..ethos

This whole year I have been reluctantly thinking about enrolling in Business Ethics this quarter.  I'm not particularly interested in business at all.  But I am interested in ethics and ethical theory and hearing my fellow students discussing ethical theory has excited(incited) me.

I think that it has been a good capstone (pun intended) to my year, thinking about the larger story of my faith and what that looks like in my life.  Simplicity has been extremely attractive to me this year. Simple theology and orthopraxy, not that eliminates variation within a complex world, but that remembers purpose and posture in confusing situations.

For me that 'ethos' or simple theology is love, particularly love for God and love for others. As a Christian the conversations about right living, just ethical theory, and social perspective should be based in a simple understanding of love.  Love is a foundation that I can build every thought upon.  It's radically simplifying and freeing.

Also, I think the other component of love is listening.  Realizing that people deserve to be respected and heard, regardless of what they say.

I feel like, really, this is all I have learned at SPU.

..limits

Today I was supposed to write a paper about Jack in the Box but I didn't.  Instead I thought about a  lot of other things:

I thought about the curse of limitlessness.  Sometime in your childhood you were likely told that you could be whatever you wanted to be when you grew up.  Astronaut, veterinarian, lawyer, dentist?  Just believe in  yourself and you could do it.  Well, I think that's bad thinking and very false.  I could never & will never be a long list of things due to the limits of my interests and natural abilities.  Instead of being a force of suppression, I think that there is freedom within those boundaries.  A sense of infinite possibility is paralyzing and fear inducing - if I can do everything will I ever be good at anything?  And it creates a world where my ultimate purpose is to pursue my inherent potential for everything, for the fulfillment of every desire.  People, money, time all become tools that are put to work, helping to fulfill my potential.  But just like the economy, environment, and tolerance for US foreign policy have limits (even if they are still looming), so do humans.  To recognize my limits is to embrace my humanity; it obliterates the possibility of me becoming God, and that is relieving.  I will not be successful at everything I attempt, I was not created for that.  I think that that is one of the parts of life that I am learning about right now.  I was designed to kick serious ass at certain things and it is my responsibility to be faithful to discovering and pursuing those things.  Most other things can be done by other people who are better at them.  

I don't know, I have little to show for my day but I feel like I have learned, so whatever that's worth...

..bathrooms

They are my phobia.  My anxiety raises whenever I go in them.  I feel like they are places where potential disaster is brooding- lots of strangers, intimate quarters, faulty equipment, wet countertops, etc.  My anxiety increases when the toilet is directly behind the door.  The possible embarrassment of  a wide door and a shocked audience is too high.  And then there is the danger of going into the wrong bathroom.  Most of my nightmares involve me walking out of a stall, washing my hands, and then seeing a urinal behind me in the mirror.  Even if no one was there to witness it I would want to die.  LOCKS!  The little hook lock that goes into the sketchy little loop does not offer very much security and causes me to only go half-time because I just want to get out while I still can. Or the punk rock lock that is made out of a bent paper clip. Really, really? Or what about the sketchy doorknob locks where you twist the dial in the middle so that the line is vertical.  Do they all have to be vertical?  Recently an evil person locked the open door to a bathroom before they left it, so I went in, placed the dial in the opposite direct, started my business and then the door opens.  The poor woman on the other side probably wet herself out of fear.  And the worst part is you can't escape- there is only one door out of the bathroom and there is a good likelihood that the victim/perpetrator is waiting on the other side.  I don't feel awkward about it but the whole situation is awkward and intrusive and falsely intimate.  I also recently had an experience where there was no lock on the bathroom door.  It was in an old house but that still not justified, people in 1920's probably needed  privacy too.  There is nothing quite as vulnerable as using the bathroom without it locked, especially in the house of a person who may one day write you a reference.  And what about bathroom stalls that have doors with bad hinges/bad locks.  You just have to slam them closed and hope with all your might that another person doesn't enter with their shoulder and that you don't have to crawl out from under the stubborn door.  I have 18 more things that terrify me about bathrooms (holding up skirts, asking strangers for toilet paper, stall-to-stall conversations, being introduced to new people in bathrooms, seeing professional/respected people you know, and others that are more private).  

The bathroom I loathe the most:  Weter. It's awful and if anything ever went wrong all of campus would be there to see.  The risk is too great.

I hate bathrooms.  If I could have one wish I would wish that I would never have to use them again.

..margin

I could spend time listing out the sources and reasons for my current stress, but it's boring to recant and usually causes me further stress.  So I'm not.

But my life has been stressful as of late.  Is the stress legitimate?  I don't know, but it exists and I have a wide range of responses to it, some constructive and many that aren't. Despite the stress I have been learning things...

I have been learning  about margin.  Often I think of margin as the wiggle room in my life.  The 10 minute buffer I give myself between an activity and the next one.  For me it's usually about time management, occasionally about money.  Recently I have had to reconsider my understanding of margin and now it strongly includes people.  I am terribly afraid of inconveniencing people.  I like following directions and being independent because it doesn't place additional burdens on people in my life.  But with that desire to not be a burden, giving myself grace when I need help is often difficult.  I find myself feeling guilty when I receive help or thinking about ways that I can repay the favor later.

Part of this thinking is rooted in a misperception of who I am - I need to learn that its okay if I'm not 100% put together and on top of my shit.  Another part of it is that I have misperceptions about the people I am in relationship with.  Somewhere I assume that people will feel obligated and guilted to help if I ask, or they are reluctant to help if I don't.  This is simply not true and believing it cheapens the love that other people have for me.  I can never fully enjoy it because I am always busy managing it.  I want to learn how to be a gracious receiver, and I want to make some improvement in my life management skills so that I am being responsible about the burdens that fall on others.

On Sunday, I went to Grace and the pastor stated that grumbling was the cause of spiritual decay. He described it as an unwillingness to give God the credit for things that are provided in our lives, a situation that quickly causes us to question God's goodness and faithfulness.  So instead of grumbling about stress,  I want to choose to see the way that God seeps out of the people in my life.

This is what I'm thankful for... bus slips, dinners prepared by my housemates, help on my math homework, sly glances that turn into laughter, people repairing my back tire (4 times...), quick conversations at the corner of the dinner table, borrowed cars, grant money, a ride to Olympia at midnight, baked goods for lunch, facebook messages, tests that get turned in for me, hugs, a friend who listens to my endless confusion about life, a day in a hotel room by myself, Al's, housemates who rock at grocery shopping, switching chores, monies from my Grandma, an awesome advisor, and a few other things...

..mercy

I think the worst thing in the world is poverty.

God, have mercy on us for what we have done.

..fixed

For a set of reasons, my theological language has shifted a lot over the last yearish (also, my conceptualization of time, that's basically non-existent now).  I don't really talk about 'sin' very much anymore and I am much more interested in life than righteousness, health instead of holiness.  When I talk about who I am I say that I am a person who is broken, rather than totally & utterly depraved.  Sweet, change...

But I think that I want to be fixed and that is posing a problem.  'In my brokenness' I want to transcend and find wholeness, health, completion, community, authenticity, and so on and so on.  But I don't know how this all works.  I think part of my current journey is learning how to live in the paradox of brokenness.  

Like when Jesus healed people- they were once blind for their entire life, get some mud rubbed on them, and then they are healed.  They were profoundly healed, their sickness was replaced with health and their lives were profoundly changed.  But the thing that always got me was that at the end of so many of the healing parables so many of the people screwed up.  Jesus would tell them not to tell anyone who had healed them and then they would do it anyways.  Maybe that's the part of the parable that I have never taken the time to imagine; what happened in the lives of the healed post healing?  I'm pretty sure they screwed up a lot of shit.

And I think that is what I want my experience with God to be so much of the time- a healing without an ending, where I will be fixed and the story will complete itself in abstracted bliss.  (Maybe this is part of the trouble with an obsession with the New Testament, it doesn't seem to show the struggle of people perpetually ruining everything like the Old  Testament does.)

Recently, I have felt the need to be fixed more strongly.  I feel like I am walking around with a pet grey cloud over my head and unintelligent, sad comment on the tip of my tongue.  And so my sociology brain starts to turn, thinking about the plausible 5,000 causes for my state (many of them are likely true) and what that means for my life, social networks, life opportunities...  In this vein, I have received wise, sagely advice from a wise, sagely friend- cause and effect relationships in peoples' lives are complex and it's foolish to assume that they aren't.

And so I sit in the intersection between plausible causes and desired solutions, wanting something else, wanting to be understood and then fixed.  But... I don't think that's God's plan.  Maybe my whole life is not about becoming more and more fixed/healed/authenticated/communal/whole.  Maybe it's one f-ing long process of becoming okay with my brokenness and choosing to hope in God regardless of it.  For some reason, I feel dumb writing this (mostly because I am blogging instead of doing my homework) but also because I think it sounds like a whole lot of the Christianese I grew up with (self-hating Baptists and the journey to moralistic humility with a God that was always a little dissatisfied with everything).  I could care less if it's a cool new theological thought, because it's one that I am learning.

The point where it all seems to crystalize for me is when I think about what life's purpose seems to be... is it always me becoming a better/more fixed person? or is it about learning how to live while being shattered and sick?  For which of these projections is God necessary, not simply employed for efficiency?  And honestly, even though there are hundreds of things in my life that I could look back on and remember marked change in, none of the areas have been fixed so what's the point in pretending like I am somehow beyond them.

I want to learn for the rest of my life how to be okay with not being okay.

..egalitarianism

[Insert snappy intro about me being a 'feminist', 'liberal', 22 year-old Christian talking about submission...]

Equality in a relationship is becoming less and less about opinion and liberation for me and more of an necessity in my understanding of God and the kingdom. The submission conversation has become more frequent and ordinarily pretty contrived due to my social location as young woman in Christian circles.  For a while I pushed back wholly on the topic but recently have wanted a logical and holistic understanding of what it means to me and how I want to live into it.

Equality, in light of the stratified world we live in, is one of the most compelling and important markers of the coming kingdom, and thus one of the central tenants of my faith.  Reading the Bible as a woman puts me in an interesting location within these ideals, finding myself placed somewhere between socially constructed gender roles, controversial biblical passages, and a slue of strong opinions on all 'sides'. 

1. I am told that I need to live in the world but not be of it.  For me this isn't a statement about morality.  It doesn't conjure images of bearing existence in a fallen reality without defiling my spiritual purity, it seems like a calling to imagination.  Live does not mean grin and bear it, it is far more robust and a primary reason why Jesus came to earth, to show us a new way of living in abundance.  For me it means remaining in the broken social structures of society with an informed imagination/knowledge of something better.  This also impacts the way I interpret my Bible.  Rather than trying to spiritualize failing systems (through the scriptures) it shows me ways of living into a new reality of life and equality.

2.  An understanding of equality seems to be founded upon humanity.  I have different characteristics that make me distinct from other people, but primarily I am human and this is the way that I try to think about myself and others.  Rather than trying to understand myself as a woman/white/middle class/Christian in relationship, equality is much more tangible when I am a human in relationship with another human.  I am in process, trying to figure out life like  everyone else and focusing on that dimension of interaction eliminates hierarchy, replacing it with mutuality through journey.

3.  So, as a woman who is in process, it seems like a sinful contradiction for me to try to live into relationship as a submissive, passive partner. It also seems to make me a lazy reader of Bible, choosing to follow small, isolated texts rather than thinking about its broader themes and the purpose of the Bible as whole. 

Christian imagination is critical to my faith and life and to not exercise it is sin. So, living prescriptively on very few sections of scripture does not make any sense to me.  I am to submit and love in relationship because everyone is to submit and love in relationship.  The conversation about female submission seems to be a limiting, narrow distraction from larger kingdom mandates.  It just seems silly at this point and a failure of imagination.  The equality of the kingdom isn't to be an abstract set of  ideals that I will embody in the future, they are the motivations of my current life and my current relationships.  To live into inequality of any form is laziness on my part (or a unwillingness to challenge contemporary social roles) and the best way to neutralize my existence as a person who is to incarnate the world as it will be.

Whatever.