Hoes in the Pews

I’m not right these days. Living your life with depression, like I did for most of mine, is like living on the perimeter of a big fucking hole. Getting better, therapy, taking your medication is learning to stop hanging around on the hole’s edge, and to stop every once and a while being like “I’m gonna jump in there.” But you are never not living near a big hole.

As I try to figure out what the F, I have signed up for a course in Pastoral Care and Recovery at the Community College of Philadelphia. The class, as an academic experience, is pretty crappy. No structure, no lesson plan, a lot of the teacher, who is also a minister, holding forth on a random trail of subjects. The textbook, which reads like an essay from a student (half nonsense half plagiarism) is totally useless. But I decided that I would take it for the experience it was, and not the one I had hoped it would be.

And that was good in ways. There were lots of new experiences to be had. Being in a majority Christian environment. Being in a majority black environment. Sitting in a class without taking observation notes on the teacher.

And then there was last week. Last week, I don’t know how it started, but the teacher was talking about a book called “Pimps in the Pulpit.” It was about ministers who take advantage of women in their congregations who come to them for counseling. And my teacher, in the middle of her lengthy description of the book and it’s contents, said that we need to understand that “if there’s pimps in the pulpit, then there’s hos in the pews.”

And everyone laughed. Not like ‘clever turn of phrase’ laughed, like knowingly.

“That’s a fucked up statement,” I said loudly, which was out of character for the quiet, wide-eyed white girl persona I’d been working on.

“What you’ve got to understand,” my teacher who, in addition to being a minister is also a psychologist, said “is that if you’re going to be in that role you need to protect yourself from women who want to take advantage.”

“Some women,” she further illuminated “need to understand that they’re hoes. That’s what they are.”

Look, gentle reader, I’m not gonna spend a  lot of typing on your knowing that that is fucked up.

I had some back and forth with my teacher about how I didn’t want to hear women referred to as hoes, and the other white girl in the class also objected, but the teacher stuck to her  “hoes got to face that they are hoes” guns so I just shut up.

That is a cool strategy I have developed for when I feel small.

After class, I pulled my homework out of the pile on her desk. I didn’t feel like handing in my homework. And then I bolted. Then I stood outside of CCP crying. My female classmates were talking to me, trying to console me by explaining that I didn’t understand the word. It has a cultural use, they said. Like you would call a man a dog, they said.

So yeah, I don’t understand the word, no lie. I only know it as an alien. Like sometimes I have to explain “faggot,” to my students and they get the idea but they don’t.

So I don’t fucking know. Maybe it is not my word to hate.

But that doesn’t really feel right.

Is it patronizing that I don’t want anyone calling black women hoes, either?

Am I a crybaby because I don’t want to go back to class ever?

I’m pretty depressed that at some point, some broken woman might go to this professional and to this religious leader and say “I went to Pastor John for help, and he invited me back to my place and got me drunk and…” and that my teacher will gently let her know that she is a ho.

We are so fragile. We’re so fragile.

It’s so hard to ask for help.

It’s such a hard fight even in the hands of generous spiritual leaders and mental health professionals.

It’s so hard when you have the privilege of whiteness and safety and money.

It’s fucking hard enough.

This whole idea has sent me curling my toes over the edge of that deep-assed hole that I haven’t seen in quite some time.

She’s the TEACHER.

What’s the point in even trying?

I wrote my teacher an email that said this:

Dear Professor,

I wanted to write to you because I am still feeling upset from our discussion in class last night.

I feel very embarrassed because I made myself vulnerable in previous classes and was feeling like it was a safe space.

But it don't feel safe in a place where the word 'ho' is used.

You've been talking to us these last three weeks about how we should never call someone anything other than what they want to be called. If Karen wants to be called Karima, we call her that. If a transgender person wants to be called "her," we call her that.

I don't think anyone wants to be called a ho.

I am particularly scared by the idea that a woman might be called a ho because she is in a relationship with a man who has power, like a pastor.

I understand that 'ho' is a cultural word, and maybe it's not a word I can totally understand. I promise to spend this week reading abut the history of that word and what it means to black people.

I hope you can understand how that word makes me feel, when it is said about any woman.

Respectfully,

C

My teacher responded thusly:

Good Afternoon Cara:

First let me begin by saying how much I admire you and know that you are in the right place every time I see you on Tuesday.

As you recall, I was repeating a comment that was made by another individual who attended the workshop with  Ms. Shannon Bellamy. You may want to look up her book  "Pimps in the Pulpit."  I truly understand how certain words can affect others.  I certainly want you to understand that it was not meant to be offensive.  I was just sharing information.  Just allow me to shed some light when you responded by saying,  "That's Fucked Up" as a minister, how do you think that made me feel?  However, I did not take it personal nor was I offended.  We must allow ourselves to be open in this field.  I hear that word everyday at the college by students.  It is not as uncommon as you may believe.  I agree, however, that it is not pretty either.

I want you to know that you are definitely in a safe space, and I do believe that when you are in the room with us you are definitely SAFE.  

So. Yeah.

I don’t feel better.

I feel shitty.

I feel really shitty.

The air is humming

Something’s coming, I can feel it. Maybe it’s just the big white monster of winter with it’s slushy grey tail curled up on the other side of fall. Maybe something else.

Approximation only. 

The weather turned quick. It’s time to haul the suitcases with sweaters in them up from the basement. Last week we opened the Art Church, although it won’t really feel like that until I do something more me in here. Twisted up in the opening is that Dan brought over the last of my parent’s behemoth bedroom furniture, since I now have a place to house it. He showed up like a visitor from another timeline, one that started in a coffee shop in West Virginia where we said opening up a space together was all we wanted to do. Maybe there’s another strand where we did. But on the one I’m riding, I did it by myself.

There's all these wisps of regret and doubt in fall, even though it’s my favorite favorite. I don’t know why. I don’t love summer but there’s this pumpkin pie flavored sad when it ends.

So I’m antsy knowing something is coming in a season that will make it complicated to take. Whatever change is here for me, whatever painful edification or irritating betterment of my soul is going  to go down even as I try to get everything organized on the bookshelf of my life. I want all my people and all my beliefs and practices lined up like a row of spines that binds me so I can ease into winter secure.

It’s just about time for rules. Marshmallows arrive and remembering Fumi, then Salem, then Halloween decorations, then Halloween, then November decorations and then Thanksgiving, and then the sprint from Thanksgiving to the Light Holidays which includes Wassailing and the first Bailey’s Irish Cream and then New Year’s Eve cigars and then the ascetic slog from New Years to the Lunar New Year. The days are lined up. The people are harder. Will Andrew and Rachel be able to have Holiday Dinner together? How to bring in Darin and his kids in a way that works for them and us? What if he has to leave? What if Corn can’t come? Will everyone be well? This is the period in which the suicide attempts all happened and wrecked us 30 ways.

I hope what’s coming will not be like that.

If I’m gonna pray on it, I’ll pray that I only need to be slightly disturbed to leap and respond. I am going to keep my spiritual ear to the ground. If the universe seems to be seeking to scold and reform me, I pray that I will catch it at a whisper and not a shout. Easy, easy.

Under

I don’t want to write. For like two years that was all I could write, I’ve got like three spiral notebooks that say “I don’t want to write” or “I hate writing” on every page, then it got a little easier, today it’s a little harder.

This past few days everything is a little harder. I’m having a little bout of depression. I have decided that it’s a little bout. I like to control things by naming them.

These days, everything is kind of hard. Like, not can’t get up hard, just hard enough. Just uninspiring enough. Just oceanwater resistance enough.

I spilled some birdseed on my bathroom floor, and it’s been there for days saying “what is wrong with you, there is birdseed on the bathroom floor.” The near perfectness of the new house and the less than perfectness of the moved in items and person is overwhelming. The number of skirts in my closet is overwhelming. The prospect of blow drying my hair is overwhelming. My student’s lack of a pen is overwhelming. And those are just the things that are by no other means overwhelming.

When I feel like this, the hardest thing is people. The hardest people are normal people, saying their normal shit. “How are you?” “How was your trip?” “How’s the new house?” God, how I loathe these questions. On a healthy day I take it as a personal challenge to respond to them honestly. Days like today the only honest response would be to punch the person in the face.

What the fuck is the way to answer that anyway? The answer is bundled up in the question. Obviously I’m fine, it was good and it’s good. You already know the answer so why are we participating in this exercise which makes my eyeballs want to get out of my face?

I do not know how to present to the people I love when I am like this. Being depressed makes me feel like I am a teenager and then everything feels like terrible teenager behavior. I feel petty and verbose and irritating and like a big burdensome pain in the ass. I am very aware of the fact that I am not engaged in making everything OK for everyone else. Then I want to hide under a blanket.

I assume this is here to remind me not to be smug. So I will try to remember not to be smug. I am pretty smug, a lot of the time. There but for the grace of god, most of the time.

I wrote this much. I think that is enough.

More on Enough

There used to be two kind of insufferable guys who came on the radio on weekday mornings, one was Brian something and the other was I forget. But one of them always used to say that the biggest uncovered news story is always the same...that 842 million people in the world are starving and there is enough to feed them. Which is sad but which also stuck with me as an idea. There’s enough, it’s just not in the right places in the right amounts.

That has been a lot on my mind recently, as Andy spoke about the idea of ‘calling’ and what we are called to do, and as I have been reading about the idea of ‘vocation.’

“Vocation’ soothes me. I love how it untangles the purpose of one’s life from one’s livelihood. How your breadwin can be your vocation or not, or how vocation can run alongside work for money but not have to run into it. How people have a lot of vocations.

How we know what we are called to do and we don’t like it.

I might, as I did once, hear about all those starving people, and being young and not having any real stories around cast myself as a savior. I might, as I did, roughly grab the vocation of feeding them all and demand the quickest route to the most fed. I might, as I did, work for non-profits, ask to be sent to the saddest poorest place, with the saddest poorest people, to get the most food in the most mouths as fast as I could with little regard for my own actual gifts and their cultivation or use.

We want to be something in the face of not enough, don’t we? That’s why it’s so easy to get people to volunteer to ladle soup for the homeless and so hard to get them to volunteer to file the backlog of their social service paperwork. One lets us perform ‘be.’

That’s why you can get donors for programming- they’ll buy the sacks of rice or the medicine or the schooling, but not the copy paper for the home office. Not the salaries of the people who manage the distribution.

The stories we have elevate some vocations and marginalize and shame others. I live in a world that doesn’t really revere the vocation of parenting, for example, despite the fact that it was devoted parenting that allowed most of us many of the blessings we have. I work with students every day who have vocations for the arts, or for helping professions or for gardening that their parents have shamed into a corner, depriving us all of the enough we need.

And though we know- as Andy said this week- we know we are called to earnestness and humility, the shame that comes with them will train us out of it.

No, dude, you're really doing me a favor. 

There are stories designed to shame us from small vocations, and there are stories that are made to let us off the hook for the charity and empathy that we know we’re called to offer.  We’re daily called to small acts of generosity that are just too hard. Spare change is hard. Not getting a really good catty remark is hard. Not taking a little extra for ourselves is hard.

Wouldn’t we rather be called to epic-scale martyrdom? Why is it so much easier to imagine yourself risking your life to save a stranger than giving somebody a dollar? Is it because there are no stories for that? No one ever said “‘tis a far far better thing I do” about not being a shithead to a co-worker. There’s no epic climax music for choosing against taking something inconsequential that still isn’t really yours. No great oil painting of someone putting their trash in the trash.

There are so many available imaginings of the vocation of self sacrifice.

The scary truth is that our vocation is self.

All the religions want us to submit to the will of God, or god, or “god.” Maybe we know inside that if we could find a way to behave in accordance with god’s will, we would improve the distribution.

Instead we strive for extremity, mis-distributing all that is needed.

Loaves & Fishes

Look, I don’t do the miracles. Like Thomas Jefferson and his pinking shears, I like to daintily discard the magic parts of the Bible. They mess with my groove.

'Uh, White Jesus, I assume
this is some kind of metaphor?'

So when it was time to read about loaves and fishes, I was ready to write it off and phone it in. Yeah, yeah, and everyone was fed.

Also, every time we get a new minister at church, and every time it is another white dude in his 20’s with millennial hair and hipster glasses (Rat calls them ‘minhipsters’) I expect him to be lame. But the new guy did alright with the old story this week. Pointing out that the loaves and fishes story is about ‘enough.’

It’s about thinking you don’t have enough, or you are not enough, and discovering, by the grace of god that it is enough. By starting from a point that is objectively measurably short of what you need and realizing that it contains all that you need.

It’s a crazy boardwalk magic trick the way once you start pulling from the resources of your actual self that things just keep unfolding, scarf after silken scarf. There is always enough of you for the thing, somehow, always. Even if the thing is more than you should have to face. Memere used to say, and Dad used to sort of doubtfully repeat that God never gives you anything you can’t handle. In the wrong hands, this translates roughly to ‘suck it up.’ But in actuality, it is true, not because all the sufferings of this world are or should be handleable, but because human capacity abounds.

But friends, you got to draw from the right well.

The well of what’s inside is infinitely deep, because if you go down far enough, you get to the source beyond the self, and the source is infinitely vast.

The little plastic cups that you have placed all around to appease the thirsty who come demanding-- those have bottoms.

You cannot draw infinitely from ‘nice,’ you cannot draw infinitely from ‘good,’ nor ‘selfless,’ nor ‘right.’ But you can draw infinitely from what’s true.

God did not grant you enough time to finish the project, or enough patience to keep from snapping, God did not grant you enough money to feed everyone or enough knowledge to solve everything. God did not grant you enough sense not to see that same mistake coming again. God did not grant you, maybe, enough milk for the pancakes. What you got is the enough behind those enoughs. Enough to do the thing. Enough to keep pedaling if you’re me, or keep running if you’re Jess or keep studying if you’re Yin Li. Enough to stop running if you're Rachel. Enough to stop helping if you're Andrew. Enough to stop being good if you're Darin.

What you got is enough to do what you are actually supposed to do.

And if you are out of enough, and at the bottom of some well, that wasn’t the well.

If you’re out of patience, you’re probably not called to be patient with this.

If you’re out of money, you’re not called to get it by buying.

If you’re out of generosity, maybe don’t give.

God doesn't expect you to do more than god gave you resources for, is what Memere might have meant.

This suffering is not a punishment. It’s not a test, sorry Job. It is showing you the bottom of a thing you were meant to spend, so that you would know infinite when you see it.

And it is nuts how far it goes down. How many times you can think it’s the bottom, and it’s not. How deep you can get and what the capacity is. 

And as far down as you ever go at a given time is enough.

Not a picnic

I love a person who has Adult ADHD. And it is not some kind of a picnic, I will tell you.

Actually, I won’t tell you. I will be too busy trying to be empathetic and also hide my shame about both being a not empathetic person and about the stuff in the relationship that is hard.

I do not have to worry that the person I love will read this, because although we have been dating for years, and he knows that I write here, it is unthinkable that the chain of things that might drive him to read my blog would come together once, let alone weekly. My foot-by-foot on the rail response to this fact  is one that is called up often by the relationship.

Let’s get out of the way that the thing about ADHD is you can’t. It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s that you can’t.

You can’t leave your keys in the same place every time. You can’t not wait until the last minute. You can’t just text to say hi. You can’t remember that my show is opening next week.

It’s not that you don’t want  to. You can’t.

I know about can’t. I am crazy also, have been crazy beyond can. It’s not that I didn’t want to stop making terrible choices and it’s not that I didn’t want to get better.

But I want to try very hard not to write about that side. I want to write about this side. I don’t always notice the distance, I am pretty busy, my life is pretty full and my friends are very good. But when I stop and look at it, there is often a cold shock.

Sometimes the important thing is coming- the show or the party or the something and I'm already hedging. I'm already putting on my single-girl armor. I'm telling him it doesn't matter that he can't, or I'm telling myself that it won't matter if he doesn't and that seems sort of true at the time. And then there is some moment when I remember that I'm not supposed to be a single girl.

To the person I pick for first, I send emails and don't expect responses, I sent invitations and anticipate flying solo, I send texts that will likely be unanswered. This isn't so bad until it is.

But it's not that he doesn't want to. It's that he can't.

And I’ve learned only to give the help I’m asked for. I think that is a good policy for the people you love unless they are a danger to themselves. But it is shiny black cold shitty to watch the person run themself into the ground. Oh. Now the deadline is a week away. Oh, now the bill is $500. Oh now you are half an hour late.

Nag or watch. Or nag then watch. It is not any kind of a picnic.

Maybe this is the best thing for me? As I am independent, like my time and space, have lots of other sources of validation and also need to learn to stop controlling people? Sometimes this is perfect, for real.

Maybe the thing to look at is the way I need a relationship to look like a thing, the way I use other people's can'ts to make my own don't-have-to's. Maybe this is a good training in letting people be who they are?

It’s a fuck of a lot better than it used to be. But that heavy-cast bell of fear still rings pretty regularly in here.

And it sucks.

Sorry. I've been about my Father's business

On Friday I bought the Art Church. It was a long time coming. Maybe all the time that I know. My entire life I’ve walked past empty spaces, fire houses (like the one Zack ended up with) abandoned buildings (like the one LaMaMa ended up with) and thought, "just get me one of those.”

Last week, Dominique at work was sitting in the office looking bummed out. Over the weekend she’d applied for a job to go teach in Japan. Her and six white men at a table. The recruiter asked her if she’d be willing to straighten her gorgeous hair which she wears on top of her head in this beautiful signature coronet. That night she dreamed that she was waiting for a train and realized that the train she wanted was on the other side of the tracks, going the other direction. She jumped onto the tracks to try to catch it, and tripped. “I should have known,” she said. “Stay on track. The message is to work on my music.”

Yes, yes and yes, Dominique, work on your music. Remember, Andrew, you’re an artist. Lucas, speak up. John, we’re all waiting for you to hang out, Rat fix your mirror.

That’s why I wanted to buy the Art Church. So that when that moment happens and Dominique says that she needs to be brave and and admit that her track is the music, I can say “I can help.”  We are all so scared to do what we know we should and we need chances to do it. We need a place for becoming.

I came to Philly dreaming of making this place when, like Dominique, I got off track. How much easier to be a teacher, a happy helper, a volunteer and a wife than to be an artist. How much safer. And how cavernous it made the places under my skin. 

How much easier to rent myself than be it.

How long it took to admit the truth. That I love art, and I love storymaking and life-figuring  and human-being and my dream is to facilitate those things on my own terms. Maybe I had to come so far through so much because I had to get those terms worthy of the enterprise.

Sharpened on fear anxiety and pain, I really know what I hold sacred. And it’s worthy of being enshrined, lived and celebrated.

I’m ready to fuck it up, to make a place for fucking up and to embrace everyone who wants to take a risk and fuck up, too.

So blessings on you, Art Church, my pencils are sharp enough. Let’s start this shit up.