Sare Liz Anuszkiewicz's Blog, page 33

Inspiration from Chautauqua

Some of you may be thinking, now how on earth does one pronounce Chautauqua? and others of you may be thinking, does she mean the Chautauqua Institute? Well – Shah-TAH-qua is how you pronounce it and yes, I do mean the Institute.

A bit of background information. I hadn’t planned on going. I was perfectly content being Bridezilla in Buffalo (wedding in T-minus 13 days) when a colleague came down with Pneumonia and I was called. Could I take the week as Episcopal Chaplain? The Vicar knew I was interested, at least in theory. Even the week minus Sunday (as I had prior engagements)? So I agreed. And I preached daily, plus led a bible study and attempted to be social during the Tea and was available for pastoral crises and for this I got a room, a parking pass, two gate passes and a continental breakfast every day. It’s not a bad way to vacation if you can do it, though two weeks before your wedding isn’t a great time to vacation. It is, however, an excellent time to go on retreat.

I emailed my Spiritual Director and told her the plan, asking for any words of wisdom to take with me. “Be open to God,” she said. Well that was helpful. I could have come up with that on my own, thanks. (The point, of course, is that I could, but I wouldn’t have. So despite my snark, it was quite helpful.)

So I retreated all by myself. My beloved couldn’t take time off from work, and certainly not with three days notice, so I loaded up the Tardis and drove 75 minutes south. It took me two days to shed the angst and anger and stress I was carrying around and once I did?

Butterfly.

Well, relatively speaking.

This week, Week 1 of Chautauqua’s ten week season, Alan Jones was the Chaplain of the Institute and John Shelby Spong was the Interfaith Lecturer for the week. They each played a beautiful and melodic counterpoint, Dean Emeritus Jones a gentle but persistent call to true humanity (like the bell that won’t stop ringing), to Anglican Orthodoxy, the unity in spite of differences, and Bishop Spong a horn cutting through the fog of biblical literalism, telling and retelling the stories of scripture in light of hard hitting and insightful research, most of which has been available to scholars for the past 200 years.

And me? Well, in those first two days all I could be was stressed out and intimidated – what could I possibly say in my three minute sermon (well, it was supposed to be three minutes. I can’t seem to bring myself to preach for only three minutes. Sue me.) at 7:45 in the morning that could possibly compare to these? And then I woke up – I woke up in so many ways. Some of them very private and intense, some of them far reaching and I’ll go into those in later blog posts, but I also woke up to my role. I was chaplain. It was my job to attend to the spiritual needs of the souls in my cure for the week, those staying in the Episcopal Cottage, those attending morning chapel. And so I did. And as I listened to them outside of chapel it became quite clear to me what I need to say inside of chapel.

Who will replace Bishop Spong? they asked. He is in his eighties, after all.

No one will replace Bishop Spong, and no one needs to, I said. His role is to do the research, to write the books, to tell YOU about it. Now it’s your turn. If you simply read the book and say, YEAH! and then put it on the shelf and do nothing more, not let it speak to your life, not let it transform you, then he may as well have never written. If you simply attend every lecture of his you can and deeply enjoy them and not let them change you when you go home, he may as well have never spoken, never lectured at all.

Ring the bells that still can ring, there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

And so I helped them with the missing links – how do we bring this home?  How do we study this by ourselves if our priest or pastor doesn’t want to help us? How do we build networks of people, of communities to be supportive as we try to be open to the spirit? How do we prepare ourselves to let the crack widen and the light to stream in, to follow where the Holy Spirit leads?

So I preached on change, unity, community, martyrdom and more and I could see the difference.  I was told by previous chaplains that the bible study is pro forma. A few people may attend out of politeness. No one came this week out of politeness. We looked at the three different versions of the ten commandments that Bishop Spong had mentioned. We read them. We compared them. We marveled over the words and the themes, the similarities and the differences. We ran out of time because we all also wanted to go hear Alan Jones preach…

[...and I can hear them clapping right now, from the porch of the Episcopal Cottage. Dame Julie Andrews must have just taken the stage in the Amphitheater. Alas, if I hadn't lost my gate pass, I'd be there instead of writing this blog post. Ah well. Moving on.]

We are the boat, we are the sea. I sail in you, you sail in me.

There is more to say. There is always more to say. And sometimes it is left unsaid quite intentionally because words can only convey so much and sometimes they fall entirely flat. So I invite you, instead of reading ten more paragraphs, to go and find a flower or a tree or a sunset or a sunrise or something quite naturally beautiful and entrancing and stare at it. Let your mind fall silent and mute. Lose track of time and allow whatever you’re staring at to speak to you in the silence. Do that and you will have shared with me in some of my experiences this week.

A Psalm for the Oppressed

Inspired by #vaginagate and #vaginablog, I have something for you.

Monday is my day to exegete the lectionary for the following Sunday, and I do that not only for myself, but for all of the subscribers to The Monday Morning Exegete – preachers and laypeople interested in engaging in the Christian holy book in a deeper and unabashedly liberal fashion.  One of the bits of scripture slated for next Sunday is the following psalm, which when I read it, seemed entirely appropriate.

Psalm 9:9-20 Page 593, BCP
Confitebor tibi

9   The LORD will be a refuge for the oppressed, *a refuge in time of trouble.
10  Those who know your Name will put their trust in you, *for you never forsake those who seek you, O LORD.
11  Sing praise to the LORD who dwells in Zion; *proclaim to the peoples the things he has done.
12  The Avenger of blood will remember them; *he will not forget the cry of the afflicted.
13  Have pity on me, O LORD; *see the misery I suffer from those who hate me,O you who lift me up from the gate of death;
14  So that I may tell of all your praisesand rejoice in your salvation *in the gates of the city of Zion.
15  The ungodly have fallen into the pit they dug, *and in the snare they set is their own foot caught.
16  The LORD is known by his acts of justice; *the wicked are trapped in the works of their own hands. 
17  The wicked shall be given over to the grave, *and also all the peoples that forget God.
18  For the needy shall not always be forgotten, *and the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever.
19  Rise up, O LORD, let not the ungodly have the upper hand; *let them be judged before you.
20  Put fear upon them, O LORD; *let the ungodly know they are but mortal.


The Reverend Sare Gordy signing out, proving that liberal Christians can quote the Bible, too.

Universal Feminine Painbody

Picture by fireyes.deviantart.com. And yes, I was screaming into pillows earlier today. It helped for about 8 minutes.

Oh, hello. Today my name is Angry!Sare. Why am I angry? Well, there are a multitude of little and not-so-little things that are going on in my life situation right now, but they’ve really got nothing to do with it because I coped with all of those things with a smile and infinite patience, say, yesterday. I am angry because I am premenstrual – but please let me explain what I mean by that.

Eckhart Tolle, in his wonderful book ‘The Power of Now’ is very clear and helpfully so, about the fact that a woman’s best and easiest time to wake up and become Enlightened is actually during the process of menstruation (pre & during). Why is this? Because there’s all that emotion right on the surface and it’s not just the woman in question’s emotion. At that point in a woman’s cycle, she is unconsciously and unintentionally tapping into not just her emotion but the collective emotional pain of all women who have ever lived and who have been unable to manage their own pain.

All the rapes. All the subjugation. All the torture. All the mutilation. All the childbirth. All the everything.

About a year ago I decided that I wasn’t going to try to medicate my way through this part of the month. Instead I was going to try to ride it out, allow the physical pain and emotional pain to wake me up, to increase my compassion. So far, so good – but let me tell you, never in my life have I been this angry before. Not when my parents got divorced. Not when I found out why they got divorced. Not when people told me I couldn’t do things I certainly could. Not when I failed to get respect that I had earned. Not when I was discriminated against because of my sex (an occasional thing), and because of my age (an ongoing thing). Not when someone called me a heretic to my face. Not when people who are supposed to love me treat me like shit. Not even then. The amount of anger I’ve ever felt in my entire life (and I’ve had anger issues) pales in comparison to what I feel right now.

O, Holy Jesus, am I angry.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, two reasons, really. It’s helping me to put it into perspective. I’m an external processor, don’t you know. But also this other reason – we need to stop adding to the universal feminine painbody.  Please. And that needs to happen everywhere – in every corner of the earth, but certainly the corner in which you yourself are resident, and certainly the corner in which I am resident. And there are some people (#VaginaBlogs) who are working on that, one angle, one path, one way in their corner. Please go look. Go bear witness and allow it to strengthen your resolve.

Me, I’m going to go meditate.

Non-Confession Confession

Okay. Confession time. I am going on a diet. I’ve never yet gone on a diet. I don’t particularly like diets. I know what evolutionary safe-guards the body has against famine and I know that diets are the best modern simulation of famine that we’ve got, at least in America. I know that every Joe with a method and a dream preys on a fragile, hopeful and overweight populous who are overweight for any bunch of a heap of reasons from Hormones Gone Wild to Eating Because Life is Horribly Unsafe For Me.

Given this, what diet have I chosen? The Dukan Diet, named for Dr. Pierre Dukan, a French Nutritionist and medical doctor. He’s been refining it for 35 years, it’s similar to but slightly different from some other diets out there, yes, yes. Here’s why I like this diet above the others that I’ve read about, bought the books and thought, ‘thanks, but no thanks – nice recipes, tho’.

1 – at no point will my body go into the very strong evolutionary famine-jolt that happens at the beginning of a lot of diets. I will be eating the proverbial wildebeest every damn day. Protein. Yum.

2 – there is no food that is the enemy. Different foods do different things to the body, all are categorized, noted and used at different moments. I like this as I see no food* as the enemy. (*By ‘food’, I mean actual food, not fake food such as twinkies and margarine which is actually sort of plastic.)(Fat may come close to being the enemy, but I’m quite friendly with bacon fat and the skin of chicken, for instance. (Perhaps this is my practicing Christianity coming to the fore – making friends of enemies?) And yet I’m still not going to eat it just at this moment. I look at it this way: I’m trying to burn up my own fat. Why would I eat the fat stores of another animal? I have plenty of my own just at the moment.) (Wow, point number two really was the land of the parentheticals, wasn’t it? Okay, moving on to point number three…)

3 – losing weight is only half of what is going on. The other half (or slightly more than half, really) is creating a new lifestyle, going through a rather long phase of telling the body ‘it’s okay, this is for real, I’m going to treat you right and this wasn’t a famine’. Five days for every pound I lose, I’ll be in this liminal phase – having lost the desired weight, but still not done yet.

4 – none of the requirements are heinous. I’m not into heinous. I am in no way, shape or form remotely masochistic. I’m into cooking really amazing food that is nearly orgasmic to eat, that my fiancé can smell from the sidewalk of our apartment and that makes me feel like a rockstar for making it.

So, a colleague of mine recommended it and I read the book. I’m starting today, and she’ll be joining me at the end of the month. Two days ago I got the book and a scale – and discovered that in the middle of that day, I weighed a whopping 280.5 pounds. Eeek! No wonder my clergy shirts are tight. And yes, that was the middle of the day, and yes I’ve been retaining water like a camel. Yesterday morning I weighed 275.0 pounds. This morning I weighed 273.5 pounds. So yeah, in the past two days I lost 7 pounds of water weight, but I’m claiming it nonetheless. According to Dukan’s system, my goal weight is 173 pounds, which is the weight that I’ll be able to manage in a healthy way for the rest of my life, and that’s with the most moderate exercise in the world – if I actually do some of the active things I want to, that number might be smaller. All the same, that’s 100.5 pounds from here, and 107.5 pounds from Monday.

[And for the sake of honesty, what don't I like? I really can't stand his writing style. But I console myself with the twin facts that a) he wrote it in French and it's been translated and b) he's writing it to be convincing whereas I just want a plain recitation of the facts, implications and plans. But you know, a lot of those other plans I chose not to adopt are written really well. I suppose picking a diet plan because of the writing is a little like picking the beer because of the label, which while fun, in no way guarantees the product within...]

So, here we go. I’ll be posting periodic updates and perhaps pictures. Perhaps. We’ll see.

Daily Inspiration

I get daily inspiration from a variety of different sources, some of them ancient turns of phrase, some of them new reflections on the same wisdom we all tap into. I have mantras that I write for myself, or occasionally get from somewhere else. I have  Morning Prayer which incorporates some of those ancient turns of phrase – some of them only a thousand years old, and some of them more like three thousand years old. I move and twist my body while I do yoga and that seems to move and twist my mind and my spirit and delicious ways. And I have things emailed to me every morning that are inspirational.

Why?

Funny you should ask. It’s nice at any point in my life, and right now it’s absolutely necessary. It’s a stressful pot of crabs over here – moving out of a commune, getting married, the job I’ve created for myself over the past 3 years finally materializing, every other vocational thing taking off and taking time, and the necessary balance… Let’s just say I go to bed grateful that I can rest and I wake up grumpy, despite saying Compline or Night Prayer with my beloved.  My daily inspiration is the way I transform GrumpMuffin into Grateful, Smiling Sarah.

And so I share with you here two pieces of that daily inspiration. The first one in the picture above comes from the magazine Real Simple who, despite its grammatically sketchy title, provides a lovely ‘Daily Thought’. I subscribed to their magazine for a few years, but grew beyond it. I have yet to grow beyond the Daily Thought, and I deeply appreciate it. “If you can dream it, you can make it so.” – Belva Davis.

The second comes from the mac widget produced by The Secret. Today’s ‘Daily Teaching’ is a quote from Marcel Proust. “We don’t receive wisdom. We must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

I hope you all have a very lovely day.

The Clarity of Hope

What does desire have to do with faith?

When we feel a strong need, there is desperation in that need. Even if we’re not used to putting it quite that way, it doesn’t take a whole lot of introspection to identify it. God doesn’t dwell in desperation. Faith is where God is found – faith, hope, love, joy, peace, bliss, light, life… Yes this is the stomping ground of God. This is, in fact, That Which Is God.

When we feel desire – and here I take the stance that we can feel desire apart from need – there is no desperation, there is no fear, there is no sense of lack or incompleteness. There is a freedom and openness in desire – the exact opposite of desperation. When we feel desire, this open, free sensation makes faith easy. And faith isn’t about buying into a belief system, a set of historical events that may or may not have occurred. Faith is about placing your heart inside of this Hope-Love-Joy-Peace-Bliss-Life-Light thing that is God. Faith is about saying ‘that’s what I want, that’s how I want to live, that’s what I’m going to do, that’s how I’m going to be’.

When we feel desire it is easier to sense the abundance around us and we can very easily be in tune with the stomping ground of God – we can be faith-y, placing our hearts inside of hope, love, joy, peace, bliss, light and life.

When we have faith, we can know that our desires are possible. It is God’s happy joy to answer our prayers, but when we are trembling in fear or anger then we’ve already separated ourselves from God… and it’s that separation which needs to be addressed before any other prayers can be heard. God is, loves, and wants faith, hope, joy, love, peace, bliss, light and life for all of us, and God wants it RIGHT NOW.

So… Get in the groove. Practice giving up the desperate sense of need (which is a spiritual practice all on it’s own, popular in every major religion, under different titles), and embrace Holy Desire – where we can have the clarity of hope and the fullness of faith. Also, Joy. Lots and lots of joy. (All the joy! All of it!)

Italian Open-Faced Scrambled Bagel

Lunch. Ung. Sometimes it’s so good, I amaze myself.  Here’s how this one turned out:

A diced slice of onion & one sliced garlic clove into the pan with a dab of Earth Balance. Pour in one egg, beaten into submission and topped with a generous helping of milk, salt and pepper. (Or whatever else you can find in your church kitchen.) Scramble.

Meanwhile, toast up two halves of your favorite bagel, and put a bit of that Earth Balance on each open face before you hit ‘toast’! When they come out, sprinkle them in nutritional yeast and Italian seasonings. Then sprinkle them in shredded mozzarella.

Moving back to the eggs, grab whatever vegetable is handy (in said church fridge – today it was celery) dice it and add some to the eggs. Keep some back for toppings.

When all is ready to join forces, pile egg concoction on top of two open face halves, top with more mozzarella and remaining Diced Random-Vegetable.

Eat. Savor. Moan in happiness. Be grateful for a sense of imagination and a church kitchen. And if you have a cell phone… take a picture of the gorgeous White-Green happiness that is on your plate. (But can you make the Gooseberry work well enough to actually post it on your blog? This part remains to be seen. Perhaps in a future edit.

Self-Sabotaging Behaviors

Last night in the kitchen (the kitchen of the commune in which I still live, at least for the next three weeks) I was having a conversation with a housemate. We were talking about self-sabotaging behaviors, mine in question was procrastination on a specific project at work. I’d struggled with procrastination all the way through two graduate degrees and beyond and never quite mastered it, you see, though it had been getting much better. Okay, slightly better.

The gentleman I was discussing this with had his own self-sabotaging behaviors that he shared, though he balked at the word ‘sabotage’ on the basis that the behaviors weren’t conscious, so they couldn’t be actual sabotage – sabotage implies consent and intention.

But here’s how I see it:

My procrastination is a coping mechanism for when I feel overwhelmed. Now, I used to feel overwhelmed because I wasn’t actually capable of finishing successfully, or didn’t have all the information and data and didn’t know how to ask for it. Now, I feel overwhelmed because it’s really important and it could affect a lot of people’s lives in really incredible and positive ways… but I know I’m up to the challenge, I know I have all the resources I need. But my coping mechanism is going to protect me at all costs. 

And what is the cost, in this case? What is being sabotaged by this behavior? Not my current sense of self. That’s what’s being protected at all costs. It’s my vision of who I want to be. The ways I’ve articulated, the list of attributes that I’m working steadily toward that include things like joyful, enlightened, following my bliss, loving, grounded, influential, a change agent, deeply peaceful, inspirational. This is what is at risk for sabotage because my coping mechanism is willing to protect my current being at all costs. And in this case, the cost is who I want to be. I sabotage my future and desired self when I pull this sort of thing.

So it stops now. And it’s a lovely feeling, being free of it.

Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Lose

The ways in which Katniss and Jesus are really quite similar: They were willing to lay down their lives for their friends. Neither had anything to lose, nor anything to fear. And it’s not just these two…

Harry Potter walked back into the woods. Firefighters run back into the fire. The Mayor of Newark ran into a burning house last week to save his next door neighbor – after throwing off his bodyguard.

And all of these people aren’t ‘one of them’, they’re one of us. They’re no one particularly special… until afterwards when you hear their story and you realize that in the moment that that totally normal person had no fear and nothing to lose.

Nothing to fear, nothing to lose – The stockbroker who decides the Wall St. rat-race isn’t worth it, takes a 90% pay cut, buys a farm and lives a happier life?

If your church ceased to exist tomorrow, other than your core members, who would notice? Who would care? If the answer is nobody, it’s not looking good for your church.

In crisis we have two choices – which are actually the two choices we always have, but are put in stark relief in in the midst of crisis – we can hold on tight or let go. If we hold on tight, we break, we are inflexible, we have everything to lose and everything to fear and when we lose even part of it much less all of it, we ourselves feel as if we are breaking. And if we let go, if we release we still may lose things – items, reputation, money, loved ones – and yet we are able to weather it like a palm tree in the wind, bending and swaying. But the perspective we have when we hold on is so painful, so full of suffering. The perspective we have when we let go is one of freedom and expectation.

So – will you wait for a crisis to let go, or are you willing to do so now and live a gentler and easier life?

Book Signing!

My very first book signing is coming up! It will be located in New York City (in the West Village), where the editor of the anthology resides, and we’re all very excited. We’ll be signing HOT MESS: Speculative fiction about climate change, which is an absolutely fabulous piece of wonderfulness that if you don’t already own, you really should. Of course you can buy it in a digital format, but that would make it awfully hard to sign, wouldn’t it? You can get it for $6.99, before the event, however, in a beautifully bound trade paperback version. Delightful, it is.  So, enough waxing eloquent – here are the details!

Where: Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, NY, NY 10014 (map)

When: Thursday, May 17, at 6pm (arrive at 5:45!)

Admission: $7, includes a drink

Reservations: A REALLY GOOD IDEA! 212-989-9319  - and if you’re coming, please drop me a line or respond to this post!