holy hellions

“Remind me to talk to you about money, okay?” I blurt in the middle of our conversation. She had asked me about how things were going with the new book. I was learning about her summer trip to Africa. And I had been meaning to ask her for so long, meaning to say something before I ever wrote this post because I never want to write a post that blindsides someone: “How do you feel about fundraising and faith?”

I went to a Presbyterian college, except it didn’t feel like a Presbyterian college because I didn’t really know what Presbyterianism felt like. I was a Catholic. From the Midwest.

But this was North Carolina. And everyone in North Carolina had something to say about God and why they weren’t going to their grandma’s church anymore or why they were going to be a preacher just like their daddy. Even at a school where over 50% of the student body wasn’t from the South, many of us eased into an environment where devoting your life to Christ was something  you had to reckon with, just like bow ties and Bojangles.

When we graduated we went on to do all manner of altruistic things from teaching to pastoring to nursing to mothering to public interest law. Two of my good friends went on to work for mission-minded organizations.

As part of their job responsibilities, they raised support for things like a salary, living expenses, travel costs, etc. I loved these girls, and I wanted them to feel love – “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It didn’t matter if I knew what they were doing exactly or if I agreed with their theology exactly. I gave, sometimes regularly as a “ministry partner” and sometimes one-off gifts to let them know I was still here, still loving, still supporting hundreds of miles away. It wasn’t until our late twenties that I began to wonder, “Isn’t it time for your organization to pay your salary? To afford your benefits? To show you it can sustain your job and appreciate your value as a woman in the workplace?”

I tell my friend this over the phone. I tell her I have been skeptical. I tell her that the rest of us are doing good things with our lives, too, and so what was stopping us from raising our own support for things like having a baby or taking a pay cut or working as a part-time writer, ahem? I also tell her I can be a hypocrite.

Because here’s the thing. In the last two weeks, I have been asking my family and friends to support a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to help start a conversation around the globe sparked by Talking Taboo. What was stopping me from funding the whole thing myself with savings and Roth IRAs and money squirreled away in the change bowl? Then we could do all the things we hope to do with the money raised: set-up events and sponsor conferences and gather groups of women in churches, prisons, and community centers around the country to get frank about their faith and feel oh-so-less-alone.

But this would leave me oh-so-more-alone in the end, driven by my own ideas and efforts rather than the swell of people who might not agree with me but agree that we have a problem with closeted beliefs of all sorts in the church and that we’re all the worse for it if we don’t come up with a solution.

“How do you do it each time, ask for money? Aren’t you so nervous and nauseous?” I ask her.

She laughs. “I try not to take it personally. Whether people give or don’t, it’s not about me. It’s about the vision, a vision that’s so much bigger than I.”

She can’t see me but I’m nodding to myself. I take a deep breath and exhale anxiousness – that we won’t meet our goal, that I could be doing more, that the book will be a flop – and inhale gratitude, taking her advice to not let the petty “thought police” arrest my best efforts to follow a vision and a God who was and is and is to come.

After all, the world is only big enough for one savior complex.

All rights reserved by Andy Fillmore

I knew the question would come soon enough, and I knew that it deserved a answer. A real answer. A cut through the BS kind of answer. After all, it came from a reader I don’t know personally but one who I suspect is a cut through the BS kind of woman. She commented on last week’s post about the new anthology Talking Taboo: ”Are lesbian relationships discussed in your book?”

The short answer is not really. There are two contributors who identify as queer. There’s exploration of same-sex desire in contributor lizzie mcmanus’s piece. But there is not a single essay devoted to the topic of women in love with women who may or may not be in love with the church.

It seems an odd thing to have a book about taboo that doesn’t address one of the biggest ones out there. In fact, it’s something I regret, always knew I would regret. But that’s the rub of letting people speak for themselves. You can’t tell them what issue to talk about or where their comfort should reside. They get to choose, and you don’t get to treat them like mouthpieces.

We asked a number of women we knew who self-identified as lesbians if they would write for the anthology. One turned out to be over 40. Another didn’t have the time. A third agreed and then never turned in her essay. We were scrambling to get someone to talk about it, and yet we were met with the limits of time and who we knew and who we knew might know.

But still, I wish I had tried harder, been more explicit about our desire, asked more people, put a halt on the manuscript deadline. I wish that it had turned out differently on this one.

“You’ve got to be vigilant,” Claudia said to me in the airy meeting room of the Stone House where couches sagged under the weight of woolen blankets and tea steeped in mugs between us. Claudia is this beautiful Jewish woman with gray ringlets and an East Coast directness who runs a retreat center committed to over 50% of its participants being people of color. “Vigilance is the only way we’re able to have such diverse people in our midst.”

She explained further how there were the people who it was easy to work with because you vibe with their style or you already know someone who knows them. But this typically privileges the people who already similar to you if you’re white. or Christian. or a woman. or heterosexual. It’s the people you don’t know about, who you have to go hunting for, who you may even have to go out on a limb to work with, who offer the alchemy of “otherness” that makes for richer partnerships, deeper concoctions of truth – mine, yours, and ours.

It’s a vigilance I’m still learning. A fellow facilitator in my work at the Center for Courage & Renewal shared with me a question she asks herself all the time: “Who do I want to work hard to find ways to work with?” Even if it takes me initiating  Even if it feels like tokenism at first.  Even if it takes a really, really long time to see that it’s worth it.

There are a lot of things I am proud of the book for – for a publishing team spearheaded by two Muslim women at I Speak For Myself, Inc and a Sufi-Buddhist editor at White Cloud Press, for having two co-editors of different colors and ages, for having contributors with a wide variety of ethnic and denominational backgrounds, for having a foreword written by a young man named Andy Marin who runs a Christian bridge-building organization between the LGBT community and social conservatives.

But no, after all this, we still don’t have an essay written on first-hand experience of a lesbian relationship.

I hope it’ll be an important lesson and talking point for the book; some taboos are still taboo because we don’t yet have relationships with the people who are living them. The kind of relationships that are real.

The kind of relationships that slice through BS like a soggy stick of butter and serve it up on some taboo toast.

It’s official. The anthology I’ve been working on with Enuma Okoro for over a year now – Talking Taboo: American Christian Women Get Frank about Faith – is available for pre-sale today. (See our brand spanking new video here.) But I’m not going to ask you buy a book. I’m going to ask you to take a risk.

Okay, fine that risk might be financial, but we’re getting there.

I was in divinity school when I really noticed the problem. There was a lack of honesty and humility in Christian communities around certain topics. For instance, I could talk freely about the sexual line my husband and I had drawn before marriage but I was rarely encouraged (or even asked by friends) to get specific about our sex life after marriage, how many times a week we did it, what kind of lubricant we preferred, if we were working through any hangups. It seemed there were plenty of issues to be debated but little space for the details of lived experiences.

I don’t know about you, but I think God – not the devil – is in the details.

Like when Talking Taboo contributor Carol Howard Merritt shares the perils of negotiating a salary as a female pastor or Patience Perry writes about using menstrual blood as fertilizer. I love when aja monet starts her essay off with a poem about the theology of daughters, and I laugh when Meghan Florian writes about learning “the man’s part” as a single woman at swing class. Yes, I say to myself, tell me more about how you live and what you love and when you feel at home. Because that is how I will feel at home, too – hearing your story, honest and humble.

Brene Brown puts it this way: Empathy is the anecdote for shame.

A few weeks ago, the Barna Group published its latest research findings on Christian leadership, and I was appalled. The most desired quality in a leader was integrity – sure, that’s nice, who’s going to argue? But one of the least desired? Humility. Because why would anyone who had integrity – defined by the researchers as doing the right thing – need to admit their frailty?

There is a problem when integrity is defined as living rightly rather than living wholly. What if integrity meant being honesty about the fragments of light and shadow that make up the whole of who we are? What if honesty meant telling the truth about our very humanness that grows in the dirt of humility? What if we risked showing up in the world as our unashamed, unfinished selves, in all the details?

Talking Taboo is that risk. And I hope when you read Talking Taboo, you’ll want to risk telling your own unspeakable stories to a partner, a community, a pastor, or even at our new website www.webetalkingtaboo.com. I hope you won’t rely on the comfort of the abstract or the safety of an argument. Instead, I hope you’ll speak for yourself, as the forty women in this anthology have committed to do.

We know books aren’t just books, after all. They are conversation partners, dialogue starters, movement makers.

That’s why we are trying to raise money through a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo. In the next forty days, we want to sell the equivalent of 1,000 pre-sale copies of the book to show book buyers that there’s a need and a desire for new Christian voices who are willing to break out of the same-old-story mold. There are all sorts of incentives for your generosity from a What the Frank? badge for your blog or website to an in-person conversation with me and Enuma. You can even choose to have books donated to a local women’s nonprofit of your choice. Since White Cloud Press is a small publisher, the money raised also supports our efforts to promote the book more widely, market events related to the book in churches, on campuses, and through community centers, and support our contributors in raising their voices and being heard.

Even if you don’t identify as a Christian, I hope you’ll agree with the authors of Half the Sky who argue that the most effective change will come from  ”bringing together feminist organizations and evangelical churches and everyone in between.”

—

I was heartened by one statistic in particular from the Barna Group survey. Christians under forty rated humility as a key leadership trait at four times the rate of the overall group. Transformation is afoot. Will you join me in this movement of truth-tellers and risk-takers?

“I don’t feel like talking much today,” I said to him as I shut the passenger side door.

He nodded at me over the top of the car. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be anyone but you.”

It was a rare occurrence. Here it was 1pm on a Sunday and the two of us were together. Not only were we together but we were spending our precious lunch hour going to a barbecue at my associate pastor’s house. An associate pastor who just learned my name. And probably didn’t even know I was married until today. Why would he? I worshiped alone most Sundays.

One has a lot of pre-mature ideas about marriage before actually walking a day in her one-flesh-colored shoes. I took my husband’s last name and then gave it back. I was against the division of labor and now I refuse to let him do the laundry. I begged him to move across the country but I’m the one who acts like every day we stay put is a revelation. To be blunt, I don’t always know what I want till I’m tarred thick with the weight of it and breathing my way through a straw.

I wanted to worship wherever I chose.

I waited for Rush to come around the car and timed my gait to fall in line behind his. He knows I do this at social gatherings, pretend like I’ve seen some bird in a branch so I don’t have to be the first to enter a room. Or if I happen to reach the front door first, I open the door for him like any chivalrous wife would, only it’s a ruse, of course, to avoid the spotlight. He knows, but with him, I get to be me and everyone thinks I’m all the more charming for it.

An awkward woman without a husband? Well, she’s just the picture of unfulfilled longing, or so it feels. Is this how my single friends feel, too, when they walk into a church?

I don’t always like to mention right up front that I’m married. Not because I’m hiding anything really, but because I want people to pay attention to my words and not the picture of my life that may or may not be behind them. And besides, I’ve been the victim of one too many men who’ve inserted some off-handed comment about their wives precisely when we’ve started to get chummy. Like I was flirting. And he was worried.

A couple months back, I found myself sitting next to a woman in her forties or fifties at a church gathering. She mentioned two of her kids were adopted, so I leaned in close and smiled. “It’s a possibility that’s been on my heart.” She smiled back, her eyes pooling in sympathy, and said, “Yes, dear. But are you married?” I quickly assured her I was. “And does your husband feel the same way?” she prodded. Now I was sure she was feeling sorry for me, a pious woman with all these hopes and dreams that my louse of a husband just couldn’t share; how could he if I couldn’t even get him off the couch to come to church with me?

Sometimes I am the biggest sexist in the room. I assume that I am being stereotyped, and then I wind myself into a strait-jacket to prove that I am not that, this is not that.

I wanted to worship with my husband.

But there is only one car, and he is in it on Sunday. He is a pastor, after all, a pastor with a twelve-hour day.

I got one of those hours with him at the barbecue. And I didn’t have to talk to everyone in the room and I had someone to ask, “Can I get you another plate of anything?” and I could look at his watch and say, “He has to get back to work.” My associate pastor even pulled up a chair next to him and made a real effort. I wondered if he felt more at ease with me now that I had a man beside me. I wondered if this was that.

When Rush dropped me off at home, our dog was perched in the window wondering why we weren’t both coming in together.

“Do you have your keys?” he asked. “I’ll wait until you get in.”

I looked back at him and whispered, “The world. This meant the world,” before sticking my flesh-colored flats into the drizzle of a rainy Sunday.

Boston. We’ve been thinking of Boston this week, watching the news or avoiding the news and wondering if it’s a fluke or a whole school of troubled water. Some of us dare not ask what if we had been there at the finish line or what if it had happened closer to home or what if we were shut-in our houses while a wounded nineteen year-old boy was laid out in fear. What if Ben Affleck makes a movie about it?

Church. I’ve been thinking about Church this week, and holding the shards it has shot through our home. It’s a body, too, you know. And bodies are fragile – they get cancer and ticks lodged in their necks and they bend in Gumbi-like yoga poses and crack in operatic wails. They bury bombs.

I never liked asking what if. Growing up, I had a knack for imagining the worst, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure of nightmarish possibilities. ”Worry about nothing but pray about everything” was paraphrased from the book of Philippians. Accept things as they are. Don’t dwell on what might have been. Look toward the hope of all that could be and let that be that place for wild minds.

I recently read a letter to an advice columnist from a man who was a little over forty and wondering when he would know, really know, if he wanted to have kids, and how there was just no telling if in ten years time he would feel relief or regret over a decision made. How then to move forward when to ask what if seemed futile?

Did I tell you yet that the advice columnist’s name is Sugar? Her response was as crystalline as her name. She recalled a line from Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue House” in which he stands in the woods, looking toward his home, and meditating on all that might have been within its walls. He observes, “Our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route.” Sugar put it this way: “We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.”

And so she tells her dear reader to pursue the what if of dreams, pursue it the horizon as only your imagination can. It  helps little to put ourselves back at the scene of what already has been but we can splay ourselves out on the floor with diagrams of what might be for your life. Does this sound sacrilegious? Like we are masters of our own destiny? The sort of “today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town” kind of thinking that was condemned by the apostle James? “For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes,” he assures.

My husband and I played the what if game last week on another one of our epic walk and talks. What if we stayed in Durham five more years? Or how about ten? Would we still be tinkering away on home improvements? Would I still be working till noonday in my pajamas and he some fifteen miles away? Would we still be attending separate churches as separate bodies? And which Body was strong enough to hold us together but supple enough to embrace are differences?

The “what ifs” aren’t all bad, really. Truthfully, I think they are better than “it is what it is.” Lord knows we can’t see but two feet or two days in front of us. Lord knows. But this is how we move forward out of the wreckage. By setting a course in one direction, foregoing all others for the time being, and saying, “In light of what I do know about the world and myself in it, this is the person I intend to be.”

It’s the wind that takes care of the rest.

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day. – Rumi

“You’re so beautiful, you could be a part-time model.”

It was a classic line from an odd-ball source, the New Zealand musical-comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. It’s funny because it’s a compliment and a dig rolled into one. But it’s sad, too, like funny-true things often are, because it implies part-time models – or part-time any persons – are second-rate versions of their full-time peers.

I don’t remember setting out to work part-time when I graduated from college but by virtue of my woman-ness it was held out to me as a viable option. I was about to be married, too, to a man who had been working steadily for two years and was guaranteed a well-paying job for two more after we married. “Does this mean graduate school is off the table?” a rather judge-y professor asked when he learned of my upcoming marriage. I replied, “I don’t know why it would. The way I see it, I have even more freedom to find what I love.”

I didn’t know what I loved, exactly, only that I loved so many things, like writing  and travel planning and dog walking and closet organizing. This is who was birthed out of the canal of a liberal arts education – a woman who couldn’t choose only one, who saw the electricity of connection between each, and who at twenty-two believed she was perfectly capable of trying them all.

An early marriage (and second income) had given me security in one realm of my life only to be widened to the impossible number of possibilities in another. But so too had the privilege of a debt-free education. I had always been a bit mum about my good fortune, secretly proud to not only be free of debt myself but also to pay off what remained of my new husband’s. It gave me permission to have a meltdown at my first full-time job as a magazine account executive and find a 25-hr a week job as an assistant at my alma mater. It gave me freedom to set my own schedule and take Fridays off so I could share the same “weekend” as my youth pastor husband. It gave me security when we finally decided to move across the country and began tallying how many months we could live off our savings while I worked as a minimum-wage publishing intern.

It feels important to say this out loud, especially as I’ve begun giving advice to a handful of young female writers about how to make their way in this vocation.  It’s a strange thing to have to tell them, “Look, it’s because I am married, and almost certainly because I am white and educated and able-bodied, that I am able to thrive on this project-based life of mine where things come piecemeal and I’m at the whim of my gut and good sense.” But I think this honesty does something to free the roving “How does she do it?” thought cycle that so many of us let play in our mind without ever asking, “How do you pay for childcare?” or “Save up for that down payment?” or “Find time to write that book?” It matters how we do it, the individual choices we make and the systems we’re caught up in through no merit of our own.

In Do It Anyway, journalist Courtney E. Martin profiles Tyrone Boucher, a transgender activist who co-founded the blog EnoughEnough.org about young people with large inheritances who are discerning how to redistribute their wealth. He recognizes that even the decision to live simply is a privileged one, where “living on a really small budget [is] an exciting project rather than a stressful necessity.”

It is no small luxury to believe in work/life balance and work for personal/professional renewal and write blog posts without pay or interruption. Sometimes the judge-y voice comes to me in this place, too, when I wonder if Solomon’s mother is speaking directly to me when she asks in the book of Proverbs, “How long, lazy person will you lie down?”

Um, nine hours, at least, ma’am?

A graduate professor once told me that one of the most powerful forms of economic justice is to employ someone. Not hand them money or fund a system but give them the joy of work. I’m thinking of ways to do that now – in book publishing and home gardening and website designing – that is, make someone else’s part-time model dreams come true, too.

When people on the street ask what I do for a living now, I usually say something like, “I work part-time for a Seattle-based nonprofit, and I write.” I can’t always tell if my answer is met with pity (she must want more, poor thing, but the economy and all) or envy (isn’t that peachy, smug thing, with your pedantic dreams.)  But I have the unmerited pleasure of doing what I love, and doing it with people that I love. For this, I feel like I’m definitely in the top three luckiest girls on the street.

Depending on the street.

What do vaginas, dogs, and God have in common? I mention each in a Skype interview about my upcoming book Talking Taboo with Episcopal priest Chris Yaw. (My husband Rush gives him bonus points for not flinching.) Chris is the founder of an online forum for Christian ministers called ChurchNext.

Watch the interview here in which I explain what’s still so taboo about women and faith, how churches can better address gender,
and why the foolishness of Christ is underrated.