The Cost as a Woman in Following Christ

There are times when old non Christian friends look at me with their heads tilted sideways. "How is it that you can do this?" they ask, " be a part of a religion that has been responsible for the pain and suffering of hundreds of thousands of women?"

Some are angry, have I let the sisterhood down, some I suppose see me as a sell out - we don't tend to do coffee anymore, and others, dear sweet others, fear that I shall be damaged following the Christian Way. That the cost of following this God will be too high.

And to a point they are right. There is a cost in following Christ. It always makes me smile people who assume that once you become a Christian life becomes easy. I would have to say that since I became a Christian I have had anything but an easy life. Of course there is a cost.

The thing is the cost of not following Christ for me is now even higher. As a woman in New Zealand Anglican Church I am lucky that I have the freedom when called to express my ministry in all its forms to a point (there are churches here who although will not state it publicly will not have ordained women in their parishes).

I remember when I was a fairly new Christian being taught to serve. I had been shown the ropes and then got to serve for a staunch elderly retired priest who after mass (I think I may have lit the Gospel Candle first or some other deadly sin) marched me into the vestry where I was told in no uncertain terms that I would now be told how to serve in the proper Anglo Catholic tradition. He looked me up and down and sighed "you are a girl but I suppose there's nothing I can do about that"

Looking down at my chest I too sighed, nope no hiding these. Actually I ended up learning a lot from that priest, I think we both had to work on tolerance. At that time however I was profoundly aware of the cost as I struggled against the structure of the Church, stuck out my elbows and tried to find my place. What did it mean for me as a woman to follow Christ, what did it mean as a women to be a part of the church?

One of the first things I learnt and indeed sadly have yet to see much if any change in, was that as an intelligent women in her 30's there was no place, no social support, network or ministry for me if I didn't have children providing the sacred entry pass into a "parents" group. Unless you had a child you were an anomaly. Even women in that age group who were interested in investigating what it meant to be a Christian beyond the role of parent were invisible.

Today (hence the topic) I found a piece I wrote in those early days, and here it is...

She never knew how high the cost would be to keep her witness low
Her love song to the Lord whispered in dark feminine places

Play nice
Be sweet
Set up for the next service
and while your at it make us a nice cup of tea love

She never knew how deep the divisions they demanded in her would cut
How much of her they were prepared to carve away
How a half women could be better than one at all?

Play nice
Be sweet
and while your at it pass the scones woman
and if your really good well let you wash up afterwards

She never knew how high the cost would be to keep her witness low

So why stay? It would have been easy to walk away, to tell myself I will follow Christ in my own way. But God often has other plans for us. Around the same time I wrote this, a wonderful woman sent me this piece by author Dorothy L. Sayers, a friend of C.S.Lewis

"Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.
They had never known a man like this Man - there has never been such another.
A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them; never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as 'The women, God help us!' or 'The ladies, God bless them!... "

There is a cost in following Christ sometimes it is great, sometimes it is hidden. I am not sure what the cost is for me at the moment I just know that the cost of not following is far greater.

Vanity Thy Name is Mine

The last week or so I have been having dreams where I am going bald. For days now I have resisted the temptation to surf the plethora or dream dictionary websites to find out what it could really mean. That is until today when I discovered that such interesting facts that, I was scared of getting old, I was probably feeling unattractive, and considering that I wasn't intelligent.

So after I took a course of botox...
Anyway what I am aware of is that very soon I am to lose all my hair. There are a couple of special people dear to me fighting cancer at the moment, one of whom has just begun chemotherapy. Several of us have decided that when my friend begins to loose her hair we will join her in shaving ours off too. I kind of think there is so much of this journey I can not take with her I can at least join her in this. Her hair is so precious to her, and I am discovering so too is mine to me.

I don't consider my hair often, its just kind of there really. But loosing it feels suddenly very exposing, I am aware of the social stigmas around hair, of how I look at women without hair. I wonder what messages I have told my self in passing, what assumptions I have made.
And how I am a little scared of what assumptions people will make of me...
My vicar is also having his hair shaved off but as a bloke I do think it is a little different (although that could be because I am married to a man who blade shaves his head). I have been trying to convince my vicar that in the mean time it would be far more noble to let us wax his legs $10 her wax strip - but for some reason he's not so enthusiastic.

Anyway so in the next fortnight I will lose my hair. I look in the mirror and wonder if my friend looks at hers in the same way.

I just know Im going to look like a bowling ball

Bring on the hats

Dont Fault Others for Your Fear of Tumbling Into Something New

Okay so here is my dilemma.

There is this calling which I respond to (finally).
This Discernment of calling which I fall into, and now after months of being in the discernment process I am discerned for priesthood and what do you know, I'm paralysed! Discerned for priesthood one week, signed up for study a BTheol in distance education the next (oh yeah I learn best in group situations by the way) as well as working full time.

In some strange way its like watching oneself dissolve before your very eyes. I've done tertiary study before but the courses were always practicum based, now I am here with these assignments looming and I can't even focus to study! My brain races a thousand miles a minute, every sentence raises more and more questions and possibilities and then hell there is the stuff that is so dry the pages fare crumble to the touch.

I feel thick in all of this theological language which leaves me spending most of my time in my Oxford dictionary of Theological terms trying to understand what inevitably turns out to be something that could be said in far more accessible terms.

Okay so I am sabotaging myself here, scaring myself really. There have been times over the last week when I have sat at my laptop weeping at my lack of understanding. Okay to be fair I have had a bereavement, a cold, and now blessings a stomic flue.
BUT COME ON MEG GET IT TOGETHER.

No profound poetry here no gentle words of God, cos quite frankly the warm moist salty God of my understanding doesn't seem to terribly interested in the Historical Critical or Literal or what ever way of dissection. Just of nudging me in the night, sitting with me when I am in my bathroom vigil and I wonder what on earth I have done in saying YES God pick me!
Have they made a mistake?

In a moment of watching Deadwood my current favourite dvd series I hear the line "Don't fault others for your fear of tumbling into something new" and just think buggar.

Any assistance or comments for those experienceng the terror of study greatly accepted and appreciated.

What does it mean to Forgive?

I had this friend...

I am not sure what he is now.

A few years ago it came to light that he had abused the daughter of another friend of ours.

I still remember this young women coming to my door on the way to the police to lay a complaint. I looked at this beautiful young courageous women and all I could do was cry and say things like

"I am so sorry this happened to you",

"I am so sorry we didn't know",

"I'm so sorry we let this happen and didn't protect you and you had to go through this alone".

What followed next was very public the guy confessed, was sentenced, fined, and basically lost everything and everyone.

At the time I did a lot of soul searching, there was a lot of grief for the young woman and her mother and also for the friendship that my husband and I had had previously with this guy who had now shown a face we hadn't anticipated.

We never made contact with him, I myself was so angry with him, this was a guy who had been my first Christian friend, who had shown me that maybe God was an okay way to go.

Anyway he has been on my heart of late. I have been left pondering such questions as "how as a Christian do I practice what I preach?", "how do I have forgiveness and act with compassion to one who has acted in a way repugnant to me and indeed those I love?"

All rather knaw your arm off stuff really.

Over time I have moved from holding rage and betrayal, to acid bitterness, and now somtthing a kin to a pool of sadness that sits in my belly.

And God, being God is quite happy for me to sit with this dis-ease with just a simple ...well?

In the end I had to act.

I contacted his mother. She was so suspicious, so incredibly fearful of me and the world. Her brokenness over what has happened manifested in moments of terror at the end of the phone and a high pitched hysteria which in one moment was spewed out and in the next swallowed back deep into herself .

I left a number and today some weeks later when I tell myself that it is all over he phones... of course!

We skirt around things at first, me not sure what to say to this person in some ways so familiar yet so foreign. There is a barren loneliness in him yet what I hear is about him, not about what he has done or who has been hurt. I am torn between wanting to shake him and ask if he really knows what he has done, and in another moment to tell him it is okay.

A phone conversation in the middle of an office is not the place to speak of such things.

To a point we are superficial touching on agonies briefly and without depth, aware the whole time of the cautiousness in us both. We talk about meeting to talk more about this, then there is this long pause and I don't know what it is I am supposed to say but I know that this is what all the unease over the last few weeks has been leading up too.

"You are not hated (name)" it is all I can find to say
"Know you are not hated"

there is a pause and down the end of the phone he sobs "My God you just made me cry..."

We hang up I go into the bathroom and am sick.

Sometimes forgiveness is hard.

To be the face of humnity in the face of evil

This is an icon I wrote recently of St Veronica. (We call it writing Icons as opposed to painting because the art of creating an icon is an act of prayer unfolding, we write the prayer). I am a member of the 'Icon Writers of St Luke' who meet weekly here in Christchurch to teach and write icons together.

Anyway what struck me about Veronica -who was said to have knelt before Christ on his way to the cross and wiped his face, was that she represented that moment of extraordinary compassion in the midst of an indescribable madness. That place where evil and grace scuff up against one another. There is something for me in this about being in that place of witness I guess. That place where that single moment may not tip the balance but stays glowing long after the event.

I wonder if it is where sign posts are placed so that eventually we can find our way home? I remember years ago being on the streets working with what we now call homeless young people but back then just referred to as street kids. One night warming my hands over the lights of the Cathedral (as we did many nights) my buddy at the time talking about those sign posts in the form of an event or person that lead us in a new direction. I know that one of the things that works in turning around lives are those people who for a time loved, accepted and believed in another, who placed there a possibility of a new way.

20 years ago there were three of us in a group voted least likely to ever become Christians and here we are some 20 plus years later to discover each other again, all within the Anglican Church. All responding to a call placed in our hearts , looking for the signpost back. And I don't think it is case of simply coming back, or too, faith, I think maybe we return again and again and again to faith, dance and skirt around and fall over into something far beyond us all.

Being a tad retroflective on this day I am listening to an old Leonard Cohen song as sung by Jennifer Warnes on Famous Blue Raincoat that goes.

Maybe I'm still hurting

I can't turn the other cheek

I know that I still love you

it's just that I can't speak

I looked for you in everyone

and they called me on that too

I lived alone but I was only coming back to you.

Even in your arms I know I'll never get it right

even when you bend to give me comfort in the night

but Ive got to have your word on this or none of it is true

And I left my pride on the other side of coming back to you.

Have a nice day maybe if anyone ever reads this or miracle of miracle comments I will be encouraged minimise waffling and engage in dialogue!

Meg in the windy day

Lord be in all that I do and All that I am ...I think

Okay easier said, than done. If indeed Christ is in us, what is it that we are saying and indeed doing to Christ in how we treat ourselves and each other?
What does it mean to be Christ bearers?
Do we treat the Christ within and indeed ourselves and a sacred and tender vibrant creation rich with potential and love, or like the embarrassing family member you only let around people who "understand" and secretly resent.

Does being a Christ bearer become some kind of vaguely creepy experience with the "Gods not only always watching you but is in you as well" scenario in play. It can all become a little like an esoteric 1984 really.

I am not sure why I began with this, I spend a lot of time chatting with God, arguing, begging, asking for signs, ways to get through the next day, hour, minute, aching for an external affirmation that I am not alone that things will get better.

And so I pray

Lord,
Sometimes I feel I might break
with the strength it takes
to hold up those around me.

Be at my back Lord
when the burden is too great.
Hold firm my spine,
when it begins to crumble.

Give strength
to these trembling arms
that hold up others,

and

if the time comes,
catch all the pieces of me
as I break.

All the while whispering
soft words of morning
to those who minister
to the night



We are not alone

First Days Alone In the Desert

I have been haunted since first learning about the Desert Mothers about what it was to be in the Wilderness, to be stripped down before God. If you haven't heard about the Desert Mothers these were women who yearned for a complete union with God . Who through embracing abundant simplicity, went into the desert, where stripped of worldly concerns and influences, fought to remove any and all obstacles in the pursuit of communion with God.
In this yearning they sort to make space for God and too quote “actively cultivate a burning love for God”.
Non attachment and non possessiveness were essential. Although they cared for those around them they were not tied them. They also sort to mortidy what were seen as disordered passions, demons of fornication and lust that were seen as distractions from a deepening relationship with God.
This journey called one into relationship that was both deeply intimate and vulnerable.
Several weeks ago I took a God Talk at Theology House entitled "Into the Wilderness: A reflection on the early Desert Mothers and our own journeys in the urban wilderness" since then I have been as I said haunted by questions such as "In the Wilderness how does the tomb become the womb. Anyway here is a reflection on the first few days of madness alone.


Lord I ache
it feels like I have searched for you so long
what have I done that I can no longer hear you?
Lord Have mercy

Lord its me
I cut of my hair for you, but I am torn
If you come to me now, how will I wash your feet?
For my vanity
Christ have mercy

Lord I thought I saw your eyes in the night
I imagined I had finally done enough to be with you
But it was a sand cat
And when it blinked and I was reminded a thousand times of my presumption,
for my sin
Lord have mercy

Lord I screamed today, heard my voice bounce of valley walls a hundred times
The silence ached in its solitude
It craved to hear a word
A sound
A whisper
And that’s how it began
a word
a Psalm
A whisper
But the belly demanded more and I screamed and screamed
But all I heard, was me
Saying too much
Saying too loud
I cover my mouth
Weak in my will
Christ have mercy

Lord I begged for food today when I should embrace the raging hunger that sits with me daily,
I ate crickets and old fruit
Turned by back on demons,
Thought of you and fell down
I thought if I could just stop the rumbling below
Maybe that which is underneath
The dark me
The raging me
The terrified broken me-unacceptable in your sight, may disappear
But instead she just aches to be before you
For that which I have kept hidden
Powerful Lord
Vengeful Lord
Graceful, Loving , Laughing Lord Have
Mercy have mercy
For just a moment in this magnificent day
Have mercy

Into the Urban Wilderness

I spit out these words into space
falling falling
what is it the song says?
Nobody answers the adverts in her brain
But it is done
now nothing to do
but sit in fear and expectation
look at sites long dead
and have cups of tea with distracted deities
Oh happy day
Fringe Dweller - an urban women in the wilderness