Calling, part 2

Discussions of calling need to include career decisions, but need to also encompass the non-work parts of life, employment that is by necessity not life-giving or subject to personal choice (probably applies to 95% of people alive today), and responsibilities for which we are not well-gifted. A theology that can suit all those situations might become less about what we do, and more about who we are as persons. Our doings, especially our income-related doings, are highly contextualized in circumstances largely beyond our control, but personhood can be honored and even flourish in nearly any circumstance.

I didn't receive a divine calling to marriage or motherhood, unless you count raw desire as calling (in which case almost any reasonably good desire becomes calling, and then it loses its usefulness as a concept). God created me with the capacity and the desire, but I called marriage, and I called motherhood (called, begged, beckoned, beseeched, cajoled...). Infertility and infant loss were, arguably and in the theologies of too many evangelicals, God's message that I ought not be a mother. Instead of listening for a call from heaven, I answered the voice of my heart, using the gifts God gave me to marshal resources toward making a family.

The capitalist notion of calling -- individual, gift-based, employment-oriented -- was helpful in my early twenties when I was making choices about how to make a living and contribute to society. I never had the seemingly common problem of the phone not ringing - God called me all the time, and life was packed with good and meaningful things to do. But now, in my mid-thirties, I'm locked into the consequences of those choices, and that model of calling seems less useful. The opportunity cost of changing any variable in my life is simply too high. Maybe the framework of calling isn't very helpful for people who have already answered lots of calls -- we need also to stay put sometimes. Luther's notion of station -- sit in the social location where you were born and shut the hell up -- may be more helpful than Calvin's calling. Calling has a bias toward movement, social mobility, and individual progress. Station could help us think about staying put, but frankly, it just reminds me of those peasants Luther refused to support.

So true self it is. Parker Palmer, Thomas Merton, and why not, Deepak Choprah. Find your true self, and live in ageless body timeless mind - just live your life. And from feminists everywhere, the truth that we are situated in the world by virtue of relationships, at least as much as we exist as individuated selves. It's not all about being a self-actualized, upwardly mobile individual economic actors -- it's also about living in meaningful relationships that include being and doing.

And true self sometimes works outside its giftedness. The emphasis on giftedness in discussions of calling/vocation have troubled me as a wife and mother. Student evaluations of my teaching are much, much stronger than my own internal evaluation of my work at home. I wonder regularly, what if I just suck as a wife and mother? I actually feel OK about my mothering, but I can see as well as anyone else that I'm not a very wifey kind of woman. I'm just not gifted to be patient, kind, generous, hospitable, or forgiving. The Chariots of Fire approach to vocation explains how my friend's husband could argue, from the pulpit, that "God is calling me out of my marriage." Theology around "what I'm supposed to do with my life" needs to be about pursuing giftedness, self-actualization and meaningful service, but also commitment-keeping, which in my case includes repentance, humiliation, long-suffering, and managing negative self-talk. We're often called to work outside our giftedness. Me doing poorly what someone else could do with excellence is good work, when it's mine to do.

I'm not really saying anything new here - there are plenty of good books written on the subject of calling and vocation. If I can contribute anything to the discourse, it would be to end where I began: with a plea to pastors and public speakers to please expand your citations beyond Abraham Kuyper (no square inch of creation...) and Frederick Buechner (world's deep sadness and your great gladness). I realize they may be irresistible to you, so quote them if you must, but please, please stop showing that clip from Chariots of Fire. The Matrix is pretty much over, too.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrring

It could be my friend, my mom, or God, but I'm not answering during the monsters' waking hours, and when they're asleep I'm usually too tired to talk. My children don't like me to take calls -- they whine, distract me, and even hurt themselves with toys to make themselves cry -- anything to keep mommy off the phone. Speaking as one who rarely picks up, it's no wonder I'm rethinking the Christian notion of calling.

Talking about "why do I exist and what does God want me to do with my life" is daily conversation at a Christian college, and not only in the faculty lounge. The question "What does God want me to do?" is poorly framed, though, on two counts. The God character is entirely external - he's far away, calling people and hoping they don't hang up on him (this God always speaks in a low voice to me and my friends, hence the male pronoun). For women especially, we tend to farm out our identity, orienting ourselves around external standards and ideals -- it's little improvement to center life around Telemarketer God than around Boyfriend. I say listen to all of God's voices - the Imago Dei within you, the Holy Spirit within, the Creator in nature, the Author of Scripture, and the God in heaven. And if Telemarketer God does call, by all means answer if you're able.

Second, the focus on doing feeds the capitalist beast at least as much as it feeds the kingdom of God. Focusing vocational conversation on work and employment sacrilizes capitalism's need for constant expansion, making our productive activity appear holy. Public school already prepares citizens for democracy and capitalism - the church should prepare us for critical and constructive engagement with social institutions and should help us learn the art of being human, not just help us find a useful place in the economy. The correlation between spiritual gifts and calling/vocation is problematic for that reason - suggests that what we ought to do is what we're good at doing, which just allows your employer to extract more profit from your labor, and makes you less likely to perceive or complain about your own exploitation.

When it comes to vocation, I like Parker Palmer and Thomas Merton. True self. God has created you to be someone so go ahead, be someone. Palmer asks, "Is the life you're living at peace with the life that is trying to live in you?" Merton encourages us to shed our masks and live before God and the world with our true faces. Life-giving work, as well as leisure, sleep, and relationships, come from a self at peace.

I'm going to talk more about personhood with my students than calling, at least during this season of life in which I'm not accepting any calls. Students, both male and female, seem to appreciate a focus on marriage and family as parts of vocation -- in the past when I was an unusually productive career person in my late 20s, I think students were reluctant to speak their dreams of being moms and dads, or to say that what they really want to get out of college is a spouse. Now, I want to open up that whole conversation, the whole of life, not just the professional part. But even if your deepest dream is to be a wife and mother, I'll also say that I'm not so sure God shares that dream. For myself, I don't think God really cared whether I became a professor, a wife, or even a mother. I believe God honors my freedom and my choices, and the choices to step into those life stations could have been made otherwise. But more on that subject in the next post.

Please vote

Please go to this link and vote for Eric and his fiance - you can read their engagement story, too. Eric is the best friend of the cousin of my good friend Marla, which makes it an absolutely top priority for me to abandon my plans for the day in order to contribute all my resources toward helping them win whatever this contest is. But seriously, their story is pretty amazing.

Go here: www.bridalguide.com/vote and vote for Eric and his fiance.

Perish the thought

I saw my doctor yesterday about my headaches (got labeled 'optical migraines') and am still tearing up at the thought of carrying out her suggestion. I can hardly even write it: stop nursing. She says I should take daily meds, but they aren't allowed while pregant or nursing. "But if I stop nursing, I said, "the headaches will probably stop without medication because of the extra sleep I'll get and the hormone re-adjustment." "Hmmm," she said, "there's your answer."

Several other equally realistic ideas that would reduce my stress enough to end the headaches would be: take on a second stay-at-home-husband, or James and I and our three kids could become live-in nannies for another family (allowing neither of us to work full-time outside the home), or I could take addictive relaxant prescriptions several times daily probably for the rest of my life. Don't sound realistic? Neither does weaning. When I said the boy is 11 months old, she acted like nursing was strange - "Doesn't he eat table food?" I said, "Of course - he eats table food, baby food, breastmilk, stickers, and lint." And don't even get me started on what breastfeeding means in cross-cultural perspective in the history of hominids...the long and the short of it is that I'm right.

Nursing may seem to be the most expendable of my responsibilities, but it's actually the most relaxing and centering thing I do. I look forward to it the way properly religious people look forward to prayer. It is my prayer, calling forth holiness, beauty, and peace in my life.

But not today. Today, I worry while we nurse, holding baby secure by the ankle, furtively glancing side to side for predators. That damn doctor wouldn't come take the baby away from me with one hand, stuffing pills in my mouth with the other...would she?

What I'm working on

I teach one class Monday night, and two on Tuesday morning -- six hours of teaching between 6 pm Monday and noon Tuesday. It is hard to sound, or feel, genuinely passionate about three different subjects back to back -- last night and today it was an overview of three of Margaret Mead's Pacific fieldsites since she was there, then the validity of participant-observation as a research method, and then sexuality in cross-cultural perspective.

Am I, both intellectually and bodily, just rushing from class to class all semester, or is there any order to what I'm working on? On my agenda at the moment is finding encouragement from Madeleine L'Engle in her Crosswicks journals, catching up on Stan Jones/Mark Yarhouse's ex-gay longitudinal study, enjoying Tanya Erzen's ethnography of an ex-gay ministry, finding the zen of mothering in Momma Zen (by Karen Maezen Miller), writing a lecture on global warming in the Pacific, teaching how to conduct a semistructured interview, bemoaning the downfall of the !Kung and the viability of the hunter-gatherer subsistence system, reading half of the first chapter of Tony Jones' "Dispatches" new book and hoping to finish it (the chapter, not the book), trying to work with a Slovenian graphic design firm to illustrate my children's books, making a big promotional poster of myself (ugh) for Scholarship Day at my school, and finishing a grant application. And wondering why I never get around to writing the book that is begging me to write it.

But what really calls me? The point at which my deep gladness and the world's great hunger meet? Dinner: that's my calling. When I make chicken pot pie with Joy of Cooking instead of America's Test Kitchen recipe, I feel God's pleasure. There is no inch of my pie crust over which Jesus does not say, "Mine!" (I'm also teaching vocation in one of my classes, and have HAD IT with Christian cliches on the subject.)

Two things I don't understand

Someone at the college library saw the videos I was about to check out and said, "Those are salty, huh?" I smiled and acted like I understood, like I used to do with jokes about sex when I was twelve. One video is footage of a !Kung child playing with a scorpion for 8 minutes, and the other is a !Kung child having a tantrum for 4 minutes. What does salty even mean, and why is ethnographic film salty? If pressed for a flavor, I might call the films 'sweet' (unlike another of John Marshall's documentaries, "Bitter Melons," in which a !Kung woman bemoans the fruits of the day's gathering.)

Someone asked me for a list of book recommendations, so I gave him my list of favorites. He said, "But what do you read for pleasure?" I said, "Those books -- all spiritual memoir and theology -- are pleasurable to me." The only unpleasurable reading I do is stuff I assigned for class, when I'm (re)reading it under pressure of a deadline. Everything else is pleasure. Does "pleasure reading" mean fluff? Fiction? Best-sellers? I only have two categories for what I read: "inherent interest", and "need to read this before my students do." Both are almost always enjoyable, because the mere act of reading is a pleasure.

Look good or be good: you decide

Someone recently suggested to me that she and I cover up something that happened so others wouldn't find out and get mad at us. She called it our "dirty little secret." In pondering my options, I realized that religious legalism puts the believer in an impossible situation: the tradition demands both moral goodness and the appearance of goodness (reject even the appearance of evil!), which puts people in the catch-22 of either looking good or being good. Doing bad things, feeling shame, and then lying, misrepresenting, or hiding the truth is as much part of my fundagelical background as donuts and coffee after the service.

The thing is, we can't look good all the time because none of us are good all the time -- no, not one. The pressure to appear morally clean compels people to lie, misrepresent their lives, and live in fear, shame, and hiding. It's the same game whether you're committing adultery or just staying out after curfew. In traditions without confession, the church might offer venues for accountability for big sins like sexual ones, but unless you're screwed up enough to get on the church prayer list or to have a group devoted to your problem, you're living morally on your own, individually responsible to maintain your own morality, with the group hovering at a distance threatening public exposure and shame.

What does it even mean to be good? When a person praises a dog, "Good dog!", it's for being just that -- a dog. Maybe a good person is like a good dog, living out a created nature in integrity and wholeness. Part of being human is being bad, so human goodness must contain human badness -- not just repentance and restoration, but the badness itself. The good person, then, doesn't look very good at all. The good person acknowledges her badness, sees it for what it is, and accepts it as part of her being. Goodness is so good, so generous and big, that it provides a home for badness.

Being bad is bad -- I'm not minimizing it. But encouraging people to hide the badness isn't a solution. In considering my 'dirty little secret', I realized that I was trapped. I can't be good and look good -- only one or the other is possible. It's why I hate dressing up for church -- I know there are real people trapped behind all that synthetic fabric, make-up, and uncomfortable shoes. I want church to be a site of resistance where we don't relate to the material world, the clock, and each other in captalist-approved ways (timeliness, professional dress, professionalism in worship). Is it possible to let go of the veneer, the masks, and the lies, and trust goodness to hold us?

The holiness of is

Six days ago all three of my boys succumbed again to a virus that flushes their rotten insides outside by any means possible. I laid down for a rest this afternoon, but it was really more of a waiting than a resting. Whether at work or home, day or night, all of my time has been spent waiting for the next foul discharge. There are six possibilities -- either end of any of the three boys -- which at least keeps it interesting. At least one of them has been sick with this kind of thing for 18 of the last 46 days. A friend said, "Are they sickly, or what?" I replied, without humor, "Look who's talking," because his kid gets sick alot, too.

My waiting was rewarded, five minutes after lying down, but I don't mind having cleaned it up (boy#1, bottom end). Bodily sickness is teaching me the zen of parenting: the moment is what it is, live in it. I'm not saying I've come to embrace vomit or welcome diarrhea into my open arms, but maybe I see now that resistance isn't the best approach. In 2003, I vomited at least 500 times (pregnancy #1), in 2004-5 at least 300 times (pregnancy #2), and in 2006 at least 250 times (pregnancy #3). I resisted it every single time, and learned nothing from the experience.

Last night, however, I made Max cry like he never has cried, and his agony took me right into the heart of the moment, the zen of it. He was sleeping deeply when I picked him up to change his diaper. The shock of the diaper removal prompted a vomit, and a sad, sleepy wail. When I turned the bath water on him, the sad, sleepy wail continued, but punctuated with a sharp protest against the insult just added to his injury. Of course I washed him as quickly as possible and then wrapped him in two towels and held him tightly.

His cry within a cry reminded me that it's OK to get filth on my hands, because I can wash my hands. It's OK to gag and turn away from the filth of my beloved, because it really is awful. And in the midst of it, someone will hold you. In holding Max, I was held. In witnessing his sickness, smallness, and restoration, I saw my own weakness and its loveliness. Weak is strong. Sick is well. Baby is parent, and parent is baby.

This is a wild, unusual season of life, and I'm trying to figure out how I got here and who I am in it. I left the boys at home this morning and sat through a church service. All was clean, crafted, glorious, ephemeral, abstract. It didn't usher me above this world into the heavenlies -- it just made me aware of my disheveled appearance, dry contacts, and mental to-do list. But in cleaning up after my boys, I'm all there, in the moment -- love, suffering, bodies, waste, blankets, warmth -- it is holy simply because it is.

What fool asked, "What is is?" Is is everything.

Breaking the Generational Curse

I accidentally read this book once to my sons. Then I read it a second time at their request, but with my 'remix' version below. This book came from a box of books from my childhood - this one was published by Moody Bible Press in 1971. It explains how female anger cannot be spoken of directly, and how prayer can be used to regulate feelings in a positive direction (i.e. cure depression or anger). It's well-worn condition reflects the strength of this theology in my socialization.

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Full text of the original: Pammie Beth had an upside-down feeling. Do you know what an upside-down feeling is? It is a mixed-up feeling, an upset feeling, a wrong-side-out feeling. She didn't have the upset feeling in her stomach, or in her head, but somewhere inside of her she had it. She was angry. She was angry at the cat, at the dog, at her baby brother, at everyone! Pammie Beth stamped her foot and threw her best doll onto the floor and cried hard! Mother said, "Jesus understands upside-down, mixed-up, upset, wrong-side-out feelings." "I'm sorry, Jesus," said Pammie Beth. "Take away my upside-down, bad feeling. Help me to be good." Jesus helped her, and Pammie Beth hugged the cat, brought water for the dog, and played games with her baby brother. The upside-down feeling went away. Do you ever have the upside-down feeling? Jesus will help you, too, if you ask Him. He'll give you a happy-on-the-inside, smiling-again-on-the-outside feeling! Ask Him!

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Mommy's Remix:

Pammie Beth was angry. Sometimes girls get angry. It is a mixed-up feeling, an upset feeling, a wrong-side-out-feeling, and it's OK to call it anger. She was angry at the cat, at the dog, at her baby brother, at everyone! Pammie Beth stamped her foot and threw her best doll onto the floor and cried hard! Mother said, "It's OK to be angry, Pammie Beth. Mommy gets angry sometimes. Even Jesus got angry. Try not to hurt the cat or your brother when you're angry, but if you do, say you're sorry later." Later, Pammie Beth apologized to the cat, apologized to her brother, and hugged her mommy. After crying, kicking, throwing, and stamping her feet, the anger went away! Do you ever have anger? Thank Jesus for giving you powerful emotions, ways to express them, and people who love you no matter how you feel. Jesus will help you integrate anger into your womanhood! Ask Him!

Short and Sweet

Val calls for six-word memoirs. Here are some of mine - how about yours?

Anthropology Saved My Faith From Naivete

Dated Five Years, Married Someone Else

Three Babies, Two Babies, One Baby

Pedophilia: Faith in God, Not Pastors

From Hal Lindsay to Thomas Merton

In Over My Head (Three Sons)

Like Shirts, Like Sheep

I said to James, "This laundry represents the balance of giving and receiving in my life." I folded 2.5 bins of laundry, and only one item, a pink long-sleeved shirt, belonged to me. The rest included big-toe-worn-through jammies, chewed-cuff 3T shirts, and socks ranging from infant to 4T.

Joan Chittister writes in Wisdom Distilled From The Daily, "listen to what your own life patterns are saying." A new voice in my head is pounding, banging, swooshing out a message to me. I've never had stress headaches before, and these aren't migraines, but they disturb my vision and hearing daily. The headaches are alerting me to the pattern of my days, which is to power through each day (and night) fueled by caffeine, sugar, worry and anger. I say I don't have any options - sleeping through the night isn't an option, eating a meal undisturbed isn't an option, cooking healthy grown-up food isn't an option, working less isn't an option.

I've been skimming The Chemistry of Joy and Bob Greene's book, and sense strongly that I don't need to follow someone else's plan. My headache is shouting out answers: drink water, plan out vitamins, drink kefir, drink licorice or red raspberry tea, breathe, meditate, pray, calm down, do less, say no. Beverages and breath beckon.

There really are lots of things I can't do, or am not willing to do because of their opportunity cost. But I can drink good things and I can breathe, and I think those two things will relieve my headaches. The years I had for adequate self-care before the babies came along are still present within me like a reservoir -- just a token now can tap into that wellness of that not-too-distant past. (Or is it the distant past...I've been reproductively engaged 95% of the time since early 2003 - pregnant, nursing, or on fertility meds 55 out of the last 58 months!)

I may only get one shirt for myself out of every hundred I fold, so I'm going to take my sweet time folding it. After all, the ninety nine matter to Jesus, and so does the one.

What do you hate about Sam's Club?

With ambivalence and full cognizance of my pursuit of low prices, I go to Sam's Club for diapers, which we purchase 900 at a time. Once they're potty-trained, I vow to never return. It's been three days since my last diaper spree, and I'm having persistent negative thoughts and images that I'm unable to stop.

I don't want to live in a culture where people buy meat in huge transparent tubes. I'm distressed by how meat works its way into our food supply. I don't think people need such large containers of mayonnaise. Totino's Pizza Rolls are a little bit gross in a normal-sized container, and more gross in mega-super-duper boxes.

I don't like the way warehouse stores make me feel about myself, the shape of my ass, or the health of my family. Know what I mean?

Not feeling very pacific about the Pacific

My Pacific Cultures course begins in 20 minutes. Anthropology often serves as a mirror, and developing this course is no exception, exposing vestiges of faulty assumptions about the vocation of teaching. I don't know much about the Pacific Islands, but I have had an academic crush on Margaret Mead for about fifteen years. (Samoa _is_ in the Pacific, right?) I've felt panicky about teaching a subject in which I am not expert. But if students really wanted to know about the Pacific, couldn't they teach themselves? Or better yet, e-mail with a Fijian or Sambian 'penpal'? Margaret Mead was an expert on Samoa because only a handful of other Americans had ever been there. There was a discrete body of knowledge on the topic, and only a few people had their hands on it.

Today's students have instant access to most available information. They don't need me to contain all that information within my brain, and then dump it into their empty heads. That's the 'banking' method of education -- we might call it 'downloading' - critiqued by Paulo Freire. A pedagogy of liberation, in contrast, would help students connect their experiences to the broader life of the world, take ownership of their lived experience, and begin to live more empowered, centered, effectual lives.

I felt worried about this class because I feared some student would ask a question and I wouldn't know the answer. I actually considered lecturing for long periods of time and not allowing questions, just to protect myself. I considered acting more formal or distance -- changing my very self -- to hold them at bay so I wouldn't _care_ if they saw through me. But I realized a few things. First, I do know a little bit about the Pacific - it's the home to classical anthropological fieldwork and theory. Second, I'm not an expert in everything (or anything, for that matter), but I am a good student. I can model ways of learning, critical consumption of on-line information, question-asking, critical assessment of ethnographic data, and, best of all, I can wax eloquent about Margaret Mead.

I don't mean for this to be a self-aggrandizing post -- what I'm really saying is that preparing for this class has opened my eyes to how out-of-step educational practice can be with students' lived experiences. They need credits, they need degrees, and they need to learn how to learn. In today's world, we can't possibly teach them a body of content, or a profession, that will sustain them for their adulthood. The world is changing fast, and information is changing fast. But we can teach them skills, like reading, writing, speaking, googling, and facebooking even, and how to use them with wisdom. And we can help contribute to their ability to participate in their own species -- that, after going to college, they know a little more about how to be human.

Whew - that's my pep talk to myself. Class starts in six minutes. Gotta go.

Emerging reading

It's just a hypothetical, but say an anthropologist who used to worship in an emergent church were to give a guest lecture in a Bible class on the topic of 'the emerging church' in a region where things emergent are either unknown or associated primarily with A Generous Orthodoxy. She feels intimidated by Bible classrooms in general, and on this topic isn't even sure whether her old church was an 'emergent' church, an 'emerging' church, or 'church associated with emergent,' or just a 'church.' She is quite sure, however, that her talk should include a lot of quotation marks.

What on-line reading should the students do ahead of time? Look at emergent village? or Brian McLaren.com? or something else?

What would be the most important points to make in describing the emerging church?