Jesus in a van Down by the River

       Starting my second masters in May to get my MSW appears to many like i’m a glutton for punishment.  I often question this of myself, why does one need two masters other than to get more letters behind your name and get lots of nice papers and tassels to put on the wall.  One of the critical components of the MSW is field work or an internship. This where the rubber hits the road to say and all of the theories and concepts that you learn out of books and doodle in your notebooks if you're like me hit you smack in the face.

    In seminary my field placement was in a food pantry in an affluent county in New Jersey where we competed for grants against cities like Newark, Camden, Paterson. Where the need is at least perceived to be greater. But the county I worked in had a great deal of the in be-tweeners or the people who are only one or two paychecks away from disaster. Heaven forbid the car needs repair or someone gets sick, they are right there at the welfare office begging for help to get past a hump. Known as ALICE, for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.  

    I have found in my work in social services both secular and religious that there is a huge gap between public assistance and not. But what of the in between, those who need that extra $30 in food stamp/SNAP benefits to make it to just exist not even save. But they make in their gross pay too much. What of them? My MSW field placement is at a men's homeless shelter in a country of great wealth disparity. One side of the county is tremendously wealthy but the other side is tremendously poverty stricken. Likewise this shelter takes men from a neighboring county where there is a MAJOR state university but won’t help you unless you are getting $2.00 a month or less it seems. I also work at 211 where I take calls from all over the state of NJ for people asking for assistance and do a lot of intakes for said county's residents. What can I offer them when they call in homeless at 9:00pm on a Friday night. Nothing.

          I am frustrated by all of this, my lack of being able to help, to feed, to clothe, to shelter, to keep warm in the winter, get needed prescriptions let alone give spiritual solace to.  Pope Francis recently said “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”

This is an insurmountable task to even dream of some days after I'm done with work or my internship, when I feel most productive banging my head against the wall. I am left to wonder of the gift of the Holy Spirit and Jesus’ time on Earth taught us anything at all. Jesus might today be that homeless person who goes to work, makes a wage, not a living wage but still to much for assistance other than maybe $16.00 a month in food stamps. But can not afford a safe decent place to live. He and the disciples instead of a boat might have had a run down van and an ‘Obama’ phone as the guys at the shelter call it, or a government sponsored phone with 250 free minutes and unlimited texts a month. Living the high life for sure.

    I might be blaspheming to some here but the truth and reality can slap you upside the head mighty fast. I see all the resources that churches and faith groups have an wonder why social service and faith need be separate. I hate giving referrals where there is a condition to get a meal you must go to the church service before hand. It's wrong and not the way that Jesus operated at all. You sat down you had a conversation you ate together even if it was a scrap of bread a dash of oil, and a tiny piece of fish. You did it together not forcing. I think this is where the disconnect often happens.

       Our buildings are becoming just that buildings that collect dust, what if we as people of faith were truly able to serve the in-betweeners and fill gaps to help people get strong for themselves and then return the good will to others who have become in-betweeners. What if  Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. In the letter of, James  we are told, "If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? (James 2 15) became a lifestyle and not just words on a page.

How we ought to act at the moment of someone takeing there own life

           I’ve been rolling around in thought about Robin Williams’s suicide. A tragic course of events for sure. Well for us the public he always bought his A game, from the serious role in Dead Poets Society to playing Genie in Aladdin, but we only now see the role that he had outside of the public; the role of living with depression, anxiety, mental illness.  As I posted on Facebook last night this was a loss was not one that needed or ought to have happened.

            Having been in the place where I was just two steps from actually committing the act of suicide something stopped me. I think now several years latter that it was an inner longing of the hope I knew remained. I still cared some how. But to often it comes to the point where the thoughts, the plan, the letters the notes come about and hope and desire to live ends. I wish I could have been in the place of his death with Robin to talk to him to listen to his pain or as I say in pastor counseling/listening; sit in the shit with the person, dwell.

            In working in peer mental health I see the spark of hope persistently poking through as one client states of his depression ‘the frozen lake’. Some how kindling that spark that fire even in the frozen of a deep Alaskan winter.  But I know as a peer, a professional and as a family member, that at a certain time after you as a helper can not do more then hold hands with the person and call them to remember who they are from the soul. But it then is in the persons hands, giving it over to their soul their spirit to defend and concur the pain inside their brains.To kick ass and get the golden perhaps platinum metal of valor, honor and strength.

It pains me that only when the death of celebrity do we discuss the power that mental illness has to scare, to cause stigma, to be sad and scared. But we never discuss it when it is manageable and treatable when it’s the persistent sadness, lack of interest, the over sleeping the odd eating patterns the crying jags. When there are a many options for treatment and management. 

Likewise as a person of faith who is a peer, it is our God given duty, to love. Especially when people cannot love themselves. Not to heal but to love to simply love. To act as the way Jesus acted reaching out to less then desirable of society. To celebrate them as fellow children of God.

Anger with the Almighty

            One of the subjects and trains of thought I have been following for a long time is that of Anger with, and/or at God. When I first got really sick, as in I admitted it. God had not talked with me for a long time. I even sat in more silence then before to try and hear the voice of the creator to know that I was loved, especially when I could not love myself.  But still the profound silence remained. And not knowing what to do with that fact I became even more depressed crying “my God, my God why have you left me?”

            Well I know that I’m not alone in that anger and frustration with God. Heck even God in the person of Jesus prayed for the cup to pass to someone else. The prophets crying out with Gods displeasure often where going on gut and on strings of faith. I ‘caught’ somewhere along the line that it was not acceptable to be angry with God, I have no clue where though. But in a bible study the pastor who was acting as facilitator said ‘look to the psalms, lots of anger there. But likewise lots of hope, dreaming and praying’. Or as I like to think, nothing comes out of or exists in a vacuumed. As sweet is to sour the universe must hold a balance with itself.  So if there is love there need to be the balance, I often wonder if God is sometimes frustrated with us in our humanness.  Likewise as I was speaking to a colleague of mine at work today, if we are created to be in relationship with God in the image of human relationship, anger is normal.

            However I think the anger is more often a convenient mask for disappointment and frustration. I in my work within the community work with a young women and her family. She finally said yes to a residential treatment, where she could get the best help and go on trips to Dorney Park if she earned it. The facility was clean and bright, with trees all around. More like a retreat center then a residential program for youths with serious mental health issues. We got onto the property and 20 feet from the door she stopped. We played this game for three hours. Eventually I left with the mother after having the young women signed over to the facility.  As we where leaving she still had not entered.

As I found out latter that afternoon, as I celebrated the young women getting to the property, I found that in her refusal the child welfare branch that was involved took her to a shelter because they felt that residential needed to 100% voluntary.  I ran through a gambit of feelings, anger, frustration, disgust, but ultimately ended up on disappointed. I think the most extreme type of anger. The knowledge that the services are there but can not be accessed because of systems, money and personal choice. Freewill gives us this last one and I think that is where God often becomes sad, that we never fully experience all that is offered to us to succeed.

            For me disappointment and anger, also lead to distrust. But in the course of my own recovery and Systematic Theology (yes of all places) I figured out and accepted “our no to God, can NEVER overwhelm God’s yes to us”. So the anger and related feelings, might just be our rebellion to the extreme emotional feelings of what that complete yes from God is.

"I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning.”

Todays title is from a quote from Stevie Smith

Its been a while since I have been able to create a post to write for the blog. I guess its because I have been yet once again smacked again in the face and butt with depression. Depression has been a companion at different lengths away from my late childhood. I got the help I deserved in seminary and have been facing the challenge of acceptance a mental illness for two years. It has not been an easy walk, often with God being in silence. Radio silence. But i’ve stuck with the work of treatment and ‘staying in love with God’ and trying to hide my un-welness. I was good very good, I am still very Good. 

http://www.sevencounties.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=8106

But yet I hurt and it breaks through to those who can see beyond the mask. I am afraid of a pattern developing that I will be ‘well’ for 6-8 months and then spiral back into dark deep depression. I remain fearful of what this means for me in terms of ordination. I know my call is firm and that as I have stated in my papers for UMC ordination who is the Shepard to those who are so afraid of the shepherds? Who goes out into the wilderness? 

As of the last three weeks I’ve been on a leave from my job and in an intense outpatient treatment program that teaches DBT.  Dialectical behavioral therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavioral_therapy) focuses on mindfulness, loving yourself and just getting along better in the world. No small task for anyone let alone those of us who are in pits of all sorts. It’s a little more complicated then that but a lot of the coping mechanisms I see have parallels to Christianity and to Wesley spirituality. DBT for me is about allowing the Grace we already have into our lives and using it to expand our self’s on a path to wellness. One of the big coping skills is observing your breath. 

I have read in several places (all that escape me right now) that the sound of our breath is pronouncing one of the names of God, YHWH. We are born with breath and the name of our creator on our lips. So for me my interpretation of observe the breath is a way to also know that we are beloved and an integral part of something big, very big. Depression is isolating the chemicals your body produces or does not produce betray you, and it lies to you. Telling you of your non-belovedness. And worst of all you believe it. 

I have often been one who sees my ministry as in the mud. But what about in the muck that sucks you down so you cant move your feet? How do you act then, how do you minister and let go to allow yourself to be ministered to? (I’m still working on this one folks)

This round I have been blessed to not be so devoid of God where I have cried out for her to just come and dwell with me. I am guilty of demanding to know why if created in the image of God, why God would allow for chemicals to get messed up. I have yet to get an answer, but regardless God always remains. 

Moving from one stage of life to the next and so on, and for me from un-welness to wellness. I hope to write some more blogs about the experiences of this round of depression and the role my faith and personal spirituality plays into it(for this intake of the DBT program they asked about my spirituality and its role in my life. I was very impressed)

Oh Thanks God for Making me Better Then Them!

Luke 18:9-14

⁹ Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust: ¹⁰ “Two people went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹  The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹²  I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ ¹³  But the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’ ¹⁴  I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”

I’m almost into my third month of my new job where I work as a peer in mental health.  I am the youngest of all the team between two houses, one of the most educated, and the resident spirituality export (or as a professor said “theologian in residence”.  I like to think of myself as a low judgmental person, but I can tell you that I am quick to judge. I feel very much like the Pharisee who gives thanks for what is not happening to him. I have my anxiety managed, I have health insurance, I have a job where I don’t need to hide my illness, I can afford and have easy access to my prescriptions, I go to therapy every week, I have people or supporters as my job training would call it! I am called to this when I see my co-worker peers telling there stories or having a day where they symptoms of there diagnoses comes nocking at the door. I say to myself and unintentionally to God “thank you that I don’t have paralyzing anxiety like she does” or “wow I’m glad that I was never interested in dope like he was, what a mess of things he made”.  I am thankful that my symptoms are not as bad as someone else’s. Not thinking of how to support the person into having symptom reduction or even reduction.

            It is an interesting parallel, because we celebrate recovery and the resurrection of the person and not the patient (going from patient-hood to personhood). Yet our struggles also keep us down, and have caused me to think about myself and my place in this group of people a lot.  I am still cocky and feeling like I’m hot stuff and excited that I’m the first of my seminary friends graduating this year to have a ‘grown up job’.  We celebrate success and moving forward however it comes as an agency value. And yet I find myself still living in the judgment of ‘I’m doing awesome, whoot!’

            Yes I do a lot of the things that my faith demands of me, in the ways that suit my life, myself and beliefs and I sometimes brag about them. Yes I brag and it can be bad sometimes, very bad. But I know I brag because more often I feel like the tax collector, “God I’m sorry that I have to ask this person to explain why they came to a food pantry”, “Can’t you just create a compound, element, something to take this persons pain away? ‘Why do you let me suffer?’ Learning to question God both in angry ways demanding to know why God has done or not done this or that is something that has become a new practice for me. But the questions of why that come with my repentance of what feels like diminishing someone’s imago-dei are the ones that most make me feel like I’m separate from God a sinner who has missed the mark completely.

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Astronomy_Amateur_3_V2.jpg

Yet at the same time, I know that relationships are part of the process to restoration of the spirit. Maybe “hearing the person in to being”* even in the shame, stigma, and doubt is siting in the mud with the person, helping them to rise to there own feet and to tell them they are the beloved. To invite them instead of looking down in life, when everyone is already looking at you as ‘another welfare case’ at the social security line, or the disability, line or at the local homeless or outreach center. I can point to the way that will lead them to look up to see there imago-dei there lives filled with Grace so big they don’t yet know it.  I know that I am not the one who will fix the world, that’s God’s job. Nor am I the last person who will point to look up and out but I aspire to be one who helps to prepare and prime the soul for the journey ahead

*Inspired by a favorite theologian of my seminary Nell Morton (she is amazing BTW, I wish I had known her outside of her writing)

reflections on dark nights

        I have three saints’ well maybe four (not sure about Julian of Norwich, if shes a saint), saints that I follow, St. Francis, St Teresa of Avila and St. John of the cross. Three out of the four are known mystics; perhaps St. Francis was a different type of mystic. But anyways, I have been studying for CPE as well as personally about Dark Night of the Soul.  I thought that I would share with you my thoughts on dark nights of the soul.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul provides an overview. But I have more where that comes from!

I felt very connected to the town of Avila when I was there many years ago and could not explain.  As I learned more about her I came to know St. John as well and knowing that the deep separation from God that I had felt many times was not some freak thing that was happening to me. But rather I was one of many, many people, saints, sinners, great thinkers, and average folks throughout the ages who knew the obscure time. I feel as if I might be one of those persons whom were born with the awareness of the longing.  For me the multiple dark nights have always been a powerful redirection and reorientation in my life, but the experiences have always been incredibly painful during the process, and in the reentry process.  There is no length that a Dark Night must be or a maximum of when it must be over. Periods of dark night are also not uncommon over someone’s lifetime.  

A view of a dark night

To better understand the dark night of the soul has helped me to reframe and create new perspectives on life. The obscure nights helped me to learn how to be ok to be angry with God and to know that the pain is real and not imagined. I also feel that it helped me to understand and fully see the deep pain that is all around us, but that the pain is from humans not being able to know or even sense that deep connection that was embedded into them from God’s whisper into the dirt.

Anything Dangerous?

Anything Dangerous?

           

This semester I am entrenched in two New Jersey State facility’s, the only women’s prison in New Jersey, and a state Psychiatric hospital (yes the same one from previous entries). Both of them are very similar and also very different. But both as the same questions, ‘anything dangerous on your person?’

            I know not to bring cigarettes ,knives, plastic bags, anything sharp and so on to both places but something dangerous I think I bring. I bring knowledge, books and compassion to both places. Why are these dangerous you ask? Because knowledge gives you the power to rise above, to see differently, to challenge yourself to be different well remaining true to your core. Compassion brings the danger of knowing yourself as a human and not a number or a patient or a level of privilege.

            Jesus in his time was very dangerous not only because he discussed and sometimes screamed justice for all people. He also was a boundary crosser in a time when crossing boundaries meant all kinds of things. Jesus was also radically dangerous when he met the sick in there infections, ailments, and contagious. When he met the poor on the street and invited them in for a meal. He lived on the edge he was dangerous.

            But are we dangerous today? To we live on the edge and yell out for justice? To meet the sick in the hospitals and on the sidewalk? What about the poor? Do we determine that others will help them and we do not need to do anything? I think that as people of faith we are not dangerous enough, we don’t live on the edge.

            Granted where the edge is, remains different for each person. But learning not to judge as much the poor off the county I work in has made me dangerous, because I see not the poor in them, but the humanness of them.  Forcing me to see a bit through the eyes of Jesus, who did not see the condition but the human in a condition. Not pathology but a person.

            So yes I bring danger with me when I enter into these places.

Worship from the Floor

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            In late February my niece turned three and I went home to my parents house where she lives with my sister. Being that I was home I went to my home church on Sunday morning. Stevens has a hall instead of a sanctuary where we set up chairs into rows. Addy my niece feels free to run from us to our neighbors who also got to the same church, and to other friendly faces, then to the toys, and back again. This particular Sunday she was running all over the place having a great time and making everyone smile. She was running between my mom and I, who was on the computer running the PowerPoint. About one minuet into the sermon my niece started yelling for Aunt Betty. To calm her I went and sat on the floor with her. We did the ABC puzzle that is her favorite at church. The pastor preached and I still heard the message, but it was in a new way for me to receive. I like to watch the speaker it helps me stay focused on the person and to remember the message. I don’t remember quite what the message was (sorry Gene!) but I remember the feeling of knowing my niece was beloved in this community and I was too, we where perfectly welcomed in worship and to sit on the floor well doing so.

            But a church I was involved in had terribly uncomfortably pews and the kids would kick them and get yelled at or get the dirty look. I was super uncomfortable growing up in a church where you could move. They quickly sent the kids to Sunday school, chasing them away from worship. So I was led to think how often to we chase ‘kids’ or all of the children of God who are a little different and who want AND need to sit on the floor. Having my passion for disability studies, I think first of those ‘least of these’ who are differently abled. But what about people who have been wounded by the church and are trying to believe again. Do we force them into the ‘pews’ of their past that helped contribute to the pain and woundedness? These are questions I don’t have answers to but I wonder what if we all worshiped from the floor.

How Holy the Conversation

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        I started working at a food pantry at the start of January to fulfill the requirements of my supervised ministry class. I was unsure of it as this is something I have never ever considered as a site for ministry, for me. But I love it already. I do intake interviews, shop with clients as we are a client choice pantry(items are out on shelves and clients get to chose the variety of the item. I.e. tomato soup not clam chowder), and find and refer resources to clients. Today I finished the first incarnation of the big bad book of referrals and resources. Its about 2 inches thick of paper, I also got to give my first referrals from it! I would post a picture but I forgot to take one today!

            As someone who often looks to the very ordinary as evidence of the Divine, I was reminded of this again. I had a very holy moment with a client today as we both shared a lot in common, I was able to use my knowable to help steer her to some resources. Then we went shopping; I encouraged her to keep up with her hard work and acknowledged her strength in asking for help. We talked about what could be done with the food items, like beans and rice, blueberry cobbler and so on. As we where checking out she asked how long I had been there and I told her three weeks, She was amazed and asked me what bought me to the pantry. I told her it was my internship for my M.Div and then we had a conversation about faith. I had already felt a kinship with her the moment she walked into the office for the interview but then she affirmed she felt it too.

            It was a warm reminder of just how holy the work I’m doing is. I was struggling a bit to see the connection between food pantry and ministry other then ‘they are hungry feed them, Jesus told us to’. But it is more then that it is the conversations, the affirmation of a persons strengths, the reaffirm that they are the beloved of Gods. Yes that is the ministry of the pantry