.

Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you do not see the others whom God has invited to the table. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you look blindly away from the racism and sexism and nationalism that is tearing God’s good creation apart at the seams. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you remain complacent when injustice is done right smack dab in the very midst of you. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you allow yourselves to be led by thin-skinned men more interested in their own power than in proclaiming and living the Gospel with integrity and truth.

My dad called “foul!” years ago when the politics inside a church became as vile as are the politics in our nation today. I was a teen-aged girl at the time.  I witnessed my father speak truth to the powers that be. And he voted with his feet and dusted off his sandals and moved on and he taught me to be unafraid, and bold and brave.  And so, I called out to him in my sleep. “Dad!”

And he is helping me to remember who and whose I am.

I am not anyone’s good girl.

I am a woman gifted and called by God, and by God,

I am reclaiming my voice.

Jesus Junk

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Underneath the labyrinthine exchange of roadways, the Interstate highway, the elevated expressway, and city streets that carry the heaviest traffic in our city, at the end of the dead end road beyond the fast food and drive thru Starbucks, there’s a mega-store. My skin crawls and I feel a little sick every time I see it. I went in a couple of times just to look around and felt dirty just being there. But, sadly, I think I’m pretty alone in my revulsion over this store. Recently there were protests and the city-council spent hours trying (rightly in my opinion) to keep a strip-club from opening a couple miles to the east of this place, but, I’ve never heard of anyone being anything but pleased by this store’s presence in our fair city.

Even so, I can’t help thinking if Jesus were to come to town, there might be some serious table turning action taking place down there.

So, can we talk about Jesus junk and cheap churchy tchotchkes and bad books and those who profit, bigly, off the sales of that stuff? This mega-store is crammed wall to wall with Jesus home décor, and Jesus jewelry, with Jesus plush-throws, and Jesus tees in every size, with Jesus baby burp cloths and nativity napkins and Jesus is the Reason for the Season soup mugs. The place is filled with the scent of “manger mixed with myrrh” melted wax (you can buy it in a set with the handy light-up nativity scented wax warmer for only $25.99).

A couple times I’ve been given gift cards to the Jesus Junk store. Last year I went there thinking I could use my gift card to buy a new Bible. The cover was coming off my old leather-bound Oxford Annotated NRSV and I thought it might be time to replace it. I braved my way through the Jesus gift gallery and past the thousands of glossy-covered books selling a “God loves America Best–Jesus is your Ultimate Life Insurance–Do you Know Where you’re Going when you Die? (and, in the mean-time, Heaven on Earth can be Yours if you follow our Ten Easy Ways to make your Husband Feel like a King)” kind of pseudo-Christianity. Way in the back of the store is their fairly large Bible section.

The Women’s Thin-line Pretty in Pink King James Version Bible complete with a matching pink journal and pink pen was only fifty bucks. But nowhere, amongst all their Biblical offerings was a single Bible for which a woman was a member of the editorial board. Not one. I’ve been exaggerating a little (could you tell?) about the stuff this store sells like hot cakes, but I’m not exaggerating at all about this. Every one of the hundreds of Bibles in a breathtakingly large array of colors and covers and versions and editions was translated and edited only by men. Why does that matter? Because women, like men, were created in God’s image. Women, like men, have brains and are scholars and are capable carriers of God’s stories. The more broadly representative the editors and translators of God’s word, the more accurate, the more inclusive the important editorial decisions. The earnest salesman helped me look at every version of the Bible sold in his store. Dozens of versions, no women editors. “Isn’t this strange?” I asked him. He admitted it was. He said he’d never really thought about it before.

Isn’t that the way it is with the whole big, let’s show the world how much we love Jesus by buying stuff with his name on it charade? We just don’t think about it. We have this good citizen-consumer attitude “It’s nice we have that big Christian store selling Christian things for all the good Christian people.” But, is it nice? Or, is it maybe a sham? Is it maybe a place where day after day hour after hour God’s name is taken in vain?

Using God’s name to make a buck, using God’s name to enhance one’s own wealth, using God’s name to  please one’s investors, using God’s name to improve one’s business, using God’s name to silence half of God’s people seems to me to be risky. What I’ve read in my plain old black leather covered study Bible indicates God has never been all that pleased when people claim things in God’s name that are self-serving. Who benefits from the sale of Jesus Junk? Are the factory workers paid living wages to make all that stuff? Are they given full-benefits, do they get to take Sabbath rest? And what will happen to the Jesus junk when it’s gathered dust on our shelves and our kids have to go through our stuff after they’ve sent us to the old-folk’s home? Will it be valuable, or will it go to the landfill where it will be buried with no hope of resurrection?

Who benefits from Bibles edited only by conservative old white men? Who is being served? Is it God? And who benefits from books that trumpet piety and morality and “Christian” values that leave out the poor and the vulnerable and venerate the rich and powerful?

I don’t like the strip club in the middle of town. It’s degrading and dehumanizing. But, at least it’s not selling its’ tainted wares in the name of God.

Litany

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Harvey Weinstein is not why I knitted four beautiful hot pink pussy hats and marched in the Women’s March last spring. I didn’t know about him last spring. Donald Trump was not why I marched in the Women’s March, either, but he was part of it.

Bobby, the neighbor boy who climbed the rough bricks outside our bathroom to peep in when  I was seven to see what a girl looked like after I told him, “no” when he offered me a dime to show him—Bobby started it. And Mark, the high school choir friend who was pretty immature but nice enough to hang around in a group until I told him I didn’t want to go with him to prom and I didn’t want to date him at all, after which he began loudly taunting me across the cafeteria so badly I retreated to one of the music practice rooms to eat my lunch for the rest of the year, and who yelled his usual taunt, loudly enough to be heard across the Civic Auditorium as I crossed the stage to receive my diploma at graduation. Mark added another verse to the litany being written deep inside me.

Then there was the nice divorced man from the church who had joined while I was away for my sophomore year of college who started showing up at my work place just as I clocked out at eleven pm. He was older and I didn’t like him “like that.” But, if somebody went to my church, I trusted them, because well, they went to my church and I had always trusted the people in my church. “Let’s go to coffee,” he’d say. “Sure.” I’d say. I had “go to coffee buddies” at college, why not at home during the summer, too?  Except one night he said he needed to stop by his house, did I mind tagging along? It turns out, I minded. I was ashamed. I should have known better. I didn’t tell anyone. Litany verse three.

Verse four, later that summer at the city pool. Shaken, I decided to leave after a man cornered me and would not accept my pleas of “leave me alone.”

Verse five, on my twenty-first birthday, when on a boat on the Baltic Sea as part of an  overseas study program, I left our group to return to my cabin alone and was followed by a drunken fool who tried to force his way into my cabin after me.

Verse six, the date with an exchange student during my senior year of college that turned ugly fast.

Verse seven, the seminary professor and admissions counselor at a school I visited, who looked me in the eye not once, but stared at my chest the whole time he interviewed me.

Verses eight and nine the man who tried to trick me into following him into an old barn to see some things he said were being stored there that belonged to the church where I was the pastor, and the used condom I found on the seat of my car in the pastor’s parking space outside the church a couple of weeks after I’d rebuffed him.

Litany verses ten, eleven, twelve, they’re all just more of the same. More of the same old rotten thing. More of the same thing women just chalk up to “the way things are.” Unless there’s violence, unless there’s long lasting physical harm, most of the time we women just move on and try to be “smarter” the next time—because so far, there has always been a next time.

I never added up the verses of my very personal litany, I never brought them out to see the light of day. I left them, unremembered deep in the dusty file cabinet of my life’s forgettable moments until last November, when enough people were willing to excuse a self-admitted “pussy grabber” to elect him President of the United States of America.

I marched in the march for many reasons. I knit and wore my hat for one. It was a proud defiance against the litany of disrespect shown me and women throughout the ages.

Now, let me preach a moment with the fire-like passion of the prophets:

This is not the way God intended things to be.

“At last this is flesh of my flesh,” the cry of joy from Adam in meeting Eve is not a cry of domination, but of mutuality, of partnership, of communion, of shared respect and shared pleasure.

“This is my beloved and this is my friend,” the delighted words of the bride about her groom in the Song of Solomon is not about power and possession, but about the tenderness and equality of true partners, willing the very best for each other.

“Wives submit to your husbands, Husbands love your wives like Christ loves the church,” the letter to the Christians in Ephesus is not proscribing subservient women pleasing dominating men, but, in true poetic reciprocity, each loving and serving the other with self-giving love like Jesus.

How about we start a new litany? A litany with verses about respect and tenderness?

How about verses where we march to a deeply humane beat?

How about verses in which we no longer keep quiet?

How about verses where we sing the truth?

How about verses about love?

Simply love.

What a litany.

Unglued

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The East High School gym was filled with Samsonite card tables from various eras dug out of basements and garages and covered with white paper, and high school seniors and their parents drinking orange juice from Dixie Cups and pale lukewarm coffee in Styrofoam and eating sweet rolls. At 7:30 in the morning, the din of the senior awards breakfast was deafening. My middle son Daniel was among the honorees. The two of us shared a rickety table with Dan’s classmate Michael and his dad, Jack. People, movement, sound, light, energy was all around me.

I was inside my own bubble looking out. When Jack asked, “So, how are you, Becky? Things good at the church?” it took me a moment to process the thought that I should respond. What I said was, “My mother died last night.” My words fell like a cinder block. The four of us were startled by them. It wasn’t clear our little table could support their sudden weight.

How odd it was to me that the world was going on so normally, and that I and Daniel and the rest of our family would be going about such normal-life things. I’d never before lived a day without my mother being alive. I’d lived most of my adult life hundreds of miles away from Mom, and we weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who talked to each other on the phone all the time. But always, always, my whole life she’d been there. And now, not suddenly, because her death had been a long time coming, and not surprisingly, because we had been keeping vigil and caring for her as she labored into eternal life for weeks by that time, now she was simply, gone. It was an odd, disorienting feeling.

The memory of that morning, of my feelings nine years ago returned earlier this week and linger here. Out on the deck this ridiculously pleasant Saturday morning in mid-August in Nebraska, it is so beautiful I thought, “Even my Colorado cousins can’t beat this perfection.” But, just under the surface of that thought I am disoriented. Despite all the immediate surrounding evidence to the contrary, all is not well. The perfect breeze, the ideal temperature, the green, green trees and blue, blue sky belie the heavy truth.  Our nation is in trouble. Our churches are in trouble. Our neighbors are in trouble.

Vulnerable people all around the world have been in trouble always, but, this week, every week this past year, more and more of those whom I know and love who had been less vulnerable than the most vulnerable are feeling more and more threatened, more and more afraid. Immigrant friends, brown friends, gay friends, Muslim friends, and now Jewish friends—can it really be that in 2017 in the U.S.A. on Saturday morning a week ago a congregation at worship was menaced by Neo-Nazis wielding automatic weapons?

Out of the blue the other night a friend from far away texted me, “Are you concerned for your safety?” His reason for asking was different than my reason for replying a hesitant, simple, “Yes.”

I almost flunked the Rorschach ink-blot test when I took the battery of psychological tests required by the church before sending missionaries overseas back in my twenties. There was some image in which almost any sentient human being sees a gun, but Pollyanna me, I saw something completely innocuous instead. A night in my forties spent curled up in the fetal position bracing for the possibility I could be shot cured me of any lingering naiveté about how vulnerable all of us truly are to each other. One hurting, unglued human can wreak havoc.

I know that now. And now we see the evidence there are myriads of hurting humans among us and some of them are coming unglued.  It hasn’t happened suddenly and it shouldn’t be a surprise.

We have to process this thought; it’s time for each of us to respond. It’s time to speak up for those who are threatened, even if that means we may be threatened, too. It’s time to pray and to bravely unleash the power of love. Maybe there’s still time to make whole that which and those who are coming unglued around us.