Acute and quite terrifying onset of double vision yesterday.
May I NOT recommend a sleepover at The Clinic, complete with CAT scan, MRI, and a House-like team of neurologists surrounding your bed to start the next day?
No aneurysm, no tumor, no stroke. In fact I am a remarkably healthy person according to all kinds of tests, except for probably a damaged nerve to the eye.
So another appointment with a neuro-opthamologist next week, a hope that this will resolve itself, and a Moshe Dayan fashion look. Everything is very much double, but the literally blinding headache is gone.
Posting and response to emails will be light. This post alone has been quite a challenge!
(This review is part of a blog book tour taking place this week. I'll add links to other reviews as I come across them. I received copies of the book ~ and nothing else ~ from the publisher, and offered no guarantees in return.)
I should like love this book. Seriously. Carolyn Custis James brings an easy style and a creative interpretation to issues with which women around the world contend. Issues which should challenge and embarrass and horrify those of us who live in comfort and relative security, who are well-educated and work in comfortable and accepting environments. We carry with us a host of presumptions about our freedom to travel, to work, to engage in relationships ~ and about our value to our families and friends and in the world. When daughters arrive in our midst, we are wild with joy, and we imagine and expect that their lives will be marked by the same forces: freedom, education, meaningful work, love, and hope.
James writes about girls and women whose lives are markedly different from ours. Half the Church is evidently intended as an evangelical Christian counterpart to Half the Sky, the book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff and and his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, the husband and wife team who have written about the terrifying realities of life that challenge those females whose faces never reach our television screens. Women whose lives are marred and shortened by forced marriages, by early and repeated childbearing without adequate medical care, by lack of education and training, by abuse and violence ~ and, most of all, by the presumption that they are little more than chattel, born to be traded by men, to produce sons for men, and otherwise to serve men in whatever capacity men choose.
Caroyln Custis James's response to what she has seen and learned to is wrestle creatively with those Biblical texts which might be read as promising less for women than for men. Her conclusions ~ that God creates both women and men in God's image, that women are created by God to be warriors for justice, and that God creates women and men to be in a "Blessed Alliance" of equality in which to serve God and bring God's love to bear in this world ~ are intended to affirm that Christianity has much to offer all peoples of the world. The Christian story and message bring women and men together in unity and love. The gift of God's love through Jesus Christ should transform both the status and roles of women and the relationship between men and women; it should not be misused to preserve a status quo in which women are undermined, disregarded, devalued, and forsaken.
So why don't I love this book? Something irritated and troubled me as I read it, something that did not become clear until almost the end, when the author reveals a bit about the evangelical framework in which she lives and works. As someone who participates in the mainline Protestant church and who self-identifies as a progressive Christian, I seldom never encounter debates about whether the roles of women and men should be understood in complementarian or egalitarian terms. I don't encounter debates about women's ordination (except in the Catholic Church, and that's a whole 'nother story, isn't it?). When James addresses these issues, it becomes clear that she does, in fact, live in a world in which they are debated. Her insistence upon God's hopeful project for women and men alike might be viewed in her church world as a radical re-interpretation of Biblical passages, passages that have long been understood by many as establishing secure and differentiated roles for women and men. Consequently, she has to defend her approach.
And that, I suppose, is the heart of what rankles me about the book: its emphasis on evangelical assumptions that women and men are so different from one another in such fundamental ways that we actually have to debate whether we both have a place at the table. Any table, let alone the table of leadership or service on behalf of Jesus Christ. I understand that those are the assumptions that James must challenge in order to be heard in her world, but they are not the universal assumptions of all Christians. My sense is that she is wrangling with a faith of liberation in a personal context of confining parameters, a context in which she is apparently pushing boundaries by asserting that God calls both women and men to leadership and to participation in all ways. (There seems to be a second book lurking inside the covers and between the lines of Half the Church.)
Perhaps unintentionally, Half the Church brings to our attention two separate and yet similar worldviews in which the value of women is routinely diminished. In the world of secular political, social, and economic realities, as James shows us, women are often ignored ~ overworked, undervalued, and seldom sought for the gifts we have to contribute to the shaping and flourishing of our world. We who live in the United States can conveniently ignore this reality in the secular realm, but reality it is for most women across the globe. And in the world of the church? In its evangelical expression, there is an unfortunate strain of theology and practice that, contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, seeks to limit the offering of the gifts of women to arenas delineated by misreadings of Scripture and by rejection of the realities of ordinary life.
What Carolyn Custis James wants to show us is that, although it might be (mis)understood in traditional, evangelical interpretations, Christianity presents an alternative vision: a vision in which women are created and called by God as persons of strength and power, as individuals with gifts and skills which should be nurtured and welcomed in the building of God's Kingdom. The gospel should be a powerful force for liberation of all people; it should not be corralled into the service of those who would use it merely to perpetuate outdated political, social, and economic patterns of life. Perhaps James is precisely the person needed to make this point, as she understands the pressures of conservative Christianity from the inside.
In any case, we should read this book. The author may be trying to soften her approach in order to reach a broader audience, but the basic message is forthright and is supported by Biblical references explored in scholarly and imaginative ways.. Carolyn Custis James brings to our attention much that fosters injustice and outright evil toward girls and women in our world, reminds us that the God of Jewish and Christian Scripture affirms the essential dignity of all human beings, and tells us that there is much work to be done.
**********
If you'd like a free copy, the publisher has kindly provided me with an extra. Leave a comment, I'll draw a name, and I'll contact you for mailing info if you win!
I love the variety of voices. I love writing my little pieces and hearing so many different responses. I love reading what others write, and sometimes responding to them as well. I love that I am not limited in my knowledge and understanding of the world to those whose views make the pages of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The New York Times, to those who write for America and The Christian Century. I love that I have little blogging communities: what's left of the AOL gang, the RevGals, the Ignatian folks, the Presbies, the other moms whose hearts have been shattered by loss. I love that I have readers and people whom I read who fall into none of those categories.
This afternoon, I'm thinking about all of these voices in the context of books. I've been introduced to a LOT of books and authors by bloggings friends. Tomorrow, I'll be participating in a blogging book tour of Carolyn Custis James' book, Half the Church. And some days ago, one of my Karen friends reviewed the controversial new Rob Bell book, Love Wins. I haven't read Love Wins yet, but I will go so far as to say that I missed the Life Instructions on Hell's Occupants, and so the clamor over the book is something of a mystery to me. However, I am guessing that Karen's view (and she likes parts of the book) is something of an unusual one, at least this portion of it:
"The most personally offensive to me? Rob's discussion of life and death as the cycle through which all good things come. His reasoning is that life and death are a cycle since creation, and therefore part of God's great plan. He uses the example that the plant has to die to give us life; the firefighter has to die to save someone else's life. I had a hard time with his shallow thinking on this topic. Having lived through the death of someone essential to my life, I don't see death in general as the mechanism that God uses to restore the earth. He used One Death, Christ's death, to make sure that death died and He tells us that death is the last enemy that will die. Death is an enemy, not a friend. An aberration, not the original plan. It is a result of fallenness, a consequence with which we are forced to live, not a blessing to the planet. How did he miss this great fundamental truth in seminary?"
Karen and I both have sons who have died, and her words made me think of Nick Wolterstorff's in Lament for a Son: "Don't say it's not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic."
And that's what I love about blogging most of all. Everyone can be heard!
As part of my plan to start taking better care of myself, I went to a yoga class this morning. A very gentle, almost pre-beginner class.
I knew that every part of my body hurts, but the class was an intimate, precise confirmation of all of those aches and pains. Such silence, such attentiveness to joints and muscles, to all kinds of things, bodily and otherwise, that I try to ignore.
Why is my left side such a problem? I wondered. The order in which the pain revealed itself: left hip, left calf, left knee, left shoulder, left forearm, left middle finger, left side of my head.
Josh was left-handed. Ah.
As we packed up our things at the end of the class, a woman who looked vaguely familiar came up to me and introduced herself. A former neighbor, from across and down our old street. I asked after her family. "I'm a grandmother!" she said proudly. "And you had the two boys, right?"
I nodded. We moved from that house into this one when I was pregnant with the boys.
Her husband was and, it turns out, still is, on the vestry of the church behind our house. I asked about the current goings-on there, and offered nothing at all about myself.
I wonder whether she goes to that class every Saturday morning.
Always something. As if the video of the little twin boys filling the internet all week weren't enough.
1 ~ A little while ago, I was reminded by Martha's post about seven years of blogging that, as of about today, it has been seven years for me as well. That means that when I started blogging, my boys were 19-year-old freshmen at Ohio State and the University of Chicago and the Lovely Daughter was a 16-year-old high school junior, doing a lot of choral music and theatre tech. I was teaching high school English and History to Orthodox Jewish kids, was very involved in my church, and was busy with lots of friends. My grandmother was turning 98 and would live for nearly three more years. Josh for five. Usually at the end of March we would have been in St. Augustine, but that would have been the year that we pushed our trip to June, since for the first time ever, the kids' spring breaks did not mesh. I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall: Things Change. Everything Changes.
2 ~ I got a unintended blogging present today: a lovely, lovely book from an online friend. Review coming eventually.
3 ~ I started thinking about that plan I had back in December for frontier to be my word for 2011. Haven't done so well with that. Haven't done anything at all. I started thinking about it because I had a brief conversation with the young man who inspired the homily that inspired me. It seems that I am going to live. That being the case, I need to start thinking about who I want to be.
4 ~ This past week, someone who is deep into grief asked me about trust in God. And so I asked someone else who might know a good deal more about that than I do. And he wrote, in part, "Trust is a handing over of the quest for certitude into the contemplative rest of waiting with love for God to reveal the meaning of being a creature for whom God sent his only Son as companion on the quest and an exemplar of holy waiting . . . the willingness to hand over your future to Love."
5 ~ I would like to be that person, I think. That person who could hand over her future to Love. It's harder than you might think.
It has occurred to me that I have a tab up there into which I should toss some of what I've learned over the past 2.5 years. The following eight things are what come to mind off the top of my head. They should be read with The Lovely Daughter's remonstrance in mind: "Mom, everyone is not you." She's right; I only know what works and doesn't for me. Some of these probably apply to anyone whose child has died, in whatever way, or to anyone who's suffered any kind of death at all. Other ideas? ~ add them to the comments.
I've passed scripture and theology and worship and polity and exegesis ordination exams. Not one of them asked anything about what I really learned during my seminary years, about how to live beyond your child's death from suicide:
1. Ask everything you can think of to ask; look at whatever there is to look at. Or not. My primary sources of information after my son died were the woman who ran his apartment building, the detective who investigated the "case," and my son's girlfriend. I asked what I could ~ which wasn't much ~ at first, and later I peppered the detective with questions and asked him to show me everything that he could. I talked to the coroner and to the funeral home director and to the crematorium personnel. I saw my son's body, touched him and held him, and accompanied him to the crematorium. My husband did not do any of those things, and as far as I know is glad he didn't.
2. Learn what you can about suicide. Read, go to groups, look around online. You will probably be surprised by how little you know and how much there is to learn about this taboo of all taboos. It will make you sick at first, but gradually you will get used to horrific words and pictures and concepts. My husband doesn't do this either.
3. Do your work, whenever you can and in whatever increments you can. Or find something else, perhaps an activity or event to memorialize your child. My friend Karen G does amazing work, all kinds of it, with respect to children and cancer. People told me that it would help me to go back to my seminary and spiritual direction classes, and it did. (For the record, I thought at the time that they were showing signs of extreme delusional thinking.) I could not have gone back to teaching energetic and hopeful high school students, but I could return to the fairly controlled and solitary life of a graduate student.
4. Expect bodily stress, and expect no doctor to inquire about it. Weight gain, weight loss, headaches, joint aches, sleeplessness, exhaustion, intestinal messes, cognitive dysfunction. I am just starting to address this particular arena, and I know that I have a great deal to learn. I have to re-learn how to eat, how to move, and how to sleep, and I am guessing that all of those challenges are inter-related.
5. Find someone with some expertise who will listen to you. For a long time. Years. A therapist, a spiritual director, a pastor, a rabbi. This will not necessarily be the person or people whom you expect it to be. Friends get tired and experience hurt of their own (see below). Many experts and professionals have little or no experience with the profound grief raving lunacy of bereaved parents, or of anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one by suicide. Many pastoral types are fearful or feel threatened by people who are intensely angry or feel deeply betrayed by God, or who have completely wiped their hands of God. Very few people have the stamina and creativity required to be present to a parent who has lost a child to suicide.
6. Recognize that your most genuine relationships will change. Family and friends will disappoint you and you will disappoint them. People really, really hate it when you become healthy enough to state the obvious and the true: that the "Before" life is over. They want you to be who you were, and have no way of understanding the courage and fortitude it takes to become the person who lives with and despite this new reality.
7. Make new traditions. New holiday places. New places to go out to dinner. New vacation spots. My friend Karen J has instituted a wonderful tradition of Monday night extended family dinners: They help her busy daughters, bring the warmth of family to her sons-in-law, offer her grandchildren the security of a loving circle (and the opportunity to improve table conversation and manners - Karen leaves no stone unturned!), and assuage some of her own terrible grief. But ~ all this newness takes tremendous energy. And so:
8. Take your time. It, whatever it is, takes however long it takes.
Most of us have before and after experiences in our lives: those experiences that mark a dramatic alteration in our perception of who we are, how the universe is, and who God is. They seem to have to do with death, a lot of the time, and sometimes with conversion. They are not necessary instantaneous, road-to-Damscus events, although sometimes they are and it's in the unfolding of them that we realize how much we have been changed.
I have had three such experiences: the deaths of my mother and brother when I was seven, the year in which I made the Spiritual Exercises, and now the death of my son.
I've been doing a lot of supply preaching, meaning filling in where various churches have an occasional or regular need. The biggest challenge in supply preaching lies in not knowing the congregation: who the people are and what their cares and concerns are, as individuals and as a community. The second is that they don't know me; I'm not one of them, and so no shorthand applies.
In a couple of weeks I'm returning to a church close to home where, after several visits, I have made some connections. I'm thinking about preaching the Old Testament text, the "dry bones" passage from Ezekiel.
Two years ago, I was asked to read the Scriptures during my home church's service, and the dry bones vision was one one them. I looked at it in horror and was about to pick up the phone to say that they would need to find someone else, when it rang; the church administrator was calling to say that they had made a mistake and that I would be reading something else.
Now those two years have passed, and I can both read it and preach on it. I think. Because this church and I know one another, the sermon may be more personal than anything with which I would usually be comfortable.
I'm pretty sure that Lazarus, the other main option, is still out of the question for me. But the dry bones; maybe there I have something to say.
A lot to ponder.
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and God brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. God led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then God said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as God commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
