Smuggling Grace

Text Reads:

You are loved as you are.

You’re
worth it.
fabulous.

Not when you,
Not if you.

You, right now,
Loved presently,
Loved thoroughly,
Loved wholeheartedly.

Worth it.

Fabulous.

–Renee Roederer

Image Description: Candles from Compline. Three lit candles are on top of a table. Two of the candles are blue, and the other is white. There is also a blue and white plate and small, flat, ceramic piece with a painting of a yellow and orange flower.

“Who brings out the best you?”

My friend and colleague asked that question last night when we were gathered with students at Compline. “Who has shaped you deeply — not necessarily in ways that made you like them — but in ways that made you more like you?”

We each had the occasion to reflect on that and share if we wish. I have some people in my life for whom my answer is immediate and obvious. They have given me this kind of gift in abundance, and I was grateful for the occasion to share about them.

So I bring those questions to you today also:

Who brings out the best in you? Who has shaped you deeply — not necessarily in ways that made you more like them — but in ways that made you more like you?

In the midst of our conversation, my friend and colleague also lifted up a passage from C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce. I’ve never read that book before, so this was unknown to me. While receiving a glimpse of heaven with a guide, a man sees a person he’s never encountered before.

“Is it? … is it?” I whispered to my guide.

“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golden Green.”

“She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance?”

“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”

“And who are these gigantic people… look! They’re like emeralds… who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?”

“Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”

“And who are all these young men and women on each side?”

“They are her sons and daughters.”

“She must have had a very large family, Sir.”

“Every young man or boy that met her became her son — even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to the back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”

“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”

“No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”

“And how… but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat — two cats — dozens of cats. And all those dogs… why I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”

“They are her beasts.”

“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”

I looked at my Teacher in amazement.

“Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, and it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all of the dead things of the universe into life.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

The Unknown Sarah Smith.

Who brings out the best in you? Who has shaped you deeply — not necessarily in ways that made you more like them — but in ways that made you more like you?

—Renee Roederer

 

Image Description: Six speech bubbles on a blue background. Public domain image.

Michigan Nones and Dones is a community that has been meeting in Southeast Michigan for the last four years in coffee shops, restaurants, parks, and homes to talk about spirituality and make meaning together as friends. This community includes people who are religiously unaffiliated (Nones), people who identify with a faith tradition but have departed from traditional, institutional religious communities (Dones), and people who remain connected to faith communities to some degree but find themselves curious about new ways to form and structure community.

We often say that Michigan Nones and Dones is a community for people who are “spiritually curious but institutionally suspicious.” It’s amazing how people with many various backgrounds and perspectives can gather together under the umbrella of that description. The community includes,

-people who are agnostic and interested in spirituality and forming friendships of meaning (i.e. by this, I mean talking about life — gifts, challenges, what’s going on in the world, things that matter)

-de-affiliated Christians — folks who identify as Christian, but feel disappointed in and/or ostracized by traditional churches, or who have perhaps been excluded by churches,

-people who are atheists who want to uplift the morality of humanism,

-people who might call themselves inter-spiritual, as they grew up with more than one faith tradition,

-people who say, “I’m secular,” or “spiritual but not religious,”

-people who are religiously unaffiliated and unsure about particular, theological beliefs, but who say, “I believe in a Higher Power of some kind,”

-people who say, “I don’t like labels. I just want to have good conversation,”

-people who are connected with traditional faith communities but frustrated with unethical behavior they see happening there, longing for a better vision,

-people who practice spiritual traditions that might fall under the umbrella of mysticism.

Michigan Nones and Dones is first and foremost a community, but I realize it is also an incredible platform for conversation. How rare is it to sit around a table with all of these backgrounds, find some commonality of experience, and uplift different perspectives in ways that enrich all those who are gathered together? We all learn from one another.

It is a wonderful gift to share conversation together. These relationships matter as people are welcomed and heard, invited to share insights, and brought into friendships they might not have made otherwise.

I am grateful, grateful.

Here is a story about us in the Toledo Blade newspaper: ‘Nones and Dones’ help conflicted reconnect to their spiritual side

You can follow Michigan Nones and Dones here on Facebook.

–Renee Roederer

Image Description: The earth and the moon. Public domain image.

These days, it’s so important to give and receive gentleness from one another.

Gentleness is a consistent human need, but right now, we may need it in a particularly deep and present way. Our world seems to be reeling from waves of trauma. When we hold awareness of traumatic pain, whether we’ve experienced it directly or felt it via the news cycle, our bodies, minds, and spirits can be deeply affected.

Waves of trauma in our world are not new, of course, but right now, we are especially aware of injustices and forms of insecurity – white supremacy, economic inequality, numerous natural disasters, deportations and family separations, and violence on a massive scale. To be aware of these things is not merely to know about them but to be affected by them.

We need action – decisive, creative, and disruptive action to adequately address and rectify all of these.

And alongside that action, we also need gentleness.

Our bodies need it, our minds need it, our emotions need it, our sense of spiritual longing needs it.

And perhaps, our sense of time needs it too. Here is a paradoxical thing I have learned over the years about trauma:

Trauma often distorts time. This is especially true in a post-traumatic experience. A small detail in the present moment can suddenly pull us back into the past, making it feel as though a past upheaval is happening right now. Likewise, a small detail in the present moment can suddenly ignite anxiety, causing a tailspin of fear in which we imagine a future where the upheaval might repeat itself. In these ways, trauma can bookend the present moment with a past and future that feel quite painful and insecure.

But with gentleness,

Trauma also opens up time. This is a pretty miraculous thing. There is also concept called post-traumatic growth. (Watch this video). Some people who experience the upheaval of trauma are able to remake their lives and live them more deeply, often with a greater sense of love and spiritual meaning than they might have had before. This is in no way to suggest that the trauma is somehow a good thing or a blessing in disguise. Certainly not. But post-traumatic growth can happen alongside the traumatic distortion. When it comes to a sense of time, there can actually be a bit of reversal of what I’ve articulated above. Good memories and meaningful relationships can be internalized in such a way that they are felt as deeply present. Beloved people and life-giving moments from the past and hopes for the future can feel more accessible in the present moment among people who have experienced post-traumatic growth.

So what helps people experience this kind of growth? Two things are very important:

1) being surrounded by a community of care with relationships that add gentleness and sustaining presence

and

2) becoming enabled to make meaning of the traumatic experience, while learning to create a new narrative with that meaning.

So these days, in this time we’re living, I wonder,

Can our world collectively experience post-traumatic growth? Can this be a collective awakening toward deeper love and greater meaning?

Those questions are not easily answered, so they linger.

But I know this: Gentleness will be important.

—Renee Roederer

Image Description: Two people, standing side by side, are intertwining their hands to make them into a shape of a heart.

This is a repost from a piece published here on September 12, 2018.

“But why doesn’t God have arms? I just… I wish God had arms.”

That’s what I lamented as we drove through the Texas Hill Country. The scenery was lush with long, green grasses, wildflowers, a creek, and pastures with longhorn steers. But I wasn’t noticing any of that beauty.

At age 26, I sat in the back of a Volvo and felt devastated about David’s cancer. Like a slow moving storm, I was experiencing the kind of lament that hovered over anger and despair in the five stages of grief, not moving much lately, just churning and pouring it all down.

It was all anticipatory grief. David was still with us and was his typical self too — funny, endearingly irreverent, curious, committed; still voraciously reading, still reassuring and loving of me. He was, in fact, concerned lately about how much pain I was feeling in all of this. The anticipatory grief of this particular, impending loss was enormous on its own, but along with it, this seemed to pull up previous losses I had not fully grappled with before. The cumulative grief demanded to be felt.

So feeling invited to do so, I sat in the back of Ben’s Volvo and lamented. I wanted to be comforted in all of this, and God was supposed to be this cosmic force of ultimate love in the world, right? But… was God just… a neglectful parent? Another example of this gnawing absence I was feeling? I mean, what good is a God that has no arms?

Maybe in some ways, that was a silly detail to fixate upon, but fixate I did. Yet in its own way, it was an apt fixation. When grieving like that, who doesn’t want to be held? Not metaphorically — which was my point — but actually held?

The Volvo arrived at Mo Ranch, a Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center in Hunt, Texas. We were there for College Connection, a week long event that in involved play, worship, shared meals, and reflection among college students. I was there to be a volunteer leader, assisting in worship and facilitating a small group.

Though I had not met him before, the keynoter for the week was a very beloved speaker in Presbyterian circles, well known for his work in youth ministry as a pastor and now, as a seminary professor. I heard him speak throughout the week and experienced him to be engaging, deep, funny, joyful, and inviting.

For most of the conference, I put on a face in public and pushed through my own leadership commitments. But privately, I felt miserable. Why doesn’t God have arms?

I just kept lamenting that, which was of course, a symbol for everything I was feeling. Then before the last worship service, I let myself voice that aloud once more.

The keynoter had become a friend during the week, and before that last service, we sat outside the hall, waiting for it to be unlocked so we could set up the space. With time then to spare, he asked me how the week had been for me. So I told him the truth. I talked about David, how much he meant to me, and what a gift he was in my life. I talked about cancer and the devastation of impending loss. I voiced the whirlwind of my feelings, and then, I eventually said it again:

“But why doesn’t God have arms? I just… I wish God had arms.”

The keynoter heard me meaningfully. And somehow, that conversation allowed me to enter that worship space with more vulnerability. This was a healing and wholeness service after all, and I let my public, putting-on-of-a-face fade.

I had a small role in that service. We had a time of anointing one another, placing a bit of oil on the foreheads of those who requested it with prayer. I participated in that. But when I was finished, I walked to the back of the hall and just sat in a chair totally dejected.

My eyes were closed with tears falling down my cheeks, so I didn’t really see this coming. But when he was finished with his part, seeing my sadness, the keynoter came to the back with me. I didn’t see him walk there. I only… felt his arms.

He absolutely bear hugged me. And I just melted into him.

I let the sadness be there, really and truly. But then I smiled. I already knew what he was doing before he said anything aloud.

But soon after he started to embrace me, he voiced it it. With great presence, he said,

“God does have arms.”

–Renee Roederer

Image Description: A candle is burning in a glass holder.

Yes!!! to this prayer, crafted by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, based on the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Nain (Luke 7:11-17). She published this in her post, I’m Dabbling in Compassion, which I highly recommend.

God of compassion,

As you did in Nain, enter our city gates. Enter into the somber roads down which our hearses drive and the glad streets down which our children run. Enter the parks where the junkies shoot up and the yuppies listen to jazz. Walk uninvited into starter mansions and public housing and dorms and cheap motel rooms that charge by the hour. Stroll into the cool-air freezer section where the pregnant women escape the heat and the bus stop benches where the weary wait. Enter every law office and adult books store. Step into the spaces we say we feel your awesomeness and the places where we claim your forsakenness. Enter our city gates, God of Compassion as you did the city of Nain. And bless.

Bless the things we mistakenly think are already dead. Bless that which we have already begun to carry out of town to bury. Bless our rocky marriages and our college age kids who smoke too much pot. Bless the person at work who we love to hate. Bless the young adult who wonders if they are too young to really be an alcoholic, and bless the 6o year old woman who’s had too much work done. Bless the public school lunch ladies and the guy who stole my kid’s bike. Bless the chronically sick. Bless the one who has no one. Bless what we call insignificant and which you call magnificent. Bless it all and love what only you can love: the ugly, and abandoned and unsanitary in the wash of humanity upon which you have nothing but a gleaming compassion when we have none.

God of Compassion who saw the Widow of Nain, we thank you for seeing us. Seeing our loneliness and our bravery. Seeing the times we can’t say what we need to. Seeing the ones who have never felt like they are enough but who you know already are and always have been. Seeing the moments when we are more than we thought we could be. Seeing what no one else can or will. Thank you for seeing as beautiful what we call ugly and that in your compassion you wipe away all tears. Teach us to see each other.

Reach out and raise us God of compassion. Touch us as you did the wood on which the widow’s son lay and speak those same words to us: Young man arise. Little girl, get up. To we who think we are not worthy to be loved and medicate ourselves with food and booze and shopping, say “rise up”. To us who have been hurt by those who say they follow you say “rise up”. To those who feel unworthy of forgiveness say “rise up”. To the ones who care for the least of these and who feel too burnt out to keep going, say “rise up”. To we who are holding onto resentments like a security blanket say “rise up”. To those who hide their failings behind their good works say “rise up”. To the unloved child who has no idea that one day they will change the world say “rise up”.

And when again God of Compassion, you have raised the dead…when again you have made whole that which is broken, when again you have ripped out my heart of stone and replaced it with a heart of flesh, when again you have reached into the graves we dig ourselves and loved us back to life…don’t stop there. Help us, Lord. Like the young man of Nain help us to sit up and speak. Give us words that are not empty affirmation, but give us strong words, as real as the very soil from which you raised us.

Give us the words lord, but also (especially in my case) give us the pause before the words. Please.

And then, as you did the son to his mother, give us one to another. Make us one in this fractured world. Our country is divided, neighbor against neighbor, world-view against world-view and we are so sure we are right and they are wrong. It’s a mess down here, Lord, and we’ve prayed that whole “Thy kingdom come” line a LOT already so we might stop asking nicely. We need your Kingdom of love and grace and mercy to speed the hell up. And if that’s not possible then open our eyes to where your kingdom already is taking root and growing among us, turn our eyes from our despair to any amount of light which is spreading, however small.

And help us to know when we do not have enough compassion for the road ahead, that you do, and that that is enough.

AMEN.

-Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber

Earlier this week, while scrolling through Instagram, I saw a post by @_the_open_space, that I found to be real, raw, beautiful, and inviting all at once. May connection be fullness for us, even if it’s just one, initial, small, honest step in a direction. That step and that direction could open up a larger process toward healing.

Here’s the post:

The text reads:

I will consider isolating when I feel overwhelmed by my inner & outer worlds.

I will sense myself folding inward & swallowing my feelings into some wide, open void of emptiness.

It will hurt on more levels that I can even comprehend or express.

I will yearn for the familiarity of numbness to ease both the original overwhelm & the sorrow of resolving my pain in this way.

I will consider writing this all down & sharing it with you.

And when I do, isolation be damned.

This week, I’ve started a Patreon campaign. If you’d like to participate in supporting my writing and my community work, you can check that out at my Patreon Page.

Image Description: A cartoon drawing of a pill — one half is pink, and the other half is light blue with stars, triangles, and circles of different colors. There’s a banner written in purple that says, “It’s ok if you need meds every day.” I found this image on Instagram, shared by @thesocialchanger. There’s a small print signature in the image which reads, “Starstar Party.”

As the image above says, let it ring true:
It’s ok if you need meds every day.

But seriously. Let it ring true:
It’s ok if you need meds every day.

Whatever they are and for whatever need they address, there is no shame in taking these meds, nor is there any shame in having these needs.

And if it helps, I’ll make it more personal. Just as the title says pretty clearly, mental health meds have changed my life. And this is no exaggeration. I requested a particular prescription about six months ago, received it, and my whole body has moved toward greater health.

Though it had been years since I’d taken this medication, this not the first time I had done so (that’s why I requested it by name). But this was probably the biggest physical shift I’ve ever felt upon making the decision to take it. And it was almost immediate.

I’ve written on this blog before about my journey with C-PTSD. This is a mental illness, so if you were to get out your handy, dandy DSM-5 (who am I kidding… most of us would do a Google search) you’d see a list of symptoms. In years past, I’ve dealt with most of these. They were most pronounced for me in my mid-20s.

At this stage of my life, my experience has mostly been physical. I could frame my experience through the lens of diagnosis, or I could frame it through the lens of story. Both are true. Through a lot of trauma, my nervous system has endured quite a bit, and I’ve had to take a lot of care with it for more than a decade. I’ve experienced a great deal of healing in this regard, but there have still been some big vulnerabilities. Since the nervous system governs the whole body, I found myself having many physical reactions to stress in my mid to late 30s. When life became even moderately stressful, I would lose a great deal sleep (never good) and I would experience a lot of stress-initiated illness too.

And… what a shift… After I started taking meds, I began sleeping through the night every single night. Sleep is the single most difficult physical challenge I’ve had — and by the way, for years — so this massive change feels nothing short of miraculous to me. And those big, physical reactions to stress stopped happening in the ways they had before.

Major shift.

As the image above says, let it ring true:
It’s ok if you need meds every day.

I wish I would have made this decision about two years ago. I’m glad I’ve done it now.

I’m doing other things too:
-Therapy,
-Eating well,
-Moving in helpful ways (I started running in the fall, and I’ve run 75 miles!)
and as I always value,
-Engaging and appreciating community connections.

But goodness, these meds have made a shift.

So let me say this clearly:

If you are taking meds, for whatever reason or for whatever need, or
If you think that might help you, for whatever reason or for whatever need,
including mental health,
there should be no shame or stigma in doing so.

And it’s okay to talk about these things too.

This experience has brought me to greater health and fullness of life. And I’m proud to talk about it.

—Renee Roederer

This week, I’ve started a Patreon campaign. If you’d like to participate in supporting my writing and my community work, you can check that out at my Patreon Page.

 

Image Description: A light blue house with white trim on a hill. The sky is gray and dark. The photo is taken at an angle which makes the house look askew.

More than a decade ago, I stood outside in a parking lot on a dark, October evening with a number of college students. I want to imagine that we were cold while we waited in line, but who am I kidding? This was Texas. Still warm enough, I think we were certainly intrigued and maybe a little nervous while we waited.

We had decided to go to a Hell House. This was becoming a bit of a phenomenon. Some churches were mashing up the genre of a haunted house with the fundamentalist theology of hell. Onlookers were invited to walk through the rooms where they would see dramatized versions of people committing terrible sins and then… they would end up in hell. (By the way, there was no nuance of complexity in the life situations, and I also don’t consider some of these things to be sin). We would also walk by their hellish fate and see that they were tormented for all of eternity. The clear message was, you don’t want to end up like them, do you? 

This tour concluded with a room where members of the church were present to pray the sinner’s prayer with you so you would spend your eternity in heaven instead of hell.

We did not stay for that part. We ended up at this Hell House because we watched a documentary together with the same name, and we were curious to see it in action. We processed before and afterward. We were also from a church community, but we had a different view of this.

Last week, I read an interesting article in the New York Times by David Bently Hart entitled, Opinion: Why Do People Believe in Hell?  He writes,

No truly accomplished New Testament scholar, for instance, believes that later Christianity’s opulent mythology of God’s eternal torture chamber is clearly present in the scriptural texts. It’s entirely absent from St. Paul’s writings; the only eschatological fire he ever mentions brings salvation to those whom it tries (1 Corinthians 3:15). Neither is it found in the other New Testament epistles, or in any extant documents (like the Didache) from the earliest post-apostolic period. There are a few terrible, surreal, allegorical images of judgment in the Book of Revelation, but nothing that, properly read, yields a clear doctrine of eternal torment. Even the frightening language used by Jesus in the Gospels, when read in the original Greek, fails to deliver the infernal dogmas we casually assume to be there.

On the other hand, many New Testament passages seem — and not metaphorically — to promise the eventual salvation of everyone. For example: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” (Romans 5:18) Or: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22) Or: “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:2) (Or: John 13:32; Romans 11:32; 1 Timothy 2:3-6; 4:10; Titus 2:11; and others.)

Hart believes that the concept of hell is psychologically alluring. (It’s for others, of course.)

I also think of my late friend and colleague, the Rev. Keith Wright, who wrote a book entitled, The Hell Jesus Never Intended. He looks at the Bible exegetically and also raises questions ethically. The concept of hell, as it was interpreted in that Hell House, isn’t found clearly in the Biblical texts as some would like to believe.

This is all on my mind because the Revised Common Lectionary, a calendar of Biblical texts to be read in worship, will soon include the section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus speaks about adultery, lust, and anger and says things like, “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.”

Only in the Greek text, he says more literally, “It is better to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into Gehenna.”

Gehenna was a forever burning trash heap on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom. It’s this-earthly. And it makes me wonder…

If anything is consistent and eternal, perhaps it’s those. I’m going to keep pondering these things this week…

–Renee Roederer

This week, I’ve started a Patreon campaign. If you’d like to participate in supporting my writing and my community work, you can check that out at my Patreon Page.

Image Description: Purple jacaranda trees are in bloom, lining both sides of a street in Pasadena, California.

Hello, Dear Friends!

I want to thank you for helping me to create and share reflection pieces, storytelling, and poetry on my personal website Smuggling Grace (www.reneeroederer.com), Facebook, and Instagram. It gives me great joy to share these pieces, and I hope they add encouragement to you. I’m also grateful for the ways people continue to add their own words and experiences to the conversations these pieces cultivate. Thank you!

I’ve decided to start a Patreon account for my writing and blogging. My writing will always remain free and accessible, but if you’d like to support me in this work, it helps fuel my community work too.