holy hellions

“Hate is a strong word.” I remember being told that a time or two growing up in the Midwest where most of us little girls were just trying to be likeable and honest.

We tried not to hate Mrs. Drinkwater for casting us as the bus driver in Bridge to Terabithia, tried not to hate Shelby Possom for having a french braid as thick as challah, tried not to hate our parents for divorcing and dating and generally dorking out on us in public.

We didn’t try all that hard not to hate ourselves, not to hate our womanhood. Of course, we didn’t do it overtly; Girl Power was still en vogue. But by the time we became plump and grown, we started distancing ourselves from those women, those women that were too woman-ish. Those women who still waited for a man to initiate, still took his last name on their wedding day, still named their sons Bobby Jr. after their grandaddys, still spent money getting things monogrammed, still apologized for interrupting, still cried at Hallmark commercials, still wore colors like magenta.

These days, I’m finding these distancing desires a bit laughable, a bit disingenuous, a bit sexist, a bit well, un-Christian. I don’t doubt that there are many of us who have experienced great pain because we don’t fit into the cult of true womanhood espoused by our culture, churches, and communities. Or perhaps many of us who conform (whether naturally or intentionally) to a more masculine demeanor that has been rewarded professionally, academically. Whatever our reason for distancing ourselves from women and their rich historicity, it is tearing us apart, tearing me apart on the insides.

In his letter to the ancient church at Ephesus, the Apostle Paul seems to think it preposterous, unfathomable that hate could turn inward like it has. The New International Translation is emphatic to this end in Ephesians 5:29: “After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cared for the church.” Later, 5th-century church father Augustine affirmed the same sentiment in his commentary on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: the body cannot possibly be loathed because it is gift of God, grace of God. How can we hate ourselves and be Christ bearers?

I didn’t think I hated women, didn’t think I hated myself, anyone for that matter until I came across an article by a blogger on finally accepting feminism. She writes about how she didn’t want to be like the other girls,  a tease, a drama queen. She writes how it was easier to laugh off the labels, laugh at herself. You are more fun this way, she told herself. And men like it when you are fun, low-maintenance, laying on your back in white v-necks and boyfriend jeans. It wasn’t until she had daughters (she had wanted a boy) that she realized she had to pay attention to this abstract concept of womanhood, her womanhood and theirs too, and its great responsibilities.

I’ve wrestled for years to make sense of this term: womanhood. And I’ve come to believe that I’d better start owning it. Because if I identify as a woman, if I am received as a woman, then I am an ambassador of womanhood.  Whatever traits I happen to show, whatever choices I happen to pursue are forming this unfinished tapestry of gender possibility for future generations.

Womanhood does not define me; I define it, or rather God defines it through the unique smorgasbord of my inward being and its outward expression, coupled with millions and millions of other threads of expression across the globe. Lord knows some are even magenta.

During an autobiography course that met in a women’s correctional center during my last semester of Divinity School, I was asked to complete the following sentence for a prompt: “What I am most terrified to admit publicly is…” After thinking of a few light vices – such as vanity or nose-picking – I settled on an impossibly unlikeable truth: I wanted to belong. And I hated to admit it.

I didn’t want to be one of the boys, nor really one of the girls. I just wanted to be a lover, not a hater.

Funny girls ain’t no joke. They are a rarified rush of redemptive humor. Within their satirical, slap stick, and sarcastic rhetoric, they hold the paradox of laugh-your-rump-off playfulness and serious-as-all-get-out truthfulness.

I dream of a church where these women are plentiful and pesky. I want to be inundated with their wise-cracking wit on Sunday mornings and beyond.

Tina Fey stands behind the pulpit in her “Liz Lemon” sweatpants and scunchie, preaching about the need for Sabbath with her cry, “O Lord, break the Internet forever.” Amy Poehler is the humble pastor of children’s ministry who admits the only way to manage youth is to enlist robots. “I have, like, 15 robots. They do everything from singing lullabies to driving the kids to soccer. It’s just amazing what robots can do.” And Kristen Wiig is the inspiring worship director who unabashedly punches her fist in the air during hymns, akin to her Bridesmaids‘ dance-along to the 90′s flashback hit “Hold On.”

Before you dismiss my dream as some media-induced, pop candy coma of generation-Yers, I’d argue these women are already present – although perhaps in subtler forms – in our congregations. I know them. I’ve seen them do the robot dance to Justin Beiber. I’ve done it with them.

And I’m telling you, there is something spiritual about their humor. It lifts. It holds. It heals the often tragic nature of our lives. It doesn’t just seek a laugh; it seeks deep joy.

But for some strange (cough <sexism> cough) reason, women don’t unleash this very raw and radical hilarity in the church. They already have a hard enough time being taking seriously. Why risk a failed joke when judgment is already plentiful for their open-toed shoes or kindergarden-teacher tone?

It matters to me that women bring their inner funny girls to their faith. I’m writing my Master’s thesis at Duke Divinity School on Humor in Feminist Homiletics – a highly un-saturated field of research.

Christian Humor? I had a good chuckle at Jon Acuff’s Stuff Christians Like blog and Susan E. Isaac’s Angry Conversations with God. Recently, I even stumbled across Jamie, the Very Worst Missionary and her punchy writing on girl farts. She even (reluctantly) offers tips for humor writing.

Feminist Humor? Look up any of the women enlisted in my liturgical fantasy above.

But Christian Feminist Humor?

Even Amazon puts a strike through one of these descriptors when searching, telling me they can’t possibly be strung together in a resource, let alone an individual.

I’m not convinced, despite the unfounded chorus of sinners that insists women just aren’t that funny. Stringing together paradoxes of wit and wisdom is part of the boundary-breaking nature of our God and our faith and our women.

Through parables, parody, irony, and wit Jesus broke into humanity when humanity had broken apart from God and each other. African American folk stories characterized the one who refused to signify with his or her cultural categories as a trickster, who acts very much like a savior to his or her people when there appears to be no way out of oppressive identity politics. In this way, Jesus was a sort of holy trickster who blurred the distinctions between who was in and who was out, what was central and what was peripheral, and where God’s presence could be found.

Consider the humor of the Christian foremother Sarah who when faced with the absurdity of God’s plan for her to bear children in old age asks, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” (Genesis 18:12). In that moment of revelation, her laughter ruptured the biological “reality” that she could not bear children and the theological “truth” that she was only a woman in whom God could not possibly place God’s promise. Sarah modeled what some humorists call “incongruity theory,” a characteristic of women’s sense of humor that depends on breaking down stereotypes rather than cementing them. In this way, Sarah’s laughter broke up the sacred and cut open God’s ear to hear her ludic and ludicrous laughter.

Emily Dickinson once wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Perhaps this  could be the slogan of not only Jesus’ rhetorical approach but faith-full funny girls everywhere.

We are taught to be good. We strive to be likeable. We earnestly try to make a “good life” for ourselves, protecting against all that we most fear. But with the realization in childhood and into adulthood that life is precarious and people are untrustworthy, we often invent what developmental psychologist Carol O. Eckerman identifies as “myths of control” or beliefs that only we can be relied upon and that only we have the power to ward off what we most fear.

I recently got to work with Carol on her honest new book, LESSONS IN SIMPLY BEING: Finding the Peace within Tumult (February 2012/ Circle Books / Paperback / 978-1-84694-723-0 / $16.95), a spiritual memoir for those looking to find meaning beyond themselves, a meaning that  hinges on more than the ability to do and be “good.”

Although I don’t identify myself as a perfectionist, I am a worrier, worried that I am far too lazy for God’s taste, worried that I am an unemotional underling, worried that my dog has cancer or a tick or depression. I don’t expect to be perfect, but I want to be okay, make everything okay. Is that okay?

I was struck by Carol’s story of cataloging the life lessons that her upbringing taught her about achievement, worth, and love. It wasn’t until her life shattered around her in adulthood that her false sense of security broke apart and her “myths of control” were slowly replaced by a single new lesson to live by: Simply be.

I have no problem simply being – after the email is uncluttered and the carpet is vacuumed and the toenails are clipped. But that feeling of un-doneness that lurks under life just creeps me out. Gives me the skeeves.

Simply being seems more a man’s strength anyway. Yes, I  just gender-stereotyped. I know, I know, it just seems like the hamster brain syndrome is one many women have inherited. And I want to get off but sometimes I worry (there it is again) that the only way to start afresh is to let all the scaffolding of control crumble down.

That’s what happened to Carol. It wasn’t until she faced abandonment and loneliness caused by divorce, a mother’s dementia and dying, her children’s’ bouts with cancer that she she discovered a mysterious loving presence that permeated even these dark places.  She explored her new experiences with the same curiosity she relied upon in her work as a developmental scientist. And in time she discovered that she had what others called faith and came to trust her community of neighbors, mentors, and pastors.

When I was a teenager, I was watching Wheel of Fortune with my mother one evening when I turned to ask, “Will God disfigure me in a car accident someday because I’m beautiful?” (I know, to have that sort of brazen confidence again). She laughed at my vanity but there was something deeper to that question, a feeling that I would only have nothing to fear when there was nothing left to lose.

I think of Jesus and his words in Mark 8:35 – “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it” – and I wonder if it’s okay to let go now, okay to lose my mind for awhile, okay to close the Google search window on “Does my dog have arthritis?”

I recently completed a project on humor, theology, and feminism. If it’s sounds absurd, it is; but I think Christianity is in need of a little absurdity from time to time to break up the severity of its dogma. Below is a brief excerpt:

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Humor was largely considered an affront to the sacred in the early Christian tradition, a troublesome interruption to the serious business of God and religion. A survey of the church father’s writings provides little to no evidence of the use of humor, let alone the merits of its resultant laughter. One brief example of humor’s denigration comes from a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict: “We absolutely condemn in all places any vulgarity and gossip and talk lending to laughter.”

Interestingly, those characteristics of humor considered sinful or devilish were often the very characteristics of feminine discourse and behavior.  Frivolity, pleasure, gossip, and laughter were, after all, considered the excesses of women who were often trivialized by their association with idle talk, a descriptor attached even to the testimony of the women who first witnessed the empty tomb (Luke 24:11).

But if the feminine quality of discourse was so inconsequential, why was it considered dangerous enough to be excluded from church life? While women’s humor has long been unrecognized in the Christian tradition, when it does break-through it is often quickly marked as inappropriate, a blemish on female virtue. Especially during the 1950’s and earlier, funny women of many traditions were considered loose or of ill repute. One suggestion is that the humorless Christian ideal was largely indebted to Platonic philosophy in which “intemperance, irrationality and immoderate emotional responses” threatened “both rationality and the governance of the state.”

Humor was and still is considered dangerous to regimes of totalitarians, even those institutions who claim to be in favor of the totalitarianism of God’s reign.  For with humor comes the threat of fluidity, a danger to the social order made especially potent when in the hands of those who are already fearfully regulated.

In an interview in the Christian Century with pastor and comedian Susan Sparks, she comments, “Power and humor are not friends. Humor breaks us open, reveals and brings in new perspectives. If we laugh in holy realms, it suggests there may be some wiggle room in the dogma.”

It is not that dogma becomes demonized altogether by humor but that it does not become solidified as the only authoritative way of speaking theologically. In contrast, laughter offers a more democratic pathway toward the divine by nature of its extra-linguistic characteristic available to all of creation. If one has ever tried to repress the shoulder shaking giggles during an otherwise serious event, he or she knows the uncontrollable (and socially dangerous) quality of laughter’s (dis)rupture. It cannot be contained or quantified or regulated with the disapproving smack of one’s mother or the glare of one’s neighbor.

Humor sustains us in a journey that when walked in the footsteps of Christ promises the paradox of suffering and thriving, dying and finding new life. As Simone Wiel wrote, “Contradiction is a lever of transcendence.”

While anger surely has its place in the spiritual life, when oiled by the dampness of humor, it is transformed into a holy anger that rightly both laughs and laments over the life of liminality.

Sometimes, you need to see someone loving a thing before you can love it, too – so says the character of Don Miller in the big screen version of his best-selling memoir Blue Like Jazz. (See fellow blogger Enuma Okoro’s review of the film here).

The movie, which hits theaters in some 25 cities come April 13th, tackles many of the probing questions of Christian identity – is it a stable journey that progresses linearly from baptism to the grave without doubt or duplicity? is it sustainable when dislocated into inhospitable environments? and is it enough to follow in the biblical footsteps of the early Christian disciple who confessed “Lord I believe but help my unbelief?”

Me with Author Don Miller

Understandably, the movie weaves these narrative threads together with more panache but less nuance than the book. As the director Steve Taylor put it at last night’s advance screening in Raleigh, movies aren’t made of the middle ground but gain their force by the contrast of extremes. Don himself admitted freely the movie is fiction.

But aren’t the middles infinitely more mysterious, more memorizing in their mundane-ness? Admittedly, I’d rather watch the awkward and unscripted dialogue of a movie like Blue Valentine that makes you cringe in its bleakness rather than the latest rom-com with all its aspirational aesthetics.  Certainly Miller’s upbringing as a Baptist Texan and education as a student at Reed College – “the most godless campus in America” – was already fodder enough to propel the force behind the movie’s making. Yet despite adding the plot twists of a philandering youth pastor and a lonely lesbian, the movie remarkably held on to its jazz-like subtleties whilst still being a stylish production.

Me with Director Steve Taylor

When a young youth pastor in the audience asked during the Q&A that followed the screening how she could show this PG-13 movie to her students to whom she preaches no cussing, no drinking, and no sex before marriage, Taylor and Miller answered kindly that despite what she preaches her students will soon be, if they’re not already, exposed to the incongruity of their Christian identities with those foisted upon them by the world. This is no Christian movie with saccharine smiles and pat answers. It invites inquisition. It invites improvisation.

Sometimes, you need to see someone loving a thing before you can love it, too. Perhaps this is the sentiment of the apostle Paul’s oft-used phrase pistus christou – translated in many Bibles to mean our “faith in Christ” but more accurately understood as “the faithfulness of Christ.” The distinction is profound, for like Don, we do not conjure up belief with the snap of a finger or the bending of a knee. Rather, we see someone, someone like Jesus, loving God first before we can begin to pattern our life on their faithfulness.  And so we step on their feet and learn the beat until we are emboldened to freestyle.

Is it my wisp thin hair? My rubbery jaw or tiny, rounded teeth? That stretch pants are my daily uniform? On the precipice of 30, why am I continually mistaken for a teenager?

A recent trip to the dentist proved to be a new low in carnivalesque guessing game of my age. Granted I was using a Groupon in place of solid dental insurance, surely an early twenty-something move but not one of a teenager who would rather save up for a vintage prom dress than an x-ray of her molars. There I sat in the chair, perhaps even sulking to protest the long wait, when the young Persian-looking women entered my room and stopped hesitantly.

“Where are your parents?” she asked, testing me.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your parents.” She moved a bit closer now and could see my jaw was locked hard now, all grown-up like. Maybe I even furrowed my brow. I didn’t give. “You look about 14, no?”

“No, twenty-seven,” I spit back dead-panned.

“No!” She gasped and stepped back as if I had told her I was packing an ounce of cocaine under my tongue. I wanted to retort, “If I’m in 14 then you must be a regular Doogie Howser” but I didn’t. I didn’t think that’d be very mature. I tried to get on with it, slinking back in my chair and turning my chin up to the ceiling but she wouldn’t let it go.

“You don’t have children, do you?” I was a veritable freak show to her now. When I shook my head silently, she let out a puff of air. “Oh goodness. That would be too much, just too much.”

I’ve often found it strange how much we prize maturity, stability, and composure in our youth as they fumble into adulthood. Because it would really be too much if they were children forever, too much if they believed in the silly fantasies of faith, too much if they spoke their minds without appropriate censorship. We laud “childlike faith” in Christian rhetoric but in reality we just want people to speak at an appropriate volume and try not to drool when they fall asleep in church.

At the end of my visit to Ms. Howser, she assured me her mistaken estimation of my age was a compliment. Perhaps.

Perhaps I need to give up the pursuit of being “taken seriously” and relish in the continued awkwardness of what it means to rest in the perpetual puberty of this life. A professor reminded me that even the language the apostle Paul used in 1 Corinthians signified that we are “being saved” but the process was not yet finished. We haven’t “filled-out” yet. I’m still waiting for my C-cups, my Christ cups, to come in their fully glory.

As I swim between salvation and new creation, aging is an art of becoming, interested less in final solutions than perpetual renewal. And I’ll be damned if the next time I go to church with my mother I don’t lay down on her lap and ask for a back scratch.

A few months back I suggested (or to be more accurate God suggested), splurging was a spiritual practice that ushered me into a mentality of abundance. Now my friend Alice considers the spiritual practice of lingering, something to try for those of us who strategically arrive to events two minutes late to avoid the chitter chatter. Listen and linger awhile.

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At the beginning of the year, I had a meeting every Wednesday at 7:30 AM. Every week, I was 15 minutes late. It wasn’t because I set my alarm clock wrong, wasn’t because I couldn’t tear myself from my soft sheets until the last possible minute, wasn’t because of a series of escalating calamities.

I was late on purpose.

I knew that before the actual meeting started people would chat. I had little interest in chatter about recent gossip and upcoming parties.  At home, I could be productive.

“[Martha] had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’(Luke 10:39-40)

Around this time, Erin asked me to engage in a unique spiritual practice with her. We would design our own spiritual practice to stretch our personalities, mundane habits included. I was excited to begin my spiritual practice because I expected God would reveal truths to me through the idle chatter I loathed. Maybe I would learn about a friend’s needs, or understand how to lead a small group, or come to a heightened clarity about scripture. Whatever it turned out to be, I knew God would show me something big.

The first Wednesday, I listened intently to chatter about upcoming tests, boys, gossip and talked about my excitement about the upcoming lacrosse season.

But I left vaguely disappointed. Despite my engagement, I still didn’t like idle chatter. It still knew I could be getting so much more done at home and I still could care less about the recent “drama.”

I continued in my spiritual practice and continued to be disappointed, my frustration mounting. God had revealed nothing to me: no burning bush, no letters in the sky, and not even a whisper in the wind.

“Really, God?! Really?!” I prayed “I thought I would get something out of my spiritual practice. But it was so unproductive.”

“Yep,” God replied simply.

I was a bit confused. “No, no, you don’t understand, it was unproductive”.

“Yep.”

My mind swirled. Not productive? It had to be productive!

But, God seemed to be telling me that maybe productivity wasn’t the point.

 ‘“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’” (Luke 10:41-42)

Martha was distracted by many things because there were many things to do. She needed to be productive.

I was distracted by many things because there are many things to do. I need to be productive.

But we don’t believe in a God concerned with productivity. We know a God that is concerned with little more than our hearts.

As I came to this knowledge, a strange calm came over me. I knew deep in my bones that a small me is adored by an enormous God. Not because of my productivity, not because of my work, just because God is, just because God lingers.