Nike and Rainbow Flags

Though I'd intended to blog daily in the weeks leading up to the making of our 17th CD, June found me in a whirl of end-of-the-year parties, potlucks, celebrations, graduations, baby showers, the World Cup, birthdays and most germanely, songwriting. I wrote three new songs for the CD; songs which may have effectively changed the nature of the album. We are now unsure what the title will be. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are some of my musings.

It’s Sunday evening at La Veracruzana, a Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Northampton. My family dragged me here (on a school night!) to watch the US play Portugal in the second round of the World Cup. The restaurant's main TV is broken, so everyone has pulled tables and chairs toward the west side of the room to see the TV on the eastern wall, craning their necks and jockeying for position in order to watch. My back is to the screen. I am watching the watchers.

I did slip around at one point to get our dinners from the counter, and this afforded me a good look at the screen. It was still pre-game, and there was a lovely shot from the stadium of the Rio sky, almost violet, with wisps of clouds floating through in the shape of the Nike logo.

“What a sky,” I murmured to no one.

“Ehhn, it’s OK,” said the young man standing next to me. He was wearing a black tee shirt and looked a little like Jian Ghomeshi. “Better than Massachusetts. New England skies don’t impress me.”

I pulled down the corners of my mouth. “I like them.”

“I’m from Colorado,” he shook his head. “No contest.”

I nodded. “I’ll give you that.”

But, he conceded. “I will say that yesterday I drove back here from Boston. Right into the sunset. Now that was a sky.”

Today in church, Steve preached on two different texts. The first was a parable of the Buddha’s, the one about the guy who comes to a river and builds a raft to cross it. He is so thrilled to have crossed safely that he carries the raft with him wherever he goes. “This is not a skillful use of the raft,” says the Buddha.

Then he preached on the end of Luke 9. Jesus tells a guy to follow him. The guy says, “First let me go and bury my father.”

“Let the dead bury their dead,” says Jesus. “But you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Harsh. But effective. Jesus and the Buddha are essentially saying the same thing: let it go. Move on. Don’t cling. In the Jesus passage, the message is even more direct: get over your parents. Whether they were “good” parents or “bad” parents, get over them. Move on. Live your life.

Jay is obsessed with all things soccer, not necessarily in this order: playing it; watching the World Cup; Messi; and anything that has the Nike logo on it. For those who know my son, it’s just one in a long line of obsessions: The Beatles, cars, birds of prey, guitars, Thomas trains, Ninjago, cheetahs, this band from the 90s called The Nields, Colossal Squid.

The Nike thing started a few weeks ago when we went to Famous Footwear to get Elle some shoes. Jay felt deprived, so I threw him a bone; a pack of socks. I might have noticed they were Nikes, and I might have rolled my eyes and shrugged at my unfortunate choice; the latest in my own long line of eco-transgressions. For many years, Nike has been a target for activists wanting to put an end to sweat shop conditions. Here’s more on why Nike is Bad. I used to do pretty well with my consumer boycotts, but eight long years of motherhood has worn me down.

Besides, the more I oppose him about Nike, the more appealing it surely would be to him. I started on about the sweat shops, but somehow he could not draw a connection between the logo that all his favorite kindergarten pals have on their sneakers and the stories I was telling him about unfairness on the other side of the globe.

And why should I? Recently, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I don’t get to boss everyone around. I’ve been noticing that without my excellent advice and bits of wisdom, other people do just fine. Especially my family members. Sometime in the last month, the mild voice of my beloved uncle Brian keeps popping into my head. “They’ll figure it out.” That’s my new motto. He'll find out about bad Nike on his own. We live in Northampton.

My other new motto is, “Everyone is doing the absolute best they can at any given moment.” Even though I might be mightily disappointed with their behavior (or my own), we really are, most of us, doing the best we can with the resources we have. I don’t know if I am right about this, but I do know that when I adopt this attitude, I relax and stop being a pain in other people’s necks.

On the last day of school, Jay announced, “I am going to wear all things that have Nike on them.” He showed up dressed completely in Nike garb, which meant, on a hot June day, he wore a shiny red nylon swim suit top, a pair of navy blue and orange fleecy sweatpants, his royal blue socks, and his sister’s pink and black sports sandals. He could not have been more pleased with himself. Indeed, all items were branded. I looked at him solemnly and nodded. “You are all in Nike.”

He turned on his heel and started out the door; realized it was too hot for the fleecy pants. He ran upstairs and traded them for his favorite pair of Nike shorts, which happen to be hot pink. Satisfied, he left for the day, racing off in his too-big sandals. His last day of Kindergarten. The day before, his class spent all day painting rainbow pride flags. Someone had stolen the school’s Pride flag earlier that week, ripping it down from where it flew underneath the stars and stripes. No problem. The teachers and students of Jackson Street covered the front of the school with rainbows. In the last issue of the JSS Gazette, and 8 year old wrote an editorial about how she thought it was wrong how some people said men couldn’t marry men, or women couldn’t marry women. “Adults should be able to marry anyone they want,” she opined.

So I let my son go to school in his un-PC Nike wear, not worried about what my friends would say about my logo-worshipping son, nor worried that anyone would tease him for wearing pink sandals. He lives in Northampton. These are some of the blessings. Later in the morning, I joined him and his classmates and some of their parents for a last lunch next to the playground. He was racing around the jungle gym. He saw me, and approached the fence, all big eyes and dirty knees. “Can I keep playing, Mama?”

“Of course,” I said and kissed him before he could get away completely. Kindergarten. Over in a flash. His birthday is at the end of August and he wants to invite Messi. “I know he will come,” he says. “He loves soccer, and I am having a soccer party.” I just nod. Why disappoint him now? That would be just trying to protect him from a later disappointment. If disappointment is inevitable (and it always is, isn’t it?) it’s better to let him have the joy now and the disappointment later. I'm thinking that's the proper use of the raft.

Sermon on Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon at West Cummington Church
May 20, 2012

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby--
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
-Jane Hirshfield, "Late Prayer."

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. And so I created the worlds visible and invisible.” -Islamic saying (c/o Cynthia Bourgeault

)

Matthew 15:21-28

Jesus left that place and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And suddenly out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, 'Lord, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.'23
But he said not a word in answer to her. And his disciples went and pleaded with him, saying, 'Give her what she wants, because she keeps shouting after us.'24
He said in reply, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.'25
But the woman had come up and was bowing low before him. 'Lord,' she said, 'help me.'26
He replied, 'It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs.'27
She retorted, 'Ah yes, Lord; but even little dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters' table.'28
Then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted.' And from that moment her daughter was well again.
***************************************************
Guitar playing is a lot like textual analysis—we each have a different signature, and we each bring to the task our own peculiar point of view. When approaching the text, we see what we want to see. We see what we need to see. There are so many ways of seeing this story. Jung said in our dreams, we are all the characters. Most novelists I know would agree. So with scripture. We are the Canaanite woman asking for what she needs for her daughter, we are the disciples wanting the problem to be solved and we are Jesus, breaking through our own cultural boxes and conceptual barriers.

The more I go along my spiritual journey, the more I read about Jesus, or Krishna or the Buddha for that matter, the more I am convinced that Jesus is a portal to the Point, which is love, which is presence, which is power for the powerless. And as much as I have learned from my many years of studying Buddhism and practicing meditation, from decades of yoga and close reading of the Bhagavhad Gita, Jesus is my portal. At the end of the day, I am a Christian for four reasons.

First of all, I believe in the radical social justice Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry advocating for. Second, Jesus is a healer. I have spoken in the past about the particular healing I’ve witnessed and experienced, and for me this wholeness, this power to make one well now matters more to me than any promises of eternal life.

Third, and woven into and everything warp and weft that Jesus teaches is the concept of the Kingdom of God, which I take to mean a state of consciousness open and welcoming to all. I’ll talk about this more in a moment. But the fourth reason I love Jesus is not that he died for my sins. Patti Smith said, "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine." Well, that’s one of the many things I don’t know about. I respectfully leave questions about eternal life on the altar, along with many other questions I have. Like Iris DeMent, I prefer to let the mystery be. But that particular calculus about original sin and redemption, Jesus as sacrificial lamb never rang true for me. I am much more interested in how Jesus directed us to live today.

I had the good fortune to be raised in a Presbyterian church where it was a matter of course for the minister to work out his doubts up in the pulpit with all of us as witnesses. Jesus’s gospel took us into the inner city where we worked side by side with members of an African American church to learn how to create more possibilities for the young people there. Eternal life versus hellfire and damnation weren’t mentioned.

No, the fourth reason I love Jesus is because I agree with King Missile. Jesus is way cool. I just love the man. Jesus is uniquely and eternally Jesus, just as Johnny is Johnny, Lila is Lila, Tom is Tom and Katryna is Katryna. He is a person and a personality, and I love him, just the way I love those intimate members of my family. I don’t expect this reason to win over any converts, but that’s not really my business. And yet, I do feel passionate these days more than ever, that it’s imperative for Christians like me to make our voices heard loudly and clearly that Jesus called us to love so hugely, so persistently that love can overcome our own prejudices. All of our prejudices.

This passage from Matthew has it all: social justice, healing, Jesus’s huge insight into the meaning of the Kingdom of God, and most of all because in this story of the Canaanite mama, we see Jesus himself change, learn and grow beyond his own prejudices. He evolves! As with Siddartha Gautama, as with our own president, we get to see Jesus’s own spiritual journey.

I was going to talk about how mad I am about the North Carolina vote, but you all are mad about that too, and for us all to be mad together is really no different than what happens in a Bible Belt church where the preacher bashes Obama and cites Leviticus and everyone agrees that abortion and homosexuality are abominations. We’ve had Steve already teach us that the book of Leviticus might be well understood as a documentary explaining animal and agricultural policy in the 5th C BCE. You all know that other references to homosexuality are from the letters of Paul, a passionate, possibly closeted homosexual who was clearly struggling with all sorts of questions about how to create a church in the 1st c.
And yet, my friend Peter Ives, the retired long-time pastor at First Churches in Northampton, a congregational church like this one, says that the world needs people who will take the ancients texts we know as the Bible and rescue them from the hands of the religious right. And as much as I want to rise above the fray and not engage in the dialectic/perpetuate an us/them mentality, I also feel that this is a fight worth having, just as the Canaanite woman thinks it’s worth it to persuade Jesus to heal her daughter.
In researching this text, The traditional Bible Belt interpretation of this passage says that Jesus was cool and noncommittal to the Canaanite mother because he was testing her faith. In this view, Jesus is omniscient, knowing exactly who and what he is, eternal; a judge, watching us to see what we will do. Will we make the right choice? Excellent! Go on and be healed then!

But I think what’s really going on is more interesting than that. I was fortunate to be in the old church one Sunday several years ago, when I got to hear Steve preach on a similar passage in Mark. In the Mark version, she is a Syro-Phoenician mama; either way, these were tribes who were enemies of the Jews in the same way Native American Indians were enemies of the American settlers of the 1800’s. In other words, oppressed people who were at best marginalized and at worst victims of genocide. And Jesus may be blind to this. As the passage begins, he sees this woman as outside the purview of his ministry. IF he sees her at all. And yet, she is willing to reach across a great divide to engage him, and after she succeeds in getting his attention by saying, Yes, you might see me as a dog, but make a place for dogs in your Kingdom of God. Jesus hears this. He grants her request. In the Marcan gospel, he goes further, saying "For that retort, be on your way, the demon has come out of your daughter." She returned home and found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.” (Mk. 7:25-30).

So Jesus is changed, by a radical act of listening and engaging, and doing his own share of reaching across a great cultural divide of class, race, gender and religion. This was way out there for a first century rabbi.

I get that I have to reach across a great divide too, that somehow I have to communicate with people I basically have no dealings with—the religious right. And it’s sad that I have no dealings with them. Like the Jews and the Canaanites, we share a land. We even theoretically share a faith, though at times it’s hard for me to recognize my Jesus in their idea of Christ. If you put a Bible between us, we’d rip it apart; me taking the synoptic gospels, the psalms and the prophets, while they take John, Revelations and the letters of Paul. I'd point out that there are 7 dubious mentions of homosexuality in the Bible while the directive to take care of the poor is mentioned over 300 times. If you removed all the times the Bible mentioned the poor the book would fall apart.

But back to the Canaanite woman. She reminds me of Akhilandeshvari. Akhilandeshvari is a Hindu goddess whose long name means, in typical Sanskrit fashion, “Never Not Broken.” She is the goddess we find when we are in a heap on the floor after a breakup, after a bad diagnosis, after bad news about our child. She comes to us in that place where everything we once knew is lost and we somehow have to scramble to make sense of it all. In some traditions, she rides a crocodile; in others she actually is a crocodile, carrying her children in what my yoga teacher Sara Rose calls the “safest and most dangerous place—her mouth.” And like a crocodile, who destroys its prey not by biting but by whirling it around in the water until it passes out from disorientation, she wants us confused. She wants us so confused that we surrender our tightly held beliefs and have the willingness to try something else. Ironically, the teaching is that in this broken state, we are the most powerful that we’ll ever be. Why? For the same reason Jesus tells us that the rich man will have so much trouble entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Or to quote Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” It is when we are at our most powerless that we have to rely on the power of God. Either that, or shake our fist at God, which might be the same thing. (That’s how my 3 year old functions, at any rate.)

I see Akhilandeshvari in the Canaanite mama, at her wits' end with worry about her little daughter, chasing after this Nazarene, this amazing faith healer and just throwing her ALL into her request. And when Jesus basically likens her to a dog, she retorts right back, Yes I am a dog. And dogs need to be fed too. This is an amazing combination of self-esteem, assertiveness and humility.

I think in this moment, Jesus really gets that his call is to everyone, even the people he had regarded as outsiders or even enemies. Because after this passage, in the Marcan gospel, the very next story is the one about Jesus healing a deaf and dumb person, by spitting on his tongue. Then Jesus sighs, looks up to heaven and says, “ephphatha,” which means, “be opened.” And is he talking to himself here? Hasn’t he been opened by the Canaanite woman? Hasn’t he been whirled around like Akhilandeshvari? And don’t I need to be whirled around and opened up in order to hear you? Don’t I need to be opened in order to speak to you? Don’t I need to be open to love you, all of you? It’s no hardship to love my gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual brothers and sisters. They are my friends, neighbors, employers, fans, family. They are me. I love them as myself, easily, fluidly, with no translation necessary. But how about Rush Limbaugh? How about Cardinal Dolan? How about the voters in North Carolina?

I know that what Jesus keeps pointing me towards is love and forgiveness. Forgive your brother 70 times 7. “You will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you…” (John 15:10, 12). And it is true, in the same way that any law of nature or physics is true: when we love, we are dwelling in the kingdom of heaven, which as I said before I believe Jesus understands to be a state of mind, and not a physical destination or utopia. In the Kingdom of heaven, there is no distinction between God and human, no distinction between human and human. We experience that state every spiritual tradition talks about: Unity. Oneness. Non-dual consciousness. (“The Kingdom of God is within,” Luke 17:21).

I know that when I drop the fight—really truly drop it and let it go and am glad to see it go--I am at peace. Or to borrow from a teaching of my husband Tom: when I can look deeply into your eyes and know, really know, that you are completely fine and well just as you are, I am automatically going to approach you, be with you, communicate with you differently—and better—than if I look at you to see how I can fix what’s wrong, going over you with a fine tooth comb for nits (I know about nits this week.)

But what about the fighting? What about advocating for change? Doesn’t there sometimes need to be struggle—a duel/dual-- in order to get to that place of peace? Is there peace without strife? Can one see white against a white background? That is what I want to get back to. Is there such a thing as holy anger? Does it rattle in my heart like the ruby and the nail and make the same sound? I think the better question is: Do I, like the Canaanite woman, persist (with love) to my enemies? What do I do when I have a friend with whom I respectfully disagree? Usually, I smile and nod and let her go on her way. Who am I to annoy her with my different opinion? The Buddha says, “Opinions just go around bothering other people.” But Jesus overturned the money tables. He came to overturn the societal apple cart for sure. He spoke truth to power, over and over again. And yet he went without a fight to the cross. Do I lean too heavily on my passivity when I live and let live? i am so glad that when the church burned down, we didn't passively shrug and go, "Oh well, we still have the parish house." And I have to admit, that's where I was on January 17 2010. This is good enough for me.

It’s not static. None of this is. With God, we don’t get to nail anything to the floor. It’s always a whole new ballgame. Again, this is why I am drawn to Jesus, my human brother who learns from human beings, who witnesses the Canaanite mama model this amazing balancing act of self-esteem and humility. Yes, there’s anger. Yes, there’s struggle. And over and over again, we get shaken by the struggle, rattled to our core, whirled around in the water, twirled around like a dervish. And if we are lucky, if we are open, if we are brave enough to shake our fists at God and demand God’s attention, it breaks open. We break open. Our hearts break and the love comes pouring out, connecting us to each other. The visible world crumbles like the illusion it always was and something shiny catches our inner eye. We see ourselves in the other. We see the other as ourselves. Not "as much as" ourselves, but AS ourselves. Today, to me, that’s worth it all. That’s the God I worship and follow.

Antidote to Pain

I am journaling for Lent with a friend of mine who is a minister and a mom. We are using as inspiration a book called 40 Days with Kathleen Norris. Norris, a poet and a Benedictine oblate, is deeply in love with words, and never fails to open something in me with the daily reading. On day 36, KN writes, “ To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery. Our goal will be to recover our original freedom, our childlike (but never childish) self-consciousness (here the discipline of writing can help us)…We will need a powerful catalyst.”

The prompt today is “the antidote to pain.” Well, my per-usual antidote to pain is to nail everything to the ground. So much for mystery and ambiguity. I am not generally a fan. I am literal minded when it comes to my little kingdom, though I celebrate the mystery in my own songs and writings. Maybe that’s the way most artists are: in order to make a living as a creative, one really does need to grow up and learn the nuts and bolts of adulthood, such as balancing one’s checking account and trying to make a spending plan based on an income that in the best of times fluctuates. Because I am a creature whose head has perennially been in the clouds I have found it necessary to anchor my reality firmly in practices that keep me grounded. (If I had a nickel for every time a teacher sharply rapped on my blank windows and said, “Nerissa! Stop daydreaming,” I wouldn’t be writing about money at all). To this end, I meditate, journal, do one single daily sun salutation, run for 20 minutes, keep meticulous records of my earning and spending, practice my guitar, and keep in daily or at least weekly touch with my nearest and dearest. If I don’t do these things, I become unmoored. Perhaps these practices are my powerful catalysts.

Yesterday, at the last minute, someone dropped out of the writing retreat that would start that evening. It was nothing personal—in was a situation out of the participant's control, and it was clearly a loss for that person. But my reaction to his not being able to attend was over the top. First I fumed at his circumstances, then at God, and when the fuming burned itself out, I was left with a heavy grief in the shape of an old empty (but still weighty) burlap sack. And I could not drop it. There is a term in 12 step recovery called “self-seeking” and recovering addicts are cautioned to avoid self-seeking motives every single day. The trouble is, no one I know really can define self-seeking. It’s kind of like selfishness, and it’s kind of like ego-building, but opinions vary about what the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, really meant when he wrote the term.

Yesterday, I was carrying my heavy burlap sack home with me from the co-op after getting some last minute ingredients for my caramelized red pepper and onion gruyere quiche that I planned to serve that night. I made some calls to friends who would understand, but no one was there. So I prayed. “God, take this away. Have my sack. Or if you won’t take it, fill it with something better than my hurt pride and needless anxiety. Also, I get that I am doing that thing again: trying to know that I am OK based on how much other people love me. This is an old one. I want to get my self-worth from my own heart and from your sun shining on me. Not from applause and attention. But I feel like I am knocking on your door and you won’t let me in.”

At that moment, I was driving up the street that runs perpendicular to my daughter’s school. I had a moment of wishing she were in my arms the way she had been as a baby. And just then, the door burst open, and her Kindergarten class came tumbling out, and right in the middle, my daughter in her royal blue parka and hot pink gloves. The kids tore over to the playground, shouting and running and climbing. I pulled over and parked illegally, ran over to the gate. The teacher said, “Lila, your mother’s here,” but before Lila could even look up, I scooped her into my arms. “Mommy,” she said softly, snuggling her head into my chest. A moment later, she broke away, dancing off into the playground. She skipped about in circles singing, “Ring around the Rosey, Mommy Mommy Lovey!” and held up her two hands, making the sign for “I love you” like Mohammed Ali in When We Were Kings as he trained for the big fight. She came running back to hug me again.

I get what self-seeking is. It’s seeking the self outside of the self, and all the ways we do this. It’s thinking it’s in a pair of Frye boots (and the outfit that will suddenly make everyone finally understand who you really are.) It’s going out for dinner. It’s an A on a thesis. It’s the fifth drink. It’s finding Ms. Right. It’s your best friend telling you your stomach doesn’t stick out. It’s your sister telling you her son was just as impossible as yours when he was the same age. It’s the radio station playing your CD. It’s even standing up and singing the beloved hymn in church. It’s all manner of good and not so good and downright harmful ways of engagement, and I will—we all will—continue to seek them and do them for the rest of our lives. I don’t see a cure. But I do see the problem, and I do see a solution. The solution is, as usual, kindness, humor, time, and most of all, being awake. The solution is also bowing to the mystery. Reveling in the ambiguity. Doing our little disciplines, because indeed these are our offerings to God, these are the containers in which we put our kindness, humor, time and attention, but we need to hold them lightly, make our containers out of breakable clay instead of cast iron.

My only real job is to be Nerissa. To be her, to celebrate her gifts and to respect her limits. To listen to the quiet voice in her heart whose voice can only be heard when she is still and silent and seeking. I think this is the true antidote to pain.

Jesus

This morning the sky was striped, horizontally, gray and blue outside our new windows overlooking the back yard. I held a sleepy Jay, still nursing at 3, and balanced the feelings of this early, too early, thaw. Like everything in our culture, it is too easy to go jacketless in January.

For one of my new year's intentions, I foolishly told God I wanted the courage to share my faith more openly. Also that I wanted someone to come into my life to teach me with a bit more structure than what I've been getting. But first to the faith sharing.

1. I don't really want to share my faith. Believing in God is mostly not cool, unless you are Bono or Anne Lamott or Jesus. But way more to the point, believing in God can associate one with a certain kind of holy that smacks of know-it-allness. As I am a congenital know-it-all, this is really dangerous territory for me. But about God, there is one things I am sure of: I do not know it all. For example, I do not know that there is a God. But I do believe. Those are different things.

2. I don't want to argue with anyone, ever. I don't want to convince anyone else to believe. I don't think I am better than anyone. Opposite. As I have said previously, it is not the well who need a hospital but the sick. So it is with church.

3. I am not in any way shape or form allied with the Tea Party.

4. I think fundamentalism in any guise is fundamentally dangerous. OK--perhaps that is arguing. Sorry.

That said:

5. When I first heard about Jesus I fell madly in love with him. I was about four, and we were standing around my mother's piano at Christmas time. She was playing and singing "Away in the Manger" and I burst into tears because I loved the little lord Jesus and his sweet head so much; the tenderness overwhelmed me.

6. I prayed to God every night, but not on my knees. Just in my head, lying in bed. I asked God to keep everyone I knew alive, to have them not get divorced and wished that they would all be happy.

7. When John Lennon died, I imagined him on a desert island playing guitar and holding court. I would meditate and visit him there.

8. My parents attended a Presbyterian church that met in a farmhouse in Northern VA. The minister was kind, smart, full of struggles which he generously shared with us, rather than pretend to be perfect. He wore a white backwards collar and a goatee. He and his wife became my parents' best friends. When I was fourteen, he died of Hodgkins Lymphoma. A few months before he died, my father finally joined the church. During the service, my dad came off the dias to embrace the dying minister who struggled to his feet, stumbled and fell into my dad's arms. He was thin, young and heavily freckled from the chemotherapy. His hair was falling out. I thought he looked exactly like Jesus must have.

9. I started to pay attention at church. When my father stood up and said that the third teacher in a row had quit trying to teach the sixth graders, and that "Any one in this room is qualified to teach them," I thought to myself, "He said 'Anyone.' But I'm in this room, and I am not qualified." The following Sunday I was their teacher. I taught those kids for the next three years until I left for college.

10. My uncle Brian gave me a book of poetry and photographs by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. I read it one school night when I was supposed to be writing an American history paper. In the low lamplight of my room, next to my collection of Beatles and Stones LPs I felt something land in my heart with a gentle thud. I was supposed to be a minister.

11. I told everyone. It was an unusual career choice, and I figured I'd only have to work Sundays. Perfect for raising a family, and way safer and easier than trying to be the Beatles.

12. I was in Campus Crusade for Christ for about six weeks after I broke up with the boy I had been dating for four and a half years. This was the first time I ever heard this equation: Adam sinned by disobeying God; therefore humans had to die. God had no control over this, but somehow Jesus sacrificing himself redeemed mankind, or at least those who believe in him. I could not get my mind around it, nor the idea that my best friend who was Jewish was doomed and I wasn't. So I left Campus Crusade, but not Jesus. I went to an Episcopal church and began to write songs.

13. I married right out of college, a man who called himself a secular humanist, and I visited Yale Divinity School and had an interview. Everyone there, it seemed to me, was 42 and female. "So," I said. "I am going to try to do this music thing. When I am 42 I will come back."

14. I had a music career. Deep in the bowels of that career, I got very sick with an eating disorder. I would pray to God, asking for help, but the answer always came back, "Why would God care about your ridiculous obsession with your weight and food? Just stop it!" But I couldn't stop it any more than I could change the color of my eyes. And one day someone told me I had a disease that I was powerless over. Someone suggested that God really might care that I was hurting myself. And I noticed that I was unable to sit still with myself. I could not sit and breath in and out without a surge of hammering thoughts, a kind of deafening pounding of my own heart. People suggested I meditate but that was as crazy an idea as would be telling me to fly. And I could not stop the compulsive behaviors. One night when I fell asleep in despair. I knew I had too much pride to ask for help, to admit that I was different from other people, to admit that as a thirty year old seemingly successful woman, I was incapable of caring for myself in this fundamental way. I could not feed myself. I went to bed utterly defeated. I woke up with this strange, calm willingness. There was a steady quiet voice inside that said, "I am here now. I will take care of you." And from that day forward, with a lot of help from my friends, I never hurt myself with food or lack of food again. The obsession and the compulsion were lifted. I was free.

15. I read everything I could. I had this Presence, and It did care about every aspect of my life, or at least It listened. I read Thich Nhat Hanh, more Henri Nouwen, Marcus Borg, Pema Chodron, Ram Dass, the Bhaghavad Gita, Jack Kornfield, Thomas Merton, Stephen Mitchell, Byron Katie, Eckhardt Tolle, the Bible, Elaine Pagels, and much twelve step literature. I made the twelve steps my path and slowly, a day at a time, my thinking changed. I became different. And I was the same. But in a lot less pain.

16. My marriage fell apart--too much God, he said. I was terrified, but on the first night alone in my house, I felt that Presence again. I lived well as a single woman. I followed the next breadcrumb. I met the guy I was always afraid I would meet--the one for whom I'd have to leave my first husband, or else suffer silently for the rest of my life. We found a church where the minister was a poet and a shepherd and not ordained. We pitched our tent. We got married there, baptized our daughter and then our son.

17. Being a mother proved to be the undoing of any pretense that I was holy. Every stitch of spiritual education was used until it frayed. I prayed on my knees to not yell at my kids, and by seven am I would have broken my resolution. But when I could remember to ask Jesus to show up, i became at least aware of my failings, if not able to act like the grown-up in the room. Sooner or later, I would apologize and the domestic tangles would unravel. I know how to apologize now. I can't live with my own half-turned shoulder for more than a day anymore. So I face front, heart forward. My children are my best spiritual teachers, by far. But recently I have yearned for a more orthodox teacher who can diagram sentences and answer my questions with experience rather than the koan-ic mutterings of my wee gurus.

So a few days after January first, right on schedule, I guess, one of our town's most beloved ministers, the retired pastor of the church where I found 12 step recovery, nabbed me. "It's time for you and me to talk about you going to seminary," he said. (How did he know that every few years I order the course catalogs from Harvard and Yale? Did someone tell on me?) "Do you have time to have lunch with me and another new minister?"

Of course I did. And so we are beginning a process called Discernment, to see if and when I will go on to the ministry. I don't know if it will be ten years or twenty years. I love my life right now, and I have a lot more music to make, a lot more retreats to run, a lot more HootenNannies to teach,and most importantly, a couple of small kids who need me near and close--body and soul. But I have comrades on the journey now, and it does feel as though I am on my way back home.