Ten Points about Love as the Signpost Along the Way: Retreat Notes, Day Three

Pilgrim Feet

More reflections from this period of retreat--which I offer with some concern that I'm foisting on others what are very private thoughts about very private struggles, which may not be of much interest to anyone but me, and which probably ought not to receive much attention from others, because these are idiosyncratic note-jottings from the margins of the Catholic church and its theological traditions today:*

When Things Fall Apart: Blogging Through Crisis (Even in Pajamas)

I’ve fallen behind with notices about the many welcome comments that have appeared on this blog in the past two days—most of them in response to my musings on the weekend about the abortion issue and how it’s interplaying now with the health care debate. I’m behind for a number of reasons, including work on a lecture that I’ll be giving tomorrow evening.

The more important reason I’m behind, though, is a personal crisis that has made me slow to blog recently—a soul crisis. It’s, in a sense, a theodicy crisis, a question about where God is in a world in which evil sometimes seems to be definitively unmasked, and then forces that collude with evil step in and put the mask back on. And we’re all supposed to act as if we haven’t seen what’s underneath the mask and go about our business.

I may well blog more directly about this crisis at some point down the road. I almost have to do so, because it presents me with an existential crisis as I blog. I struggle to know what I can say to others that in any way makes sense of the raw data of turbulent experience, when I can’t even make sense of some of my own experiences.

How to talk about hope, faith, solidarity, God, in a world in which evil just keeps on triumphing, or seeming to triumph? What makes the crisis more acute for me is that those colluding to put the mask back on the authority figure that was briefly unmasked are church people, people who wear the cloth, some of them. They include a Methodist bishop and a passel of Methodist pastors, who ought to have sense enough to recognize that the person they keep propping up has done serious damage to a whole string of people, and should be stopped.

Recent events have made it clear that, wherever this person goes, she ends up causing grievous harm to a far from insignificant number of people under her authority, and to the institutions she leads. When I first encountered her and began to work with her, she did not yet have a track record, and so it was difficult to see clearly what was going on with her.

I confess that I supported the person in question for longer than I should have. I gave her the benefit of the doubt even when I found some of her tactics and claims incomprehensible, because she is doubly a minority, and I wanted to assist her as someone who appeared to need the assistance of those who care about prejudice and marginalization. And I assumed that my inability to comprehend had everything to do with my lack of knowledge about what it was like to walk in her shoes, as someone doubly stigmatized.

But now that she has replicated the pattern of abusive leadership at a second institution, and has become even more grossly abusive and destructive in her second position of leadership, I see what I could not see previously. She now has a proven track record. She now has a legacy as a leader, and it’s a horrendous one.

For whatever reasons—perhaps because she simply cannot help herself, as she externalizes some twisted drama in the depths of her own soul—she creates chaos and instability all around her. She leads by dividing, by attacking, by setting one person under her authority against another. Rather than attempting to assure that those she chooses for leadership positions work together and excel at what they do, she undermines them and uses one member of her leadership team as an attack dog to savage others.

She deliberately pits the worst people on her leadership teams against the best, as she singles out those with promise and hounds them out of their positions. She is not above using lies, slander, any tactics of abuse that work, no matter how immoral, to disempower her perceived detractors and to empower incompetent and morally compromised cronies.

And she gets away with this behavior, over and over. She does so, in part, because she’s adroit about playing the race and gender cards when she’s exposed. She tries to turn the tables and make it appear that those who have the goods on her lack credibility, because they are out to get her due to her double minority status.

She also knows how to work power circuits. In her current battles, I happen to know that she has contacted at least two officials at the highest levels of the current federal administration. I would not put it past this person—and I’m not exaggerating as I say this—to contact the president himself and try to secure his assistance in her current battles.

One of the most bizarre claims I have heard her make—and others have heard this as well; it’s talked about fairly widely in the circle of the many folks she has damaged—is that a former U.S. president has targeted her and is responsible for everything that goes wrong with her leadership.

Well, enough of that story. I wanted to sketch its bare bones simply to provide some suggestion of what I’m struggling with these days, as the person in question has appeared to be decisively exposed as not only an incompetent but a corrupt leader, and then has quickly received statements of support from her supervisors, including people in positions of authority in the United Methodist church that sponsors the institution she is leading.

It’s hard to watch something like this. And even harder to understand where God is in a world in which this and many other seemingly evil events transpire. I know full well that my own little struggle and this series of events are far from the worst thing going on in the word. But it happens to be my own little drama right now, the struggle for understanding that most directly engages me right now.

And I have to try to find my way through it, in order to know how to keep on blogging with any sincerity or conviction here.

I've chosen a painting of Teresa of Avila to illustrate this posting because her feast day comes up this week, in the Catholic liturgical calendar. And because Teresa, who apparently had Jewish blood as did her fellow mystic and friend John of the Cross, was comfortable, as the Jewish tradition is, with asking God questions and complaining about God's way of doing things. According to one story, when she was traveling in her busy life of founding Carmels and a donkey dumped her into a river she was crossing, she said to God, "If this is how you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few."

I like Teresa, too, because she danced with her sisters. And because she held onto her frying pan and tried to keep on cooking for her sisters when she went into ecstasy. And because she would get up in the night and sit on the stairs and hold a lighted lantern to help her sisters find their way to the chapel for prayers. And because she prayed in exasperation that God send her fewer mystics and more people interested in scrubbing floors. And because she maintained that the Lord walks among the pots and pans in the kitchen every bit as much as in holy places.

Among the Pots and Pans

I dreamt last night that I’m called on to give a sermon—an impromptu, on-the-spot sermon. I’m unprepared. In the dream, it’s not clear to me who is the audience. And why me? I don’t give sermons. All of this is somehow happening in a kitchen, a place in which I always feel at home, the center of the home, a place where I wile away the hours cooking for those I love, while meditating and dreaming without effort.

I decide immediately that the only possible sermon I can give is to repeat what Teresa of Avila once said about her own hours in her Carmel kitchen: El Señor anda entre los cucheros, the Lord walks among the pots and pans. I decide that the most honest sermon I can give is to point to Teresa—to tell the audience that I am not prepared to speak at length, that the really effective sermon is the life lived, not the words spoken.

The Lord walks among the pots and pans: Teresa said this to her sisters who imagined that the life of meditation is somehow removed from the everyday reality of the kitchen. Teresa said this to those who imagine that one removes oneself from the mess of everyday life in order to pray. Teresa demonstrated otherwise by remaining in the kitchen to cook for her sisters while they went to chapel to pray. It was reported of Teresa that they sometimes returned from their prayers to find her elevated from the floor in ecstasy, still holding the frying pan high over the stove as she prayed.

I’m no Teresa of Avila. The most elevated I ever get is when I climb my small kitchen stepladder to dust my own pots and pans on racks above the stove.

But like Teresa, I am one more pilgrim on the path, on the journey to make sense of a life in which it is often almost impossible to discern divine presence or even any meaning beyond absurdity. Like Teresa, I have to keep challenging myself to look for faith, hope, and love among the pots and pans of my daily existence—the sometimes dirty, unscrubbed pots, the pans into which burnt bits of food seem forever stuck.

This is a challenge that is especially acute for LGBT believers. It is made acute by the churches themselves. The challenge for LGBT believers is often to see any meaning at all in a life journey constantly interrupted by prejudice, particularly when the church both fosters and defends that prejudice.

For many of us, it’s simply easier to renounce the spiritual quest altogether, at least, to renounce it as a formal quest. The very terms used by churches—spirituality, journey, compassion, faith—become, for many of us, so blackened by the fires of constant rejection, that we rightly choose to turn our backs forever on institutions that preach tolerance while practicing hate. I completely understand the response of the many LGBT believers who turn their backs on churches that cherish the warm-fuzzy self-assurance that they love, tolerate, accept, heal, and affirm when what they practice is anything but love, toleration, acceptance, healing, and affirmation.

It is very difficult for us who are LGBT to maintain even tenuous ties to a church that keeps abusing and expelling us. It is not we who reject the church. It is the church that rejects us. It is the church that devises one stratagem after another to keep us in our place, and when we will not remain there (human beings are so refractory when told to keep to their demeaned places, aren’t they?), simply expels us. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s easier to maintain the fantasy that you really do love the alien you never have to face, than the one right beside you at the communion rail, Sunday after Sunday, raising disquieting questions about your real commitment to love and justice.

We remain on our pilgrim path. We remain on the path, putting one foot after another, because that is all that is given to us—that and the story we have no choice except to tell, no matter how lonely the telling is, no matter how isolated we make ourselves when we tell it, no matter how we open ourselves up to further abuse in the telling of our story. We have to tell that story because it is an assertion of our simple, our bare, humanity against forces that threaten to obliterate that humanity. We have to keep speaking out because that is what human beings do—especially when their humanity is at stake, particularly when the obliterating force is an institution that claims to represent a God who is open heart and open door for all human beings.

We remain on our path among our own little cucheros, trying to find threads of meaning in our interrupted existences. We are on that pilgrim path, regardless of whether the church will acknowledge that we walk along as pilgrims beside the church itself: we do so, we LGBT folk, whether we are churched or unchurched. The Lord who reveals himself among the pots and pans may, in fact, be revealing himself to the pilgrim church in some human existences that the churches regard as too dirty and too marginal—too mundane and too unelevated—to examine carefully.

More’s the pity. The church is the loser when it turns aside from those who might be bearers of divine presence, if only by holding up a mirror to the churches in which they can examine themselves, and decide whether the gospel of love they preach is truly all about love for each and every human being. No church can effectively proclaim God’s welcome while turning away God’s children from its “open” doors . . . . Perhaps the churches today need to stop looking for God in faraway, elevated places, and start looking at the pots and pans in their own kitchens. Who knows what they might find among those unscrubbed and ill-used vessels of everyday life?