Morning Rounds and Evening Musings

"You lack humility." Those words have been replaying in my mind since the day Rev. Lowe said them to me during our last discernment for ordination meeting in November. Harsh words, and all because I ranted for a bit after she recommended I read Eat, Pray, Love, a book I despise (though I haven't read it). It's about a woman who divorces her husband and subsequently finds spiritual enlightenment gorging herself on pasta in Italy, and having lots of sex with her Hindu guru. Or so I gather from the interviews of the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, on NPR and Oprah. I'm sorry, but I have no interest in reading about some narrow, new age view of spiritual fulfillment for divorced, rich, suburban white women with money to burn. And that's exactly what I told Rev. Lowe when she implied that Gilbert might have something to teach an insecure, highly-driven academic like myself. Looking back, I might have come off as a tad bit arrogant. Just a bit.

The comment stemmed from my revelation that I had never received a C in class, hated B+s and read classics for fun. Rev. Lowe concluded that I don't know how to relax (not true--just because I read Crime and Punishment in my free time rather than murder mysteries, Rev. Lowe's standard of entertainment, doesn't mean that I'm a boring, high-strung weirdo). What I was hoping to get some help with was the paralyzing insecurities I face when writing Old Testament papers and reasoning through my vocational options post-May 2009. I didn't make much progress as far as that goes, other than the catharsis that came with revealing the truth of the matter I work hard to conceal to someone besides Wes and my closest friends.

Still, I found it hard to see why a discussion about my insecurity lead Rev. Lowe to say that I was prideful. It seems my problem is usually the opposite. But whether her comment stemmed from a reactionary response to my statement about phony authors or from something else, I haven't been able to get her words out of my head during the last month. And, more often than not, they've rung true. I do lack humility. And that's hard to say, especially because it's a lesson learned from a woman I don't particularly care for.

I am a person who needs to ask questions and needs to dabble in the controversial before I can reach conclusions. But often those questions and convictions gradually begin to serve as simply another way to exercise my holier-than-thou attitude, rather than the way they might have begun--as a truthful quest for what's right.

So my question is, how can I be honest about my distaste for Eat, Pray, Love and its message, how can I have a true conviction about wealth and its potential for sinfulness and express my belief that our economic life is totally wrapped up in what it means to be followers of Christ, how can I say that Jesus would want women to preach and teach and that he would be disgusted at much of George Bush's policies and the American (and my own) complacency in the face of poverty and that he might be more concerned with what we do with our money than whether a gay man is a bishop...how can I ask these questions, express my belief, struggle with such controversial issues in an authentic way? How can I have a conviction, try to live by it and orient my thinking and life around it without feeling the need to inflict that conviction on others? After all, that's sort of the point of all this moral and theological exploration, right? Finding truth to the best I can and seeking to live by it? So if I really think what I'm doing is right, how can I share that belief without using it to posit my righteousness over and against the one who disagrees?

After all, Jesus gives us a model of rather undomesticated zeal and tactlessness. Turning over tables and calling people a 'brood of vipers' doesn't exactly reek of humility either.

Of course, my life doesn't look like Jesus'. Maybe you have to actually be poor, and work for justice, and oh yeah, sacrifice your life to atone for guilty in order to do stuff like that. And ultimately, most of my interactions involving politics or money or women or theology or anything controversial involve me asserting my opinion in order to prove another wrong. Oh, I like to frame it as virtuousness-- "I think doing such and such with money is wrong..."--but really it serves to highlight my virtue, my righteousness, my infinite knowledge of what it means to be a real Christian. In other words, I lack humility.

But I still want to be able to think about these issues, to ask the question, "Is homosexuality a sin?" and "What does the parable of the rich young servant mean for us today?" without arousing arguments, without questions of my eternal salvation, without heated debates and the shouts of 'fem-nazi!' I heard throughout college. I need to be able to ask questions, to struggle authentically, and to make conclusions about morality insofar as I am able. And I need to be able to be myself--a self who has opinions, and will never be a 'super sweet', as my friend Megan and I always called those girls boys always liked in college. Wes says I need to give others more credit and that my expectation of judgment and accusation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope he's right. And I hope and pray for patience from those around me as I learn the difficult balance of being myself--the good part of myself that is as God intended me to be when God created me--and undergoing the difficult transformation of the self that disembarked from God's created intentions that day.

This is a snapshot of a conversation between a student at a beauty school giving me a pedicure after Christmas:

Pedicurist (that's a word, right?): What do you do?

Me: I'm in graduate school. (hoping the conversation ends there)

Pedicurist: oh. What are you studying?

Me: Well, I'm in seminary.

Pedicurist: Oh, so you're like, studying history and stuff then?

Me: No, not really. I study theology, Christianity and the church.

Pedicurist: Oh, so you're going to be like an anthropologist then?

Me: No, not really. Seminary trains church leaders and things like that.

Pedicurist: oh.