Seabird Lyrics 4 Survivors and Victims

I promise with my life, I will bite my tongue
And I won't say a word,
'til all the listening is done
And hold onto these memories,
the ones that drive you away

Sing 'til your heart hurts, then sing some more
Don't stop singing 'til we see the shore
Sing it loud and clear, I promise you
Someone will hear you sing

Sing it without the fear, 'cause I promise you
The whole world will hear you sing

Speechless

Tonight, I discovered a family friend's children were molested.

By a family friend.

Whom they trusted.

Two little girls. 

It's flabbergasting because the parents LOVED those kids. They did all they could to keep them safe, to provide for and nurture them. It's totally crazy that someone could do this.

But, of course, people do it all the time.

I'm trying not to hate the world right now...

Please pray...

On a Different Note...

than my last gajillion posts there will be nothing but gratitude for the good in life, and no more impassioned rants about social injustice. In this entry, anyway. (Tomorrow is a holiday. lulz.)  

It is a good day. The week was relatively good (however foggy). The sleep study was fun, the technician and I cracked some jokes.  And no crazy doctors thrill killed me (see the movie Pathology to get the reference. perhaps the creepiest movie I've ever seen). 

Happy Easter! 

I've been sleeping!!!!!! 

*hallelujah chorus*

And, before I thought I was just straight up crazy. Living even three or four days ago seemed like breathing through a bullet hole, if that makes any sense. But maybe this was just an attribution error (this may just be the best word ever!!!!!) and it was just sensory deprivation. "Circadian arrhythmia". No wonder my mind sounded like a wheel squeaking like it was gonna fall off, it probably was. 

There is a chance that sleep matters and that I'm not categorically defunct, or, "flat-out fucked" (thank you, Elizabeth Wurtzel). Hmm....

*let's think about this, shall we?*

Hmmmm....

Anyway, today, I volunteered to face paint for my church's Easter celebration for neighborhood kids. The "eggstravaganza" was a lot of fun. Paint got everywhere. And kids are too cute even sans paint. Yay! 

AND OMG!!!! 

I discovered The Inclusive Bible!!!

The Bible. Translated by Catholic clergy (of both sexes) into egalitarian, non-sexist, language. It might seem like heresy to call Jesus God's Only Begotten instead of the traditional "Only Begotten Son" but it is so helpful in more ways than one. 

Am I the only "good, Christian girl" who feels alienated from passages in the Bible which speak of "mankind"? Even if, in reality, it, unlike the constitution, actually means "humankind"? 

There's a verse in which Jesus calls God your "loving God" instead of "Heavenly Father" and I literally bawled. For joy. Because, as our lovely post modern philosophers point out, language is not fixed. And, certain words have accrued such cultural baggage they're not even what the original writer intended. When somebody says "father" to me, I hear "distant, scary yelling guy", but, you know, in the sky. By and by.

"Loving God". Well, that is somewhat easier to conceive. "Loving God", in that moment, meant both mother and father, friend and lover, savior and redeemer, rabbi, and this meager construct of language just ripped my intellectual sky in two. Just like the curtain in the temple.  

Reading this Bible, I glimpsed Jesus, not just His "Name." (Neither as a curse word or manipulative tool  to compel belief or conformity.) It was like He was there tangibly, inviting me into the sun, into loving and being loved. It was like drinking cool water after being in unbearably hot weather. Like looking through Jesus as window to God, to everything. The historical and cosmic Christ in one.

The words both included and transcended His presence. Near me? In me? 

It seems so ethereal. Speaking of spiritual experiences is nearly impossible. But, really, that moment was no doubt the meaning of Easter. God alive. God with us. (ok, that's Christmas. So what?)

Hallelujah. Since then, I've been ridiculously happy, at peace. 

And, as life is wont to do, these recent experiences got me thinking. In one of my classes, we're studying religion and spirituality. Religion was defined as seeking significance through a search for the sacred and, spirituality as the search for the sacred. I started thinking about "church" and the eggstravaganza. And how contrived it seems to sit in a building to commune with a being who is supposedly everywhere. Why didn't we go outside and look at the sky, sit in the breeze? 

But, then, I thought, if we are together, we are All together. A pot luck or kitschy celebration with Friends is infinitely better than being alone even watching a sunrise...(and sunrises are amazing!)

Yay panentheism! lol. 

Throwing My Arms Around Morrissey

I was thisclose to having a nervous break down two minutes ago.

Then, I found this:

sure, he's old enough to be my father, and dances like he's drunk but somehow, he manages to be fricking adorable.

*Swoon*

The original emo boy.

Update...

So, the sleep doctor suspects my oversized tongue(?) is choking me at night, evinced by the swamp of drool on the pillow. This, in turn, disrupts the sleep cycle and this, in turn, contributes to my feeling like being run over a truck in the morning. Or afternoon. Really, any time. This explains why no amount of sleep has been refreshing for the last six years. Cripples, he said, in so many words, frequently have this problem.

He also said that I didn’t open my mouth wide enough. Of course, that could have had something to do with the wooden stick halfway down my throat. On Thursday, I get to sleep at the hospital, connected to wires and monitored by a camera.

Yay!?!

Angel starts rousting me out of bed at 7:30 tomorrow; And, today, well, was the first step back to sanity. Today, I made it to every class. Objectively, it’s not a huge step but it feels so much better not to be drooling onto a pillow or hyperventilating in the hallway.

This morning, Fayne walked with me to my first class. And, then, later Joey appeared again. He showed me some of his art work (how cool was that? he’s really good, too). He inquired about the pinched, lemon expression, and I told him going to class was freaking me out. A next-to-complete stranger, he offered to walk me (ok, not so much a stranger anymore).

This was very cool. The morning I saw Fayne, I’d prayed for help. The anxiety was becoming too much. The fear was going too far and I allowed it to push me into a box the size of a cigarette package. Smaller. Monday was as far back as I could allow myself to recoil without springing in all directions, and, lo and behold, Fayne appeared and sent the e-mail to my professors that I feared sending. Today, I talked to all three of them. And will keep communication open (hear that, me?).

The coolest thing, though, was that I prayed that someone would walk with me. The length from the dorm to the batten center allows for too many u-turns. Bushes. Shrubbery. In the hours implicit in anxious minutes, there is too much room for retreat. It would be better God, I prayed, if the walk wasn’t so solitary. If there was yet another sign of the kindness in the world, of the reality of grace after all this terror.

When Joey said he’d walk with, I almost cried. Another one of those kairos situations.

Why is kindness always so surprising?

Oh well, let it be a surprise; it means it’ll always be this awesome.

OMG

Today, I have a lot to say, and do not know where to begin.

So, it must start with this: Thank God for Jesus. A God who understands pain, injustice, betrayal, and abandonment. Thank God for a God with scars. Thank God that He's not a man (of course, maybe Ze is a better pronoun for this), or a woman and that Ze does not have a race or a political party. That Ze doesn't think like me, or you and that Ze thinks bigger than us...

That being said, my dad started a conversation about Rush Limbaugh and his summit for women which somehow ended up being about socialism. How special interest groups function under socialist ideologies and its all power grab 

(which, true enough, it IS about power. But not about taking power away from anyone but instead, evening it out. Somehow, pointing out inequality is sexist). Somehow, we ended up discussing Thomas Paine and the constitution. 

What is maddening as even as my dad claimed women were equal in society to men, he called feminists lesbians (where have we heard that before) and then, claimed that lesbians weren't REAL women. Then, he said that black people were the n word, and that gay men weren't real men either.

Then, he talked about how there discrimination no longer exists.

See, the thing is, special interest groups exist because of power. Or, lack thereof. Now that non white, non male folk have gained a voice, they're challenging the status quo, they get blasted. Or, get accused of reverse racism or sexism. 

When a woman is paid as much as a man, can negotiate as aggressively as she needs to and still get the job, when being "feminine" is not an onus, when the first thing people hear when they hear black person is the n word, when the world is still so entrenched in this colonialist, ethnocentrism, America is not free. America is not equal. 

My dad says we need to go back to the constitution, where God was in public life and our constitutional rights were upheld. 

For one, what about the rights of the indigenous Americans?

For another, the constitutional rights only applied to rich white guys.

For another, the the founding fathers weren't all Christians. Many were deists who espoused the ideals from the enlightenment era: rationalism, empiricism, etc...

God was added into "public life" in the forties and fifties as a way to "protect" America from communism. 

For another, Christianity as a system hasn't worked. And, in my opinion, as if the Way weren't hard enough, we married it to conservative politics that thought little of those marginalized by society. It's created more atheists than anything else, IMHO.

The point is, the system sucks. And always has. Don't get me wrong. I love my country. I just hate that we think we're Gods gift to civilization. 

Activism

Since this week and all the rage, I decided to begin a blog expressly dedicated to raising awareness of issues about equality from a Christian perspective. 

You can check it out at offtherage.blogspot.com

More to follow later.