'cause we're gonna be all right

 Ack. So I'm a bad blogger. Maybe the heat's gotten to me. Or perhaps I'm just lazy.


I feel sometimes when I'm starting to write that I've got something itching right under my skin, trying to get out, and it's hard to actually figure out what that itch means. Some days, a lot of days, I don't even try.

In any case, thoughts about things.

1. Around the PA area, two unrelated but parallel events: The NCAA handed down sanctions to Penn State and Msgnr. William Lynn was convicted of child endangerment and sentenced to three to six years in prison. People in power, covering their asses and harming others in the meantime.
I've no stake in the Penn State part, except that I wonder how much this will affect the community at large, as this article points out.
As for Monsignor Lynn, well. Every time I try to write, or even think about the abuse cases in the Church, it comes out something like this: aofujasjdakjdhfajsdhRAGE. I became Catholic in part because of the social teachings of the Church: the preferential option for the poor, the belief in human dignity and the common good. I believe in those things, strongly. And between this and the Vatican's attack on the nuns, my hope just starts to dwindle.
Sigh.

2.On the shootings in Colorado:
It's about Guns, Not About Satan

Sort of related, but not really: my friend Logan wrote a book called Reborn on the Fourth of July, a discussion about pacifism, just war, and the military. (I haven't read it yet, but I know Logan, and it should be good.)

3. And because the world is depressing, and I have too much on my mind, have a cat:

 (Note that she is sleeping on top of my copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Lit cat!)

teach us to sit still

I am not a still person. I think anyone who even casually observes me can see this: my leg jiggles, or my fingers tap, or my whole body rocks (sometimes to a tune that's only inside of my head). When I'm sitting in a group, I feel sorry for the people sitting next to me, because if my leg wiggles, the entire bench or row does as well.

My mind is much the same as my body: constantly in motion. It jumps from one point to the next, one moment to the next, without much regard for what I want it to do (ADD runs in my family; I was once told that I "lean" toward ADD without actually being it). My thoughts are sort of like a roller coaster, or perhaps a leaping animal is a better analogy. It's why, I think, that writing is good for me, because it forces me to stay on track.

And it's also the reason that Lent is a hard liturgical season for me. By its nature, Lent wants us to "sit still," as Eliot puts it, to contemplate. And as much as I want to be contemplative, I'm much more inclined to want to act. I'd never be a good Benedictine.

On Ash Wednesday, when the priest puts the ashes on your forehead, he says one of two things: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return," or "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel." And those both interest me, because one could argue that the first is contemplative (remember) and the other is active (turn, be faithful). And perhaps it points to the fact that both contemplation and action are necessary for faith. And while I think Lent is more contemplative, more about remembering and thinking and, well, repenting, than anything else, I also think that contemplation and action aren't really that dichotomous. We can't have Mary without Martha, after all; otherwise, we'd starve.

On a practical level, contemplation is hard. On a daily basis, I'm distracted by a number of things: work, food, friends, family, exercise, books, whether I need to do the dishes, whether I'm going to get over this damn writer's block. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They're all important things, obviously. But sometimes, sometimes, I need to sit still. And that is hard.

I have taken, in the past years, not to praying in my own words, mainly because my thoughts are disjointed and kind of broken up. As Anne Lamott says, there are only two types of prayers: help me, help me, help me and thank you, thank you, thank you. I often pray this well-known one:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.

At Sacred Heart in Camden, during Lent, we'd sing Julian of Norwich in response to the prayers and intercessions: all shall be well, and all shall be well; all manner of thing shall be well. I repeat that often to myself, sometimes in prayer, sometimes just to remind myself that this is not the end of the world.

all shall be well.

For a more theological, and a much less disjointed, look at Lent, ya'll should head over to my friend Rebecca's blog and check out her post on Ash Wednesday.

There's a need for anything that frees us

In my family, as with many families, we have many traditions surrounding the holidays. Christmas Eve dinner, for example, is usually an attempt at the Italian 7-fish dinner (although we end up substituting in different fish, because the traditional ones are expensive). All of us have the Advent calendar memorized, because it's the same one we've used since we were kids. There's usually a viewing of Charlie Brown's Christmas at some point. We can harmonize to the "For unto us a child is born" in Handel's Messiah (and yes, I know it's really for Easter). And then there's the usual stuff, like the tree and the presents and everything.

We have slightly unusual traditions as well.

My brother once said that he waits until finals are over (he's in college) and then he starts playing The Chieftains' album "The Bells of Dublin." That's when he knows it's Christmas, he says. "The Bells of Dublin" is also my favorite, and we play it so often that we get sick of it by Epiphany. A lot of the album is Irish music, but my favorite song on the CD is "The Rebel Jesus" by Jackson Browne:



Well, we guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus.

We also usually end up watching "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever." I had the book when I was a kid, and at some point, my parents bought the movie. It's this funny story about the Herdemans, the "bad kids" in town, invading the church Christmas pageant. Here's a clip (don't mind the hair and the clothes; it was made in the '80s):



There are some gems in there: 
Imogene: What's a pageant?
Alice: It's a play.
Imogene: Like on TV? What's it about?
Alice: It's about Jesus.
Imogene: Everything here is.


You could say that "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" is about redemption--for the Herdemans, who find themselves in the midst of church, and for the church members, who are more than skeptical about these kids coming in and taking over their pageant. But there's also some interesting social commentary in the movie and book: the kids have no father; their mother works two jobs; the kids get pushed along without really learning anything in school because no teacher wants to have them twice; no one really lends a hand to this family that is obviously struggling (except, in the movie, for the poor social worker, who seems underpaid and overworked).

I don't know if this commentary was intentional or just a convenient plot device. But I do think that both "The Rebel Jesus" and "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" point to a theme that runs deep in Christianity (even if it often gets lost in the voices that scream and shout): this longing for justice, and this reminder that God became incarnated in a poor carpenter.

I think that matters.

bringing heaven to earth; or, reflections on ordinariness

A few years ago, I got about 3 minutes of fame in a documentary called The Ordinary Radicals. 
 First off, here's the trailer so you can get an idea:




Side note: It was weird, let me tell you, to see myself on the big screen (I hid my face and covered my ears when I came on). But that's not the point here.

I know a lot of the people in the film--some are friends; some I lived with; some are just acquaintances--and I know the filmmaker, Jamie Moffett. A lot of them are really the best people I know. And they live in, well, radical ways: in communities, or off the grid, or as nomads.

When I was filmed, I was living in a community house in Camden, NJ. Camden is one of the US's poorest, most dangerous cities. I write about Camden a lot because the year I lived there gave me invaluable experiences and some insight into race, poverty, and injustice. I worked as a grant writer for a small non-profit, as a teacher's aide for second graders, and as an academic aide/Americorps summer service member at a great organization called The Work Group.

I don't know how radical it was. Or rather, how radical I was. Most days I felt pretty ordinary (wake up to the cat licking your face, go to work, come home and cook dinner, hang out with your housemates). Some days were harder than others. But it was worth it, I think--and I probably would have stayed if I hadn't had the urge to go to grad school.

So why am I thinking about this now, three years later? Partially it has to do with PAPA Fest: it's a place for those sorts of radicals, people who don't really make a big fuss about how they live--they just do it. They live their lives mostly quietly, on the fringe, whether it's in rural Kentucky or urban Philadelphia. So PAPA Fest made me think about my life.

These days, I have a 9-5 job at a college, where I tutor in writing and provide academic support to struggling students. In the fall, my job will change slightly--I'll be helping to direct our writing center and training new peer tutors. On one hand, it's sort of a dream job. I get to help students learn to write. I don't grade. I'm, for the most part, on my own, since my supervisor gives me a ton of leeway to try different things.

On another hand (we have more than two hands here), students who go to art school are in some way--economically, educationally--privileged. To study art--to study the humanities in general, I think--is a privilege. That's not a bad thing; I certainly don't want to disrespect my students, or myself, since my background is in literature. But here's me, after years of hanging out with homeless folks, working in shelters, living in places like Camden, and now I'm working at a college?

And yet, on another hand, a lot of my students come from the Philly school district. And the Philadelphia school district is...let's just say it's not doing too well. And the students who come from the Philly schools tend to be the weakest. We catch the Philly school district's aftermath, students who come from, perhaps, the top of their classes in their schools and then can't make it in college. It's depressing.

When I was in college, I struggled to juggle my two sides: my very academic side that just wanted to read and write and the caring-about-social-justice side that made me want to do things. I don't know which one to pick, I remember saying to one of my professors, and, wise woman that she is, she looked back at me and said, Do you have to pick?

I am still struggling to answer that question. What's my life like now? I have that 9 to 5 job. I live in West Philly. My housemates and I are white girls in a mostly African-American neighborhood. I don't own a car (though my housemates do), and I take public transportation (mainly because I'm kind of afraid of biking in the city). We have a little garden, and we compost. We eat on our front porch when it's nice. When there are block parties and we're around, we do some grilling. I go to Mass with one of my neighbors, who's in her 70s or 80s and has been going to this particular church since the 1950s. I volunteer twice a month at one of Project HOME's "safe havens" for chronically homeless men with mental illnesses.

My life is not very radical. On a daily basis, it's downright ordinary. And I worry sometimes about that ordinariness, like I've perhaps given up on my values or my ideals.

But. But. I want to say this, that the basis of my faith--the basis of my life--is "love one another." Love your neighbor and your enemy. Love the person who blasts music at one in the morning. Love your students who show up at your door when their papers are due in two hours. Love your family when they drive you crazy and your roommates even when you want to hole up and not talk to anyone. But then--how do you love the drug dealers down the street? Or the cops who are prone to violence? Or the men who cat-call you when you're walking to the trolley?

 I don't really have the answers to those questions (hell, when do I ever have answers?). I think, sometimes, that most of my life is kind of fumbling around in the dark or trying to figure out where I fit in. Because I'm not a nomad or a farmer--if I tried to fit myself into one of those lives, it would be liking sticking a square peg in a round hole. And I'm trying to make myself okay with that.

we cannot live, except thus mutually; or, reflections on PAPA Fest

It's a little strange being back in civilization.

For the past week, I've been out in the middle-of-nowhere PA, helping to organize and participate in PAPA Fest.* 

It's a little hard to explain our little festival. When people ask, I call it an "arts and music and learning festival," but that's just a part of it. When the organizers met in the fall to start planning, we went through a ton of drafts of vision and mission statements because we had so many different ideas. To give you a feel, here's what we came up with as a vision statement:

"PAPA Festival seeks to continue to be a national volunteer-run, donation-based event that gathers a dynamic group of Christians and others to form a little village where we celebrate, support, and empower one another. Motivated by the Spirit of God, we foster the development of DIY, earth-sustaining, and relationship-building skills that we take home to create a more compassionate and just world."

Yeah. That's long and complicated. And perhaps a little (a little, you say?) idealistic. But that is our vision. We're volunteer-run: no one gets paid. We're donation-based: we ask for about $20 per adult for admission, but if you can't pay that, we'll let you in, and if you want to give more, we'll take it.

We're Christians, most of us. And that's certainly a connecting point for us. Most of us are on the fringes, in our lifestyles, our theology, our politics, whatever, and we feel disconnected or alienated from the church as it exists in the US and from our society. We had people who weren't Christians who came, and while it was a very explicitly Christian festival (we had morning liturgy and afternoon and evening daily prayer), I hope that they felt welcome.

The festival originally came out of a couple of intentional communities, like the simple way in Philly and the Camden Houses (where I lived for a year), but we've broadened quite a bit since then. Most of us who organized the festival are not formally connected to a community. And although we say we're a "convergence of communities and movements," we're also a convergence of individuals.

We're not monolithic, and that's what I love. We come from a broad swath of lifestyles and theological backgrounds. If you looked around at our little village, you'd see big families and you'd see single people, old people (the oldest participant was 81) and young (we had about 80 kids in our Children's Village). A lot of people who come try to live "off the grid," but a lot of us also come from cities and are just trying to make our lives a little more sustainable.

We had a group of folks come from New Jerusalem, an addiction recovery community in Philadelphia. We had anarcho-primitivists. We had people who live in intentional communities and people who were coming out of the intentional community movement. We had people who were white, black, Asian, Mexican. We had people like me, who live a relatively normal life but try to push back at the dominant, oppressive culture in small ways. There was a photographer there who was covering the festival, and she said that she'd covered a Neo-Pagan gathering a few weeks before that seemed similar. I said we should connect with them. I think we'd find more common ground than not.

Mainly, we're a weird bunch of folks.

One of the biggest things we try to do is to build from the ground up. The festival switches places every time. In 2006, it was in Tennessee. In 2008, it was in Illinois. This year, it was in PA. We built a stage and a chapel in two days. We had composting toilets (our "Pootown") and asked people to bring their own dishes and silverware to minimize waste. We had communal recycling and compost bins. We wanted to be easy on the earth, because (as my friend Joy's t-shirt says), it belongs to our great-grandchildren and we should handle it unselfishly.

It's a learning festival in a lot of ways. During the day, we have "learning workshops" and "skill shares." I went to a learning workshop on Christianity and Feminism and one on militarism and pacifism, and to a skill share on permaculture. But there were many more. A lot of them had to do with living in community, but not all. My friend Lauren (whom I met there and whom I now consider a friend) led a workshop called "Queering the Beloved Community," trying to provide a safe space for LGBTQ folks and allies. There were workshops on peacemaking and reconciliation, on ethnicity and racism. There were skill shares on jewelery making and on drumming, on the circus, on gathering food from the forest.

As the Volunteer Coordinator, my job was to make sure the day-to-day things ran smoothly. The whole festival ran on volunteers: we asked all people who came to volunteer each day--to take out the trash and compost and recycling, to help out with the kids, to help direct parking, so on and so forth. It was exhausting because I coordinated and managed all of that, but it was wonderful. I loved my "job" (I did it at the '08 festival, too) because I could see firsthand how much people loved being there and how much they were willing to lend a hand.

A lot of the festival is about interdependence: learning to live with and lean on each other, learning to see each other as Christ would see us, and learning to love the world because God made it good. "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other," Mother Teresa once said--and I think we're trying to relearn what exactly it means to belong to each other.

I'm going to post pictures soon....once I buy a new camera cord. I lost mine.


*People Against Poverty and Apathy. We've wanted to change the name for a variety of reasons (we feel like we should stand for something, not just against; we'd like to be more inclusive by using a non-masculine name; so on and so forth), but no one's been able to agree on another name. It is, however, kind of fun because the majority of the organizers are women; I like to call us the PAPA mamas.

what I think about when I think about faith, part 3

Part one is here. Part two is here.

And at long last, here is part three.

I graduated from college in 2006, which makes this year my fifth year out (holy crap, that's scary).

During my first year out of college, I joined the Capuchin Franciscan Volunteer Corps (CapCorps for short). They placed me at N Street Village, a nonprofit that serves homeless women. N Street started out of Luther Place Memorial Church in the 70s, when the church decided to open its doors and let people sleep inside. It's grown into a multi-services organization open to people of all (and no) faiths. I was in the day center, where anyone could walk in off the street and find a safe place to spend the day.

I'd already spent a bunch of time hanging out with people who were homeless, but I never had to enforce specific rules or boundaries other than my own personal ones. But suddenly, here I was, this 23-year-old kid who had to tell women twice her age that they couldn't get more than one shirt out of the clothing closet or had to do one more chore in order to come inside during the weekend. Add race to the whole thing, and I was a rather confused mess.

The women told me that they liked me because I treated them like people, not clients. I was bad at my job for the same reason. I had a hard time putting my foot down because my head got in the way. My boss, the day center manager, was probably a saving grace here: she was formerly homeless and a recovering alcoholic who'd gone through N Street's program herself. She could pick out bullshit a mile away. She often picked out my bullshit a mile away.

"No one's crazy 24/7," she'd say to us. Even our most mentally ill clients had stunning moments of lucidity. We had one women who was schizophrenic who rarely ate; we used to coax her with peanut butter and jelly because for months, that was the only thing she would eat. Then, one day, out of the blue, she looked up at us and said, "Why are you giving me peanut butter? I don't want peanut butter."

I have tons of stories about N Street (at least one ends with bruises up and down my arms). But that was only part of my year. There was also my housemates (who are wonderful) and the Capuchin Franciscans, with whom we spent a lot of time.

The Capuchins taught me about life together, about being in a place where you (plural) sometimes have disparate views but a common purpose. The Capuchins lived together in a friary, 35 men under one roof. You can imagine that they must butt heads a lot. We'd go over for Sunday evening prayer and dinner once a month or so, and it was sort of funny--barring any other visitors, it would be us four girls and a room full of brown habits.

We had a house friar, Brother Mark (one of my housemates nicknamed him our "frother-brother"), who'd come over once a week, have dinner with us and hang out. If there were conflicts, he'd be the one to mediate; luckily, we didn't have serious conflicts, and we got along well (our program director, Brother Dennis, called us "the walking slumber party").

Being a full-time volunteer teaches you, in some ways, about faith and trust. Room, board, transportation, and health insurance were covered. We were given $400 a month for groceries ($25/week/person), whatever we needed for transportation (for me, it was $44/month for a bus pass), and the program dealt with the rent. Other than that, we were given $100/month for living expenses. Sometimes it was plenty of money; other times, we'd get to the end of the month and have to stretch it out. It put us, in a limited way, in the position of the people we worked with, having to take their checks and make them work til the end of the month.

It wasn't perfect, obviously; most of us had savings we could fall back on, and we had numerous safety nets, like family and the volunteer corps itself. But it wasn't supposed to be an experiment, as, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was. It was supposed to be an experience in service, in life together, in faith.

(A side note: one of my favorite things about the Capuchins is that they rented out part of the friary space to TASSC--Torture Abolition and Support Survivor Coalition.)

The year after that, I moved to Camden, NJ. My main post about Camden is here.

Camden taught me a lot of things--things about race and class, about how the environment is connected to poverty, about the ways in which the powerful can ignore the marginalized without being affected. It also taught me about the beautiful side of the Church, because our community was connected to Sacred Heart. One of the odd things about Sacred Heart is that most of the parishioners come from outside of Camden (most of the kids at the school, by contrast, are from Camden and not Catholic. Fr. Michael jokes that it's a Catholic school for Baptist kids). Yet so many of them chose to spend their free time in our neighborhood: in the greenhouse and the garden, at the school, at Joe's Place, which serves neighborhood dinners a couple times a month. It's not perfect, obviously, because too much and you can create a power imbalance. But there's an element of working together with people, especially kids and their parents, that helps to level the playing field a little.

What it taught me was a continuation of what I learned as a YACHT kid and at N Street about the complexities of human interaction. In Camden, I was there all the time. There was no going home, because this was home. And if we are, as they say, supposed to see the face of Christ in others, then Camden is a great learning experience in that--because what do you say to the woman who shows up at your door, who's strung out on drugs and got every disease in the book? Well, you put on gloves and wrap up her bleeding hands and give her food...and when you turn around, she steals your wallet. That's my learning experience. And what it comes down to is this: what do you say to that woman the next time she comes to your door?


In other words, oh, Sarah. Where are your big ideals now? --I think part of the answer is that I've given up on big ideals (though, seriously, what is so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?), that I've consigned myself to what I can do around me.

I went back to school after my year in Camden. It's a bit like culture whiplash, going from Camden to University City. I work at a college now. In some ways, it feels like selling out, because working at a college necessarily means working with kids who are privileged in some ways. In others, it feels like I'm where I should be--working within my field, and often working with students who are underprepared for college.


The past few years have taught me this: the face of Christ is not pretty. It's often bruised, bleeding, malnourished, desperate, manipulative, angry, mean. Sometimes it tells you hard truths, and sometimes it yells at you things you don't want to hear. Sometimes it's a beautiful child; other times, that beautiful child is throwing a tantrum. Sometimes, it's your best friend; other times, it's your worst enemy.

I cannot separate my faith from the way I look at others. It's a people-trump-ideology ideology, if that makes sense ('swhy I support marriage equality, for example: because to believe otherwise hurts people I know and love). I once said to a friend of mine that my faith often follows my actions, that I can't believe unless I do. I don't necessarily think that that's a bad thing.

But also--as I was saying to another friend the other day--we are in flux. We don't stop changing, and perhaps in five years, I'll look at what I've written and realize that I'm completely different.

For now, though? This rambling set of posts hopefully gives a little bit of insight about "what I think about when I think about faith."

pointing to the agony of death and birth

Because every day needs a little poetry, and no less Good Friday:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

    Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

    The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

    The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

    The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

-T.S. Eliot, "East Coker" IV

Four Quartets

what I think about when I think about faith, part 2

College.

After spending 12 years in public school, I decided that I wanted something different. When I started researching schools, I focused mainly on Christian colleges.

I ended up going to Eastern University for a few reasons. The first was practical: I got a full-tuition scholarship from them. I also got into their honors college, which was, in part, a Great Books program. Plus, every other Christian college I visited had some sort of chapel requirement, as in "you must go to chapel x many times per semester." Eastern doesn't have that; whether you go to chapel or to any other group is entirely voluntary.

And then there were the other reasons. Eastern has a reputation for turning out alumni who tend to be on the...I guess you'd call them the radical side. I actually had friends whose churches warned them against coming to Eastern, because it was too "liberal" (I snicker at this now). When I started college in 2002, Tony Campolo was probably the school's most famous alumnus/professor. In any case, they have a focus on social justice and social action, which is what I wanted.

In general, college was tumultuous for me. But, besides that, it shaped me in important ways; I think it would be safe to say that I'd be in a very different place now if I hadn't gone to Eastern.

what I think about when I think about faith, part one

So I started this post about three weeks ago, and, man. It's really hard to gather my thoughts, which is why it's so late. But here you are.

So it's Lent, which is when I get all contemplative and stuff. Of course, it also means that I'm probably going to ramble, so please forgive me in advance. Mea culpa.

The reason that I tend to ramble when I think about my faith is that I'm usually rather conflicted, and so my thoughts get...complicated.

In any case, some background to begin, because, to be honest, I can't separate out my personal history from the way I think about faith. I was raised Protestant--evangelical, specifically. My parents, by contrast, grew up Catholic. I grew up in Baptist churches, one on Long Island, one in Massachusetts. They were...well, they were very different from each other.