Posts Tagged ‘internship’

Resistance, light shows, and other super powers.

{ January 16, 2009 @ 11:09 am } · { personal reflection, political, social justice, spirituality }
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I hate talking on the telephone.  Maybe this makes me sound anachronistic, or anti-social, or unlikeable.  I hate it.   My excuse has always been that I spent six years answering crisis calls at a rape crisis hotline and at a domestic violence shelter, where every call was guaranteed to be emotionally difficult or downright scary.  I don’t know if this is the case, but it’s a pretty decent excuse.  But, more than phone calls, I hate asking people for things.  Small things, big things, abstract things, concrete things.  Favors, things deserved and things needed.  Asking for help, for information.  It’s hard.  Part of it is likely pride.  But, thinking about some of the models I had growing up, it struck me lately that a portion of that resistance stems from not knowing what tone to strike.  Simple human interactions just seem so challenging sometimes, and the moment of request, of being vulnerable to “no,” heightens the feeling of being rather at sea in this world of people, most of whom seem to be able to interact with others with very little effort. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched people my whole life, studied my classmates, colleagues, people on the street and on television, my teachers and friends.  Somewhere in my childhood, I learned the skill of reading a room.  Who is uncomfortable?  Who is the leader here?   Who’s the bully?   A good friend?  In pain?  Enjoying herself?  Most people do this, I imagine, but my sense of it comes viscerally, and usually in color, bodies and personalities subtly webbed together in my mind, a moving light show of human relationships.  The problem here is that along the way, I didn’t learn how to situate myself in the web.  I can’t read the ways I connect to others, which is where the watching comes in.  Meeting someone who does “human” well, I find myself dissecting how it is that s/he manages it, especially they wear it easily and with grace. 

You’re wondering about now… okay.  What do talking on the telephone, asking for things, and feeling connected have at all to do with one another?  Well, it seems that community organizing and the role I’ve been called to in the church require all of these skills.  I could just laugh, if it weren’t so frustrating.  During my internship this year, I’ve been commissioned with the task of building a lead team around the issue of healthcare in the West Ohio Conference parish.  I think I’ve frustrated the very soul out of my supervisor asking detailed questions about how, in fact, one goes about doing this.  She is one of those amazing people who seems to be effortless in her ability to build relationships with people, at the drop of a hat.  I’ve hemmed, and hawed, and reorganized my notes, rewritten my agenda, emailed, emailed again… but there has been a stony resistance, a nearly literal barrier between myself and making those calls.  Because… I do hate talking on the phone.  Crisis calls are easy – someone else is calling me for help, knowing that my expertise is available and focused, knowing that I am there for the sole purpose of saying “yes” to whatever they ask.  There’s little vulnerability there.  But, oh… these lead team calls.  Even to folks who’ve expressed an interest in the issue, I have to sell a product.  I have to sell myself, as a coordinator.  I have to sell the conference.  It makes me want to bite something.

So.  A couple of weeks ago, having spent some time sitting in the dark in my office, parsing out exactly why I was hating this process so much, despite the fact that I very much want it to be successful and believe in it… and, annoyed with the fact that I had let something get the better of me… I made the darn calls.  In my heart of hearts, I simply knew I would sound ridiculous, unprofessional, under-educated, young, and generally flaky.  Each person would tell me “no.”  I would fail, and paradoxically, I would be proven right – failure and success in one tight little package.  But I swallowed hard and dialed.

And had numerous lovely conversations with bright and accepting people about the state of healthcare in Ohio, its relationship to spiritual formation and simple living, and the possibilities for real change through a coalition of followers of Jesus who firmly believe that we can’t do the work of God to the best of our ability unless the bodies God gave us are cared for. 

Holy hell.  I hate to be wrong.  But sometimes, a psychological smack in the face is a good thing.  One woman, she even told me at the end of the phone call that she hadn’t been very excited about this project until she spoke with me.  Yeah.  I really giggled at that, when I hung up.  But then my little internal light show blinked like a cloud of fire-flies, and one little baby light flickered into view.  It was me.  The realization that not seeing how you fit into the greater picture is not the same thing as not being in the picture at all.   Just as our feelings that God is absent sometimes is not the same as God actually being gone… Our eyes just aren’t that well-adjusted.  We can’t see everything, and we really can’t figure out for ourselves how it all fits together.  This is what I keep thinking about as I reflect on these phone calls.  Yes, I still hate the phone.  I still really dislike asking people for things.  I still read a room and struggle to know how I fit into a group, how other people see me.  Those things will likely never change.  But they don’t have to, really.  Because I get to learn from them.  Resistance is an opportunity to figure out why we are the way we are.  Fearfully and wonderfully made, and all the junk, too.  Discomfort and anxiety, uncertainty and blindness, these are human traits, not God’s.  Not liking to talk on the phone, not connecting immediately with other people, being afraid to ask for things… just because these skills are important to the work I’ve apparently been called to do, and I don’t really have them, doesn’t negate that call.   Because I don’t have all of the information, and I’m often wrong.

I’m going to chuckle about that woman’s comment for a while yet.  All the things I think I know.  And the ways in which I have no idea what I’m talking about.  God’s probably laughing, too.

The really big words.

{ January 10, 2009 @ 10:23 pm } · { personal reflection, social justice, spirituality }
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Sin. Evil. Justice. Redemption. Salvation. I’ve got to admit, even after a significant amount of seminary, I’m not entirely sure what it is we’re talking about when we use these words.  Sure, any one of us could take a vigorous stab at them, talk around them, maybe even rattle off a definition or two, thanks to lectures and chapters tucked away in the dusty recesses of our minds. Some of us will need to do much better even than that when faced with our ordination boards.   Actually, before I came to school, I probably had an easier time of it, defining what these concepts mean.  But I look at them now, and instead of feeling confident in my knowledge, it’s like a mist has floated across my vision and I can’t tell what I’m looking at.  

I’ve been asked by my internship supervisor to reflect on and attempt to answer for our next meeting, “What are the connections between evil, suffering, social justice, redemption, and salvation for you?  How do these understandings shape you as a minister?  How does this inform your interaction with other people?”  I’ll be honest, I put “think about deep stuff” on my to-do list, “due next week,” and left it there.  And now it’s hovering over me, edging in on my thinking and my reading and my time, waiting for me to notice it tugging on my pant leg, asking for attention.   I know there are connections.  I even know that they’re important, central, essential, to how I see the world and live within it.  These aren’t questions you just ask as an academic or professional exercise – we ask them all the time, with every important life decision we make, every time we watch the news or see a film or hear about the death or illness of someone who has touched our lives.  

I suppose the only way I can begin to think and feel around this problem is to ask myself, “What makes me question that God exists? And what gives me some certainty that, in fact, God does exist and is, further yet, good, despite those questions?”  I have to confess, a lesson I’ve learned quite well recently is that evil, or badness that hurts other people and the world and is opposed to who we know God to be, is rather harder to point out than I’d thought before.  I’ve learned quite well that sometimes good people do pretty awful and hurtful things, while “bad” people pretty regularly do kind and generous ones.  I hesitate to call any person “evil.”  Sinful, now that’s a different story altogether.  It seems like pretty much every one of us walks away from what we know is right, often intentionally, with some regularity.  Willfulness, even.  Panache.  Intention.  There are times, specific choices I’ve made, when in my mind I’ve walked in a particular direction, making a very specific choice, and imagined myself sticking my tongue out at God.  “Nanana-nanana.  You can’t stop me, just watch this.”  But I suppose that’s part of the answer to the question, isn’t it?  The fact that I can intentionally choose, in a moment of pique or misguided independence to give my Creator, the maker of the universe, the spiritual finger… and yet still exist, be allowed to learn from it, is grace indeed.  Justice is the correction of it, the hard realization of how stupid or cruel or inhuman I looked while doing it.  The pain of realizing how far off I was.  The shame of it.

I’ve worked in the area of relationship violence for a while, beginning with my first year in college.  At first, I got involved with rape crisis because I was lonely, away from home for school, and thought that the girls in National Organization for Women, a club associated with the rape crisis facilitators’ group, were cool and might make good friends.  I was a pretty vanilla kid from nowhere Ohio, and they were (it appeared to me) cosmopolitan, hip, interesting women whose innate coolness might with some luck rub off on me.  My selfish motives led me into a career where I actually found value, deep friendships, meaning, and excitement, as well as a developing understanding that there are many ways human beings like to hurt one another, as well as diverse and incredible ways they find to survive and discover beauty in the ugliness of living.  It led me back to church, and it dragged me to my utter surprise into recognizing a call to ministry.  Now, that’s gotta be redemption.  Out of my selfishness and deep loneliness, my lack of self-identity and confidence, God made a way for me to live with meaning.  

Further yet, out of the times when I’ve strayed away from the way, making terribly destructive personal choices or making apparently good decisions out of intensely selfish motivations or striving to enforce my own fickle will on mapping the direction of that path, God’s still somehow been able to bring me back.  Not always to the same place I would have been before, but somewhere for my good.  Like Tim Gunn says, God “makes it work.”  This gives me hope for the people in my life who make me want, even need, to believe in hell, in a place where the baddies suffer.  If God’s looking out for this vanilla girl with no apparent magically special characteristics or goals, watching what I’m doing and paying enough attention that I’m getting guided and helped along my stumbling way, then I absolutely have to believe that the same God’s got an eye on the ones who are doing serious damage to themselves and others even beyond what I’ve been capable of so far.  Gotta believe it.  Which means they’re getting second and third chances, too.  I hope it’s true.  I think it must be.  It seems as though our motivations don’t really matter much to God… just that we’re human and somehow mysteriously special.  And that, friends, is salvation.