thirty threadbare mercies

The outward expression of an inward grace.

Love is a Labyrinth April 28, 2011

Filed under: Marriage,Personal — rheabette @ 10:24 am

I believe that marriage is a series of opportunities to give grace to each other, over and over.  The longer our marriage endures, the more I believe in it, despite my weariness with the circular quality of our issues.  When the cycle comes around again to the more difficult bits, like landing on the “molasses swamp” in Candy Land, I try not to despair that we will be stuck there forever, and hope that we will pick the yellow card soon enough that allows us to get to the Candy Castle (can you tell I do a lot of play therapy with 5-year-olds?).

All commitment is circular — you create a closed loop with your promise to it, and then the hope is that though you don’t progress in a straight line, by going around the bend again and again you deepen.  Recently my husband and I had some small disagreement and I was able to respond with kindness.  “You are so patient with me”, he said, and I replied, “Well, every time I possibly can I try to give grace to you, because I know that in the next moment I will need it in return.”  And sure enough, I did something ridiculous about an hour later and needed forgiveness myself.

It is nice when some stranger is gracious with you when you bump into them, or the rare time when a receptionist doesn’t shame you for being late to an appointment.  But isn’t it so much more meaningful when someone who knows you to the core finds grace for you for the same stupid shit you’ve been doing for a decade?  This is why I believe in marriage, and in long relationships in general — the opportunities for redemption, both big and small, are myriad.  I can’t always take them — sometimes I’m just too tired, too hurt, too caught up in myself to find the mercy necessary for a loving interaction.  But I get there, eventually.  And being betrothed to him gives me that time — we’re not going anywhere, so by the time I come around he’ll be there, and we’ll meet somehow, in ways that continue to surprise me.

 

Practicing Resurrection through Fire and Water: Olive’s Baptism April 26, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Episcopal musings,Parenting — rheabette @ 10:21 am

The only time of year my father would go to church would be on Easter.  He said he could relate to coming back from the dead.  We’d go to the Catholic church because he much preferred the extra pomp and circumstance than the laid back spirituality of the Protestant church my mom and sister and I usually went to.  Perhaps it is from him that I got my love of tradition and ritual, and it is in honor of him that we had our baby baptized on his favorite holy day.

Olive’s baptism was exactly the kind of ritual my father would have loved — ancient, mysterious, filled with beauty, witnessed by loving people and finished with a toast.  I had never been to an Easter Vigil service before, and found all of the symbolism deeply moving.  First we went outside to light the New Fire, and my inner Aries leapt with delight.  Olive was in her Baptismal gown & bonnet, which were the same ones that I wore when I was a baby, and my sister before me.  There was even a tiny spit-up stain on the shoulder that one of us had left behind, proof that she and I were once tiny babes like Olive.  Anyway the gown is light and short-sleeved and she had already kicked her shoes off so I was a little worried for her with her bare feet in the typical San Francisco bluster.

Of course she was fine, actively watching the proceedings — from the Eternal Fire they lit the Paschal candle, and then everyone was handed a little candle to process in with.  The acolyte banged on the wooden church doors with a heavy staff in the shape of a cross, so hard that he left a mark, reminding me of a wizard.  Then the doors were flung open and we processed into the darkened church, our candles the only light to guide us.

When we got to the Baptism part of the service, Joel and I presented Olive, and said vows on her behalf.  I loved being asked “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”  I don’t know if Satan exists, but just in case, yes, I renounce him!  I felt like I was in a 1960/70′s occult movie (Rosemary’s Baby/The Exorcist/The Omen), minus the projectile vomit and possessed children.  I also appreciated the vows in the affirmative, to which we answered “I do.”  It reminded me so much of my wedding, only now I was holding our child rather than having my hands crushed by my husband’s nervous clasp.  My favorite one was, “Do you put your whole trust in (God’s) grace and love?”  My “I do” was a promise in faith.  I don’t always do this — I worry, I stress, but I let my “I do” be like a prayer — yes, I want to put my trust in grace, in love, and in doing so be a better parent to my child.  Then we asked the congregation to help us guide her spiritually, and they said vows as well.  We did this at our wedding too, and I believe inviting our community to actively help us has held us up over the years.  Then we said an amazingly sweet prayer for Olive’s life, call and response style.  I believe I will pray it over her again and again.  Paraphrasing here, we asked to deliver her, open her heart, fill her with spirit, keep her in faith, learn to love others, be sent into the world, and be brought into the fullness of God’s peace and glory.  I could picture Olive’s life stretching out before her like a golden field, and felt a sense of the eternal all around me.

Then the water was blessed, and we thanked God for water.  I loved how elemental this all was!  The water was sanctified, using the Paschal candle, and then Olive was passed to the priest for the actual rite.

She disliked the water on her head but she loved the anointing, especially since we had the bonnet back on her to keep her warm.  She stared at the priest, very alert and focused, as he made a sign of the cross with the oil on her forehead, sealing her in Love.    Then she turned a blew a raspberry at the acolyte.

Back in our pew, singing an Easter hymn at the top of our lungs, I couldn’t believe we’d gotten to this place.  A year and a half ago, I knew I was going to have a baby, but didn’t know I’d be getting her baptized, and wouldn’t have dreamed that it could have meant this much to me.  I certainly never saw this community coming, with their wily ways of loving and supporting us.  I felt our ancestors all around us, and said a silent prayer to them, thanking them for watching over us and being present with us in this space.

I felt an overwhelming urge to drink up the rest of the water in the baptismal fount.   One Sunday we were receiving communion in a circle around the altar as we do for the combined service, and some of the bread fell to the floor.  The retired priest who was standing next to me got down on his knees and ate every last crumb.  I was slightly shocked but also deeply gratified by this act of devotion.  I felt something similar — the desire to fully enter into this sacrament, to not let a single drop of it go to waste.  Plus, I was thirsty.  But of course I did not do this — this was Olive’s sacrament, and I was lucky enough just to be present for it.  The priest went on that night to give an incredible sermon, in which he mentioned that in baptism we die with Christ and are raised with him as well.  Since Olive had that scare with her health after her birth, I have been unduly terrified that she will die.  I took solace in this symbolic death — maybe if I could take that in, I could be less afraid of her actual physical demise.  She has already died with Christ, and been resurrected!  She is in his hands.  What I fear most has happened, and she has been raised up.

 

Maundy thoughts on the NIC-U April 24, 2011

Filed under: Childbirth,Christianity,Episcopal musings,Parenting,Pregnancy — rheabette @ 8:52 pm

4/22/10  Tonight was the Maundy Thursday service at Holy Innocents, and there is a very sweet segment in which everyone shares about their year.  This kind of group sharing can be a therapist’s nightmare but tonight it was like we were all little glowing souls getting warmer and brighter with each word people said.  When it was my turn to speak, I told them of course how much I loved them, but that they became family when they showed up in the NIC-U after I had Olive.

If you have never had to go to the NIC-U, count your lucky stars, and pray you never do.  Of course there is something magical about new life and I could sit here and find the beauty in it but really it’s just pretty awful.  SICK BABIES.  Desperate parents with ghostly faces, lots of scary machinery, and lots and lots of crying.  There was one little guy, Baby Perez, who was hitting a new decibel of sound that literally drove a person crazy when exposed to it.

When I needed breaks from such auditory madness, I sat in the little waiting room with the other new moms, perfect strangers who commented on the size of my nipples and what that would mean for feeding my baby.  We pumped milk for our babies and chatted about trivialities, never asking each other the unspeakable question on the edge of our lips, “Is your baby going to be okay?  Is mine?”  I found out later that we were in the part of the NIC-U for babies who were expected to be fine.  I was relieved to hear this, but also horrified that there are actually sadder and more terrifying sections of the NIC-U.

We ended up in the NIC-U after a long but beautiful birth at Sage Femme Birthing Center — when Olive came out at last she was breathing very quickly, and it turned out she had inhaled meconium.  I will publish my whole birth story sometime soon on this blog, you can know all the gory and fascinating (to anyone interested in birth) details.  She was rushed off to the hospital, and since I hemmoraged and lost a lot of blood after the birth, I had to stay behind and regain my strength until I could go be with her.  When I finally got there our priest was there, and I learned from him that another priest, a lovely woman named Genie who had become a sort of grandmother figure to us in the 10 months we’d been going to Holy Innocents, had sat with Olive in the interim.  The cool thing about clergy is that they are like FBI — they can get in anywhere.  So while Joel was passed out in the waiting room and I was busy eating placenta and resting up to get there, this priest was sitting with Olive, praying over her and keeping watch.  To know that she wasn’t alone in this short time, that someone who knew her in utero and loved her already was by her bedside… this is immeasurably meaningful to me.  And then in the next several days, priests and deacons from HI dropped in on us frequently, bringing us baby blankets they’d made, meals, and even doing communion with us.  They told us that when they announced Olive’s birth that Sunday in church, a great roar went up in the congregation, and that they were all praying for us to get out of the hospital soon.  I could feel their thoughts and prayers with me like little wings, sheltering me from despair.

Joan Chittester writes, “The purpose of Benedictine spirituality is to gather equally committed adults for a journey through earthen darkness to the dazzling light that already flames in each of us, but in a hidden place left to each of us to find.”  When members of Holy Innocents showed up for our new family in the NIC-U, they showed me they were willing to walk in the darkness with me.  They weren’t afraid to get too close, to see me messy, terrified, and fiercely protective of my newborn.  They were that dazzling light to me, helping me find it in myself, which I would need in those early days of parenting more than I ever could have dreamed.

newborn Olive

 

Yoga Fett April 19, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Loss,Parenting,Pregnancy,Yoga — rheabette @ 10:36 pm

I’m devouring Claire Dederer’s evocative memoir, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, and it has me thinking of all the ways yoga has been there for me in the stages of my life.  To rail against in adolescence, to try to cheat death in early adulthood, all through my pregnancy to connect with my baby, and now, to re-member this postpartum jumble of a body.

I was first introduced to yoga in a stuffy auditorium in southern Connecticut, by my beleaguered gym teacher, Mrs. Ball.  Looking back, I am appalled at how I reacted to this introduction, and feel sympathy for Mrs. Ball to the point of pity.  Here she was, in one of her ubiquitous and unfortunate multi-colored track suits, in the midst of yet another pregnancy, trying to expand the minds of these New Englander children, and perhaps have a week of not having to run after us as we escaped her clutches by hiding underneath the bleachers.  But I, newly “saved” and “on fire for Jesus”, was not having that shit.  In my dualistic 15-year-old mind, “yoga” meant “devil worship”.  Doing Tree pose would clearly send me straight to Hell.  If I truly believed Jesus saved, why was I so untrustworthy of Him that I believed that in doing a forward lunge I was endangering my very soul?  I was new to Christianity, and I was using it to find order and structure in what was an increasingly chaotic inner world.  I felt that if there were Rules, Rights and Wrongs, then perhaps I could avert feeling like such a fuck-up all the time.  And if I had to follow the Rules, which was so much less fun than my old life of getting drunk on the tennis courts before the Halloween dance, then everyone else should have to, too.  Understanding this mind-set is what helps me actually have some empathy for Tea Partiers today.  Anyway, my best friend and I caused a big stink and we moved on from yoga to Ballroom dancing, which I had no beef with, probably because I was better at it.  I look back on my behavior with embarrassment, but also with some kindness for that old self, because in some ways I was on to something.  Yoga is a spiritual practice, and Mrs. Ball pretending that it was just a series of movements to gain strength and flexibility smacked of inauthenticity to me.  And if there’s one thing any teenager can sniff out and pounce on in an adult, it’s any whiff of pretension.

I didn’t try yoga again until college, when I willfully signed up for a Yoga & Pilates course, looking for a way to combine spirituality and movement and maybe lose my Freshman Fifteen.  My teacher here was a huge upgrade – a sassy, energetic woman with bright eyes who laughed a lot and was incredibly encouraging.  Her name was Chris, and she was so charismatic that I ended up joining her ultra-liberal open and affirming Baptist church, and following in her footsteps to become a Pilates Instructor.  So, the start of this was innocent enough.  But shortly after I joined the class, my dad got sick with cancer.  It was an aggressive strain, and I moved home that summer to help him through what would be the last months of his life.  In this time, I got fanatical about my health.  I started working out several hours a day, following a strict vegan diet that included ridiculous amounts of cardboard-tasting Kashi food.  Not satisfied with Hatha Yoga’s slow beauty, I started doing vigorous Ashtanga yoga in my living room, dripping with sweat, willing myself never to be sick.  Again, looking back, I try not to judge myself.  I see what I was doing, and have some kindness for the desire to will myself through my grief with the use of endless chatarangas.  I’m glad yoga was there to help me through that terrible time in my life.  But I still wasn’t really doing yoga.  I was using it to make my body look as emaciated as I felt within, and to store up “health points” that I hoped would keep me from one day contracting a disease as terrible as the one that had just claimed my beloved father.

When I moved to San Francisco, I got a job teaching Pilates at Satori Yoga Studio, a truly wonderful place, an oasis in downtown SF.  As an instructor, I got to take free classes at the studio.  Four years in to doing yoga, this is probably the first time I started actually practicing it.  I no longer strove to lose weight, claim forever health, or attain perfection.  I just showed up on my mat and was present with what met me there.  Most of the time, that meant confronting really uncomfortable emotions.  Why on earth, when I did Crescent Lunge, was I confronted with so much anger?  I inwardly cursed my teachers through the whole first half of the class, furious with them for thinking I could do another vinyasa.  But by the time the class was ending, I was usually in tears, releasing all that rage in a healthy way.  And I was no longer addicted to it!  I did yoga about once a week.  I exercised less and ate more, filling out my curves and finding love for them.  They were not an assurance that I would die of cancer, that was simply how a woman’s body looked.

Doing prenatal yoga was incredibly sanity-inducing.  My classes with Jane Austin (with a name like that she’s sure to be trustworthy) at Yoga Tree were intuitive, challenging, and most of all, validating.  I could walk in and say in the check-in “I just feel like I’m going off the rails a little bit” and Jane would turn to the class and say, “Who else here feels crabby and out of control?”  Forty water-retaining hands would reach for the sky.  “In pregnancy everything is BIGGER.  Your personality, whatever it was before, is larger than ever.  You need more SPACE for everything.”  And then we would do Juicy Hips for an hour or so.  Her classes also really prepared me for the wonder and agony that is natural childbirth.  Breathing through the pain, doing things you never dreamed you could (or would) with your body — yoga helped me practice that along the way.

After I pushed out my little bundle of joy (which took far longer than you want to know, especially if you have not had a baby yet), my body was unrecognizable to me.  Yoga was the first form of exercise I returned to, to find myself in this body again.  I went back to Jane for the Mommy & Me classes, but I was overwhelmed by all the babies in the room!  My baby has an incredibly sweet disposition, and all the cranktastic babes in there were seriously stressing both of us out.  It was cool to see all the other moms, though.  Two women who looked just as lumpy as I did and had babies who were several months older than I asked Jane quietly “When will I start to lose weight?”  There was hope and a little desperation in their voices.  “Oh, you’ll hold on to some extra fat as long as you’re lactating.  At about a year you’ll be thin again.”  We looked at each other, probably wondering what would happen at a year if we weren’t exactly thin before we had a baby.

Anyway, Mommy & Me was not for me, and I went back to dance class soon after, which is where I got my main exercise.  But I was plagued by an anxiety the level of which I had never known.  I have never been a very fearful person, but having a child is fricken terrifying.  Going back to work, I found myself walking down the street with my hands on my belly, sorely missing my phantom limb and imagining terrible fates for her while we were apart.  I knew I needed yoga, but didn’t know how to fit it back into my schedule.  Thankfully my bestie Amanda is a yoga practitioner with the awesome Healing Yoga Foundation, and she came over and helped me devise a personalized vinyasa I could do in the 10-15 minutes I have when I get home from work before Joel comes home with Olive.  It quiets my mind, strengthens my back, and prepares me to spend my evening parenting.  However, it is not quite enough.  I am itching to get back into a regular yoga class, to sit in that space with others as we breathe and move together.  I don’t know when it will be possible, but I hope it is soon.

Yoga is a form of prayer-in-motion that I can see myself doing for the rest of my life.  As I age, my yoga will continue to shift and change.  After 10 years of doing yoga, I still feel 100% like a beginner.  It is not just a cliché — I don’t fully understand yoga but I feel it waiting for me, like an ocean that is welcoming me to plunge its depths, the waves both inviting and bone-tingling.

 

I love a good parade. April 17, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Episcopal musings,Parenting,San Francisco — rheabette @ 9:34 pm

Olive and I took the bus to Palm Sunday service, she strapped to me by a long piece of fabric called a Moby Wrap.  That guy with the long gray hair and dark glasses who plays reggaeton on a boombox that he perches on his lap sat across from us.  You know that guy?  If you live in a city you know that guy.  If you ride the 14 he’s probably your friend Ramon.

We got there just in time for the processional, in which we walked around the block waving our palms and singing.  It reminded me of last year’s processional, which was many blocks long, and consisted of us singing “This Is The Day” over and over again.  This year’s, one block and with a lovely hymn, was much preferable.  And Olive was there, waving her little palm.

When it came time for the long Passion story to be read, the children were dismissed for Children’s Sermon.  Since my husband had to work today and wasn’t with me, I decided to take the baby down with them rather than sit through a long reading with an active infant.  We sat in a circle and said our names.  When I introduced Olive, many of the kids chuckled at her presence in their midst.  One particularly thoughtful and adorable red-headed boy grinned and said, “Well, Olive looks just like a little baby.”  “Yup, she’s a little baby”, I replied.  Another girl piped up, “She’s kinda cute.”  Understatement of the century.  This was Olive’s entry into the Childrens’ Program at Holy Innocents.

The Children’s Sermon consisted of gathering vegetables to put in baskets that would be brought up to the altar for the offering, and doing a little work in the garden.  There were no felt figures on a board, no memorization of Bible verses, no animal crackers and apple juice.  Olive played with the other children, grabbing their palms or taking the springs of lemon balm they offered her.  I took her over to the huge rosemary bush and she clutched it with both hands, opening and shutting her fat little fingers over the branches.

Such was the beginning of Holy Week, a wildly important one for our family, as Olive will be baptized at the Saturday Easter Vigil.  I have not begun to reflect on the enormity of this event.  I’m so excited for her to be embraced formally by this community that has cheered her on from her time in utero, and for the beginning of her spiritual life to be ritualized.  Right now she is bound to me so fully, and yet her relationship with the spiritual world is her own.  This ceremony will be acknowledging that — that Olive has her own spiritual life, and, at seven months, we’ll be taking a moment to invite the mystery of God within her.

 

Awesome birthday video gift April 16, 2011

Filed under: Dance,Personal — rheabette @ 9:54 pm

My super-talented friend Erin made me a really fun video for my birthday, with pics from my past decade and all her design-chops-wonderfulness extras.  I had to share it because it is sheer joy & nostalgia.  Thirty is already turning out to be pretty great.  The longer you live, the more experiences you have to reflect on.

 

Parenting is prayer

Filed under: Christianity,Parenting,Prayer — rheabette @ 8:38 am
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“… a man went to the sage, RamaKrishna, saying ‘O Master, I don’t know how to love God.’ … and the sage asked him if there was anything he loved.  He said, ‘I love my little son.’  And RamaKrishna said, ‘There is your love and service to God.  In your love and service to that child.” — from Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.

   There are many days when I don’t know how to pray.  All that makes sense to me is loving my daughter.  So I pray by  changing her diaper, holding her while she sleeps, comforting her when she’s fussy, endlessly breastfeeding her, playing with her, reading to her, cleaning up after her.  I let my parenting duties be a constant litany of thanksgiving to God, for this gift and this great responsibility.  Mostly I just feel grateful for every moment I have with her.  Of course there are the things that make me very grumpy — having to get up insanely early, having to pump (oh the dreaded breastpump), the layers of filth that now consume our apartment floors as we never have time/energy to clean them.  But in general I really enjoy being with her, and I let our time together be a conversation with God.  It is just a presence that washes over me as she sleeps on my chest, or as I dance with her, even when I have to suck the snot out of her nose and she cries.  There are no words, just simple actions and being in the present moment — there’s nothing like a baby to bring you into the now!

This is the best form of prayer I know.

 

Heal yourself through your 20′s: the super-painful Rhea St. Julien way! April 14, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Dance,Episcopal musings,Loss,Marriage,Parenting,Personal,Psychotherapy,San Francisco,Tarot,Yoga — rheabette @ 9:26 pm

So, here’s how I got less crazy… and you can too, in these 18 rather difficult steps!

1.  Start when you’re 19.  Realize you have a terrible tendency to choose date-rapey dudes as boyfriends.  For the 1st time ever, go against the grain and start a relationship with a dear friend, a truly wonderful person who will end up being your husband.

2. Let this man walk you to the counseling office at your college, as he is sure you are crazy and you’re starting to think he might be right.  Your roommate’s dad just gave you a book on co-dependency — it’s a bad sign when a man who has met you thrice is giving you self-help books.

3. Grapple with the fact that you have an inherited chemical imbalance that has literally been the death of several of your forebears.  Enter therapy and the wild world of psychopharmacology.

4. Caution — do not try this at home: Lose a parent at 21 to a horrible disease.  Truly grieve this incredible person, allowing his loss to change you on every level.  Spend an entire winter staring at the neon sign across the street from your apartment, one sad paper snowflake obstructing this essential view.  Grow closer to the loved ones you still have.

5. Hang out with people a lot crazier than you for a living.  Love them like they’re family.  Realize that relationships are truly the only things that ever change people.  Embrace your talent for using art and symbols to help folks heal.

6. Marry your best friend.  Enter into this commitment with determination, total naiveté, and more love than you are humanly capable of.  Have a kick-ass wedding/Haitian dance party that people talk about for years.

7. Move far away from everything you know, to a place where you have few friends and understand little about the culture, especially everyone’s tendency to dress in costume on a normal Tuesday afternoon.  Allow this place to soften you, relax you, and open you up to the point where you own several wigs and show up to work dressed like Carol Brady just for shits and giggs.

8. Re-member your body through movement every way possible.  Dance until your feet bleed, practice yoga and om your way through your fear,  teach Pilates at lunchtime, and walk those San Francisco hills because you’ll never, ever be able to afford a car again.

9. Follow your calling as a healer.  Complete your Masters in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy from a hippie school that gratefully has a sense of humor about itself (most of the time).  Become a psychotherapist, working with people of all walks of life, guiding them through the underworld and getting stuck there sometimes.

10. Get consistent bodywork, doing a swap for Pilates to afford it.  Learn that acupressure actually does work.  Rebuild your immune system after a seriously scary bout of meningitis.

11.  Enter into a flawed but beautiful intentional community.  Give everything to it, then watch it all fall completely apart.  Recommit yourself to honesty at all costs.

12. Therapy, therapy, more therapy.  Couples, individual, retreats, Expressive Arts, Jungian, Somatic — try everything under the sun that doesn’t involve hard drugs.  Feel the steel door that guards your heart being pried ajar with a crow bar, then unceremoniously flung open.

13.  Teach yourself to read Tarot and use it to hear the Holy Spirit.  Get scary accurate in your readings.  Develop an arts-based, feminine spirituality that will never leave you, even when you return to organized religion.

14. Have transformative  friendships, especially with a gal named Amanda, who teaches you to be sensitive and how to have reciprocal relationships in which you get your needs met.

15.  Fall in love with a church community, made up mostly of a pack of misfits who are totally unselfconscious.

16. Make the decision to become a parent.  Get knocked up.  Be fully present for the whole pregnancy with teas, prenatal yoga, childbirth classes, all that jazz.  Have a 4 day long labor, resulting in a beautiful but excruciating natural birth in a birth center.  Have a terrifying health scare in which you’re not sure your baby will survive.  Then take your baby home and watch her thrive, thanking God every second you have with her.

17. Enjoy motherhood to the hilt, which is weird, terrifying, and so much more like falling in love than you ever imagined.

18.  Seek mercy.  Choose love.  Find faith somewhere in the depths of your being and cling to it while your world shakes at its very foundation.  Practice redemption.

   When this process is through, you will look exactly like this.  You will not be particularly rich, thin, successful, or free of anxiety and pain.  But you will be fabulously well-read, and be able to salsa dance.  What more could a person want?

 

No longer young, not yet old.

Filed under: Marriage,Parenting,Personal — rheabette @ 7:36 am

So today I have completed 3 decades on this Earth, which is both highly significant and pretty inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things.  My father never dreamed he’d make it past 25 — he made it to 64, which was really more of a miracle than it sounds.  And yet simply not enough time.  I wish he were here today, to wish me a Happy Birthday Kiddo in that raspy voice of his, pulling me in for a hug with his tattooed arms and huge, battered hands.

Instead I have the sweetest baby in the world, who when she smiles reminds me of him.  That is what is incredible about having a child of your own flesh and blood — your loved ones who have died come back to you in their little faces.  Olive gave me the truly wonderful gift of sleeping through the night for the first time in over a month!  When she woke up and Joel brought her to me, she gave me a look of unparalleled joy at seeing my face — it’s truly amazing when she does that, it makes me feel like a zillion dollars.  Then Joel gave me the fabulous gift of an e-reader, which I have been wanting for a very long time and he has been telling me there’s no way we can afford it.  He got friends and family to chip in and now I don’t have to balance huge tomes on my lap while breastfeeding the baby!  It’s very exciting.  I believe the first book I buy will be Tina Fey’s Bossypants.

So, thirty.  This past decade has been all about creating good habits, finding balance and sanity.  Then I threw a wrench in the whole machine by having a child, and now I am searching for my footing again, seeking to make meaning in this post-baby life.

I have a close friend who constantly reminds me of how far I’ve come, how much work I’ve done to heal myself.  I see what he means — it’s been ten long years of slogging through the underworld, but sometimes I wonder if what he’s trying to tell me is that I was totally crazy and terrible to be around when he first met me, and he’s incredulous at how I can be bearable to be around now.  Which is pretty much true.  When Joel first fell in love with me, this friend was like “Dude, pass on her.  One way ticket to Crazytown.”  But I guess I won him over because he was in our wedding and is our baby’s Godfather and basically our biggest fan.  And thank Jeebus Joel didn’t listen to him and pursued me anyway — my transformative love relationship with him has been the #1 reason I am not growing snakes out of my head today.

My next blog post will be: “Heal Yourself Through Your Twenties The Rhea St. Julien Way: in 20 Difficult Steps!”  It’s sure to be a banger.  But for now, I’m going to go enjoy my birthday to the hilt, remembering where I came from (Big ups to my longest relationship — with my Mama!) and where I still have to go.

 

Sneaky sneaky sir April 13, 2011

Filed under: Christianity,Episcopal musings — rheabette @ 1:29 pm

Coming back to the Church was not, at first, a conscious decision.  It was basically a sneaky grace trick.  I was coming off of five years of churchlessness, and was following a spirituality based mostly in symbols and synchronicity.  My husband Joel had been going to a large Catholic church, and I went there with him one Sunday, where I was struck by one fellow in the clergy who threw back his head and sung the hymns to their fullest extent.  Joel told me that was his favorite priest, basically the whole reason he kept going to that church.  But Catholicism was not something I could return to — the exclusionary repressive ideals that still plague that institution were too much for me to be a part of, despite the beauty of the ritual and the passion of this particular priest.  A short while later that priest left that church, and my husband stopped going as well.  So we found ourselves on Christmas Eve of 2009, churchless and with a desire to go to a midnight service.

We knew about Holy Innocents because we had been to a wedding there, in that glorious yet all-too-brief period in California history in which folks were legally allowed to wed whomever they chose (Here’s hoping that we return to that legislative affirmation of love as soon as possible).  Therefore, I knew if they loved the gays enough to marry them to one another, they would probably not balk at me, a person who looks innocent enough on the outside but has the pesky habit of loving people the Church deems unlovable (or at least worthy of much judgment).  Well, we walked into the cozy, candlelit evening service to find that the priest from Joel’s old church was one of the acolytes!  We saw this as a sign, at least that we were in the right place that night.  We enjoyed the service, steeped in ritual and mystery, perfect for a introspective Christmas Eve.  We went home, worked on our Christmas song, and decided to go back to HI to try out a Sunday service.

When we went the following Sunday, we noticed in the bulletin that there was an upcoming series on Celtic Christianity on Wednesday nights.  I was intrigued, as I love me some Celts, and have often looked for avenues to merge their witchy ways with more contemporary spiritual practices.  One St. Patrick’s Day I did a whole community ritual that I made up myself, using Celtic, Christian and arts-based practices.  Anyway I decided to check it out.  It was being held after their potluck and I figured I’d get a meal out of it either way, even if it was not what I was looking for.

When we arrived at the potluck, we learned an interesting fact about Episcopals — when they get together for a meal, they drink!  Wine!  Lots of it!  This was a delicious realization.  Maybe I could enjoy these folks after all.  Everyone was very sweet and welcoming, interested in us but not jumping down our throats to be their new best friends and join their pet committee (okay one woman did ask us to help with the annual tag sale but she was so hilarious about it that we didn’t mind).  Also they were great cooks.  So, two points there.  We really enjoyed the session on Celtic spirituality, finding it delightfully rooted in a care of the Earth and centuries-old Christian practices.  So we kept going back. Every  Sunday and Wednesday, we’d surprise ourselves by actually wanting to be there.

It was like finding an old sweater in the dark depths of your closet that you used to wear all the time and decided to throw on.  It didn’t fit the same, but it was warm,  comforting, and you started to remember why you used to love it.

I asked the vicar one week if it was okay that I didn’t actually believe half of the things we said in a Sunday mass.  “When we get up and say the Nicene creed, I feel like a fraud.  I don’t know if I believe any of it!”  In her Southern drawl she admitted, “Oh, I don’t believe it half the time either.  This week I did.  Next week perhaps I won’t.”  It was so relieving to hear that I could be a part of the community, showing up wherever I was that week on my faith journey, and be involved as much as I chose.  I found myself in tears when she would remind us, every Sunday, that “this communion table is not the table of the Episcopal church.  It is God’s table, and all are welcome.”  This was not the exclusionary theology I had experienced in almost every other church I had been to.  But it was also not Christian Lite.  We were still proclaiming Jesus, but just saying that everyone, exactly as they were that moment, could be a part of this mercy, could receive this grace.  And I needed it, more than I even knew.

 

 
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