Pass Go, Collect $200

Maundy Thursday, April 5, 2012

Like an idiot, I’m hopeful again.  Just weary of the rollercoaster.

Lent is almost over.  Maybe I ought to have embraced the failure rollercoaster as a spiritual discipline: you could, after all, classify it as via negativa. 

Former parishioners are rollercoaster aficionados.  They never tire of rollercoasters; in fact, they sometimes make travel plans around bagging another rollercoaster for their life list.  That’s right: they even have a rollercoaster life list.

Maybe I should make a life list.  Or maybe several.  Should I make a life list of getting rejected by every pulpit committee in New York City Presbytery?  How about by one from every presbytery in the PCUSA?  At least one more of those interview weekends has popped up, in a presbytery I haven’t had a rejection from yet—that’s why I’m hopeful again.  Pathetic, really, how little it takes.

I know: I’ll put them all onto a Monopoly board.  Shouldn’t be too hard for a queer woman, who went to Union New York, doesn’t even have any kids, and is pushing sixty, to get rejected in San Joachin or Shenandoah.  Those are kind of Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues.  So, Park Place must be Genesee Valley, and Boardwalk, New York City.
          Well, I’ve got a house now on Genesee Valley, and a couple of hotels on New York City.  Hotels on hotels.  Do those little plastic pieces interlock like stacking tuna cans?  They should.

Just think:  if I stack up the rejections high enough, eventually they’ll all come tumbling down, and maybe there will be a job somewhere, rising like a phoenix from the rubble.  And wait—that's right, the Rejection Rollercoaster edition of Monopoly goes up and down as well as round and round, so let's add in Chutes and Ladders.

Meanwhile, going round the board again, there’s $200 pulpit supply, at least one new weekend coming up, maybe more, and this ridiculous, bedraggled thing with feathers that keeps climbing back on the rollercoaster and hoping, this time, to fly.

Still a Bridesmaid

 This morning, yet another church joined the mighty band of Those Who Picked Someone Else. Serves me right for getting my hopes up, and for trusting God.

 And it had even been a place worth working on Sundays for.
          This time I actually got up the nerve to ask if there was anything I could have said or done differently.  Answer: Nothing. Was it my age? No, apparently all three were the same age. They picked a woman, so it isn't that. She's probably queer, too, so it isn't that, either. (I thought I knew all the other queer clergy my age in the denomination, but this one I don't.)
          I just hope she's a Native American African-American Latina Asian transsexual lesbian. In a wheelchair. With five adopted HIV-positive kids. Born-crack-addicted kids.  With tragic birth defects. What else?
          Truly this is getting farcical.
          Luseana says I missed bipolar. Yeah. (The mom, not the poor kids.)
         There are enough of you out there looking for work these days that I don't have to explain how discouraging this is: "You're so talented, I just know God has the right thing for you right around the corner.  We'll keep you in our prayers."  For three years now, if it’s God making stuff happen, then all God has waiting around the corner is one more wallop in the kisser.  And don't pray for me, please: I don't want to remind God I exist, for God to say, "Oh, her.  That's right, I haven't smacked her around yet this week."      
        One of you tells me that Tom Waits said, "Satan is just God drunk." Come to think of it, I do feel kind of like a child of an alcoholic parent, deciding it’s best to lie low and not get noticed, and then forgetting and hoping and getting mowed down yet again. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Yup.

And my home group last night was a third-step meeting.  Turn It Over.  

More like Bend Over. 

All that Program submission talk sounds to me like a sort of S&M approach to spirituality, except that from what my S&M friends say, S&M is really about trust. Right. Like God is trustworthy. Reliable, yes—to kick me in the gut when I'm down. But trustworthy?  

I am tired of hearing, and making, excuses for the Sadist in the Sky. I am going to become a flight attendant. Anyone for joining the Mile High Flagellation Club? Cloud Clamps? Bible Bondage?

But clearly God doesn't listen to safe words.
          Aardvark!  Aardvark, already!

Day 17: Losing Her Grip

 “Uncle” Sid Lovett, one of the best preachers I’ve ever heard, used to like to quote New Hampshire farmers.  Here’s what one of them told him once about using a chainsaw: Ye can shift yer grip, but ye mustn’t lose your holt. 

Tonight finds me holed up in Pennsville, New Jersey, nursing a clutch that was doing just that. 

Spent the weekend in DC.  Dancing was great, seeing friends was great, being part of Chalicechick’s splendid youth group murder mystery dinner theater (which they wrote themselves) was great, more dancing, great food, more friends, all the things I’m enjoying doing because I don’t have to work on Sundays, and meanwhile, the car started revving a lot and smelling funny. 

Limped home: yes, it’s scary on I95 with no pickup, and toiling up over the Memorial Bridge from Delaware to the NJ Turnpike, down to 20mph and smelling very funny, was relieved to see a DOT highway truck pulling in front of me, lights flashing, obviously giving the lame duck an escort.  Oh, how nice, I thought, he’s keeping me from getting rear-ended.  He pulled me over, asked me some questions, told me what was wrong, suggested I hole up and get it fixed in the morning rather than take my chances on Sunday night—so that’s what I did.  And in the motel with free WiFi, there's really nothing else to do but catch up on blogging, which after all I promised to do every day, and it’s been awhile.

“Look at that,” I thought, “you actually took a suggestion.”  And I remembered the reason why I swore I’d never have a car with an automatic transmission again: a broken transmission costs thousands, and a broken clutch, merely hundreds. 

I hope.  I’ll find out tomorrow.  But it’s a reassuring thought to someone on Unemployment when her car breaks down.

And once again, people are wonderful.  I may still not have a job or an apartment or a girlfriend, but in spite of all that, there’s something new: I seem able to accept kindness for what it is.  And hopefully not mess anyone's life up too much in the process.  

People still ask, “what are you doing now?” and there are lots of quotations for that, too: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests….” but apparently also…

“She that loseth her grip shall find it.”

One day, anyway.

Day 10: Hell in the Hallway

"When one door closes, another opens...but it's hell in the hallway."

Took a day off from hot yoga today.  Something in my fifty-eight-year-old body hurt, not in a good way, and besides, yesterday the inevitable happened: I was feeling really good about yoga, ready to believe I could someday grow fond of my body, even, after reading that blog from yesterday, and then, because it was Saturday, and snowing, I went at a different time, and got a teacher who, it seemed to me, was picking on me.

So I sat down, raging, but determined not to wreck everyone else's class for them.  Nobody cares about your childhood traumas, I told myself.  They were never the big fat girl, a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than all the other kids in the fourth grade.  They never had a sadistic gym teacher who called the whole class over and lined them up around the jungle gym to watch the big fat girl fail yet again to do even one chin-up.

And it was probably all in my own head, I thought: the yoga teacher was only trying to help.

But something in my fifty-eight-year-old heart hurt, and not a new hurt, either.  (“I’ll never get it right, never amount to anything, never fit in, never get anywhere, never never never….”)

So it was immensely gratifying, vindicating actually, and profoundly comforting, when one of the sleekest in the class leaned over to me afterwards, when just the two of us were left, and said, "she shouldn't have singled you out that way, it's so distracting when they do that, I always lose my concentration, and they tell you you're supposed to work at your own pace anyway."

Funny that the more distant God seems, the kinder people are.  Really amazingly kind, in all sorts of unexpected ways, in the last couple of years.  

Conventional wisdom says, "God always answers prayer; only sometimes the answer is 'no'."  Well, from where I sit, it's seemed more like invariably the answer is 'no'.  I seem to pick all the wrong things to ask for.  So I've stopped asking God for things.  Which is, in a funny way, "turning it over" and "letting God be God."  

I do find it's easier to trust God that way.  Probably more mature, too.  Makes the hallway actually kind of interesting.  The Wood Between the Worlds.  A place of mystery, fecundity, and...hope, even.  Go figure.

And the truth is, not asking God for things hasn't affected my inexplicably good parking karma one bit.     

Day 9: The Fat Girl at Hot Yoga in New York

No blog for a couple of days is a good thing: it means I’ve had lots to write and edit for real, for actual possible jobs. 

Meanwhile, Chalicechick spotted this brilliant blog and sent it to me.  She’s right, it’s not me:

·        it’s dated before I started hot yoga,

·        some of the things she says make it clear it’s not the same kind of hot yoga,

·        objectively, I do concede I’m not fat, not in any mat-flattening, record-breaking way, anyway; I just think I am, and 

·        nobody from Georgia (the state) is going to go to hot yoga in this part of Queens.  

This is not a part of Queens that tourists go to, no matter how young, hip, and artsy they are.  This is a part of Queens that young, hip artists grow up in and flee—or maybe, at the most, come back to so they can take eerie, campy, cynically ironic photographs to show the world how far they’ve grown apart from their families in Queens.

People from Georgia (the country), on the other hand, might live around here, or visit family here.  But this lady’s English is too good.  It really is marvelous writing.  I wish I’d written it.  So here it is.  Enjoy it. Here’s the link (move your cursor over the space below this line if you can't see it, and when you get to her site, scroll down to December 29, 2011).
http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p+1675

Day 6: Censored

Just when I'm getting started blogging, and actually enjoying this, too.  Harrumph.

January 25, a week from today, and the day after Congress votes on PIPA/SOPA, will be Rabbie Burns's birthday.  My lowland Scots heritage is coming out.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley.

Anyone remember the Country comedy team Pinkard and Bowden, and their song "Please Censor Us"?

Please censor us,

Tell us we cain't cuss:

Help us make a payment

On that new tour bus...

But maybe under this proposed legislation, I wouldn't be able to quote that.

William Tyndale, famous early translator of the English Bible, was in hiding in Holland (like all good religious radicals of his day), when the Bishop of Westminster decided to make a big public show of burning every single seditious, blasphemous copy of Tyndale's translation, so was looking to buy them all up.  A friend of Tyndale's, knowing how much warehousing all those Bibles was costing long distance from Holland, slipped the bishop a tip, with the result that, all at once, Tyndale no longer had the expense, but instead the bishop's money in his pocket, plus he had the best free publicity ever: banned and burned in a big bonfire in front of Westminster Abbey, his book was the hottest item going.

Yep, hard to imagine now, but people were falling all over themselves to learn to read so that they could read the Bible.  

Nobody seems to know who said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity." 

It could have been Tyndale: "Of Badde Publycitye there is No Swych Thyngge."

Day 5: From the Outside In

Back in 1985, I was sitting on the Number Five bus, eagerly anticipating the introductory-visit-with-a-day-of-classes-and-an-interview I was on my way to at Union, and as the bus passed the Wilfred Academy of Beauty on Sixth Avenue, it occurred to me, “Good: if I flunk out of seminary, I can always go to beauty school.”   

If I can’t work from the inside out, was the idea, I can always work from the outside in.  And, these days, I bet anyway most people get their pastoral care from the person who cuts their hair. 

It has been a great boon living in Queens the past few weeks, for many reasons, but high on the list is going to yoga in Queens—as it so happens, on the same road as my first parish, where, as one of you who was in a similar parish at the same time reminded me, we Fought the Good Fight: striving side by side to resist the parish pressure to get fat (a fat pastor loves the congregation more) and wear pastel polyester combinations with elasticized waists.  You can take the girl out of Manhattan, but you can’t take the Manhattan out of the girl, and we agreed, somewhat ruefully but not at all apologetically, that although you really do have to find ways to fit in, we had our limits. 

And then, for a couple of ghastly years, after menopause and quitting smoking seven years ago, I was left with no metabolism whatsoever.  Elasticized waists were an ever-present reality: even if I told myself they were Eileen Fisher and a hundred percent linen, I automatically averted my eyes when passing shop windows and full-length mirrors, and approached the bathroom scale with a growing dread, coupled with a feeling of horrified powerlessness as none of my well-worn diets worked any more. 

In all I gained forty pounds, starting from a lot more than forty pounds to begin with.  I’d snarl at anyone who tried to get me to say I was happy not to be smoking any more.  But eventually I learned how to kick up the metabolism, and there’s no secret to it if you’ve ever fired a wood-burning kiln: you just can’t let the fire go out, and that means you don’t choke it with too much fuel, nor do you starve it with too little.  Or like an engine.  You just have to keep it topped up.  (That brought me right up against an even harsher reality: one more way in which I’m much more like my mother than I care to admit.)

You have to keep the air pumping, the fuel flowing, the water cooling, and the fire burning.  So, yoga.  Hot yoga.

And that’s the beauty of going to yoga in Queens.  It’s Queens.  I am not the oldest, nor the fattest, nor the clumsiest person there.  In younger, hipper neighborhoods, which is where I have taken yoga classes before, it’s felt like everyone else is twenty years old, weighs all of forty pounds soaking wet, and spends the whole ninety minutes with both ankles behind their head, floating three feet above the ground—which I suppose isn’t as hard to do if you only weigh forty pounds soaking wet.  And, when I shared this observation with another fiftysomething woman in the class, she high-fived me.  I’ve missed Queens. 

But hip or square, the yoga teachers all tell you that it’s all about the breath, which is, of course, about as embodied a spirituality as you can get (remember spiritus), so right now it is just right for me.  I am breathing, and sweating, and learning to be gentle with myself—if not my inner being, at least its house—and learning all the ways in which I am just as flexible as I always was, and all the ways in which I seem to have calcified without realizing it until now. 

So here I am praying from the outside in.  It does work.  And it feels so good when you stop.