“Really, all I wanted, even more than any gift or party is for just one day to pass without anyone needing anything from me . . . I curled up in the corner of a crowded restaurant on Mother’s Day, alone, and I read an Oprah Magazine and ate carbs until I felt like a person again.”

Like Sarah, all I really wanted was ONE DAY in which I did not have to take care of ANYTHING. Because I am always taking care of someone and something. I wanted one day in which somebody else did it all. I have to admit that Steven did most of the somethings on Mother’s Day. He got up with the kids when they woke up and got them both dressed for church and drove both to and from church (it’s a 50 minute drive, so we always take turns). He took me out to eat for lunch so I wouldn’t have to worry about dishes and sandwich crusts and straws in the Capri Suns. He picked up the house and loaded the dishwasher. And I am thankful.

But I also have to admit that the night before I’d warned him that he better have a card or something for me (even though I’d previously told him not to get me anything) or that I’d be very upset, and that at the end of Mother’s Day I sulked because I still had to do laundry and help the kids with baths that night.

And Sarah said, “The tinies threw me a homemade party when I came home an hour later . . I was spinning in our tiny pink kitchen, with a baby on my hip, and this is still my favourite thing in the world to be their mother.”

And yes, on Mother’s Day I opened a book Ephraim made just for me at school and a card Madeleine spent a lot of time on and I spent an entire meal at P.F. Chang’s sitting in the sun, laughing and talking with my 3 special people without rushing so we could get to school or ball practice or whatever. And it was joy and loveliness and everything to be thankful for. I am a mother. I am their mother. I am their main encourager and listener and problem solver. I am their lunch-maker and hair-rinser and laundry-folder. And as much as I push for feminism and equality and gender-free roles, I know that I need my children and they need me. I know that under all the frustration and resentment that creep in sometimes, I love being their mother.

Sarah went on, “I confessed to you that sometimes I get so mad at the Inklings . .  C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and all these other writers, real writers, had luxuries like housekeepers and pubs and colleagues, they had creature comforts and every time the Muse arrived, they didn’t have to shush her, plead with her to come back later because, right now, Muse, can’t you see? preschool, supper, diapers, bath times, and everything wonderful in my life needs my attention.”

Amen! I tend to wonder why it seems like others (by others I gotta admit I mostly mean men) can put domestic life on hold for their work and passions, while I am trying to fit in writing here and there, wherever I can. I can’t stop my life for writing.

But then I wonder about that Motherlove that wanted just one more, the one in my womb, the one I call Ember because that’s what I wanted to name her if it was a girl, the one that hardly grew at all and then she was gone. And the Motherlove that wanted the baby from Thailand, which was once my home, and how that may or may not happen now. And the Motherlove that speaks a language all its own, that keeps me up at night after a bad dream about my child, and that warms me each morning when my son kisses me goodbye, that whispers to me how fragile my children are and that I only get one chance at this.

And I wonder about all the women who aren’t mothers and want to be, and how Mother’s Day is difficult for them. The friend who waits, month after month, for a positive pregnancy test. The friend who was a guardian-but-really-a-mother to a family member, but is no longer that. The friend who hopes to get a foster child soon. The friend who lost her baby at nine weeks pregnant. And the women who have chosen not to be mothers, and are vilified for it.

I don’t know the answers, and I don’t have something lovely and poetic to say. I wonder, I grieve, I love, and I ask your forgiveness.

I am ALMOST done first drafting . . . it’s kinda sad to think that I’m only almost done with the FIRST draft when technically I’ve been working on this thing for 3 years. But I’ve really only worked REGULARLY on it for about 10 months, plus my life is already pretty hectic. It’s rough finding the time and sanity to write when you’re working full time and parenting 2 kids. Anyway, I have a goal to be done with the first draft by June 1st, and I think I’m gonna make it!!! P.F. Chang’s thinks so, too, based on the fortune they gave me yesterday:

Anyway, I have adjusted my outline a bit and now have four sections: Believing, Questioning, Becoming, and Looking Back (that last section may have a title change yet), with each section having 13,000 – 18,000 words. The sections are (roughly) divided into chapters. I have already finished the first section, Believing, and am working through the second section by adding a little new material and revising a little.

But here’s the thing: I need a title. The best title I’ve come up with is (TA-DA!) “Conversion.” I know. BORRRRR-ING. Seriously. I’m a writer. Can’t I come up with something better than that?

No. I can’t. Seriously. The muses have failed me here. “Metamorphosis” is too cheesy, “Journey” is too common, and “Why The Hell Did You Leave The Nazarene Church?” is too crazy. And it has the word Hell in it. This is where YOU come in! My story is about a Nazarene missionary kid – turned Orthodox Christian. That’s it in a nutshell. I know, that sounds a little – yawn – boring, too, but I promise (I hope) it’s not. When are you going to get Buddhist monks, treacherous trips up mountains, outhouses, Coke in Sunday School (the soft drink kind, of course), and Orthodox liturgy all in one book? And what would you name that book??? I promise that whoever comes up with the name I end up using will get a thank you in the acknowledgments if the book ever gets published. Okay, peeps! Give my book a hat!

Then I got pregnant.

We asked our agency to put us on hold in the adoption process. In some ways, I was disappointed about the pregnancy, because I knew that Thailand won’t let you adopt from there if you have 3 biological children. But eventually I came to get excited about a new baby. The pregnancy symptoms set in: exhaustion and nausea. I went in for an 8 week checkup and everything was fine. By this point we had told our children and our parents. I went in two weeks later for the first ultrasound.

There was no baby. There was an empty sac. He saw the amniotic sac, but no “fetal pole.” Which means baby. In addition, it was showing me at only 7.5 weeks instead of 10 weeks. My doctor tried to be hopeful and told me we would wait a week and have another ultrasound to see if there had been any growth.

It was a difficult week. A week that I waited to find out if my baby lived or died.

At the second ultrasound, there was still no baby. I had initially been pregnant, but the baby had died very early on, before it was big enough to be seen on an ultrasound. I remembered seeing Ephraim’s heartbeat on an ultrasound at 6 weeks pregnant, so I knew it had probably stopped growing before 6 weeks.

The next day, I had a D & C.

It was heartbreaking to have to tell our children that there was no baby. They had begun to get excited about having a sibling.

It was heartbreaking to feel like my womb had become a tomb.

I felt like I’d been on an emotional rollercoaster all winter.

After all of it, it was my writing that saved me. Of course, my family and the few friends we’d told showed support and love, but it was writing that helped me process it all and carried me through. Maybe one day I will share some of that writing with you.

So where does all this leave us? Do we try again? Do we go back to the adoption process? For a while I really wanted to forget about ever trying to get pregnant again and just go back to the adoption. But due to several recent unexpected expenses, we feel like we are not financially ready to dive back into the adoption process. I don’t know that we are emotionally ready, either. Yet I don’t know that I can handle getting pregnant again and losing it again. When I think of all our options right now, I feel like what we need to do is wait. I don’t know what for or how long.

So we have asked our adoption agency to continue to keep us on hold. They can do so for up to a year without us having to reapply. (If we do not re-enter the process soon, we will return all of our adoption donations – thank you to those of you who have given.) For now, we wait. For now, I keep loving the children that I have. For now, I keep praying for the children that I have lost. For now, I live one day at a time, I find things to be thankful for, and I look for God’s grace.

The Bier of Christ

A friend of mine made the statement on facebook, ” Coming home with Christ still on the cross is a lot tougher than going to a passion play where you get to experience the joy of the Resurrection five minutes after the Crucifixion.” She’s right. Orthodox Christians don’t relive the last week of Christ in a 45 minute choir special. On Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. On Thursday, he gets nailed to the cross (literally – a lifesize icon of Jesus gets nailed to the cross). On Friday, he dies, and we bury him. Friday night, we go to his funeral. Saturday, we wait in darkness and mourning. And finally, in the early hours of Sunday morning, he rises again.

Last night was the Lamentations Service of Holy Week. It’s my favorite Holy Week service (other than Pascha, of course.) It is basically a funeral for Jesus. We sing dirges. We lament. The little girls toss ross petals across his Bier and among us. The priest sprinkles us with rosewater, just as the myrrh-bearing women brought myrrh and spices for Jesus’ body. Here are a few of the many lamentations we sang last night:

O my sweet Lord Jesus, my Salvation my Light: How art Thou now hidden within a dark sepulcher? Lo, Thy burial surpasseth human speech.

All the earth was troubled and did tremble with fear, and the morning star, O Word hid its brilliant rays, when they hid Thee in the earth, O Most Great Light. 

Songs of lamentation poured from Thy pure Mother, when Thou, O Word, was slaughtered. 

All the hosts of heaven stood with fear, confounded, beholding Thy dead body. 

Weeping and lamenting, Thy most holy Mother doth mourn the, my slain Savior. 

Minds must tremble seeing, O Maker of Creation, Thy strange and dire entombment. 

Last night was the first time I’d been there for the procession with the Bier. There have been years I haven’t even made it to the Lamentations Service; other years, we’ve left early because of the kids. But last night, they lifted up the Bier on their shoulders, and we all fell into a funeral procession. We exited the church and were met by a light rain. There were rose petals on the sidewalk that had fallen from the Bier. I grabbed my daughter’s hand because I needed something to hang on to. I was overcome, and the tears flowed.

I wasn’t sad for my dead brother, or my dead grandparents, or my dead friends.

I was sad for my dead Jesus. 

My Jesus, who I’d pinned my hopes on, who I’d given my life to, was gone.

I was his Mother Mary and I was Mary Magdalene and I was every disciple. I was broken, bewildered, and grieving.

Today is Saturday. The rain pours; the world is gray. There is no joy today.

Christ the Bridegroom Icon

This week is Orthodox Holy Week. On Friday, Jesus will be crucified. On Saturday, we will quietly mourn. On Sunday, he will rise again.

Last night the kids and I went to the second Bridegroom Matins service of the week. This service likens Orthodox believers to the ten virgins who waited for the bridegroom to come in the middle of the night. It is a time of waiting and repentance. During Bridegroom Matins, a reader reads or chants six Psalms. One of them is Psalm 37  (Psalm 38 in Protestant Bibles). These lines stood out to me:

I am feeble and sore broken; I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart. Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.

I have roared. Wow. Most Bibles translate that as groaned instead of roared. But I like roared. I can hear the anger and anguish behind that word. I can hear the urgency: See me! Hear me! I roar! 

It makes me think of these words from Ursula K. LeGuin: “We are all volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want – to hear you erupting.”

That’s what I want, too – to erupt, to roar, to have a voice, to break open the ground I’ve always walked on.

I roar because I am imperfect.

I roar because I am broken.

I roar because I am selfish.

I roar because I am searching.

I roar because I am hurting.

I roar because I am sorry.

I roar because I want to be strong.

I roar because I want to be saved.

I roar because I want to be found.

I roar because I want joy.

I roar because I want God.

As the reader read the Six Psalms, Father Stephen was not sitting idly by the altar. He was working, too. He was praying the twelve Orthros prayers – mostly in front of the icon of Christ. I watched my priest stand before Jesus with his head bowed, praying for all of us. Here are just the first phrases of a few of these twelve prayers:

We give thanks unto thee

Out of the night our spirit awaketh at dawn unto thee

O Master God, holy and unsearchable

O Treasury of good things, Fountain eternal

Illumine our hearts

O Lord our God, who hast granted unto men pardon

I roar, and I hope. I hope that He hears me. And finds me. And saves me. And us all.

I grew up steeped in Christianity. I was the youth pastor’s kid, then the pastor’s kid, then the missionaries’ kid. My life revolved around our faith. I was at church three times a week (and sometimes in between, just hanging out in my dad’s office). I knew every Old Testament Hero Bible Story and every Beatitude. I could ace every quiz in Sunday school and could sing every hymn with gusto. However, my faith went beyond those “surface Christian” tasks. From a very young age, I sought God out through reading my Bible, praying, and asking my parents questions.

Once we moved to Thailand, even though I was surrounded by Buddhists (and, at my school – Hindus and Sikhs and even a Zoroastrian or two), my faith held fast. While other teenagers were sneaking out, smoking cigarettes, and getting grounded, I was organizing See You at the Pole at my school and wholeheartedly obeying the “no movies” and “no dancing” rules of the Nazarene Church. I was as passionate about missionary work as my parents were. I was involved at our church plant in both worship and the youth group. At school I gave an anti-abortion speech in the Forensics Competition and wrote an article for the school paper on waiting until marriage to have sex. I had devotions every day and fervently sought God’s will for my life. I was the model Christian. I did everything I had been told I was supposed to do, and I did it with a (mostly) willing heart.

I went to a Nazarene university, so even in college, I was surrounded by a faith-based worldview. My best friend from college recently told me that she, along with many other friends, went through a time of searching and questioning in college, yet she never saw me go through that. “You just accepted everything,” she told me.

That comment surprised me. I feel like I DID go through some times of searching during those years. In fact, I dealt with some things my senior year that probably marked the beginning of my journey to Orthodoxy. However, maybe that questioning was mostly internal. I see evidence of it in my old journals, but on the outside, I continued doing all the “right things” that I had always done, the things that made me a Christian. I was still attending church, still speaking the religious jargon, still outwardly “accepting everything.”

And why shouldn’t I accept it? It was all I had ever known.

Which is why I say that now I feel like I might need to step away from it. I can’t keep doing this because it’s a “must do” or a “have to” or a religious formula for living a godly life. (The Orthodox Church has all the “must dos” and the “have tos” too. And it says they’re all for a spiritual purpose just like the Nazarene Church does.)

I have come to see that my faith has been shaped by the religious culture I’ve always been surrounded by. I’ve been given the language and the theology and the explanations. I’ve been given the traditions and the feasts and the saints. I’ve been given every good reason to believe in God and in Christianity. And I am thankful for all these things. I am not bitter about they way my parents raised me or the church I’ve now chosen.

Yet I need to discover God away from all these influences. I don’t want to love Him just because the church tells me I should love Him. I want to catch a glimpse of Him in the world. I want to know that He exists above and beyond our human descriptions of Him. That’s what I was talking about when I said about Gentiles in my last post: “There is a purity to that kind of faith, one untouched by influence, unmotivated by years of religious culture.” As an example, here are a few lines lifted from my in-progress memoir about converting to Orthodoxy:

“One afternoon I was standing chest-deep in saltwater and suddenly I felt God rushing all around me. The sea and the sky merged into this vastness that was filled with God. As His creation moved around me, He moved into my soul. I felt like I was a part of the vastness, the beauty, of everything that God created. I felt closer to God than I’d ever felt at any revival or altar call or worship time. God was soaking into me with every breath of air and every churning wave. In that moment, I knew Him, that He was real, that He was Creator, and that He loved me.”

I asked my husband (a theologian) for feedback on my last post, and one of the things he said was, “I can look up at the stars and deduce or even feel that there is a God, but I could never know who that God is.” What he meant is that the church tells us who God is and how to know Him. I don’t disagree with that. Yes, the church has authority and truth.

Yet didn’t God exist before the church did? Wasn’t he in a relationship with humans before religion existed? My point is I want to know God, and I want to know that my faith in Him is not solely because of a list of rules or a history of traditions or a familiarity with “church speak” or years of living in religious culture.

Now am I talking about literally leaving the church for a while? Probably not. That would confuse my children, and I don’t want to do that. I want to encourage their faith. But mentally, emotionally, and spiritually I remain a pilgrim, searching for God and working out my salvation. Just as the father of the demon-possessed boy, I approach Jesus saying, “I believe! Help me in my unbelief!”

Questioning, reconsideration or challenging of tradition Christian doctrines by some who profess Christian faith (italics mine)

Well, that one hit the bulls eye. Yep, that’s me, I thought when I read it. I question. I reconsider. And maybe, I am starting to challenge.

I question whether or not the Orthodox Church is really THE only true and perfect church.

I question whether or not the Orthodox Church is right to forbid women to be clergy.

I question whether or not God really is all-knowing and all-powerful.

I question whether homosexuals can or can’t be Christians and should or should not be able to marry.

I question whether pre-marital sex is really a sin.

I question all the rules I live by and have always lived by, and if they are rules or if I am just interpreting them that way.

Allen talks about religion vs spirituality in the article, and how Americans are searching for spirituality, which is “focused on the way a person sees his own place in universe,” rather than religion, which is “concerned with God’s relationship with the universe.”  (Italics mine) I get that. And I am guilty of wanting to be spiritual, but not religious. I want to fit in with my non-religious friends; most of them know I am spiritual, but I don’t want to appear to be a religious kook. I want to be able to look at my faith from a lens of doubt, and beauty, and art, and questioning, and passion, but I often feel like I’m only offered the lens of fear, guilt, and commands.

I believe in God; I believe that Jesus died and rose again to save me from sin, eternal death, and separation from Him (although really the three are synonymous to me). But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m tired of following the rules. Does Jesus really care whether or not I eat before Eucharist? Or whether or not I eat dairy? I don’t think He does. But I understand that these are manifestations of the Orthodox belief that spirit and body are not separate; I withhold things from my body as a spiritual practice in order to focus myself on Christ rather than on worldly things like . . um, food.

In his article, Allen warns that the term “spirituality” has become a synonym for self-help and self-love. It has come to mean that you can find God (or a god) within yourself; that you are God and God is you. I just read something similar to that in the book Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which says, “To embrace Goddess is simply to discover the Divine in yourself as powerfully and vividly feminine.” Can I admit that there is something deeply attractive about that line? I realize that I am NOT God (or Goddess) and am NOT divine, but oh, how I would love to discover that “powerfully and vividly feminine” spiritual part of me.

That may sound confusing; I’m female, so of course I’m feminine! Yet my spirituality has always depended on men, on male imagery and language. God the Father, Jesus the Son. My own father, who led me to accept Jesus into my heart at the altar of his church when I was six, my Uncle Mike from the mission field, all my male pastors and male youth pastors and male religion profs at college. Even the theologians and spiritual writers I’ve read through the years have been primarily men – Nouwen, Lewis, Chesterton, Hauerwas, Hopko, Schmemann. I have always lived in a Christian world, and the story of my God has almost always been defined by men.

She’s getting off topic, you’re thinking. She’s off on a feminist rage and needs to come back to the subject at hand. No, I am not enraged. Yes, I am addressing feminism. And I do so to say that right now, I am both spiritual – concerned about my own place in the universe (and in the church, and in my family, and in my community, and within myself) – and religious – concerned about God’s relationship with the universe. The fact that God created us and put on human skin to come down and save us is more important to me than whether or not God is male, or whether or not women should be priests.

However, I’m ready to meet God on my own terms. To me, spirituality is a deep awareness of one’s soul. What you find when you look inward. And if God is there, you will find Him. Spirituality involves opening your soul to receive the things that nourish and grow it. Surely I can find God in a poem, or in a blooming dogwood tree, or in my daughter’s fingers creating beautiful piano music? Can’t those things be givers of His grace? Can I find him in the words of a woman who once wrote for Guidepost, and now “lives by her own inner guidance?” Why can’t I find Him in the feminine, in the depths of my own womb, where life was created and brought forth, in the voices of the desert mothers, or in the lap of his own Mother, that baby boy Jesus, who in that moment embodies nothing but the pure and overpowering love of a son?

I realize the danger of the statement “meeting God on my own terms.” I understand that a Christian’s personal decisions and opinions should be corroborated by the church, or Christian tradition, or Scripture. Someone who murders someone and then says, “God told me to kill him” will obviously not be supported by the church or Scripture.

Still, I think about the fact that Paul offered salvation to Gentiles, who weren’t familiar with Jewish rules and traditions. They hadn’t been raised in a world of Jewish customs and teachings. They hadn’t been forced to go to the temple week after week or taught to read the Torah or forbidden to cook on the Sabbath. All it took was their willing belief, a turning of their hearts toward Christ. There is a purity to that kind of faith, one untouched by influence, unmotivated by years of religious culture.

Sometimes I feel like I need to walk away from the religious life I’ve always known so I can find God on my own, and then I’ll be able to come back.

For now, I keep questioning. And reconsidering. And challenging. And I hope that God and my church won’t see it as anti-Christian. I hope they’ll know that right now, this is my journey toward true faith, toward a place where spirituality and religion feel like one and the same.

Thank you to Pinterest for all the ideas . . . and to Simply Sweet by Kori for the cake! All the kids enjoyed the day, especially Madeleine!

Eagle Poem

by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

from Wikimedia Commons

. . . saying it in a way no one has said it before.

. . . believing that your words are good enough.

. . . knowing when your words aren’t good enough and you need to revise.

. . . coming up with a title.

. . . organizing your manuscript.

While ALL of the above plague me, the last one in particular has been nagging at me since October. Back then I had a week of fall break and made a lot of headway in terms of word count. But I was not happy with the way my draft was organized. Though it’s a memoir, I didn’t want to just write everything out in chronological order because I thought it would be too boring, too this-is-how-everyone-does-it. Instead I wanted to find similar themes within my content and lump together all the content about each theme into a section or chapter. When I tried that, I was able to mesh together ONE chapter that made sense. My approach wasn’t working. But I was determined not to be like everyone else. I just didn’t know what other approach to take. So I abandoned trying to organize and just kept writing.

Since then, I’ve read several spiritual memoirs to see how they were laid out and I’ve found two that have given me a lot of inspiration and ideas. One is Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner, and the other is Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans. And surprise, surprise! Both are more or less organized chronologically. I found that both authors did weave back and forth in time a bit throughout their books, but the overall arc of both books is chronological.

(This shows you how much creative non-fiction, particularly memoir, echoes fiction writing. There’s some discussion about this in the writing world right now and I would love to talk about it more but I should probably save that for a different post.)

Now it’s spring break and I am supposed to be “finishing my book.” I have 53,000 words, which is enough to make a book, but I am still not done writing. I have more to say. (If you know me personally, you are not surprised by that. ) Well, both my kids are sick this week, so it does not look like I am going to completely finish it, but I FINALLY have an outline!!! And guess what? I went back to chronological organization. Yep. I caved. I got off my high horse and did it the way it seemed to work best. One day an editor may tell me how to organize it better, but for now there is an immense load off my shoulders and a greater clarity as to the direction the book is going. (I still need a title, though!)

Here are my sections (chapters, maybe?):

1. Believing

2. Questioning

3. Learning Liturgy

4. Conversion

5. Backward-Looking (or possibly Looking Backward, not sure)

6. An Imperfect Church

It feels really weird for me to be talking about this on the blog in such detail. It seems  . . . real. I have no agent, no publisher, no contract, no guarantee whatsoever that this book will EVER be published. But gosh darn it I am determined to finish writing it even if it never gets published! It is real for me, and it is my story, and I am going to finish the work of telling it. Ahem, writing it.