On Accidental Saints

Last year (2015, for those keeping track) at Lent, my church picked two books for the Lenten book group. One was Accidental Saints, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, and the other was Desmond Tutu's Made for Goodness. Well, I was in college up to my eyebrows, and the book group ended up not having its last meeting, and I got severely behind in my reading. I didn't pick up either book again. Here are my first and last posts on the books.

The rest of this has spoilers, so, if you're not into spoilers for Accidental Saints, you should stop reading here.

So, now that college is all but over and I have more spare time, I went ahead and finished Accidental Saints. You can check out my review on GoodReads, but I wanted to add something that really struck me about the last 3/4 of this book. It was the chapter that dealt with Nadia's friend Bruce's drunk driving accident.

Nadia had befriended Bruce, a Bishop in the Lutheran church, whose wife was dying of cancer. Some years later, something bad happens. Nadia writes,

"In a brief exchange on instant message, I learned that, two nights earlier, Bruce got behind the wheel of his car with what tests would later show to be a higher than legal blood-alcohol level, lost control, and hit and killed a fifty-two-year-old mother of three. And by the time I found out, from my luxurious room in a resort in Mexico, Bruce was sitting alone in jail."

This chapter so spoke to me. I still often think of my bishop, who also got behind the wheel of her car with what tests would later show to be a far higher than legal blood-alcohol-level, wasn't paying attention, and struck and killed a 41-year-old father of father of two.

It was hard to know what to pray for - Tom Palermo, his family, and cyclists everywhere, or my suffragan Bishop Heather Cook, her family, and prisoners everywhere. Of course I prayed for all of the above. I wrestled with anger at the bishop, I wrestled with disappointment in a church leader, I worried about the divide this might drive between often liberal-atheist-cyclists and drivers and the church.

Nadia talks in this chapter about the need for mercy and the remorse Peter must have felt as he swam up to Jesus and proclaimed three times that he loved him. She writes, "We simply have to cling tightly to the truth that God can redeem it." I'm still struggling with that one.

I know Jesus being resurrected is supposed to make it all okay - that the resurrection makes everything okay. It washes away all our sins - as Nadia might say, mine, yours, Heather's, Peter's. But that's hard to swallow. It's hard to not still feel a little angry and a little lost and a little heartbroken.

On Accidental Saints and Made For Goodness - Week 2

On Perfection

I have to say, Nadia's chapter where she talked about the expectations of others really spoke to me. She said, "Maybe it's not only the leaders who think they should be perfect; maybe it's also their followers who expect them to have it all together."

I am totally guilty of this. Like, all-the-time guilty. I have high expectations of myself, and high expectations of others. I tend to know my friends well enough to love them and their imperfections. I love their snarky-ness, their sarcasm, their occasional falling-apart. I identify with all those things, and I do them myself. I know we're not perfect.

But I expect my leaders - in family, in church, at work - to be always forgiving, never snarky, never falling-apart. At least, not when I'm around. I have some amends to make, and I'll make them in person.

Desmond Tutu again echoes her: "As human beings, we hear in the command to be perfect a demand for flawlessness. But flawlessness is not the goal of God's invitation. ... Godly perfection is not flawlessness. Godly perfection is wholeness." I love him for saying this. I guess I have some work to do.

Desmond Tutu talks about practicing being good. He talks about how God gave us choice, but the choice really is ours, and it does take practice. I have to admit, this really confused me. Last week, he was saying that being good is something we are, not something we do, and now he's saying that we have to practice being good.

Not the Blessing

The other thing Nadia said that really struck me, was when she talked about how we are not the blessing that is bestowed upon others. I'm guilty of this one, too. Thinking that I will magnanimously step down from my ivory tower and bless people with my presence or my works. She points out that we are all both needy and needs-meeters. It was a difficult concept to wrap my head around. I think she's also saying that experiencing the need and the meeting of that need is to experience Jesus. It's not in the being needy or in the generosity - it's in the communion.

The Discussion Questions

1. 1. What is your Nineveh? Has God ever moved you to confront that thing, person, or event that you would rather avoid? What happened, and how did it feel?
   
   Not so much, on this one. I would say that the closest it comes is at work. As a team-lead, I was a great coach, mentor, cheer-leader. But I wasn't good at giving negative feedback or conducting sessions where I had to counsel someone on poor performance. I had to do it, and it felt awful. I'm still much better at "A for effort!" than I am at "these are the expectations. Let's find a way for you to start meeting them."
   
   
2. Have you ever felt like you were someone's "project" - as if they were trying to "minister" to you, yet somehow were serving themselves? How did it feel? Why is it so difficult for us to give to others without becoming self-important?
   
   Again, not so much. I've definitely been on the other side of that - believing that I could lead a youth group (I don't even like kids!) because I was young and energetic (I was) and I understood teenagers (nope. Not even when I was one). It was a gift I didn't and don't possess, and I failed miserably. I think we do better at ministration when it's in a way that comes more naturally.
   
   
3. (Summarizing) When you were young, did you believe that Godliness meant following a list of prohibitions? ...Has that rules-based messaging affected how you live and feel as an adult? Is there such a thing as "Godly living"? Is the lifestyle and personality of the Christian the primary focus of faith?
   
   Oh, yes. Christians don't smoke, drink, smoke pot, swear, have pre-marital sex. I know now those things aren't true, but when I was a teenager, I vacillated between believing that we are saved by faith and that we are saved by works. When I thought we are saved by works, I was super-puritan. When I thought we are saved by faith, I took it as a free pass - I'm already saved, I can do whatever the hell I want. Now, I think it's both. I do still believe that we should aim for a lifestyle that treats ourselves and those around us well. I know that as sinners, we'll fall short. But I do believe we should be trying.

On Accidental Saints and Made For Goodness - Week 1

I can't always make it to church, and that means missing book group. So I'm participating via blog, at least on the weeks I can't make it.

Overall Impressions

The choice to read these two books together was brilliant. They echo each other using different voices for much the same message, and it's a good and powerful message. So far, I'd say the message is, "You are worthy - it'll be okay."

Nadia Bolz-Weber's voice in Accidental Saints - Finding God in All the Wrong People is humorous, at times irreverent. She uses swear words! She sounds like someone I'd like to have coffee with. It's refreshing to "hear" someone speak on Godly matters without the lofty speech that often makes books on the subject inaccessible to the average Joe.

Desmond Tutu's voice in Made for Goodness and Why This Makes All the Difference is grandfatherly. Kind, approachable, instructive. His text is a little denser than Nadia's, which is why I think it's a good thing that we typically read three chapters of her book to two of his. He has a much different outlook than Nadia (for some obvious reasons), but still manages to relate to the American experience.

What Spoke to Me

One of the best quotes from Accidental Saints is: "There is nothing we have done that God cannot redeem." It's really hard to internalize this one. Tutu helps a bit: "God already loves us perfectly; God cannot love us one iota more. Equally, there is nothing we can do that will make God love us one iota less." This, too, is difficult to internalize, but remembering God's love is perfect is helpful.

The next quote from Accidental Saints captures the idea that we are all complicated. I think this speaks to the idea that we're all marred by sin in some way, but also reflects the idea that we're all saints, too: "On All Saints' Sunday, I am faced with sticky ambiguities around saints who were bad and sinners who were good." This pairs nicely with one from Made for Goodness, which reminds us that even though we are all complicated, we're also all good: "There is not a single person that God gives up on, because God knows that we are made to be like God, who is goodness itself."

Nadia talks about her struggles with racism, and that resonated with me. She says that for all her anti-racism talk and liberal leanings, she can't get around the fact that she reacts differently to (for example) young black men she sees on the street. She also references white privilege and her empty outrage at the inherent racism in our society. She says she feels that if she could just "show the right level of outrage, it'll make up for the fact that every single day of my life I have benefited from the very same system that acquitted George Zimmerman." Tutu has a slightly different take on it: "If wrong was the norm, it wouldn't be news... Murder and mayhem are not the norm. The norm is goodness." This brought me hope. It's easy to feel discouraged watching the news. Whether it's local stories or international news, there are atrocities everywhere, and there's so much of it I can't do a thing about. I like this reminder that while it may seem that stuff is everywhere, there's also goodness everywhere. It's almost like he's speaking to her outrage, here.

Desmond Tutu devotes a lot of time to explaining that our efforts to "be good" get in the way of our recognition that we "are good." One of the things he says is, "Attached to that notion of "being good" are all the "oughts" and "shoulds" that we think will win us... God's love and divine favor." I've been in therapy a few times. One of the more recent was because of the stress I was facing with accepting a decision that meant our family was geographically spread out, and I was (temporarily) a single mom. I had stopped sleeping. I had almost stopped eating. I was consumed by anger and stress. The therapist worked with me using cognitive behavioral therapy - changing your thinking in order to better control your thinking. He talked about "musterbating" - allowing too many toxic thoughts into your head. "It must be fair" (no, it isn't always fair), "I must do the dishes" (no, you don't have to do the dishes, but maybe there's a way to remind yourself that you want to), "I must be understood" (nope, that doesn't always happen, either). Focusing on that stuff will drive you certifiably crazy. Tutu also said, "We cannot choose how we feel. We can choose what we do, how we act." I'm not sure I agree with this. I think you can make choices about how you feel. I think my therapy did just that. I think when we are angry, that's as much a choice we make as when we decide to move forward from a set-back.

One of the first things I highlighted from Accidental Saints was a quote about the saints in our lives: "Saint Paul describes the saints as "a great cloud of witnesses," so when they have passed, we still hold them up, hoping perhaps that their virtues... might become our own virtue, our own strength." I had never considered our (Episcopal) view of the saints in this light, but I like the idea. It was an "aha!" moment.

There's this, on leadership, from Accidental Saints: "I'm a leader, but only by saying, 'Oh, screw it. I'll go first.'" I wonder how much of corporate leadership is this "Fine - I'll go first" kind of attitude and how much is "We (meaning you) need to go this way." Is one way better in the corporate world? More effective? Is there room for high-level corporate leaders to "go first"? I'd like to say that going first is the best leadership... But honestly, I'm not sure the guys at the top can do that. Not in any "corporate vision" kind of way. Maybe they can sometimes. I don't know.

The Discussion Questions

1. I rarely think of myself as a saint. Mostly, I realize how broken I am - I'm so mean, sometimes. Often, even. I've said before that if my mom, my aunt, and my husband are praying for you, you're going to be okay. While each of these people is merely human - they each have their flaws - I also know that they can be my strongest supporters. I've always felt their spiritual health was really high, even when they were in crisis or questioning their faith.

2. I think I'm often in places where I say the wrong thing, or I react the wrong way. I think loving (in a Christian kind of way) the people around you helps you empathize with them more, and might help you not say the wrong thing, but I think getting it right 100% of the time is impossible for humans. I think Desmond Tutu answers this better, by encouraging us to not try to say the right thing or do the right thing, but to remember that we are good, even when we're not.

3. Figuring out just what crap I've had exchanged for Jesus's blessedness is pretty hard. I know I've got a lot of crap. Figuring out which has been more or less directly exchanged is a tall order. I suppose, I could say that there have been a few times when I said exactly the wrong thing to someone... And those people chose to keep talking to me, to be my friends, to forgive me. I guess that's my crap for His blessedness.

Chaucer Hath Mad Jokes

I was supposed to be a discussion leader for the discussion on selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales this week, but there was a bit of a communications error, and my thunder totally got stolen. That's okay - I'm pretty sure I'll get to do Arthurian Heroes, which is almost as cool.

I had gone to some trouble to prepare this "Discussion Leader" post, and had thought of two things I really wanted to share in addition to the academic bits. So I whipped up some rhymed couplets. *Ahem* Forthwith:

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a mighty blog
Which loaded with witticisms is; that churlish dog
Updates his posts on so seldom a moon,
Causing geeks like me to nearly swoon.
One may find the blog (and ken the dog anon)
At House of Flame, blogspot dot com
But whilst I dally with you here a time,
Allow a goodwife yet one more little rhyme.
I saw a comic upon the Google Plus,
As I was dawdling on this forum; it is attached, thus,
Click the attachment and humor you will see,
About the Middle Ages, that which tickles me.

The school's forum thingie is painfully out-moded, so the image below was an attachment that had to be "clicked" rather than just displayed in the post.

By the way, if you need a bawdy laugh, and/or if you haven't recently, find a nearby copy of the Tales, and read the Wife of Bath's Tale. Omg. Hysterical.

A New Pantheon

I was recently at a party where I mentioned that my paper on the three Greek works from which we read selections (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid - I'm seeking my B.A., if you didn't know) would actually be on how the women in these stories wield power. I didn't mention how much it irked me that in these three great works, the woman's role is really minimal, and mortal women especially are mostly portrayed as powerless pawns of their hero male family members and the gods, because, well, I didn't want to be that girl
at the party.

Little did I know, the person to whom I was speaking - a friend's husband, both of whom I had admired for other reasons - happened to have gotten his degree in feminine studies. The friend told me that her husband knew all about how women wield power. He laughed and said that what his degree was really about was how to create a society in which women are truly equal.

He mentioned the American and French schools of thought on gender equality, and said that the French school of thought - which is less popular - states that so long as women are living in a value-system created by men, the society cannot truly be objective; women will never be free from sexism, even when it's women talking about women, because they have to talk about it using the male-created terms. What women really need, he said, is their own pantheon, made up of deities that reflect women's values. (And here we see why it's not very popular. How many feminists do you know who are willing to abandon their faith to create and follow their own pantheon?)

And that got me to thinking: What's the one god that women really need? If I was going to create a pantheon for women, who would be in it? What would they look like? Do we need a healer? A fertility deity? A warrior? A beauty queen? A peace-maker? A wisdom deity? Do they have to all be women?

In Samuel Butler's translation of the Aeneid (why didn't my department head choose Fitzgerald? Maybe s/he was trying to be new and different?), Cupid, the god of love, takes on a boy's appearance so that when he greets Queen Dido and she hugs him, he can poison her to become infatuated with Aeneas. Because it's prepubescent boys that inspire love and infatuation? I don't think so.

Although, I'm not sure I'd have a love deity. Love is a property that should belong to every deity. I would have a fertility deity, but I think she'd also be the anti-fertility deity. She'd be the one you prayed to when it was month 5 of "we're trying to get pregnant" and day two of, "am I late, or did I count wrong?" and day 12 of, "okay, I planted, I watered... Now what?" and whenever you think of people facing drought or famine. Maybe she'd also be the one in charge of New Ideas and Healthy Changes. She'd be the one writers and artists and inventors prayed to.

Maybe she'd look a little like this

 What deity do you think women need?

NaNoWriMo Update - Wrote-In; Hung-Out; Got Stuck

I had a super-productive day.

I woke up late, but got me and the kids to the Howard County Library for the Saturday Write-In. I thought it'd be a lot more social, but it was pretty much "silent writing time." Which was awesome. For me. Next time, the kids can stay home. Maybe the one at BAM is more lively.

Between the library-time and the kids coming home and immediately leaving to make use of the sunshine, I got a ton of writing done. I wrote up to a senator's speech in the library, and chickened out for a bit. Then wrote the senator's speech. Then got myself stuck. Where to go from here? Focus on building a little romance? Or get the plot moving? It seems slow. I see a huge novel that gets cut down to a short story in my future. :(

I also finished my book, A Game of Thrones. Time to start book 2.

I just got done with my first-ever Google Hangout. It seemed like a pretty awesome GUI and when a bug was discovered, the support staff were great about sticking around to see it fixed. We had a lot of fun and I was able to get a good bit of writing done during the "sprints." Will definitely do that again!