Sarahbeth Caplin's Blog, page 43

I don’t believe in ‘good people,’ but I believe in goodness

When Miley Cyrus appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show wearing pasties, Kimmel asked her what her father would think of that outfit choice. Cyrus replied, ““My dad’s cool because I’m sure he’d maybe rather not have me have my tits out all the time, but he’d rather me have my tits out and be a good person than have a shirt on and be a bitch.”

This isn’t a post about modesty (or lackthereof), but an idea that I’ve discussed before on this blog, and continue thinking about in my daily life offline: what is a “good person,” and who qualifies?

I’ve stated previously that I don’t buy into this idea of “really good people,” precisely because there are as many definitions of “good” as there are people. The “Good person/Bad person” dichotomy suggests some kind of scale in which we weigh our deeds, and who has time for that? Furthermore, wouldn’t our definition of “bad deeds” still be biased in our favor? “No, I shouldn’t have posted that mean tweet about my boss, but she is a bitch…”

I don’t think accepting that no one is truly “good” means that evil is the default. That seems like a heavy Calvinist-leaning idea, which I don’t buy into. Speaking for myself, realizing I’m not a “good person” means having a healthy awareness of my flaws, and recognizing that I sin on a daily basis. Even the people I know who seem like paragons of righteousness probably have battles within their hearts I’ll never know anything about.

I’m reminded of something C.S. Lewis says in his book Mere Christianity. He doesn’t dismiss other religious ideas as flat-out wrong, which I deeply respect. Instead, supposing that there is an Absolute Truth out there, some religions contain pieces of it, or come closer to it than others. The same goes for our own actions and attitudes towards others: I can think of a few people who are not Christian, but have a better understanding of Christ-likeness than many self-professed Christians do. Ergo, maybe it’s possible that some people are following Christ – or at least his teachings – without knowing it.

That’s something I thought about when someone in one of my classes at seminary raised the question of whether the Jews – God’s chosen people – are in hell because they “rejected” Jesus. You can imagine just how much I loathe this question, but my understanding is that the people who wrote the laws Jesus himself endorsed definitely know a thing or two about the character of God. I can’t elaborate very much beyond that, but I believe that God makes himself accessible in a multitude of creative ways, whether we recognize it or not. I’m thankful that it’s not my job to judge the condition of others’ hearts.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, Judaism

Lessons on death and grieving from The Lion King

Here’s an uplifting opening sentence: I’ve been thinking about death lately. Our bodies have ways of reminding us of particularly painful seasons, and I recently realized that in my family, the start of Fall is a time marked by death: our first dog died in early September, my father in late September, the cat two weeks after that, and now my first kitty, almost twenty years old, is just barely clinging to life. For him it could be any day now.

I guess it’s not so unusual that I’m thinking about this; and it’s somewhat ironic that this time is leading into Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, you’re supposed to ask God to keep your name in the Book of Life another year. I haven’t practiced this in years, but now I feel somewhat superstitious about it.

I’m also thinking about the first time I learned about death. I don’t want to date myself by admitting how old I was when The Lion King came out, but I was quite young. Young enough to not quite “get” what death was all about, and at that point, I’d been spared from ever having to deal with it. The scene in which Simba has a vision of his father telling him to return to Pride Rock confused me – in my child mind, it was like Mufasa came back. He must have just been sleeping.

My father gently corrected me, and that scene is one of my earliest “traumatic” memories: being told that no, Sweetie, death is permanent. So it’s not like sleeping? Well, in a way…but it’s sleep that never ends.

That conversation made bedtime more of a chore than it already was. Now that my father is eleven months gone, I can’t get that moment out of my mind.

What’s the point of rehashing all this? I had a conversation with my therapist recently about the moments in which we feel we’ve grown up. For many people, adulthood happens much earlier than it’s supposed to. They are forced to take on the roles of grown-ups when barely out of childhood themselves. I, luckily, did not have a childhood like that.

My “growing up” moment happened at age fourteen, when a thirteen-year-old classmate committed suicide. We weren’t close at the time, but we used to be. He’d come over to my house and we’d climb this giant tree in my backyard, goofy eleven-year-olds that we were. By seventh grade we moved to different friendship circles, but still exchanged the occasional “Hey” between classes. His death was my first realization that bad things could not only happen in my small town of Glorified Suburbia, but they could happen to kids. Kids I knew.

But now that I think about it, the death conversation from The Lion King was a pivotal growing up moment. And sort of like in The Lion King, I had a dream not long after Dad’s death where I was driving through the valley that lead to one of our favorite breakfast locations: a tradition we cultivated in the last years of his life. Dad was in the backseat, which I thought was strange, and when I asked what he was doing back there, he said, “I can’t stay long. But you’re doing fine.”

I can’t stay long. But you’re doing fine.

I feel silly relating that grief-motivated dream to Simba’s vision, but in the same way that that vision motivated him to return home and make things right, so too did my dream of Dad motivate me to accept that things are sucky right now – and this won’t be the last season of sadness – but if I continue taking care of myself and moving forward, I’ll be fine.

I’ll be fine.

Filed under: Other stuff Tagged: cancer, depression, grief, Judaism

An ode to the art of innuendo

Like many people, I used to think that traditional curse words signaled a lack of creative vocabulary. I’ve since changed my mind, though. Substitute words like “fricking,” “fudging,” or “eff” can be cute in certain contexts, but seem out of place in an adult novel, or even coming from the mouth of an adult. If you’re going to substitute a word that means the exact same thing, why not just say the real one?

But when talking about anything sex-related, we’ll do anything to avoid using the real words, from describing body parts to specific acts. Thanks to TV sitcoms and the advent of “That’s What She Said” jokes, even normal, non-sexual words like “vibrate” and “penetrate” are ruined for me, because I’ve heard them used in sexual contexts one too many times. Then I went and married the king of That’s What She Said jokes. Even my most innocuous statements get twisted into punch lines, which he finds hilarious, which means I have to try extra hard to twist his words around to get even.

One of our best “That’s what she said” moments happened at the Denver zoo. We walk past a Merry-Go-Round and I ask if he wants to go on it with me, because we’re such big kids. He responds, “Only if you ride the jaguar.” Without even thinking about it, I said “I’ll ride whatever you want,” and he had to sit down on the nearest bench because he was laughing so hard, his stomach hurt.

We are in our late twenties, and one of us turns thirty next month. Are we getting too old for this kind of middle school humor?

I have to laugh and say no. In this regard, we are only getting more creative in our attempts to one-up the other. How can I, as a lover of words, complain about that? Even if I find myself inappropriately cracking up at a friend who, staring at her pizza at a restaurant, says she doesn’t think six inches is big enough, the literary part of me can’t help thinking, The versatility of words is just so fascinating! But then I have to text my husband, Wait till you hear this one…and wonder if I’m just kidding myself, because I have reverted back to the mentality of a seventh grader. Well, if that’s the case, I know exactly who to blame!

I go back and forth in my head, thinking that words are arbitrary and constantly evolving, and on the other hand chastising myself for being part of a so-called movement to degrade the English language. But then again, people unfamiliar with Shakespeare would not believe the number of sexual innuendos in Romeo and Juliet, and not just between Romeo and Juliet! Romeo was a bit of a horn-dog who traded innuendos with his buddies, not unlike how men still do today (and yes, women too). And yet we hail this Shakespeare as some paragon of literary mastery. Yet not much has changed!

Personally, what I find most fascinating is that we can be constantly making up new sayings, and in the context of the moment, people still understand what we mean.

Filed under: Other stuff, Writing & Publishing Tagged: censorship, Controversy

Coincidence or redemption?

By now, many of my faith struggles are well-documented. I have few issues with Jesus, the man, but I’m still struggling with the thought of him being the only path to God (and was an agonizing crucifixion really the only way of atonement?). I can’t stomach the idea that people who follow the wrong doctrines can end up in hell. The Jew in me struggles to understand how this is “good news.”

But I’ve had moments in my life – several, in fact – that more or less affirm the idea of brokenness to redemption, by far Christianity’s most beautiful feature. And if those moments point to the God of the bible as the God, I’m willing to continue learning all I can about him:

It was at his funeral that I met the sister of a friend of mine who committed suicide in middle school. She became one of my most treasured friends, and our friendship went full circle when she was there for me at my father’s funeral.

It was because of seminary, an environment that was toxic to my faith, that I met my first Colorado best friend, Kerry (though it did cost me a few grand to meet her, and I joke about whether she would have paid the same amount just to meet me. She still hasn’t directly answered that question).

And then, some maybe-miracle stories: it was while pushing myself out of my comfort zone through “cold turkey” evangelizing with my college church (I was horrible at it) that I ran into a man I recognized from Campus Crusade for Christ (or “Cru”). That man is now my husband. And when I attempted to raise money for a summer retreat in Estes Park, Colorado, I was five hundred dollars short a week before the payment deadline. It was my Jewish grandparents who footed the rest of that bill, knowing full well what that money would support. They didn’t believe in the cause, but they believed in me.

Last but not least, it was cancer that forced my dad to retire early so we could receive disability insurance, but allowed him to fulfill his true vocation (albeit on a volunteer basis): high school track coach.

Are all those examples nothing more than coincidence? Maybe. If it wasn’t the hand of God, I’m not one to put stock in the ability of “the universe” to line things up for me just so I can be happy (the universe seems a little big to be concerned with the personal goings-on of one species on one of an infinite number of planets, but that’s just me). But too many coincidences in a row, or even in a short number of years, just make me wonder.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Campus Crusade for Christ, cancer, Christian culture, Christianity, evangelicals, hell, Judaism, Seminary

‘Confessions’ reaches bestseller status!

The best things in life aren’t “things,” but when you’re a writer, a screen shot like this is kind of a big deal:

#199 in Kindle free books, #1 in personal growth, #1 in memoirs!

I’ve come a long way since I first started writing books out of construction paper and crayons. Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter was my first self-published book baby to be released into the world, and I was just thrilled that I figured out how to put it out there. It was a real shock that people who don’t even know me actually read the thing.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to invest in my story. Thank you to everyone who downloaded a copy, and special thanks to those who wrote honest reviews. I wouldn’t be where I am today without you. I may not be rich from what I do (hell, I don’t even have a real annual salary), but I get to do what I love, and that gift is priceless (but speaking of prices…the book is free to download through tomorrow before returning to its regular price of $2.99).

Thank you, thank you, a million times thank you. This girl feels mighty blessed.

Filed under: Writing & Publishing Tagged: Author Sarahbeth Caplin, Christianity, Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter, Judaism, self-publishing, Writing

If he were my son, I’d put the cuffs on him myself

The newest TLC reality show featuring the infamous Duggar family is called “Breaking the Silence,” referring to the recent discovery of molestation committed by Josh, the oldest Duggar child, against his own sisters. The original show that made them famous, 19 Kids and Counting, has been cancelled, but I guess the network just can’t bring itself to part with its biggest cash cow yet. It’s also more than a little ironic that the title “Breaking the Silence” is referring to a family that went out of its way to cover up the abuse, and only issued half-assed not-pologies when they couldn’t hide it any longer.

I learned something throughout this entire “scandal.” I learned how many people, my own Facebook friends included, know shockingly little about sex abuse. What it is: a crime. And what it isn’t: a “teenage mistake,” an expression that’s been thrown around quite a bit, as if molesting your sibling is on par with breaking a window playing baseball or staying out past curfew. Those are things that normal teenagers do.

But the biggest shock for me was the outrage after I commented (unwisely, I know) on a related article that if Josh Duggar were my son, I would put the handcuffs on him myself.

Is it necessary for me to have children of my own to understand that helping them hide from the consequences of their actions isn’t helping them at all? Why is the future of an outed sex offender more important than the future of a victim who has been shamed into silence? To ask, “What would you do if it were your son?” is the wrong question. If you are outraged at the thought of someone wrongly touching your child, then you know reporting the offender is the right thing to do. Frankly, I’m a little concerned about the number of people who seem to put image above justice. How many people are aware that letting justice be served is a form of love?

I know a family in which the kid caught with drugs was denied bail by his parents, who wanted him to spend a night in jail to fully comprehend the magnitude of his decision. On a lesser scale, I was raised in a home where we lost privileges for breaking the rules no matter how “sorry” we said we were. We were old enough to have rules, and therefore old enough to choose to break them. At fourteen years of age, why do we act like Josh Duggar shouldn’t have known better than to hurt someone?

Love may be tough, but it doesn’t enable.

Filed under: Rape Culture Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, Duggars, evangelicals, Facebook, rape culture

A birthday post for a special co-worker

I interrupt my normal flow of serious posts to honor the birth of one of my favorite co-workers.

This little lady has been a huge encouragement to me, always there with an encouraging hug when I need it. In fact, she loves hugs so much, I gave her her own special seat, so she can work closely with me at all times.

And yesterday was her first birthday.

It’s been a privilege getting to know little Zoey over the last eight months. True, she’s not as serious a work-o-holic as I am – at least, not in the same department. Her specialty lies in toilet paper art.

And sleeping in bizarre positions.

And crawling into small spaces.

But most importantly, she loves reading, just like her Mommy Boss.

She’s listening, she’s just…concentrating really hard.

Happy birthday, Zo-Zo girl!

Filed under: Other stuff Tagged: Author Sarahbeth Caplin, cats, Writing

Can you help your “unbelief”?

“Lord, I believe – help my unbelief!”

I was more than a little surprised when a friend asked if I would consider taking on the role of a “moderator” on his blog about living openly atheist in the Bible Belt. I was his first and only theist moderator, charged with keeping the comment threads civil: not an easy task, given the subject matter of leaving a religion whose culture influences literally every aspect of Southern life. I was chosen for the “job” because I identified myself as a Christian with the sole agenda of learning rather than preaching. Not until discovering Neil’s blog did I give serious consideration to the question of how much control we have in choosing our beliefs.

In our world, beliefs tend to be distinguished from facts. We treat beliefs as individual preferences, but facts as indisputable. You can believe gravity doesn’t exist, but will be proven dangerously wrong by jumping off a building. Facts transcend culture on every level.

Evangelicals, I’ve noticed, have a different definition of “belief.” I’ve read tracts with careful phrasing about “choosing” to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior. Since words are my livelihood, I spend a great deal of time analyzing them in definition and context, and in evangelical context you can choose to believe or choose to reject. It’s all very simple.

But for many people, the choice to believe is a struggle. If I could easily choose to believe or disbelieve, I wouldn’t struggle with doctrinal ideas like eternal punishment. I struggle to believe because the very idea itself makes little sense to me. Is my thinking brain, my ability to reason, a gift from God or a defect from the Fall? I’ve sat in bible studies with people who believe that asking questions and using logic is playing straight into the hands of the Devil.

With the ability to reason comes the ability to accept or reject an ideology, and the amount of grace I have for people who tried to believe and failed continues to increase as I get older. Christianity asks thinking adults to believe in talking snakes, parting seas, and a dead man coming back to life. Even more uncomfortable is the belief that man has something inherently wrong with him, and he cannot find meaning on his own. I completely understand why, for some people, the choice to believe is as feasible as choosing to believe in the Easter Bunny. It stretches the mind too much.

There is one thing I must choose to believe, no matter how unlikely it seems: I must choose to believe that God’s grace is bigger and deeper than what our human brains are capable of comprehending. I have to believe that God’s love transcends the roadblocks set in place by nature: we know that when people die, they stay dead. We know that watching a newborn sleep soundly makes Original Sin sound ludicrous. We observe and believe what is tangibly visible with evidence. Is it wrong to want a God of the universe to be proven the same way? No one who can see God would consider it a choice to believe; they would simply know.

I envy people who feel they know. And while I choose to believe (for my own sanity) that God has his ways of making himself known to people who wish they were born with a “belief gene,” I strongly empathize with those who just couldn’t do it. I’ve been there; some days I still am. I believe those who say they were devout believers for many years, but are not anymore. Let no one try and dictate your story for you when they haven’t lived it.

Excerpted from my upcoming book, Add Jesus and Stir: a Jewish-born Christian’s attempt to understand evangelical culture.

Filed under: Religion, Writing & Publishing Tagged: Author Sarahbeth Caplin, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christian culture, Christianity, evangelicals, Writing

A word about my next book, ‘Add Jesus and Stir’

Surprise, surprise, I’m working on another book. Because of the unexpected success of my first memoir, Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter, which ranked #51 in Amazon’s top 100 paid books on personal growth this summer (for six days!), I think now is the best time to write a second one.

I didn’t expect to be a nonfiction author, particularly a nonfiction religious author, but writing about religion is when I am most honest, most authentic, and I would not have nearly the same number of blog and Twitter followers as I do if not for all my questions. Some of my favorite religious writers are people who dare to ask the questions I’m afraid to acknowledge even in my own head. I like to imagine that that’s how many readers of this blog and of Confessions feel.

But a second memoir was inevitable, regardless of how well the first one did. It was inevitable not because I’ve lived such a unique life, but because the questions keep on growing, and they are hard to find addressed in mainstream Christian books. There are plenty of stories out there about finding God, but not so much what to do when no one in church can answer your questions, and when those questions threaten to break your faith. There are few books out there that address doubt but don’t end neatly, and for converts like myself, who still carry some baggage from the faith of their childhood, that pool of books has even fewer options.

Add Jesus and Stir: a Jewish-born Christian’s attempt at understanding evangelical culture is my response to Christians who claim to love Judaism, but don’t really understand what it’s about. It’s also a book for anyone, not just converted Jews, who embraced a new tradition as an adult, but cannot for the life of them fit in with the surrounding cultural norms. My story of wading through evangelical waters has been, and continues to be, a fish out of water experience. In Evangelical World I have met some truly amazing people, but have also experienced a lot of damage, which my Jewish background made me particularly prone to.

This is a book about questioning all the beautiful parts – an incarnate god, the promise of redemption – because of the ugly: when not enjoying worship music is sinful, and your non-believing relatives are assumed destined for hell.

What is one to do with a dichotomy like that – especially coming from a religious tradition that affirms more than one viable path to God?

Add Jesus and Stir doesn’t offer any answers, but it has been therapeutic for me to write (100 pages and 22,000 words so far, some of which have been test-driven on this blog). I have a love-hate relationship with my unusual testimony, but I don’t think it’s so “out there” that no cradle Christian can possibly relate. I come from a tradition that is known for asking questions, and I want this book to be encouraging for Christians bred with the idea that doubt is not okay.

Much has changed since the first edition of Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter was published. The honeymoon phase of my new relationship with Jesus has long faded. Restlessness has moved in. Frustration and irreconcilable differences are daily battles.

At the time I started writing that first draft, I was an opinion columnist for my college newspaper. I wanted the job because I was tired of the pervasive liberal attitude of seemingly every editorial. It didn’t take long to develop a reputation as “that Christian columnist,” and the title was not always used favorably. I can see now that my tone was obnoxious in many columns, writing as someone who thought she found indisputable Truth. But the biggest mistake I made as a columnist was adopting the assumption that I was disliked by so many because I happened to be Christian, which could not have been further from the truth. As a Jew raised in a small, conservative Christian town, shouldn’t I have known better than to play the persecution card? Why would I have done that?

I know why, though I wouldn’t have admitted it then. It’s very much a cultural trend to take on a persecution complex, no matter how outrageous it sounds compared to Christians across the world who are losing their lives for their faith. I just wanted to be included more than anything. I wanted to know what being part of the religious in-crowd felt like. If that meant pretending that the Christian majority I recognized so clearly growing up was actually in danger of extinction, so be it.

Thankfully, the mindset didn’t last. I could only pretend for so long that being the odd Jew out (an actual minority) for most of my life wouldn’t catch up to me at some point. Sure enough, during my stint at seminary, it did.

Add Jesus and Stir is the story of what happened to my faith when I confronted my inner Jew, who was buried for a time, but never actually went away. Perhaps she was never meant to.

Filed under: Religion, Writing & Publishing Tagged: Author Sarahbeth Caplin, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christian culture, Christianity, Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter, Controversy, evangelicals, Judaism, self-publishing, Writing

Thinking outside the tampon box

A woman runs a marathon during her period, without a tampon, and it’s all that Twitter is talking about (this hour, anyway). I had never heard of “period shaming,” but then again, I live in a society where no one cares if I sit down on a public bench whilst “unclean.” For many women around the world, there is a real stigma.

Still, I’m not entirely convinced that running with blood covering your crotch is really the best way to draw the kind of attention you want. I’m torn between thinking, “Wow, she’s got lady-balls,” and “Damn, that’s disgusting.”

Maybe I don’t think outside the [tampon] box enough, but can you really convince people to see your point when violating basic rules of hygiene?

Well, people are talking about it, so I guess her point has been made. Still, I can’t help but get the feeling that the new goal of awareness is to create as much shock value as possible, even though it’s worked in the past: the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC uses graphic footage not just to show history as it happened, but also because there are still people out there who believe it never happened. I have friends who post disturbing photos of slaughtered pigs and post-abortion fetuses on Facebook to get their messages across, but even if the message is one I agree with, at what point does shock value push away more people than it actually educates?

In a world that craves “big” stories, the need to go drastic is understandable, and I’ve certainly felt that burning need to have people LOOK AT ME, because I HAVE SOMETHING I NEED TO SAY. I’d just be afraid that saying something with menstrual blood soaking my pants might cause more people to stare rather than actually listen.

Do these shock-value methods for awareness really work? Better question: what are you willing to do to get people to pay attention?

Filed under: Feminism, Other stuff Tagged: Abortion, censorship, Controversy, Feminism, social justice