Dear Pneuma,

I'm taking time to write today, as I stand still and breathe deep; as the sky shines and the earth forgets to be frozen. Today is a good day to be quiet. My friend has rolled himself into a sleepy ball by the Christmas tree, and my Beloved sits to my left. Nothing needs doing today.

Did you have a good holiday, Pneuma? It is a hard time for some of us. I spent a lot of my time un"Humbugging." A habit of cynicism and unhappiness is not a good reason to visit my crabbiness and anxiety on those around me. Overall, I think I was successful, and I especially enjoyed some extended time with family.

The best part of the season, though, was the opportunity to give away. We gave bread to a stranger who plowed our driveway. We gave bread to a neighbor who misses her dog and sometimes asks to walk ours. We gave fifteen dollars and Christmas goodies to a man without steady employment who shovelled our walk. We gave up presents to a three-year-old and felt better about the loss than we did the gain. We found we had extra resources to share and gave to three projects via "The Avance."

I wonder how we should negotiate that difference between the joy of the giver and the guilt of the receiver? It seems that a practice of grace helps; that and an intention never to hold on to that which is given, but instead to share wherever possible.

Hope you had a splendid season,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

At the bottom of it all is people.  People are why power.  People are why commerce.  People are why fear.  People are why ideologies.  People are why work.  People are why hate.  People are why compassion.  People are why governments.  People are why philosophies.  People are why grocery stores.  People are why crops.  People are why landscapes. People are why art.  People are why poverty.  People are why justice.  People are why joy.  People are why sorrow.  People are why despair.  People are why hope.  People are why pain.  People are why pleasure.

Societies, cultures, infrastructures, wars, nations, wealth-figments of human imagination.  I find it somehow amazing that we design, wrangle, hustle, plead, fight, invent, provide, deny, breathe, submit, coerce, destroy, torture, heal, sacrifice, forgive, live, and die, and name them for all purposes but the true one: for people.  Take away people, and none of the rest of it actually matters.  

What a glorious insanity we are,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

If my worldview holds that the righteousness of a claim can be proven on my body, will I get fair judgement in a court of law?

If my worldview holds that property ownership confers freedom from personal restriction, will I get along well with my neighbors in a gated/covenant community?

If my worldview holds that my family cares more for me than my government, is it reasonable to assume that I will trust teachers, police officers or parsons to look out for my well being?

If my worldview equates my worth with my ability to offset the cost of my food, clothing and shelter, will I be content to let another pay my way?

If my worldview holds no assurance of long life, does savings towards retirement hold any appeal?

Just wondering,

Cobalt Dreams 

 

 

Dear Pneuma,

Glass fills my thoughts this week.  Glass is hard, smooth, invisible when clean, and cuts viciously when broken.  Birds break their necks on glass panes, thinking they are spaces through which to fly, and glass allows us to see and be seen without having to trust.  I think about an aquarium that houses a giant spider, a test tube that houses a poisonous gas, a prison visitor center that allows voice contact but prohibits touch.

Glass allows me to see a view outside a flying airplane from within the airplane, without discernible distortion.  Glass distorts light and allows me to read words that my eye can no longer bring into focus.  Painted glass colors a view and frosted glass inhibits a view.  Molten glass flows quickly, cooled glass flows slowly, time runs inexorably through glass.

I take glass for granted.  I forget to look for it.  Like a wasp in the house, I get fooled into believing there is nothing between me and the light that calls.  I look down, and I can see where I have been.  I look up, and I can see where I am going.  I see people behind me.  I see people ahead of me.  I don't see the glass.  They don't see the glass.  

I forget I am standing on a barrier.  I forget I cut myself breaking the barrier to get here.  I forget there is a barrier above me, that I stand in a glass box, separated.  I reach out to touch the spider;  it tries to touch me, but we meet at the glass, each prisoned in our own environment, only knowing that we long to feel one another, taste one another, know one another, unable, truly, to see what it is that stands between us.

Love Always,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I just returned from a church mission trip.  This was my first such trip, and it was a lot like and a lot different from my expectations.  Our group went to "do triage" on homes.  We put up walls, insulation, sheet rock, and roofs.  We dug trenches, septic tanks, and porch pilings.  We painted, mudded, plumbed and floored for an entire week.  This was not Habitat for Humanity. This was not Extreme Home Makeover.  This was barely adequate construction and some cosmetic additions to homes that should not house people.

This was a hard week for me, Pneuma.  We witnessed rubbled lives buried in raw sewage, moldering mobile home siding, hulking car fossils and relationships stretching and pulling at every seam.  We witnessed lives lived without running water, without electricity, without enough food to eat, and without neighbors able to alleviate suffering.  We witnessed the hard lives of people.  We witnessed this in our own United States, and this week, I am having a hard time reconciling the fact that I watch the same sit-coms, read the same newspapers, and vote for the same political candidates as people who do not have the luxury of clean drinking water.

This was a hard week for me, Pneuma.  I heard church friends say things that hurt me.  I heard comments about the hygiene of people and pets.  I heard comments about home management and habits of child-rearing.  I heard peanut butter and jelly sandwiches being offered the way that someone offers crackers to animals in the zoo.  I heard judgment and disdain in the voices of my co-workers, and I felt shame.  

I grew up in a yard with junker cars.  My house had no insulation in the walls until I was fourteen. We lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while waiting on a better paycheck. We had a roof that leaked and a furnace that smoked up the house.  We ran our wash water out into the back yard, and sometimes, we didn't take showers in the winter when the pipes would freeze.  My siblings, friends and I played in dirty ditch water and ran barefoot in the yard, despite nails, sticker-weeds and black widow spiders.  I never had a spayed kitten with a license and vaccination tag.

Did church people look at me that way?  Was I dirty?  Was I uneducated?  Was I ignorant? Were my parents lazy and unskilled?  Did it come as a surprise to anyone that I knew how to laugh?  Did it come as a surprise to anyone that I worried about my clothes and hair?  Did it come as a surprise that I played with my flea-bitten cat, though I might not have let her in the house?  Is it surprising to anyone that I loved my home and I love my family?  

After the shame came anger.  How dare these people make me feel ashamed of myself and my people!  How dare these people think things that would shame the woman whose home we were trying to heal!  What right did any of us have to even be there?  If she hadn't asked, we would never have had the chance to judge her.  

That took serious courage.  That took the kind of integrity and grit that says, I cannot do this alone.  That took the kind of self knowledge that would allow strangers to see all of the cracks and vulnerabilities of a desperate life, and still offer itself in the name of love.  She needed a better roof for her children.  She wanted something bright and pretty for them.  She was using every resource she could find to provide.  I would guess she prayed for help.  I felt humbled at the poor help I was able to give.  I was humbled that God could have sent me, with my disease and my lack of construction experience as any kind of answer to those prayers.   

One night there was a picnic.  All of the families on whose homes we were working came.  The mission leaders suggested that the families line up first for food.  The mission leaders looked at that group of people and decided that some were hungrier than others, because some were poorer than others.  I was standing next to a man, and he said , "That ain't right.  Around here, young'ens eat first."  He looked at me from the corner of his eye, "That's what we call 'em.  Young'ens.  They eat first, and if there is anything left, we can eat."   That man stood right beside me, until the very end of the line, after all of the "young'ens," after all of the teenagers, and after most of the adults, before he would fill his plate.  

I have much.  I have friends and things.  I have church and a college degree.  I have connections and skills.  I have a home that stands.  I am no longer poor, but even I  forgot the kind of necessary sharing of scarcity, where one may have to sacrifice, so that others have enough.  

Pneuma, I do not feel as though I did a "good deed" this last week.  I do not feel as though I accomplished anything for the "Kingdom of God."  Instead, while taking Communion on Sunday, I heard these words, "This is my body, broken for you,"  and I thought of the homes and lives we saw.  I thought of the prejudices and fears we brought.  I thought about my physical limitations and the desperate hunger for connection that so many of us carried in our church vans.  I thought, "These are Christ's broken body."  Why?  Why was it broken for me?

Cobalt Dreams

 

Dear Pneuma,

I hear people say this thing, "Another's love rescued me."  It is said in a tone of assumption, as though it is an undisputed truth.  This bothers me, because I do not believe it to be true.  The redemptive power of Love is not found when "that one" person sees the real you and loves that you into existence.  Love redeems when you find the real you, know her fully, and choose to live her into existence.  

Fairy tales are not stories that teach little girls that they are princesses incapable of self determination, awaiting princes to awaken them to their own sexuality.  Fairy tales are stories that show us our divided selves.  Only when our inner prince rescues our inner princess, only when our inner princess bestows her grace upon our inner prince,  only when our inner, unloved and truly extraordinary sister proves herself to be stronger than the opinions of the respectable yet mean-spirited older sisters, can we be integrated people.  

Our "other, better half" is not somewhere on the loose outside of ourselves.  It lives inside us, and is waiting to be rescued, redeemed, saved.  Love, romantic, filial, or spiritual, is not bestowed by others.  Knowing and loving self comes first.  For some, that is simply a given. They love themselves.  They always have.  They tumble from genie to enchanted castle and always avoid the traps.  They cut through the bramble hedge that would prick and pick apart their bones.

For some,  becoming their own best friend is one of the hardest relationship goals to reach. Each time they embark on a new journey, they have to struggle to remind themselves that they have a prince's sword, a princess' kindness, a witch's mystery at their disposal.  They have to work to disbelieve the mirror someone else holds before them.  They have to struggle against the voices of step-siblings listing the litany of their failures. 

I disagree with the notion that it is God's love that rescues.  I disagree with the notion that it is a partner's love that rescues.  I disagree with the notion that it is parents' love that rescues.  I believe it is my love that rescues.  When I love myself, I can hear the love from God.  When I love myself, I can see the love from my partner.  When I love myself, I can reconcile the love from my parents.  When I love myself, I can give my love to others and never lose it, even when that love is rejected, vilified or defiled.  

Do you love yourself, Pneuma?

I do,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

Here are my cards: I have an incurable disease that I manage to live with 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days on a Gregorian calendar year. I wish I could say that I can sometimes forget about it. I wish I could say that, generally, the disease has little to say to my daily life. I wish I could say that I have declared peace with my disease, but Pneuma, I am not going to lie with you: I still wake up hating this thing in my life and wishing I could wish it away.

So then I am left with hate in my heart, and I don't know if that can be good. What does it do to me to hate this? I'll tell you what it does. It makes me tired. It makes me heavy. It makes me enclosed. It makes me build walls to keep out fear and physical pain, and those things make me sick.

So I think some about hate, and I think some about God. In me, the meeting place with God is the moment when I know "what is, is." So, if my disease is, and my disease is bad for me, then must God be bad for me? I hate my disease, and my disease is, so must I then hate God? I mean to say, how dare God, being what is, be this!

Yet, I did not know God before this disease. I hid from life altogether before this disease. I was coldly rational, harshly skeptical, and arrogantly judgemental from my sterile environment of intelligent choices, shallow relationships and highly controlled lifestyle. I was safe, undiseased, agnostic and I couldn't imagine that life meant anything. I woke most days tired, heavy, and enclosed-sick.

I stood beside a road, one morning, and I hated. I focussed and felt and screamed that hate at God's blue sky for being blue, at God's green earth for being earth, at God's living people everywhere for living free of my wounds. I screamed my hate at Life, for taking my life from me, and for the very first time, in my memory, I realized the nonsensical premise at the bottom of all my arguments: life itself.

I am living. I am. At all.

I suppose that means my disease took nothing from me. Instead, by breaking me, disease asked to make me whole. In many ways, I am less rational, less skeptical, less, intelligent, and less controlled. I feel more. I hurt more. I risk poor decisions more often. And some days, I am simply more aware of how very tired I am. But I know today, that my living has meaning, that my commitments matter, that fear keeps nothing at bay.

I suppose then, that hating my disease, is not good for me. In fact, it is an ever present reminder that right here and right now, I am living at all. I suppose the thing to do then, is love Life and turn my compassion on despair, and make it flee away.

Thankful,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

Have you ever experienced life as a few layers; as though your mind was projecting one image over the top of the real life you were living?  Have you ever caught yourself thinking in the patterns of your past, while experiencing the consequences of life lived according to choices made with new patterns of thought?  Have you ever seen, in a moment, the places where life is at odds with stated beliefs, and been surprised?

I don't mean hypocrisy.  I mean the bizarre multiple realities created by self-perceptions, other-perceptions, and scientifically measurable occurrences.   I mean those moments where I can clearly see another's patterns of self-destruction while being completely blind to my own.  I mean those moments where I am both keening from fear of loss, and aware of the fact that all life is finally lost.  I mean the moment where I find I cannot judge another's poor decisions, but have no problem condemning my own self to destruction for poor decision-making.  

I mean: I believe in money, nation-states, and armies, even while realizing these are all figments of human imagination.  There is no value in electronic numbers.  There are no ultimate boundaries between Colorado and New Mexico.  There is no power that moves soldiers; save belief; save human decision to ascribe value and meaning to these things.

I find these moments electrifying, humbling and terrifying, and I wonder if I am seeing in between realities.  I wonder what happens when all of them align to the same reality.  I wonder why we humans seem to so easily agree on some of these ideas, and so violently disagree on others.  I wonder what the possibilities are.  I wonder what we can create when we free ourselves from belief.  I wonder what realities we lose when we cannot believe.  I wonder what we are supposed to do with these realities.  I wonder whether we are better off knowing or unsuspecting.  I wonder.  I wonder.  

Still wondering,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

You walked out the door.
My day grew long.
It is dangerous, this love of mine,
Love that relies, depends, defines itself in you.

What is it when you are gone?

Loneliness. . . Lessness . . . Loss

I don't want to love you like this: in a way that makes me feel.

     I catch myself stacking glass bricks.

Reversion

     Forgetting I used to live life that way: wanting without reaching

The promise of Love, though

     Is touching Loneliness

          knowing self next to, beside, being outside the other

     Is choosing Loss

          realizing time, change, fragility and incompletion

     Is seeing self Lessened alone

          though no more singular than ever before.

I suppose, I just don't remember Wisdom telling me this.

Maybe I tried not to hear.

Seems this love is a miracle, happening when I forgot to fear the pain.

-Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I am struck by the thought that the statement, "Everything is meaningless!" expresses an inward cowardice. This statement underlies the entirety of Ecclesiastes, and it is the bored refrain of many privileged folks. It is a refrain that says, I have been there, done that, and it wasn't that great. It is a refrain that suggests disengagement and ennui are the necessary conclusions to any form of life.

I say, that attitude is way too easy. It is way too easy to claim, "this endeavor doesn't matter," or "I am above caring about the outcome." It is also way too easy to pull out of relationships with people because "nothing ever changes," and that what has been experienced thus far is a disappointment. When I distance myself from broken relationships, lost expectations, or grief, I avoid pain and I gain a sense of shallow superiority, but I deny my basic being in the process. If everything is meaningless, joy and sorrow together, then breathing itself is unnecessary, and uneventful. According to the creed that everything is meaningless, a will to nihilism makes sense-why endure anything? Why try anything? By self-obliterating, the human being can then avoid altogether the boredom, disappointment, and difficulties that arise when it interrelates with this world. What's more, that being has then quite efficiently avoided the extra work and energy necessary to discover meaninglessness on it's own. Yet, this will to non-being arises from a fear to find that being has no meaning.

That strikes me as cowardly in the extreme. What is to be lost in trying for meaning if there is no meaning? What is to be lost in asking questions and searching for the miracle implied by Creation herself? What is to be lost in believing? What is to be lost in touching and being touched? If I don't matter, if I am meaningless, then I should do my damnedest to prove it. I should live so passionately, so strongly, so brilliantly, so fully, that whether I am 38 or 88, I still haven't "been there and done that."

If I don't, then I won't have held the hand of a dying child, to know whether that child matters. If I don't, then I won't have kissed my Beloved under a full moon in the spring, to know whether that experience matters. If I don't, then I won't have buried my brother to know whether he mattered to me. If I don't then I won't have tried to teach someone to sing, to know if her voice matters. If I don't . . .

Maybe the author of Ecclesiastes meant to imply that hedonism and material wealth do not supply meaning. Maybe the author meant that when relationships become commodities and when avoidance of pain becomes the purpose, life is meaningless. Maybe, when we have every resource we can imagine simply for the asking, we start to spiritually whither; but if the point is to state: "ho-hum," I say "how dare you?" I say, "I challenge you to live a life that not only looks pain in the face, but acknowledges its implacable reality. I challenge you to love imperfections as you love perfections. I challenge you to prove to me that you have given up all of yourself for another being. I challenge you to show me how your life is so meaningless, you don't exist, either in your own mind or mine."

Then I might believe that you know whether life has meaning. Then I might believe that you have the courage to see life as it is. Until then, "Life is meaningless!" is the cry of self interested self-indulgence that shrinks in the face of human being, and chooses retreat from life over living.

As Ever,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

One thing I hate about Christian religion: its bent toward control. So often, the religious start defining themselves and their beliefs. When they realize how many others share those definitions and beliefs, they start to band together. They feel so wonderful about no longer being alone, they make a fatal error: they start to think that the validity of their religious experiences comes from this very communal uniformity. The next step is to develop conformity, and those that do not share the same definitions and beliefs become "others." Once there are "others," the religious start to worry about them. Those "others" need to be "taught." Their lifestyles, beliefs, definitions and ways of seeing the cosmos need to be controlled. In other words, the religious seek power over "others."

Being religious, I can say that I believe this kind of movement always starts out for the best. I believe that most religious people are genuinely worried about the fate of the "others." They genuinely convince themselves that because they believe in Hell, it must be real. Once it is real, it is an extremely loving goal to try and "save" folks from it. They genuinely believe that God needs to be named, and so they wrangle and natter about how God/ess is to be addressed so people can know It, as if, without a Name, the Nameless cannot know us. When being known is a promise of Christian religion, then sharing that promise, naming to be known, is an act of gracious kindness.

As though the Divine were defined by the beliefs of the believers. As though reality is the dream of us. As though the constant newness of creation and the individual in the creation of change are the forces of evil which keep humanity fettered to death and destruction. If we can just control this one group's behavior, creeds, and sense of self, say the religious, the Divine will continue to speak to us, but if we fail, we will be cast into "the outer dark;" but control is power, and I distrust human politics, a venture wherein the currency is power over other people, more than I distrust anything else on this earth. So when religion seeks to control, I distrust it. When religious goals become goals of power over the free being of persons, I distrust them. In fact, when my institutions tell me that they are bigger than the Nameless Known, I know they are lying. When concern over my creed or my sexual organs outweighs the need to provide love, shelter, medicine and food for the starving, crying, dying in the world, a world given for us, I know we Christian religious are getting it wrong.

Love Always,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

When I started writing to you, I intended to be honest. I intended to share without withholding. I intended to trust you. Well, here goes:

God visited me this week. I'd forgotten the warmth and laughter in God's "voice;" the way in which God's presence gently warms and lifts. I sensed the wisdom and ancient surety of God, and, thinking back this morning, I feel like crying at its loss. I was reminded that God's strength flows from the assurance that God experiences the worst of our human fears and "knows" them. She has absorbed/faced/engulfed/embraced every single loss of her children since the beginning/end of time. There is no joy she has not known. There is no horror she has not forgiven. God is that wide.

What does it mean that God visited me this week? It means that I was close enough to the reality of life that I could hear. It means that the scariest of my fears is inadequate to the truth of God. It means that we are not alone, and that all of our efforts to live life fully in love with being are important. It means that the worst news can be heard/embraced/engulfed and overcome. It means that our God is with us. Our God loves us, and our God speaks when we stop focussing obsessively on our own wantings, fears, worries, goads and spurs.

I've heard God before. I'd forgotten the absoluteness. I'd forgotten the simplicity. I'd forgotten the care. I thank God, and I wish the experience for everyone: knowing God is the greatest gift I have ever received.

Love Always,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I need to vent about worship. I am pissed this morning. I am feeling extremely agitated about the fact that my church is failing in worship. I am agitated that worship can be seen as a throw together business, with the idea that we should just "get it done."

I am pissed because I attend seminars, read books, and work with musicians, clergy, lay speakers, altar guild members, and ushers that circle continually around a vision of a declining membership and a church that has become irrelevant to the life of the world, yet, when it comes to confronting the reality of dead worship in our own home church, we look somewhere else for the answers.

I am pissed. I see, again and again, opportunities to change ignored in order to keep the boat from tipping, to cost less, to fit into a daily schedule, or to avoid making mistakes. Do we even believe in God? Do we believe, in any part of our beings, that God is present in worship? What if God is there, but we are not? What if we are bringing our world's fears, expectations and prejudices into the ways we "plan" worship? To quote Tex Sample, "We put God' story into the world's story, when what we should be doing is putting the world's story into God's story."

I think, our goal as worship leaders should be to invite the Holy to be with us. It should be time of passionate devotion, of vulnerable asking, of angry questions, of joyous exaltation, of aching loss, and blushing fulfillment as we come together in a body of believers, knowing our God yearns to be there with us. We, as worship leaders, as midwives of the birthing process (Jorge Lockwood), can create an atmosphere of comfort, care and demand that brings those exchanges to life.

Worship is corporate practice of discerning the Divine, different than prayer because of the power and scope of need, offering, and devotion within a body of believers. Worship is a time to become a one made of many instead of a place where the many are reduced to the preferences of any one. It is a sacrifice of time, made to be together with God.

Our God needs that time with us. We need that time with our God. It seems to me that when we create worship with this intent, we will hear our God, and our God will hear us. It seems to me, that when the Holy touches our time, we will seek time to touch the Holy. It seems to me that worship will become something we need, not something we plan, organize, direct, or DO.

When worship becomes business, when worship becomes a repeated template of activity leading to an offering of money, when worship becomes something, as a body, that we just attend, our God is better served outside the house of worship.

So, here is my rant:
If worship is dead: bury it.
If worship is dying: love it, and let it go.
If worship is being born: midwife it free.
If worship is becoming: embrace its being, whatever form it takes.

Worship is not "the first thing people see when the come in and that last thing they see as they leave." It is not the "first impression" we make on our prospective customers. Worship has nothing to do with the business of the church. The church's business comes from the practices of worship. Worship is Holy Time. Worship is conversation with God across the kitchen table. Worship is an opportunity to bring our fingerpaintings to God and see them hung with care on the refrigerator.

So what are we doing with our organs and pianos? What are we doing with our choirs, our gold offering plates, and our Eucharist liturgies? What are we doing with drums, guitars, and clapping hands? What are we doing when we read a prayer? What are we doing when we offer a bulletin? What are we doing when we sing a song? If we don't know, maybe we should find out, and if we don't mean it, we had better not do it.

So, New Pact with myself: I will not support conversations that reduce worship to a series of actions devoid of power. I will not engage in worship practices that are dead. I will challenge any concept that God is bound by the shape of a space, the number of people worshipping, or the stylistic expressions of an art form.

Last, Pneuma, let me express this: maybe, when we American Christians decide to take worship seriously enough to laugh at it, to laugh at ourselves, and to put business aside so that worship can happen, we will find that worship is where God happens, and where God happens, people will come.

Thank you SO much for being there.
Love Always, Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

It does not seem to be enough to feel. Feeling creates energy. Energy leads to action. Action leads to release of energy. Hence, the outcome of feeling is action and catharsis. Yet, here I am this morning, feeling . . . with no action to follow. I spoke to someone I do not know very well. I believe we communicated some important things. I feel nervous, worried, and concerned that maybe I said some things I should not have said. I feel happy and hopeful that I understand that person a little bit better. I feel guilty and ashamed at the ways in which we keep ourselves from speaking truth to one another. I feel like I have betrayed loyalties. I feel freed from hurt silence. I feel as though I colluded with an outsider to gossip about a loved one. I feel as though I finally included a new person into the circle of loved ones.

Yet, what action to follow? Last night, I saw a glimpse of a thing. I saw an expression on a human face that was simply feeling. There was feeling as action; as a physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental activity that engaged the entire being. I thirsted for that ability.

This morning, I fear the cost. I fear the time lost for formulating plans. I itch to do damage control-to talk with another and move the social dynamic even farther. I want the conversation to continue. I want the conversation to end. All of these activities as a way to avoid feeling feelings as action.

Today is Sunday. Today is Sabbath. Feeling is a relationship with time. Sabbath is time in relationship with God. I shall relate with this time through feeling and share these moments with God.

Love Always,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

Last week I went to a conference and heard a woman named Roberta Bondi speak on prayer. Somehow, her lectures inspired me to reengage my prayer life. I had been on auto-pilot, assuming that God knows what I need, when I need it and will provide whether or not I ask. Silly of me. I know that relationship with God is active and dynamic and necessarily requires attention from me.

So, I started a small prayer discipline. It is hard to describe what has happened. I have become more aware of my feelings, and I have found significant clarity in the question that has been plaguing me for months now. Below, I will share the conversation that I had with myself, but I want to reiterate one of my personality traits: I believe that choosing is the definition of faithful response to Life.

" . . . maybe this is necessary for me to be able to relate to new people and forge new meaning for this life I am living.

I need to start building new relationships
-i'm not safe. i have attachment disorders, i'm incapable . . .

[Wow! Who knew you believed this of yourself. You used to believe you were poison in love relationships. Where is this coming from?]

-past jobs

[In what ways?]

-well, i had a strong vision, selfish, of a program at my last job, and i forced that vision over (listening to the needs of those i was working with)

[I think, possibly, you may have done that to some extent. I do not believe 1. that you did that all of the time, or 2. that the program ultimately suffered under your leadership]

-well, teaching, then. i . . .was looking for validation from students. i told stories to myself about their lives and imagined i was the one person that understood how the world was putting them down; that i was called to discern their inner potential and bring it forth through education. being good by being a crusader. how naive and stupid.

[Wow! How old are you?]

-almost . . .

[How old were you then]

-ten years younger

[Hm]

-i am a hard-shelled, cold person

[What evidence of that do you see?]

-i don't want to give my life over to volunteering to visit or care for people

[Hm.] [That statement bothers you?]

-i do not want to be unfaithful. i fear the consequences of believing faithfulness requires more from me in terms of giving of my being to others. i fear the loss of MY energy, MY time, MY life, and i dislike {hate} being selfish and self-oriented to such an extent.

[Wow! You seem to be holding on to your self, clinging tightly to control-You know, controlled environment, controlled choices, controlled outcomes. Deciding in advance the consequences of attempting to give more of yourself, and not doing anything. If you don't try, you can't fail. How safe.]

-whooo.

[You love throwing yourself over barriers. What barriers does your control create?]

-inhibitions in joining groups and committing time; confusion in regards to "job" choices; anxiety about "being" (specifically, feeling unheard, ineffectual, unimportant, etc.) OH !@#$%%!!! TOO MUCH @#$% ANALYSIS!!! JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO


. . . . .

Still choosing,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I have been a crab recently. I have been hyper-critical of people and events, strongly vocal about the ways in which they have not met my expectations. What is it about a turn of thought, that takes righteous indignation and reveals it for silly selfishness? I have been searching for self-fulfilling activities and relationships in the wrong places, which is why I have not been finding them. At the same time, I have misunderstood the true goals behind jumping the hoops of silly bureaucracies: investments in skills and contacts that will support me for the future.

I have thought that my activity was meant to fulfill me. Instead, my activity has been ground work for living into a new role and status. This role and status is not me-not personally, spiritually, or authentically an expression of myself, but it is a part of the commitment that I have made with my Beloved. It is an expression of the entity created when we got married.

No matter what actions, decisions and relationships I choose, there is a part of the world that will have and voice opinions about me that directly relate to the role and status that I now have in society. My choices, then, for the last few months, have been influenced by that role and status. The machinery of people's carefully constructed order has been using the lens of role and status to interpret my actions, my words, and my meaning to this community. I will never be "myself" in this structure, because it defines me in categories I neither understand nor care much about. It cannot "hear" or "see" me. Yet, there is a self that is imaged here, a self that impacts both me and my Beloved.

How the community views my Beloved is closely related to how the community views me, using its lens. I have no control over that lens. Believing that lens actually has the power to define and judge me has been causing a great deal of dissatisfaction, but if I release myself, and allow the relationship identity to engage with people instead, I predict that I will be less angry and dissatisfied with the nature of relationship with those I have been meeting. I can turn a need for self-fulfillment and personal connection into the power to support my Beloved's call. The self created by others' definition can then relate to those others in ways they understand, allowing me the freedom to control whether that image is a creation of integrity and largesse, or a bundle of insecurities and petty dominions.

In the meantime, I will still need community and relationship. I work too hard at loving life to turn my soul over to duty or expectation. Therefore, I will seek out friends. I will search for people who think, feel, laugh and play in synergy with me; people that treasure absurdities; people that tell dirty jokes and use profane language; people that have opinions, hopes, and dreams that coincide with mine; people that do not know me by a role or a status beyond the role of person and the status of friend.

I have to admit to some sadness. I had hoped that I could be real here, but maybe my life is a sequence of public and secret selves: each authentic, each real, but each incomplete. Maybe it is only with my true intimates that the whole person can be shared, and that authenticity of action and intention is sometimes best costumed in someone else's clothes.

Let me know if you think I am wrong.

Love you,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I love my life! Being a grown-up is often difficult, but the rewards are enormous. I do not mean material rewards such as a house, alcohol, or a driver's license. I mean life rewards such as strength, confidence, and self-identity. These past months, I have been engaged in a process. I have been testing relationships, reacting to new situations, feeling grief, and reflecting on what kind of person I want to be. In terms of being grown-up, I have been taking responsibility, making commitments, accepting change and loss, and choosing right action over comfortable patterns of behavior. Hard, but wonderful, all the same, to rediscover who I am, and what I need.

Tonight, I clearly articulated my desires to another person. Tonight, I heard a loved-one's concerns without losing my own self-assurance. Tonight, I felt empathy for another person's problems, without the need to try and fix them. Tonight, I expressed annoyance with a situation, without attributing blame. Tonight, I reasserted the lesson that I can live without the approval or understanding of those closest to me.

I like myself again. I like my flaws and my uncertainties. I revel in the fact that I am a person, not a thing; not a trophy of someone else's achievement; not the yard stick for anyone else's satisfaction. Because I am claiming responsibility for my actions, my choices and my state of being, I am free to reject the burden of anyone else's. I am free of past relationships and first relationships. I am free to turn from them. I can let them flourish or flounder without me. Loosing them, I lose childish expectations and the past's definition of my self. I do this with love and gratitude.

Loving now,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I struggle with the concept of community. I struggle with the idea of turning my determination over to a committee of believers. I struggle with the concept of surrendering myself, all that I am and can be, over to other people. I even struggle with the idea of turning myself over "to Jesus." On Sundays, we often sing hymns that imply a crucifixion of individual needs in following the call of Jesus in our lives.

I don't believe in it. I don't believe that anyone, Jesus Christ included, lives my life, and so I find an almost insurmountable barrier in myself when it comes to relinquishing self. There is a common thread in many Christian theologies that requires personal acceptance of failures, but no personal power in success. My sins are all my own, but any accomplishments are only "by the blood of Christ." I wonder, as a Christian, if I must accept this understanding: true Christians replace themselves with Christ, losing sin only in losing self.

I tried once, to nullify myself completely. I was in hate with my desires, my hopes, my dreams, my wounds, my body, my family, my friends. I was in hate with the entirety of life as I knew it. I decided to nullify myself, and found that I could not. What's more, in that bitter battle with God, I discovered that I had been denying myself for years. I had been standing in the tried and true methods of my ancestors, walking the straight and narrow, pretending that, simply, I could not actually matter. Putting goodness, purity, and "low maintenance" in place of my desires, my expectations, and my personal attainments, I still kept intruding. I simply would not go away, whether I mattered or not.

Waking back into life, I took some terrible chances. I made some terrible choices. I abrogated my will to my desires. I risked. I failed. I hurt people. I lost a carefully built network of relationships and patterns of choice, but I had decided to be. I live today, a life I treasure. I live today a life as full as it had been empty. I live today with a terrifying truth: I do matter, and every decision, choice, and action I make is my responsibility and my duty to God.

So often, on a Sunday morning, I hear sermons that seem to imply that Christ calls us to "renounce ourselves and the world," "to accept our insufficient powers," and to "turn ourselves over to him;" sermons of self-nullification, abrogation of will and a vision of sweet, easy surrender. I know a lie in this. I did not give myself to Christ with "joy and thanksgiving in my heart." I went kicking, screaming and crying. I went with hate boiling in my spirit. I went with nails and barbed wire in my soul. When I sing "I Surrender All," I am am Robert E. Lee at Appomatox Courthouse, not a pure and submissive bride, opening myself to my Lover's caresses and the inevitability of place in my community.

Christ has meaning for me because I am I. I believe that Christ's call is a call to the courage to be alive, the way that Jesus was alive. I believe it is a call to share, a call to compassion, and a call to the reckless belief that every human being matters absolutely. I do not believe that Christ carried me through the steepest times of my being: harried, yelled, encouraged, maybe Christ even stretched out his hand, but I climbed those hills myself, one filthy handful of clay at a time. I believe that many do the same.

Knowing these things in myself, I struggle with the idea of trusting the opinions and judgments of a religious community. I have a hard time letting a group be my wisdom. I have a hard time believing myself unequal to anyone in my community. I have a hard time bowing my head. Importantly, I find myself unwilling to be yoked to my community's vision when that vision requires a belief that the individual is a poor, miserly, insignificant, and powerless being. It feels like a betrayal of all the reasons I became a Christian in the first place.

Thanks for Listening,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

Recently, I was asked to articulate what I believe about sacrifice in a philosophical discussion. I stated that I believe the act of sacrifice is somehow necessary for human well-being. How? In what ways? These are questions that I had a hard time addressing. Since then, I have also been thinking about prayer. I am finding that it, too, seems to be necessary for human well-being. How? In what ways?

The answer that I keep "hearing" to both of these questions, in both instances, is "to be right with God.," that humans need to sacrifice and to pray "to be right with God."

Uh-oh. What does this mean, "to be right with God?" Does this mean that God requires sacrifices and adoration from humanity? Why? What reason have I to sacrifice to and adore that which allows people to die in hunger, despair and violence? What reason have I to sacrifice to and adore that which allows children and animals to be systematically and cruelly abused, manipulated and destroyed? What satisfactory reason have I to sacrifice to and adore that which either ordained or ignored the unspeakable violations of the Crusades, the Black Plague, the Inquisition, the French Revolution, slavery, and and the calculated genocide of whole cultures of humanity in the American continents? What do I get in return?

Do I believe that I should sacrifice and pray to God so that I, the righteous person, can rest assured that disease and harm shall never touch me or mine? Is it then my fault, my lack of devotion and true contrition that caused a nearby relative to die slowly of cancer before her children and grandchildren's eyes? How does that reflect on her grandchildren's righteousness, children under 3? What does that say about the nature of God?

Do I believe that "being right with God" means that the whole nature of the Universe is changed? Am I to believe that if all humans on the planet (and beyond) were to "be right with God," not only would wars cease, but diabetes would no longer exist, broken bone would never happen, and no person's desire to listen to country music could conflict with my own preference for opera? Do I believe that, if all humanity were to "be right with God" that the Rocky Mountains themselves would become more magnificent and any less dangerous? Do I believe that prayer and sacrifice will make the vacuum of space any deeper and more meaningful to poets and musicians?

Though I realize the above conclusions may work in some people's theology-a theology where the very pine trees of this world are a twisted corruption, consigned by human sin to existence in Paradise Lost-they do not work in my theology. I do not believe in that understanding of God's relationship with the world.

I believe that God is what is. I believe that God named God's self as " I am that I am." I believe that the impenetrable, immovable, incorruptible truth of God is all that is. My will does not redefine this moment. My will does not call family back from the dead. My will does not erase hurricane Katrina. I do not believe that my prayers and my sacrifices recreate nature. I do not believe that my prayers and my sacrifices will bring my brother back to life or repay me for the years of knowing him that I have missed.

I do, however, believe that my prayers and my sacrifices make me "right with God." I believe they make me right with all that is, as it is, while freeing me to be in new relationship with the foundation of the Universe. Rather than causing God to wave Its fingers and take away my neighbor's unemployment, my prayers and my sacrifices align my understanding with the reality of my neighbor's unemployment, making it something that matters, rather than something to fear. My prayers and my sacrifices realize my disease, freeing me to relate authentically with the blessings and hardships that attend. My prayers and my sacrifices require movement from self-gratification to interaction with the reality that besets me.

Sacrifice means giving something precious to destruction. Prayer means giving something shameful to another's care. Both are acts of self-denial and faith. Both acts require without return. I believe that both are necessary to make humans "right with God"-aligned somehow with both adamantine reality and the human capacity to alter and transcend it. I believe that prayer and sacrifice are answered by God when we become vulnerable, broken and compassionate, relational with one another and with God.

Still Thinking,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I am uncomfortable in myself today. If I were an artist drawing a self-portait, I would be all black, slashy lines. I seem to be full of angry thoughts and ugly criticisms. Neither I nor my Beloved can get it right today. Neither doing, nor being are OK by my inner critic. It yells that I am selfish, but resists any move to gift. It yells that we have enough to spend, but pulls back in fear at the thought of buying anything more. It is angry that I am not enjoying this wonderful new day of cold, bright sunshine, yet its own nagging nature is at the root of my disenchantment.

I will attribute this to tiredness after the holidays. I will attribute this to the terrible messes we make with our lives. I will attribute this to my own inability to let go of the past. I will attribute this to a need to understand my world a certain way, and cowardice at the thought of trying to believe something new. I will attribute this to close loved ones that make me accountable for my own self by refusing to carry my burdens as their own.

All good reasons to feel angry, sullen, put-upon, unfinished, and swamped by intentions that rarely seem to materialize in actions.

Why am I so small? I want to be better than I am. I want to believe bravely. I want to love freely. I want to give easily. I want to care compassionately. I want to live fully. The only thing standing in my way is me. You'd think that would be a simple obstacle to overcome.

Yours ever,
Cobalt Dreams