Gratitude Week Two: Karen

I’m going to start by giving a big shout out to my baby sister who while driving the two of us to the post office encountered a group of middle aged women standing obstructively in the middle of the street and shouted “This is the most Karen thing I have ever seen!”

The window was open.

And then I made eye contact with a woman I am trying to get a job from.

She was standing obnoxiously in the middle of our suburban street, but that Karen’s got power.

Big sarcastic thanks to the sis.

Middle aged women have been catching a lot of heat lately (maybe because they believe that cars are not a threat anymore) and I’m not saying I disagree with the complaints, but I am saying that there are a couple Karens who are keeping me together.

The insecurity I feel when a man who is about four seniority levels above me tells me what I am doing is wrong is profound. Even though I know the science, even though I have read and memorized the policy, I am reduced to an expendable puddle of incompetence under the unfair scrutiny of the boss.

And then I see Karen, behind the reception desk rolling her eyes and shaking her head. I see her after the boss has left breaking the poorly reasoned policy he just randomly announced.

Then I hear another Karen telling me how she innocently asked a clarifying question in the presence of his superior to get a policy overturned.

Still another warning me about his vigilant monitoring today.

And another muttering a sweet song which is subtly undermining but only if you notice her.

It is by the actions of the Karens, the unassuming middle aged women, who nurture the insecure new grad through rebellion and disobedience.

The ones who turned insecure into cheerfully obstinate.

I am grateful for the Karens.

An Open Letter to my Grandchildren

Hello my sweet babies!

I am writing this letter at the age of twenty-three because every freaking person I come into contact with is telling me, “You’ll tell your grandchildren about this someday” as some sort of weak consolation for me derailed life and, kids, I’m not a procrastinator so here you go.

I’m living during a time called social distancing or Corona Virus or COVID-19 or the 2020 Quarantine or whatever the heck is written in your textbook.

I want to be sure that if you eventually ask me about this I don’t conflate my memory with the influence of how things turned out.

My number one emotion is frustration. So much frustration. You see, I was supposed to be getting my master’s degree in occupational therapy at the beginning of May and I can’t. And I can’t test to be a therapist. I have spent a year rotating through clinical sites and a month ago I could see my own patients but, now, I am barred from healing anyone during a time of widespread sickness because I can’t take a test. I am supremely frustrated by the bureaucratically imposed impotence.

I won’t see the group of people that I worked with for 5 years to get educated again. No ceremonies to commemorate the five years I spent hustling to learn as much as I could as fast as I could so I could help in the most hopeless, traumatic situations. My number two emotion is grief. I’m grieving the celebrations, the job I thought I’d have by now and the potential to get a job over the next year.

I got a job (mostly to get out of the house) making sure everyone coming into a medical facility is healthy and sometimes I help out with some of the sick elderly people whose spouses can’t see them because it is not safe for them to be together.

They have it worse than me.

I hope all that whining gave you enough for your report on “What it was like.” Oh, and be sure to mention that when I was so frustrated, I also had to stay at home with only my parents and SIBLINGS for WEEKS. I know, right?

I want to tell you the good things too. People are sacrificing so much for good of the vulnerable older people and I think that it amazing. We don’t always show the elderly how we value them. They are usually an afterthought but now, they are the reason so many of our lives are disrupted and most people are happy to do it and that’s pretty amazing.

I was initially really scared about all these changes. A lot of what I read in my psychology classes taught me all the bad things people do in times of struggle. My literature teachers read me the Lord of the Flies and told me that people were essentially immoral animals just behaving within the expectations of society.

They were wrong.

People have been amazing. I have gotten to know how resilient and beautiful my neighbors are, how creative and generous my community is and how willing my community is to provide thanks and well wishes to healthcare workers.

Kids, my job is just taking temperatures and disinfecting things and the amount of gratitude patients’ families show is astronomical. If I was allowed to hug people, I would hug a lot of people.

I think that long after the frustration is gone and I have marched through the stages of grief, I will live as a witness to the triumph of the human spirit. How we walked into an outbreak, put on face shields and masks and tried to make the dying comfortable, and when we failed, we walked to next room and tried even harder.

Despite the nasty smells of your breath in a mask and face shields making your face a moist greenhouse situation, ordinary people laced up their sneakers and took extra shifts. The pride I have in my neighbors and colleagues will undoubtedly last longer than my frustration and grief.

This is an emotionally charged and complicated time. Perhaps the reason that everyone wants me to be telling you about this is that I may not have it all distilled and unpacked even by the time I’m in my eighties.

Don’t worry, I’ll make you cookies before I give you my long winded retrospective, promise.

Love you,

Mémè

Becoming a Better Steward

God gave Adam dominion over all the creatures and He gave me a pandemic instead of a job.

That’s what I like to call “unfair.”

I have spent a lot of time complaining about this in the recent weeks. I have just finished my education, it is time for my ambition to be fulfilled. It was time for the pay off.

But it didn’t come.

But I don’t recognize what I have, I dream of bigger things. They are not dreams out of love of what I do and who I love, they are dreams born of malcontent and dissatisfaction.

I will always have dreams; I will always want something greater than what I have. I thrive on the desire to grow.

I recently learned that if you are intrapersonally intelligent (as defined by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences) then you are prone to dreaming, that happens to be my highest category.

Anyways, as an intraspect, I have noticed an increase in dreams that do not motivate me but paralyze me.

It is not just that I want to have a job and treat patients and get married and have a beautiful yard with a garden and cook meals with fresh vegetables, it is that I want it all now.

I demonize the present because it is not yielding the fruit that I tell it to.

Jesus cursed the fig tree because it wasn’t producing figs.

I am cursing a fig tree because it isn’t producing horses.

I continue to ask God to expand my dominion to include other, greater things when I am not clearing the inbox I have, maintaining the room that I occupy or giving the projects I have undertaken my full effort.

I am not sure why, but it is precisely when I am the most irresponsible, the most careless and flippant, that I request that my domain be expanded.

And so, my task is to identify and focus on the things in my domain, finish my tasks and do them well. Not because of a pathological need to control but out of a love for the life I have been entrusted with. I need to adopt an attitude of stewardship.

If my sugar addiction is any indication, then willing myself to be better at stewardship is not going to help.

I believe (because Gretchen Reuben’s and Brené Brown’s books have told me) that a practice of gratitude can transform both attitudes and behaviors and so, a weekly gratitude practice begins.

Gratitude Project Week One: Scrap Wood

This week, I am grateful for the scrap wood pile at my house that occupied my time this week. It allowed me to build a composter and a raised garden bed and stabilize our little greenhouse that was falling over.

I am grateful for the sun and the sawdust and the feeling of accomplishment even though I have absolutely no clue how to use power tools and was largely in fear for my life as I stripped so many screws. Stripping screws, I learned, is what happens when you approach a drill with the same level of gentleness as you approach a newborn.

I am grateful that the wood was a little bent and uneven so I could blame my poor workmanship on state of the 20 year old wood.

I am grateful for a week of creativity and learning the hard way and my dad who didn’t make fun of me for getting copious amounts of saw dust in my knock off purple crocs.

This week is a week to be grateful.

Living in an Amorphous Time Blob

I have never been as chronically late to meetings as I have been the last two weeks.

In fact, I’ve almost never been late to meetings until right now when it is the easiest to be on time. I am only ever in two places and the only action I ever need to complete is opening my laptop and clicking the link embedded in my calendar.

When I have the most time to clean my inbox, pray, keep my room clean and exercise, I don’t.

The strange thing is, I actually did those things before, when I have a full-time internship, graduate classes, a job and a volunteer position, I read more, exercised better and my room was cleaned weekly.

Now, it is all sweatpants and squalor.

It is fascinating to me how before my chief excuse was always, “I have barely any time.” and now that I have that time, I do less.

There’s probably a thousand reasons why I am like this but I think I can best understand my behavior not by measuring the quantity of time but by the absence of metaphorical time fences.

Social psychologists love telling the story about kids and a playground fence. When there are no boundaries to the schoolyard, the kids play very close to the building and stay on the blacktop, but give those rugrats a fence and they will disperse so much further. It’s paradoxical, give people restrictions and they will go further.

I hypothesize that it is the same with my time. When I have so many boundaries: early start times, work schedules and social calls, then I get more done because the twenty minutes between work and school means I can fold my laundry and have more time later. Now, if I don’t fold my laundry in the next twenty minutes, I will do it later, because I have nothing else going on and the procrastination wheel spins out of control and boom it’s 2:02 and I’m late.

Time, like everything human, needs boundaries.

The natural response, then is to create artificial boundaries, to make a schedule and stick to it. But there are absolutely no consequences if I push off my morning study appointment for another ten minutes… except for the fact that I end up living in the chaos of a disordered, amorphous time blob.

People with more discipline probably maybe don’t have this problem. Maybe I should be more disciplined but as my obligations trickle down with my impending graduation, the consequences are evaporating.

I do not know anyone who learned discipline in the absence of consequence.

So I am going a different route to be a better steward of my time and that is to not even bother with the clock, which, I don’t care about but to bother with the tasks. In order to get more done I need to focus on tasks, getting one project or element of a project done per day.

Why do I think this is going to work better than a schedule? Because the boundaries I am setting are more obvious than a clock.

“The sweater is knitted” is a more obvious an end goal than “2 pm craft time, do something creative for an hour.”

The task-oriented approach is its own reward system, it is less rigid, more natural and requires less shear grit and will-power than adherence to something as arbitrary as a clock.

Therefore the sweaters will be knitted and the chapters will be written with more intensity, ease and regularity than my previously chopped up, evenly spaced out schedule.

The Boring Writings of Saint Justin Martyr

I’m trying to be a better girlfriend.

So when J. asked me to read one of the office readings from the Liturgy of the Hours I did not roll my eyes and I actually read it. Like a champion.

Keeping score in a relationship is highly discouraged so I didn’t rack up what should have been at least 25 points.

In the reading, Justin Martyr informed me that Christians gathered on Sundays. He explains that they read the Gospels and a leader encourages them to virtue and then prayers and thanksgiving is given and the people say Amen and receive the Eucharist and offerings are made for the poor.

Boring.

This is all extremely normal. There is no novelty in this reading.

This is what I do on Sundays. It is about as interesting as reading about the sequence by which I wake up, get dressed, brush my teeth and then make eggs.

Except for the fact that it was written in the second century.

Christians were praying and worshiping in the same way that I am. That before the internet, the printing press and the English language itself, this rite was practiced by the people who knew the sound of Jesus’ voice, how tall He was and the texture of His hair.

It is all at once profound and exciting and completely ordinary.

It’s like falling in love.

Your life will never be the same. You will never be the same. You will cease to be amazed when your beloved punctuates his conversations with the most profound and simple words in the English language: I love you and your life will always be measured by before you fell in love and after.

We measure time with before and after Christ but our knees are not always inclined to bend at the profundity of His name.

As I read and contemplated the ancient Saint’s words I was struck by how the best things in life are the regular routine occurances and the rites of passage which knit humanity together.

I am overwhelmed by what a blessing it is that the the news reports only the bad stuff because new life, falling in love and Jesus becoming flesh in our Churches is routine.

It would make for terrible ratings to report on the most profound, the beautiful, because the greatest, most life changing blessings are given routinely and abundantly.

Because love is routine.

And that is the best thing about it.

Big Feelings in Little Bodies

“Hold Still! It’s like a bird’s nest! I can’t believe this!” Every morning of first grade my mom would take a dainty hair brush with a beautiful floral design and violently rip the hair from my scalp or, as she called it, get me ready for school.

There was a girl in my class who, I reasoned, did not undergo this particular brand of maternal torment, because, she came to school with messy hair. One time, the teacher had us sit next to each other and that girl had the nerve to kick me and then scream when I told her off. That’s what I call “not my fault.”

My teacher gave her a special pencil case that had a hair brush and pretty barrettes in it and the teacher’s aid would do her hair before our “morning meeting.”

I remember discussing all of this with my mom in a fit of rage following a particularly savage beauty treatment, “Allie’s mom doesn’t brush her hair!” My mom explained to me that not all moms brush their kids’ hair and that can make the kids feel sad. When I came home after the kicking, my mom told me to be nice to her because she had a lot more challenges than I did.

I was allowed to go to her birthday party but my mom didn’t drop me off. She stayed the whole time. I remember remarking to my mom that “Allie’s mom is nice and I’m surprised because I thought she didn’t love her.”

I don’t quite remember the rest of the conversation or how I tried to articulate the confusing dynamic that I was observing. I imagine my mom muttered that I was “very perceptive” which was a common refrain from my mom, usually followed by “But don’t talk about those things outside the house because that is family talk.”

A bit of unsolicited advice, educate your kids on the concept of “family talk.” It saved me from sharing my insightful perspective on the world; such as, the music teacher was mean and should probably get married so that she could turn nice and that fat people yell more.

I was always intrigued by human behavior.

The Allies of this world are my people now. The kids with the big problems and big feelings to match. The kids whose feelings are bigger than their bodies and those powerful neurotransmitters build up inside like shaken up soda and they kick the girl with the stained shirt and pigtails next to them.

Their little bodies can’t contain those big feelings.

Adults you see are much different, while first graders are on average 45 inches tall, we are on average 67 inches tall, which is of course, much taller, much less vulnerable. While kids have absolutely no control over their lives, (if their hair gets done, when they shower, where their family can afford to live, if a pandemic breaks out, if a family member dies, if they are diagnosed with a chronic illness, who their teacher is, if their friend is nice to them), adults, have far more control, we can control exactly if and when we shower and do our hair.

Some of the best advice I ever got was in a marriage class. Put a picture of your spouse as a child in a prominent place in your house so that you never forget that they were and are a vulnerable child. This way, you remember how to speak to them.

Picture everyone as a vulnerable child, because, they are.

Our worlds have shrunk these past few weeks and we have shrunk along with them. Instead working under our illusion of control, we have become small, around 67 inches on average. And our feelings are too big for our bodies.

Perhaps, that is a part of this sacrifice that we remember, someone gave His body up for us so that He can bear those big feelings with us.

Normal is Not for Christians

I’m talking about families here, people.

Those of us that have the privilege to safely wait out the Corona have maybe had one or two homicidal thoughts towards the people we love the most.

Of course, I would never actually poison them, that is why I make sarcastic comments and roll my eyes.

You see, this is normal.

It is normal for the Boomers to blatantly reject emotion and insist that hard work will cure my grief. It is normal for me to assume the moral high ground and scoff at their low emotional intelligence. It is normal for us to be terrible listeners because we have heard this story and subsequent complaint roughly 8 thousand times.

And you know what? Normal relationships are not for Christians.

Statistically, divorce is normal, pre-marital sex is normal, porn is normal, abortion is normal and so is the general maltreatment of women.

Christians have no problem mounting the high horse and pointing out the splinters in “today’s society.” No sir, normal, is not good enough for us.

Good.

Now, about that beam.

Christian relationships cannot just be without the aforementioned sins. They have to involve virtue and sacrifice, biting our tongues and keeping our eye rolls in check.

Dismissing the imperfections that are bubbling up in our relationships as “normal family stuff” and “just human” is a rejection of an opportunity to grow in love.

So don’t say that.

Grow.

Protecting Thomas

It might be my professional training, or maybe the resonance of the story, but I have a subtle sense dissatisfaction with the “doubting Thomas” story.

The story I heard in CCD was pretty one dimensional. “Thomas doubted Jesus. Don’t doubt Jesus.”

Everyone I know in the world doubts Jesus.

A binomial understanding of doubt is not representative of my experience as a Christian and I assume the same is true for Thomas.

He was still with the apostles. He still defined his identity as a member of the group who defined themselves by Christ. He did not reject all of Christ when he rejected the resurrection. In the Bible I’m reading, Thomas still looks like a Christian from the outside even if his heart cannot accept the Living Christ.

The minister-therapist in me wants to know why.

Because I don’t think Thomas doubted out of a lack of an intellectual belief. Eleven witnesses is enough to convince even the greatest cynic.

Still, he refused to believe.

because of fear.

Thomas had seen his Lord his friend his hope fail. Everything that he staked his life on had disappointed him. If he believed in the resurrection if he rejoiced, he risked it all being taken away from him again.

The researcher and author Brene Brown asserts that joy is one of the most vulnerable emotions. Many of us experience a sense of foreboding joy:

I am so blessed too have my grandparents… it will be so hard to lose them.

I love Sunday brunch with my friends in the college cafeteria… we only have two more before we graduate.

I love my sister… I hope nothing happens to her.

We shackle our own joy to hypothetical suffering and do not allow ourselves the freedom to rejoice. We are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I imagine Thomas wide-eyed watching the Lord enter Jerusalem and realizing that Jesus was the messiah. Perhaps, his doubts evaporated and he was finally able to rejoice for love of his friend in the hope of salvation.

He unshackled his joy.

But within the week, he was crushed.

He resolved never to hope or rejoice again. His friend was naked and murdered… and so was his hope.

Still, in that same week, his friends urge him to rejoice. Perhaps, because they can’t handle the trauma. They say Jesus had risen from the dead but there was not way the shackled of joy could ever be released for Thomas. The chains were greater than ever and he was weak with grief.

He recalls what they did to his friend,

“Until I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Jn 20:25

Because I can’t believe, because I can’t hope again, and because I am so broken by this loss, I am too afraid of my heart breaking to believe in the resurrection. Because this joy might be taken from me and I can’t go through it again. I’m scared.

And a week later, Jesus greets him and commands him to quiet his pounding, aching, fearful heart and says,

“Peace be with you”

Jn 20:26

Thomas, do not be afraid to break your heart! See how mine was broken for you?

“Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believe.”

Jn 20:27

Blessed are we who have not seen but believe.

We who have hope and rejoice despite the vulnerability of our flesh and our hearts.

Blessed are we who quiet our hearts and do not fear what love demands: the capacity for heartbreak and loss.

Blessed are we who believe in love.

Blessed are we who believe that love is strong enough to raise the dead.

May Christ break the shackles on our joy and bring us peace.

What’s Driving Me Crazy

I do not like quarantine in my room, I do not like it with a broom.

I do not like it in my sweats, I do not like it with my pets.

I would like to go outside, then my feelings, I could hide.

I wonder how I have grown during our time in quarantine so far?

I no longer have the option to justify my existence by the things I do for my patients or the effects of my actions in ministry, or the degree that I was supposed to receive.

Am I valuable because what I do and what I produce or am I valuable because of who I am? 

Of course, intellectually, I can produce the theologically correct answer, it is my identity as a created being that gives me value, but, as I am without the things that make me feel valuable, I am realizing how this truth has not traveled from my head to my heart.

I feel good when I do good things, which is good, because, I am not a sociopath, which is something I am proud of.

But, feeling good because I have done good does not mean that I am good. 

It means that I feel good.

My  behavior, conscience and emotions do not determine my worth.

I am realizing that it is not only my missed graduation which is truly difficult, it is the absence of the people and activity and achievement, the good things, which I had inadvertently staked my worth on.

It’s not only the burning love of ice cream parlors, libraries and Thursday wine and Bible night that is making this so difficult; it is being forced to deal with the spiritual and psychological struggles we have always had but have been able to drown out and numb.

How many people busy themselves with good things to drown out the sin and anxiety and insecurity and loneliness?

Perhaps, the space that has been created in my life will create space on the road between the head and the heart and we will learn who we are.