"Living out of the false self creates a compulsive deire to present a perfect image to the public so that everybody will admire us and nobody will know us."
Brennan Manning
The Rabbi's Heartbeat
Etchings - tentative outlines from which to move as one learns to be more contemplative, to move into this pilgrimage of life and embrace the Mystery that asks us to live with unknowns and surprises.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Friday, May 26, 2006
Holding the Power
Yesterday I was asked the question "do you give away your power when you don't feel safe?" This question startled me with the truth that I do.
Abusers hold the power but what is it in the abused that at a core soul level is unable to hold the power that is theirs?
Just a question I am looking for the answers on within my own soul. I need to know the answer.
Abusers hold the power but what is it in the abused that at a core soul level is unable to hold the power that is theirs?
Just a question I am looking for the answers on within my own soul. I need to know the answer.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
What Can I Prepare You - Revisited
Last fall this piece What Can I Prepare for You brought out pieces of story and created good discussion which moved us into sacred space as we looked at it. At least I felt the sacredness of the responses to the question.
Some time ago I began working on a cookbook, compiling a few recipes, outlining ideas for the theme of it and then the project became too tedious and I set it aside. There was disappointment for me because somehow by doing nothing I felt guilt and loss.
Earlier this year I slipped into a depression and felt overwhelmed and totally drained of energy for life and for the first time in my life actually admitted that was where I was and asked for medical help. Yet at no time have I felt God being absent – in fact I often hear the Spirit remind me that this is a place to embrace, to face, not to walk around or away from, but look it in the face and embrace it. That takes energy, which is not in abundant supply for me at present. So I began asking myself the question “what food could be prepared and served to you that would reflect how you feel?” The answer is unquestionably slow cooked food and dishes that require using my hands to eat. Why? What does that satisfy, or pacify inside of me?
Fast food is often eaten with our hands yet it lacks nutrition and doesn’t beckon us to the sacred place of lingering at table. In fact the only sense really involved in fast food is touch – what is that about? We just eat and run. Like a peck on the cheek from someone who is pretending to love you!
Slowly cooked food demands preparation and time in order to give you the most savoury gifts it holds. In my two summers lingering on the Amalfi Coast, my friend Anna-Maria would get squid at 8AM when the fisherman pulled his boat ashore, clean it, cut it and along with garlic and lemon, simmer it all morning in tomato sauce. Under the shade of the bougainvilleas, with the serenading of the cicadas, we feasted on spaghetti with this exquisite sauce, mopping up the leftover liquid with freshly purchased baguette.
Last weekend I was preparing dinner for 26 people who had arrived for weekend of art, music, sculpting and writing. They were exploring creative gifts so I decided to create something new and unusual for dinner. Pork shoulder was on sale at the market for an excellent price: cheaper meat that I believed could have a most delicious taste if basted and cooked slowly so flavours mingled, tenderized and tantalized us as it cooked. The meat was brushed with Dijon mustard, honey and garlic, sprinkled with salt and white pepper and placed in the roaster. Fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden was liberally placed on top of the meat. A small amount of chicken broth and sherry were added before it was covered and placed in the oven at 175 degrees. After cooking for 24 hours, and sending the most tantalizing aroma through the house, it was sliced and served with blackberry sauce. The sauce was a combination of berries in a syrup, sherry, and cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and lemon juice. Slowly, very slowly cooked meat that became succulent and tender, and a berry sauce that held spices with a suggestion of wild, exotic mystery.
This meal has brought several metaphorical pictures to where I am, how it must be embraced and given me some new thoughts on the “cookbook”. A wise woman said that when we are in a place of needing to store energy we often crave food cooked slowly. I cannot rush this part of my life – it deserves to be honored by embracing it. Moments of sweetness, like this exotic sauce, invite me to continue exploring the mystery while giving myself permission to enjoy their surprising presence.
I have not yet defined why food that I can eat with my hands is important. Although often in places of depression our senses will shut down. We withdraw and shut ourselves/our heart off from touch and in some way this reminds me to be intentional in my awareness of how every sense is responding in this particular place.
The cookbook piece of this particular journey clearly shows that in order to combine others stories with recipes, it must begin with my own story. I am working at the connection of what foods I am asking for, what the ingredients of sacred and how I can step more deeply into culinary ministry. Maybe, as my friend Angie said, it is time to embrace the marinating process! I would really like to ask the Maestro what is cooking though!!
Some time ago I began working on a cookbook, compiling a few recipes, outlining ideas for the theme of it and then the project became too tedious and I set it aside. There was disappointment for me because somehow by doing nothing I felt guilt and loss.
Earlier this year I slipped into a depression and felt overwhelmed and totally drained of energy for life and for the first time in my life actually admitted that was where I was and asked for medical help. Yet at no time have I felt God being absent – in fact I often hear the Spirit remind me that this is a place to embrace, to face, not to walk around or away from, but look it in the face and embrace it. That takes energy, which is not in abundant supply for me at present. So I began asking myself the question “what food could be prepared and served to you that would reflect how you feel?” The answer is unquestionably slow cooked food and dishes that require using my hands to eat. Why? What does that satisfy, or pacify inside of me?
Fast food is often eaten with our hands yet it lacks nutrition and doesn’t beckon us to the sacred place of lingering at table. In fact the only sense really involved in fast food is touch – what is that about? We just eat and run. Like a peck on the cheek from someone who is pretending to love you!
Slowly cooked food demands preparation and time in order to give you the most savoury gifts it holds. In my two summers lingering on the Amalfi Coast, my friend Anna-Maria would get squid at 8AM when the fisherman pulled his boat ashore, clean it, cut it and along with garlic and lemon, simmer it all morning in tomato sauce. Under the shade of the bougainvilleas, with the serenading of the cicadas, we feasted on spaghetti with this exquisite sauce, mopping up the leftover liquid with freshly purchased baguette.
Last weekend I was preparing dinner for 26 people who had arrived for weekend of art, music, sculpting and writing. They were exploring creative gifts so I decided to create something new and unusual for dinner. Pork shoulder was on sale at the market for an excellent price: cheaper meat that I believed could have a most delicious taste if basted and cooked slowly so flavours mingled, tenderized and tantalized us as it cooked. The meat was brushed with Dijon mustard, honey and garlic, sprinkled with salt and white pepper and placed in the roaster. Fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden was liberally placed on top of the meat. A small amount of chicken broth and sherry were added before it was covered and placed in the oven at 175 degrees. After cooking for 24 hours, and sending the most tantalizing aroma through the house, it was sliced and served with blackberry sauce. The sauce was a combination of berries in a syrup, sherry, and cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and lemon juice. Slowly, very slowly cooked meat that became succulent and tender, and a berry sauce that held spices with a suggestion of wild, exotic mystery.
This meal has brought several metaphorical pictures to where I am, how it must be embraced and given me some new thoughts on the “cookbook”. A wise woman said that when we are in a place of needing to store energy we often crave food cooked slowly. I cannot rush this part of my life – it deserves to be honored by embracing it. Moments of sweetness, like this exotic sauce, invite me to continue exploring the mystery while giving myself permission to enjoy their surprising presence.
I have not yet defined why food that I can eat with my hands is important. Although often in places of depression our senses will shut down. We withdraw and shut ourselves/our heart off from touch and in some way this reminds me to be intentional in my awareness of how every sense is responding in this particular place.
The cookbook piece of this particular journey clearly shows that in order to combine others stories with recipes, it must begin with my own story. I am working at the connection of what foods I am asking for, what the ingredients of sacred and how I can step more deeply into culinary ministry. Maybe, as my friend Angie said, it is time to embrace the marinating process! I would really like to ask the Maestro what is cooking though!!
Sunday, May 14, 2006
HIV in Russia
Russia has an exponentially growing epidemic of HIV/AIDS. As in Africa, the diagnosis leaves one a social outcast. Women are denied medical attention if they are HIV positive when Doctors simply reject them.
Now there is a whole generation growing up the mirrors the orphanages of Romania that we have heard so much about. Children who remain in one room most of their lives and some never even experience the outdoors. They are the rejected and abandoned children of HIV/AIDS mothers that Russia still cannot embrace or offer affection to. The following link from the BBC News on Russia's abandoned children is heartbreaking.
Fear makes is so difficult for us to love.
Now there is a whole generation growing up the mirrors the orphanages of Romania that we have heard so much about. Children who remain in one room most of their lives and some never even experience the outdoors. They are the rejected and abandoned children of HIV/AIDS mothers that Russia still cannot embrace or offer affection to. The following link from the BBC News on Russia's abandoned children is heartbreaking.
Fear makes is so difficult for us to love.
Monday, May 08, 2006
More Gender Question Considerations
In my previous article “Weight and Gender” I had wanted to write from an honest perspective that was not weighted with contempt. There are so many questions on this journey, many that will probably take a lifetime of searching. One of those is the huge issue of patriarchy and gender within the Church that both women and men have been deeply affected by. Wounds run deep, theological views are entrenched and yet if my heart is open I can learn from the differences. Yet that wounding also leaves scars that carry contempt, disappointment, disillusion and silence.
In some reading this week I have come across a number of quotes by Paul Smith that have held a powerful impact for me:
The war on women is not a war of men against women. We naively assume that this war has been declared by and caused by men. That’s the big lie! This war is being fought against both sexes, against all of us. Men are not the author of this war, Satan is. This cause of the war on women is Satan, who uses the fallen powers and principalities of this world to keep us in oppressive traditions and structures. Jesus has taught us to know that the enemy is always the Enemy! Pg 106/107
Both man and woman participated in the Fall. Adam and Eve were both responsible (Gen 3:6; Rom 5:15-21; 1 Cor 15:21-22). A direct result of the Fall, gender mutuality was disrupted and woman became dependent on man and man became an authority over women. Sin, not God, destroyed the partnership between man and woman. Patriarchy is worshipping the curse. Pg 109
Calling Patriarchy God’s will is like calling pornography God’s will. The analogy between patriarchy and pornography is quite fitting because the two are very similar in their effects. Pornography objectifies persons by turning them into property to be owned, demeans the feminine, trivializes sexuality, and perpetuates violence toward women. This is precisely what patriarchy does. Patriarchy treats women as objects, demeans and trivializes them, and provides a subtle theological framework for the right to abuse women. Calling patriarchy God’s will is theological pornography! pg 114
All quotes from Is it Okay to Call God Mother? Considering the Feminine Face of God
By Paul R. Smith
How does the church begin to change? How do I begin to change? How do I influence others around me? All I know right now is that I want change, I want to be an agent of change and only waiting in Holy Presence, continuing to ask and listen and be willing to sit in that tension zone, can I find truth as I sift through it all.
In some reading this week I have come across a number of quotes by Paul Smith that have held a powerful impact for me:
The war on women is not a war of men against women. We naively assume that this war has been declared by and caused by men. That’s the big lie! This war is being fought against both sexes, against all of us. Men are not the author of this war, Satan is. This cause of the war on women is Satan, who uses the fallen powers and principalities of this world to keep us in oppressive traditions and structures. Jesus has taught us to know that the enemy is always the Enemy! Pg 106/107
Both man and woman participated in the Fall. Adam and Eve were both responsible (Gen 3:6; Rom 5:15-21; 1 Cor 15:21-22). A direct result of the Fall, gender mutuality was disrupted and woman became dependent on man and man became an authority over women. Sin, not God, destroyed the partnership between man and woman. Patriarchy is worshipping the curse. Pg 109
Calling Patriarchy God’s will is like calling pornography God’s will. The analogy between patriarchy and pornography is quite fitting because the two are very similar in their effects. Pornography objectifies persons by turning them into property to be owned, demeans the feminine, trivializes sexuality, and perpetuates violence toward women. This is precisely what patriarchy does. Patriarchy treats women as objects, demeans and trivializes them, and provides a subtle theological framework for the right to abuse women. Calling patriarchy God’s will is theological pornography! pg 114
All quotes from Is it Okay to Call God Mother? Considering the Feminine Face of God
By Paul R. Smith
How does the church begin to change? How do I begin to change? How do I influence others around me? All I know right now is that I want change, I want to be an agent of change and only waiting in Holy Presence, continuing to ask and listen and be willing to sit in that tension zone, can I find truth as I sift through it all.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Weight and Gender
The new Dove campaign is powerful and something to be applauded – an advertising campaign specifically targeted at suggesting women are beautiful as they are. I love the add. For many years I have so hated my own size and body shape. And many women, no matter their spiritual outlook, have wrestled for much of their life with this question of am I too fat or too thin? I laugh every time I see the Jenny Craig commercial with Kirsty Alley and I wonder if I too should be on a diet. Do I need to diet? What about healthier eating? What does my heart really ask for by wanting to be thinner, or more shapely? And where does the question really come from?
Obviously this is a subject that is being discussed at great length these days. And depending on the culture you dwell in, your perspective will be different.
I picked up a book my friend was reading that was written in 1989. It is called Trusting Ourselves (The Sourcebook on Psychology for Women), and while it is 17 years old, the following article on weight has merit.
"How have contemporary American women become so obsessed with controlling their weight? Current efforts to “make women smaller” may be a backlash against the women’s movement. Some theorists have even suggested that the mass semi-starvation of women is the modern equivalent of ‘foot-binding, lip-stretching, and other forms of female mutilation’.
But body size and shape are not altered as easily as hemlines. Asking women to adjust, rearrange, and accommodate to a new standard of attractiveness every decade or so ties up energy and time that could go elsewhere.
The fear of fat robs women of self-esteem and pride, keeps them preoccupied with their appearance, and, perhaps most disturbingly, keeps them from taking up ‘too much space in the world. It is OK for a man to be big. A man has to actually be fat to suffer from fatness. A woman only has to be a woman." Pg 369
Yet reading this through several times today I have realized this is connected more deeply to hierarchical and patriarchal thinking that has deeply scarred men and women – the need to control others in order to gain power over them.
The Dove campaign came after the mostly male executive were shown interviews with their own daughters who really hated how they looked and suffered from low self-esteem. Only then could they be sold on the fact that this campaign was essential.
How much have we women been told, or silently heard loud and clear, that our weight or body shape was not desirable to men. I am sure there are men on the other side who have felt they were not desirable to women either – I am not ignoring that side of the equation. But what I really see here is that the message to be thin and attractive is not about being who you are but about trying to become someone that will attractive to the opposite sex. Then how your life can be molded by them or for them. And the message is just as clear in the church as out of it!
For me this issue of weight has many facets to it but one of them is that it is definitely tied to the gender issue, of controlling how we are to look or act, instead of learning to love ourselves as Jesus specifically asked us to and become those who love our neighbour because of that.
I would love to hear what others think of this thought.
Obviously this is a subject that is being discussed at great length these days. And depending on the culture you dwell in, your perspective will be different.
I picked up a book my friend was reading that was written in 1989. It is called Trusting Ourselves (The Sourcebook on Psychology for Women), and while it is 17 years old, the following article on weight has merit.
"How have contemporary American women become so obsessed with controlling their weight? Current efforts to “make women smaller” may be a backlash against the women’s movement. Some theorists have even suggested that the mass semi-starvation of women is the modern equivalent of ‘foot-binding, lip-stretching, and other forms of female mutilation’.
But body size and shape are not altered as easily as hemlines. Asking women to adjust, rearrange, and accommodate to a new standard of attractiveness every decade or so ties up energy and time that could go elsewhere.
The fear of fat robs women of self-esteem and pride, keeps them preoccupied with their appearance, and, perhaps most disturbingly, keeps them from taking up ‘too much space in the world. It is OK for a man to be big. A man has to actually be fat to suffer from fatness. A woman only has to be a woman." Pg 369
Yet reading this through several times today I have realized this is connected more deeply to hierarchical and patriarchal thinking that has deeply scarred men and women – the need to control others in order to gain power over them.
The Dove campaign came after the mostly male executive were shown interviews with their own daughters who really hated how they looked and suffered from low self-esteem. Only then could they be sold on the fact that this campaign was essential.
How much have we women been told, or silently heard loud and clear, that our weight or body shape was not desirable to men. I am sure there are men on the other side who have felt they were not desirable to women either – I am not ignoring that side of the equation. But what I really see here is that the message to be thin and attractive is not about being who you are but about trying to become someone that will attractive to the opposite sex. Then how your life can be molded by them or for them. And the message is just as clear in the church as out of it!
For me this issue of weight has many facets to it but one of them is that it is definitely tied to the gender issue, of controlling how we are to look or act, instead of learning to love ourselves as Jesus specifically asked us to and become those who love our neighbour because of that.
I would love to hear what others think of this thought.
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