Salt-Water and Oaks

The waves of pleasure rolled over her little form, hidden in the dark.

She was seven and alone, completely unprepared.

No one had shared with her “the talk.”

No one knew it was time, that it would be past time,

Then it was. Past time.

Yearnings that grew originated and overwhelmed at night.

She’d never seen the ocean, been led to its shallows,

Been allowed to play in the eddies that gently romped and rolled.

Yet her little body remembered the beach, the waters, the rhythms.

The yearnings had come, their dark seed an acorn tossed onto sandy shores.

So of course, an oak tree grew, with strongly gnarled bark.

Its roots moved the sand to dig deep into fertile humus, dark soil required of life,

Its branches left the salts and stretched beyond ken toward gentling sunlight.

Now its buds come every season, breaking blossoms into winter flowers, whose

Bountiful leaves with thick-veined waters offer shade and solace.

Imagine her surprise when she finds herself rooted, planted, blossoming,

Grafted into another. His roots, blossoms, and gnarled bark?

Stunning, for she sees strength and safety of iron-bark mirrored, redemptive, gracious.

They intertwine roots, share branches and blossoms, committed as two into one.

How strange for salt-water and oaks to find voice here and now.

One of them spoke with a smile, you see,

Reframing all darkness and shame with surprise and delight:

“My wife is orgasmically-gifted. How cool is that? Really? Second grade?”

The Art of Separation in Conscious Love

What if separation did not ultimately mean loss, good-bye, or rupture of relationship?  Traditional associations with separation cover the gamut from abrupt departures (after an argument), bereaved departures (after a betrayal or a broken trust) all the way to those of apathy or indifference (after neglect or simple divergence of connection). I have grown interested in this question of late, grafted as I seem to have been into a path of erotic-chaste loves as contemplative practice, each of which, in its time, enters into an act of separation. An act whose necessity is only intuited but which signifies commitment, not departure; fidelity, not rupture; love, not anger or indifference. What in the world...?

For my purposes, this musing-matter does not refer to a marital commitment, which has an internal and external, intimate and social logic all its own, interpreted in sacred scriptures of many kinds and in faith communities of varying persuasion and rhetorical finesse in today's secular spaces. I continue to learn within my own marital commitment, but it has a singularity in my spirit-life-and-loves, an integrity set apart from what I reflect on here. Here, in contrast or in some distance, I'm musing on what I will call companionships of Spirit, though not all companions in my life would be comfortable with that language. It has been a path of erotic-chaste loves as contemplative practice, engaged with those whose life opened to such possibility at the same time mine did. Almost without agency but with receptivity and a sacred curiosity all the same. A path of erotic-chaste loves...

Loves, plural? Yes, plural. It’s difficult to speak or write clearly of this path, immersed in a sex-saturated media-American cultural soup as we are. It sounds salacious, seductive, even adulterous. Something around which to gather and point fingers, whisper to one’s friends behind cupped hands. The language around agape or platonic loves suffocates the reality of this way—the latter funding life with a bit of intellectual remove and the former tinging life with religious asceticism and self-sacrificing kindness. Platonic brings old philosophers and dusty intellectuals to mind. Agape brings suggestion of saints and martyrs—St. Francis, Rabbi Akiva, Mother Teresa. What I mean by multiple loves as a contemplative practice, in contrast, trucks in the world of the earthly, the socially disruptive, the impassioned yearnings ‘allowed’ mostly for artists, eccentrics, mystics.

And erotic-chaste? The sensation of which I speak has deep roots in embodied wisdom, unruly energies through which unpredictable-uncontrollable life erupts into awareness.  A bit less sensational prose (pun intended) comes under the title of devotion, but that brings to mind the associations of “morning devotions,” at least for this Christian only one generation from Baptist/Brethren scriptural-literalists. Such acts of piety are about the furthest thing I can think of in the context of what I mean by the word. No, this path erupts into one’s awareness from within the dan tien, the root chakra, the generative source of human sexual and sensual energies—a place of abiding presence and abundant joy, sensate pleasure and the yearning that aches. Satiating the desire only deepens the yearning, which means ego strategies of response and negotiation are useless. Connection births deeper connection which births deeper awareness again and again of how much deeper one can go. It hurts to yearn like this, but life grows vibrant beyond belief. Literally. (As an aside, I’m beginning to wonder whether this is what Teresa of Avila meant by her ‘prayer of pain,’ a manner of connection increasingly painful but so enlivening that one desires it more and more, in search of its Source. Not masochism but participation in Love greater than any mortal frame can possibly withstand).

Any companionship of Spirit in this fashion, to reach its transformative depth, requires a commitment and fidelity tinged with ultimacy. Whether such things are articulated with intention may depend upon circumstance and character, but there has to be a sense of long-lasting connection for either or both participants to allow the other into such intimate space, such shared passion. In one instance, the nature of covenant was articulate in written prose. In another, the commitment was lived into time over distance and cost shared fairly equally by both. Without the commitment, without the enacted covenant, no container shapes to hold the passions shared. Inevitably, though, if each participant is growing in discipline and devotion, both will chafe against the perceived container. What served its purpose to channel or hold shared energies inevitably becomes a box or worse, an unintentional prison for one or both. As in any spiritual practice, the reality is grow or die, which means growth pushes its seeds beyond previous bounds of ground. When this time comes, what preserves and deepens the erotic-chaste love of connection and service of all?

An act of separation, ironically enough.

Contemplative Cynthia Bourgeault observes the “art of separation” as an essential practice for those called into what she calls the Fifth Way, relationship as spiritual practice. In her words: “The art of separation is essential to conscious love.” When I first read this in her The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, I thought I knew what it meant. I interpreted it against the familiar backdrop of a spiritual friendship that reached its completion a long while back. Hearing it again this past week (Holy Week or time spent in anticipation of Pesach), I learned something different but consistent.

I learned that the separation I had feared was loss or rupture of relationship is not that at all. Recognizing release from the container does not mean conclusion of the relationship, alive and breathing. It means a renewed, pregnant life, outside of control of any and all. It means relinquishing attachment to a beloved in order to release that energy into practiced awareness of connection amongst us all. The language of container or covenant speaks a scaffolding into existence, necessary for the mark of infinity to be impressed upon flesh and hearts. That mark can never be taken away. It will never be erased. Yet spirits healthy and growing always move into new air, new food, grafted life. Soil must always be aerated. Winter must come if spring is to birth new life. Sound and silence create each other, with quiet deepening presence, creating new capacity for presence.

Doing this well requires practice in the art of separation—perhaps a poem signaling a conclusion steeped in the “I do” of fidelity--all without knowing whether it will be understood. In the first instance of my learning, it was the shared community of faith that emerged to hold the conscious love without and beyond its ‘container’ of covenant. In the second instance now, it was an intuition or instinct that surprised me as it unfolded within a familiar liturgy. Perhaps a call from an old and new Beloved, a rabbinic Ancient of Days, perhaps not. Regardless, I recognized the pattern, the invitation. I was reminded that the many loves given into my path each bring their spark of divinity. Each spark can only be tended if relinquished to flicker freely, nourished and unattached. The path is to learn being immaculately safe in the stewardship of erotic-chastity, a conjugal path of devotion offered to those willing, within and beyond their other covenants of commitment.

What would our world be like if one fell in love with everyone one met, living into that love without ego-feeding on its energies but instead, ego-relinquishing such energies for the good of the earth and us all? What would our world be like if we could receive, intimately, what is of God in each of us, however lost or grieved, and just as faithfully release such beauty beyond our grasping it back into the world?

Assignment: Self-Portrait

I am

Woman, shadow-man, intellect, capricious and earnest
Bride, surprised and bashful, undeserving, enflamed

Friend, released, releasing yet companioned

Wife, socially recalcitrant and cherished still

Sister, unseen, unheard, unknown, unwelcome

Poet, shy and uncertain, wounded and healing

Writer, captivated in centuries of prose, tearfully smiling

Daughter, confidant in laughter and loss, relearning uncompetitve

Niece, awakened, enlivened, goaded into wonder

Teacher, silenced, searching, contemplative, newly born

Trickster, ancient wisdom of days, mirroring love in form anew

Student, shepherded and lost, awaiting another, found

Music, intimate and yearning, embarrassing the traditional

Baker, God-wrestler in flour, yeast, salt, water kneaded

Body, knot of expectation, others,’ my own, others,’ my own

Mover, last but first, willing in fear, delight received

Outsider, beloved, vocationally-aroused, listening

Firekeeper, steward of the Flame, quietly roaring 

Companion, tenacious fragment of divinity, a spark in love

with you.

Catching Myself in a Lie

Drama exhausts me.

Particularly my own.

Particularly when I catch myself in a half-truth or even a lie.

“How is that possible?” you ask, “to catch oneself in a lie?” Let’s find out.

Not surprisingly, Ed Sullivan’s been on my mind a lot this week. Without getting creepy, it is a bit like a presence has returned to my life, my mind, with some compelling sense about it. I don’t mean by this that some figment of my experience has returned from the grave or is haunting me or even is. I simply mean a renewed awareness of him and our short time of listening together.

This renewed awareness has several components to it. I feel a new need to honor the integrity of who we were in some new fashion. I’ve ordered an Easter lily for my congregation’s celebration of Easter morning this year, “in memoriam, Ed “Sully” Sullivan of Newtown, PA.” I have a faint whisper within me of the intensity of devotion I felt for him, though only at a minute portion compared to the experience then. He feels like a companion as I mean it today, before I knew how I would mean the word ‘companion.’ Perhaps the newest thing is seeing him as one of the teachers of this path, a teacher I’d not recognized as such a teacher.

The rude awakening for me in all this was catching myself misremembering about the ring. As I read my journal from 1998 last week, my own script, I was sensately surprised to be reminded of a connection between the anam cara ring and him. But it was reminded, because I had described the ring in its origin just this past December, in a particularly intense experience of “letting the ring go” to receive all. My experience of last week, though, did not begin with or include such a memory. My experience of last week felt like an awakening to Ed as a companion I had never felt as a companion. Reading the connection between him and the ring felt like a totally new association. The piece of "rendering incarnation" did open with a sense of being confused again, for the first time. Not inaccurate here either. How could I have been clearly reminded of something about which I, at the time, had no recollection? Am I losing my bloomin’ mind? As I compiled the blog-record for back-up’s sake last night, this discovery felt really uncomfortable. It seemed like I had written falsely, been caught in a lie. To myself.

Anything from this point on becomes rationalization or justification, of course, but I really am curious. How could I have un-remembered something that was so intense just this past December? Or perhaps a better question, what might it mean, this divergence of memory in a creative act of forgetting?

My sensitive, raw places always beckon first. “It’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Lisa.” I hear in my head. My husband and I live within a community whose median age is 71, so that one’s received easily from my context. Then there’s the constant quest for some dramatic narrative in which to be a part. This is the drama of myself that wears me out. I steward it fairly well most days, which means watching its bemusing twists and turns of egoic flailing. But on days like this—in misremembered discrepancies like this—this aspect of who I am wears me out. Where is the off-switch, I whine next, making a drama out of the drama.

With a bit of remove, offered by writing’s balm, I do find myself a bit fascinated by the role such discrepancy ultimately played in this intense “re-encounter” of sorts with Ed. “Insight” is not unlike a drug or adrenaline for an academic, after all. To realize something you had not seen before is what we live for. As you can imagine, this gets harder and less frequent the longer you stay with the same subject, discipline, inquiry. The old joke goes: academics are those who learn more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing. To re-encounter what you are learning with the surprise and felt-devotion with which you began becomes more and more impossible.  This is a particular bind in theology, when one gets accustomed to handling holy things (to cite a friend, Clift Black). If you truck in the Holy all the time, how do you avoid the boredom of familiarity?

I don’t think that’s “what happened” here, but it does offer some food for thought in what did happen. At root, part of me knew very well that the ring’s associations originated with Ed Sullivan and so its meaning would be intertwined with him from the start. In my strange experience of reading an old journal from 1998, I misremembered that association amidst receiving important words I needed to hear for just such a week, a next step along the path. Another part of me arguably hid that recollection within a creative act of forgetting. I had never understood him to be a companion like I mean the word today—a fellow-traveler on paths of Spirit, tinged with devotion in both inward and outward dimensions—and now I do.

The distance of years makes this rediscovery inordinately compelling. I’m bemused that a Hospice patient with whom I visited nearly fifteen years ago could still instigate a renewed and renewing path of awakening in me this year, this week. I’m reminded of how fragile each of us is as we yearn to contribute to the world around us in small and large ways, even as we are so very small, regularly inconsistent, even incoherent at times. It’s amazing we do as well as we do, I think. Mostly, I’m relieved to have this off my chest in some way, as Holy Week beckons and I listen for how to be faithful in the days to come. In such listening, at least for me, do I find rest for my soul, release from my labors, a balm for the weariness in me…most acutely from my own internal drama!

Rendering Incarnation Across the Years

"Be selfish, Lisa," I read, confused again for the first time. I was sitting in a conference plenary lecture, multitasking as usual. The speaker entertained, inspired, taught, but somehow, not for me. The old journal from long ago had whispered to me from my bag. I pulled it out with attempt to be nonchalant, inoffensive. It was for my writing class, to start that night. On a whim, I had decided perhaps it was time to continue writing in it. A bound leather journal, with gild-edged pages and wide-spaced lines on which to write. My handwriting spoke the year easily—1998. Back then, I had moved from printing in all capital letters into a tentative cursive script, feeling my way slowly into a more gentle, embodied flow of life. So my own script read back to me, “Be selfish, Lisa.” I knew to trust what I had written, but I had no recollection of what was there on the page in front of me.

Allow me to introduce you to my Ed Sullivan. I call him ‘mine’ mostly to say he’s not the famous comedian of old, Ed Sullivan, but a Hospice patient with whom I met four times in our second incarnation. We had apparently met once before, a first incarnation of our companionship, when I had served as a hospital intern in the heart ward of a local hospital. I don’t count that time. He had apparently been one of many that year and I had not been as mindful as I should have been to remember him. No, Ed became Ed for me when I moved into my Hospice internship, calling a stranger-patient on my list to schedule a home-visit. “Is this Ed Sullivan?” I asked over the phone. “This is Lisa, the Hospice chaplain.” “Hi, Lisa,” I heard. “It’s so good to hear from you again.” “Again?” I asked. “Yes, you met with me once, a year ago, in St. Mary’s hospital.” I had moved institutions, changed jobs, been given a home number I had never had before, and still been recognized. He recognized my voice, he said, on the phone.

In my journal’s recollection, we met a total of four times. I’m not sure whether our erotic-but-chaste love began at the phone call or sometime amidst the four visits and one phone call, but that’s what happened. I fell in love with him mind, soul, spirit and body. His death, predetermined though it was by the definition of Hospice, devastated me. The 1998 journal was a preliminary attempt to grieve through prose, to rail at the universe for bringing such a holy beloved into my life and then ripping him away again. 

I had begun the journal of grief with a question, “What does the communion of saints signify…?”, which is how any fledgling theologian would attempt to process her grief. One theologian taught me a highbrow answer. She said it “signifies the relationship flowing among an intergenerational company of persons profoundly touched by the sacred, sharing in the cosmic community of life which is also sacred. Ultimately,” this author argues, “it points to the Creator Spirit who vivifies creation, weaves interconnections, and makes holy the world.” Elizabeth Johnson, whose words these are, names this communion a “circle of companions by the power of Spirit-Sophia.” My prose throughout the journal entries then moves deeper to describe a short companionship with Ed or “Sully,” as he was called, begun September 30^th, 1998. 

Perhaps not as short as I had supposed.

Ed was from Newtown Pennsylvania, and celebrated his 38^th year of marriage to a lovely woman, Mary, about three weeks before he died. They had had three sons, reared true to Irish-Catholic roots. He had lung cancer, congestive pulmonary disorder, both probably from his many years as a smoker, which accompanied his decades of alcoholism. He’d been dry for over 20 years but spoke easily of his regrets, the turmoil that his addiction had inflicted on those he loved most. I found out much later that in his AA meeting, he was a weighty elder, a demanding sponsor and excruciating truth-teller for those on the path to long-term sobriety. “You were Ed’s Hospice chaplain?!” a colleague in ministry asked me, with a tone of awe or fear, I couldn’t tell which. “I would have died if I’d had to do that.” She was part of his AA meeting.

His words to me, recollected in my script, came from the last time that I ever saw him, on the fourth visit to his home. I had planned on visiting patients on the other side of town, but changed my plans at the last minute. I called to set up a visit, and Ed whispered into the phone that he would welcome me. He had COPD and was on oxygen, after all. I then had intentions for our time together—some Scripture, perhaps a bit of singing for him, if he couldn’t speak much—but those got interrupted by the local parish’s Eucharistic ministers coming to his house. “Interrupted” only in my own mind, of course. The sacramental setting, shared in a larger web of relationship, contextualized all of what Ed and I shared together. My hand-written words then recreate a long-forgotten scene. “As I left this time,” I wrote, “(Ed) said, ‘Be selfish, Lisa.’ Confused, I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘You have a gift and if you say yes to too many, you won’t be able to share it. Be selfish.’”

Dumbfounded was the word I used to describe my reaction then. It works pretty well to describe my re-receiving the words nearly fifteen years later. I interpreted it then within my original intention to visit patients on the other side of town that morning, plans changed to visit with him in what was to be the last time. I had decided to narrow my efforts to fewer patients to visit per day. This time, fifteen years later, his words overwhelmed me in the plenary lecture, surrounded by people but isolated by circumstance, even un-seeing choice. Tears flowed easily, beginning in the throat but moving more deeply and quickly in awareness, both coming from my core, my gut. “Be selfish, Lisa. You have a gift and if you say yes to too many, you won’t be able to share it.” I received something sensate, aligned, generous and risky.  But what? I shrugged it off, put the journal away. Really. Didn't give it another thought.

Yet within twenty-four hours of this last “hearing,” my work life changed in tectonic ways—clearly by my willingness and choice, but almost without effort or realized intention. A dissonance and weight I had carried for months was lifted as my life moved into an alignment I had only intuited but could not see. Way opened for narrowing my work energies and expanding the ways I can be present out of my strengths, not out of others’ needs. Something in me heard him, across the years, and I became selfish enough to honor what it is that I have to offer in abundance.

Whatever that may be. I’m not sure what that gift is that Ed saw so clearly. I don’t think I actually need to know how to articulate it or describe it. I do need to offer it, however, to be willing to steward my unknowing, allow it to flow through me, and as it does, align me with who I know I am being asked to be, in my gut, at my core. The flow comes through in what I am coming to learn, to know, to write as “a companionable way,” which I never connected to Ed, for some reason. In terms I’ve used before, he’s an “absent antecedent” I had not known in such fashion. The anam cara ring that has coursed with such significance in my life these last years? I got it to signify him, I re-learn from my journal. His Irish-Catholic impishness had come to mind while browsing in the Celtic shop in town after he died; I seized on the connection. When my parents asked what I might want for Christmas, I told them “that ring.” How could I have forgotten its origin in the time of grief after Ed’s death?

And it wasn’t all in my head either. We met each other a total of five times, and when I left that last day, he expressed his love for me, unbidden and startling. I told him I loved him too, because I did. The section of the journal concludes, “I remember being in my car, waiting at a light and thinking, ‘I’m in love with another man…’ How would my boyfriend (of the time) hear that? Two loves, so different, yet both so intense.” I loved him, deeply, even still. I can feel it, at my core.

The pragmatic side of me pulls me out of my gut and into my head… Who was this man anyway? I don’t even know his sons' names, let alone anything substantive about him, like what he did for a living, what a bastard he must have been when he was drinking, what kind of faith enlivened him as an Irish Catholic. Like those were the point for either of us. He recognized my voice, on the phone. He saw me in ways I could not, ways I yearned to be seen. He shaped my life in ways I had forgotten, opening doors I had not remembered. And his words awakened me once again, precisely when I needed to stir to life in faith again.

Incarnation is like that, I guess, whatever its rendition.

They Have to Want to Leave the Ship...

“How do you get two hundred soldiers to want to get off a submarine? How do you get two hundred soldiers want to get off a nuclear submarine?” These questions mark the moment of insight for Jack Ryan, CIA analyst who found himself on an operations mission in The Hunt for Red October. He spends most of the film thinking out loud, finding his way into and out of a counter-intuitive but narratively logical, action-thriller plot: the cat-and-mouse hunt for a Soviet submarine skipper who has decided to defect to the USA by means of delivering a Russian nuclear sub built for one purpose—to start and finish, in stealth, a nuclear war. As Ryan asks himself the question, sleepless but tenacious, shaving and thinking, he intuits the plan: a mock sabotage, a radiation contamination of the ship.

I’m hearing a voiced-question in my head more and more regularly these days, having to do with a much less action-thriller plot but an engaging conundrum for me all the same. How do you get hundreds of seminary students to see interreligious engagement as fundamental to their faith in God? How do you get hundreds of seminary students—and their professors, for that matter—to see formation as a traditionally-rooted and traditionally-transcendent inquiry-activity-task absolutely necessary to being a good Christian? If our tradition-centric way of doing things is the nuclear submarine, well-equipped to start wars in stealth and fundamentalisms, how do you get two hundred seminary students want to get off a nuclear submarine? They have to want to get off…

We could begin by itemizing the various attachments we develop as people of faith, those things that accord our life meaning, purpose, direction. Attachments in this sense are not bad, per se, just limited and limiting. They serve their purpose and then must be relinquished with grace (or not, usually, in my case). Things like “who God has been for me” or “what faith practice looks like, feels like, in the communities of which I’ve been a part.” Not only do these things offer meaning, but they structure experience. They provide boundaries within which we know who we are, how we do things, what we’re supposed to do. One could say, impishly, well then let’s all become Buddhist, but Buddhists have just as much, or more, difficulty with relinquishing attachment as the rest of us. They’re simply helpful in naming the phenomenon (in my view). Besides, even if we itemize each attachment—like that’d be possible!—there’s no help in the listing-knowledge for actually releasing them, being free of them. Life wouldn’t be human without the gift and burden of attachment. We would never learn freedom without captivity, bliss without yearning, life without death.

We could return to the modernist’s approach, developing a rationality suitable for each setting and practicing the rhetorical flair to persuade others of truth, beauty, goodness available in more traditions than just our tradition. The difficulty here, however, is that it creates fundamentalists of every stripe—those whose structures or orders require just their rationality, truth, goodness, beauty. Then we get the platitudes that grate my nerves more and more these days. “I know Jesus is the only way, but we can still be friends.” “It’s all relative, so why bother.” “Let the competitions begin and we’ll see whose faith tradition is [true, right, just, whatever] in the end. I know it will be mine.” This approach imposes a literary or mind-body distance—whether through texts, rationalities, “religions” or “traditions”—that simultaneously absolutizes and diffuses human relationships. It also disregards and then over-emphasizes power relations, usually in some form of power-over instead of power-with.

In the first instance, our seminary students would need to develop a preference for disorder over order, free-fall from meaning/purpose/direction over tentatively held “humble absolutes” that feel inconclusive (because they are). Anyone coming to seminary these days—whatever reason they come for—does not come for that. Those that are here at seminary already pretty much live in the second instance, at least where I teach and learn. We have increased attention to textual precisions and disregard—without awareness of the disregard—of collaborative, relational centers within which texts matter.

The pivot point of the action-thriller is probably not a good model for this vocational conundrum, in the end, though I still find it lively and compelling. At root, Ryan has the privilege of watching an intentional deception from the outside, figuring it out, and responding to meet the skipper (and his submarine) with open-arms and sanctuary. I’m not interested in stewarding an institutional effort for self-deception for our students—at least at this stage (though talk to me in a couple years). Anything grown in faith must have its organic, stewarded integrity in the power of Spirit.

On the other hand, how is what we’re offering now not a bit of institutional deception? To use this metaphor, we are inviting spiritually-seeking folks onto a nuclear submarine that seems to lean toward war—interreligious war, intercultural insensitivities, my-way-or-highway kinds of understandings of traditions’ wisdom, information-transmission teaching built on old power-hierarchies of teaching/learning. How is invitation onto such a ship not part of the problem we face today?

I guess the question becomes, as I head out to the gym to work out what my body knows, can the invitation from seminaries today be part of the solution…? Granted the systemic realities of higher education, are these the best we’ve got so we keep tweaking the ship…or is it time to think about smaller boats, smaller cohorts of seekers, seekers who are weary enough to risk real work that makes a difference in uncharted waters yet in Spirit’s tether…?

The Value of Hooey

My uncle has a Word-a-Day calendar discipline, begun when his daughter gifted him (and educated the rest of us) with a calendar from which he would muse quarterly, eloquently and of course, from time to time, punnishly. I believe each installment was called “Words of Interest,” mailed to his daughter as a return of sorts. I’m not sure it’s ethical to receive interest from a gift, come to think of it, but that didn’t matter to us. In his rather large-shoes, I’ve developed my own fascination with words, often taken one at a time. Today’s word is hooey.

It’s actually in the dictionary, believe it or not. Supposed “first use” listed in early 1900’s, whether 1912 or 1921. The dictionary appears dyslexic, which is fun. More interesting entries would promised in such fashion. Hooey is both an interjection and a noun, the former being a statement of disbelief or surprise, the latter referring to “nonsense” or “nothing.” Surprising to me, at least in this stage of my life, I’m drawn to both definitions almost immediately.

I’m in the business of meaning, one might say. Significance. Relevance. Nothing livens my wire quite so much as the drive of direction, the pursuits of purpose. That’s how I wound up in seminary, after all. I had been a chemistry major, planning on medical school—it’s what my dad did, so why not? I fell into a Kierkegaard philosophy class in college, despite my best efforts to land in an upper level English class I would have hated. Instead, I landed in the library stacks, fascinated with poetic philosophy with a religious hue, finally charting a respectable path through shelves of other peoples’ meanings, discovering secondary literature for the first time in my life. How cool to learn from others’ quests for significance, I thought. How much easier that is. It was a short fall into seminary from there, though I took the scenic route through L.A. and the Rodney King riots. Seminary is chock full of other peoples’ meanings, littering the hallways for those who have come there—whether their own or others, one can’t really tell. So now I’m a seminary graduate, with a doctorate of other people’s meanings.

What if the whole blooming thing is hooey? I mean, what if the quest for meaning is not best engaged by delving into centuries of human history and theology but by learning to live compassionately amidst the radical evil alongside the delights of the world? Most of the world which, I might add, will never steep in the centuries of literate prose I have? What if choosing that path was the original error, yea, the original sin?

Maybe it’s time to schedule the midlife crisis. Past time.

Thankfully, I’m not alone. My husband's survey results came in today, alerting him to a quandary he’d not confronted fully before. He’s pursuing a DMin degree at a prestigious institution some distance from home, so it has online-learning components. Part of the degree requirement has been inviting his congregation to fill out a survey about church life, leadership, direction, and mission (among other things). He called this morning with his ambivalent news. “Over 69% of the congregation identified “the minister” as the reason they joined the church. When the survey asked what was the most significant factor in keeping folks at the church, do you know what the percentage was?” he asked. “No, do tell,” I responded. “Over 90% identified “the minister” as the one factor that kept them at the church. Over 90%. That’s f—ked,” he exclaimed, then explained: “At first, my reaction was emotional, like ‘They like me.’ But then I thought about it. The minister—most definitely I—should not be the reason that people choose a church or choose to stay in a church. This thing is broken!” he exclaimed.

For him, “this thing” meant the congregation, the church, the social structure that seminary graduates are “trained” to lead and teach in pulpit and bedside manner. For me, “this thing” means that, as well as the theological educational system which has “prepared” alumni to enter into service in such bodies. What if the whole thing were busted? Would anyone in the comforts of the Matrix ever know it? If so, what would they do about it?

Existential questions never have immediate answers, of course, so let’s rachet it down a bit. Even if the whole thing is hooey—a statement of disbelief there, or an assessment of “nothing” or “nonsense”—I’m programmed to see the value even in hooey. I think sometimes my own journey requires me to acknowledge the human-construction and utter inanity of finding meaning in a world like we live in today. Talk about Herculean effort. That’s good: Herculean Hooey. There’s little quite as freeing as living into the void of hooey-ness in the human condition. If it all is nothingness, one can at least play a little.

Because it IS all nothingness, in one sense. Think about all that which deflates hope: children dying in the bombs of corporate greed become international politics; domestic sex-trafficking, right here in the good ol’ USA; overwhelming loneliness of a cyberspace, unlanded populace hungry for human touch; the list is endless. Noting the utter hooey-ness of religious significance in face of such things can be an emancipation proclamation for all of us. Confessions of faith are hooey in such venues. The value of hooey becomes a something when the nothingness is recognized, honored for what it is.

But then the rub: only human beings willing to awaken to what really is can testify to it, can give value to the nothingness in this fashion. The act of seeing what actually is creates meaning, whether one desires it or not. Truth-telling, whether desired or only compelled, lands each of us into an experience of meaning, of significance, which draws us forward despite ourselves.

What a pain in the ass. Even to say it’s all hooey is an act of meaning-making. Might as well strive for the meanings that matter—good friends, skills of learned-compassion amidst inane ego-desires, regulated ways to tradition what one has learned on the offchance that those who come after us might benefit, might make the world more beautiful than we could. The value of hooey seems to be returning us to where we never left—the embrace of the Holy One who smiles when we rant and rave. "It will all be woven into the World to Come, little one", I hear. "Not to worry."

Not to worry indeed. L’chaim—to life—no matter what. J