Daily Bread

Here's today's homily.  The Gospel is Matthew 15:21-28.

*

Today’s Gospel is one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and the Canaanite woman is one of my favorite characters in Scripture. She is alone and despised, an outcast, a mother desperate to find healing for her sick child. She is the kind of person we expect Jesus to embrace and include, but when he doesn’t, she thinks on her feet and challenges his rejection of her, his cruelty. She is the only person in the Gospels who wins an argument with Jesus. She proves that people can sometimes teach God a lesson.  

Jesus is tired, overwhelmed. Fully human, he needs a vacation. He has told his disciples, just as he tells this nameless woman, that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. The frantic mother isn’t the right nationality. She’s from the wrong place. She doesn’t look like him. Her child isn’t one of his children. And so he tries to dismiss her. “It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

Fully divine, Jesus snaps to. He admits that he was wrong. He blesses the mother and heals the child. From now on, his ministry will be much more inclusive. This moment marks a change in how he sees both himself and the people he has come to save.

The lesson this nameless woman teaches God has been articulated more recently by a man named Paul Farmer, an American doctor who  does remarkable work in Haiti, and elsewhere in the world, treating the poorest of the poor. Paul Farmer has written, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” That could come from the Bible, couldn’t it? It sounds like something Jesus might say. It sounds like things Jesus did say, but only after his encounter with the Canaanite woman. All lives matter.

God has learned that lesson, but the world still hasn’t gotten the message. The news this week has been particularly grim and despairing. Stories from Gaza and Missouri, from the Mexican border and from a private home in Tiburon, California, all attest to how easily we fall into believing that some lives matter less. Whether the lives we dismiss are our own or other people’s, the root tragedy is our failure to cherish all of God’s beloved creation. We are all God’s children, whatever the nationality or economic status or skin color of our human parents.

The Canaanite woman taught Jesus this lesson millenia ago. Why haven’t we learned it yet? What will it take to get it through our thick skulls and into our hardened hearts?

I don’t have an answer, but I do have an observation. The story of the Canaanite woman occurs in both Matthew, where we heard it today, and in Mark. In both Gospels, it is preceded by the famous story of the feeding of the five thousand. And in both Gospels, it’s followed by a lesser-known miracle, the feeding of the four thousand. Once again, Jesus is faced with a huge hungry crowd. Once again, the disciples panic at their lack of supplies. Once again, Jesus commands them to feed the crowd anyway, and once again, a few measly fish and some crumbs of bread stretch to feed the multitude.  

I’ve read various commentaries on this curious repetition. Some scholars believe that the same miracle is being described twice. Others point out that the differing details -- the numbers of people and fish, the amount of bread -- suggest two discrete events. I think we’re being taught a lesson:  namely, that humans have to learn the same lessons over and over again, and that they have to be fed over and over again.  We can’t eat just once.  That’s why we take Communion, our food for the journey, every week. That’s why we pray to receive our daily bread, the crumbs we need to keep going.

A feminist Catholic scholar named Megan McKenna has pointed out that in all four feeding stories, the two in Mark and the two in Matthew, we’re told that the crowd numbered however many thousands, “not including women and children.” She points out that women with children are usually carrying diaper bags with snacks. She suggests that those measly fish and crumbs stretched so far because the crowd shared what it had, because mothers shared their own children’s food with other people’s children.  

If you share with strangers, even if you’re afraid there isn’t enough, you’ll discover that there is. The feeding miracles teach us that; so does the story of the Canaanite woman. God’s healing grace doesn’t need to be rationed. There’s enough to go around.  

But we need to be reminded of this, sometimes every day. And sometimes the people who do the reminding need to be persistent, even unpleasant, because that’s the only way to get the attention of the people controlling those crumbs. The Canaanite woman runs after Jesus. Yelling, she chases him down in the street. She’s so noisy and annoying that the disciples tell Jesus to send her away, but if she weren’t that noisy and annoying, Jesus would have kept ignoring her, and her daughter wouldn’t have been healed. The Canaanite woman challenges the notion that only men are entitled to public space, public speech, public advocacy. Among other things, she’s a model of feminist activism.

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, the heyday of feminism, when women in the United States were marching and burning bras and publishing manifestos about how their lives mattered as much as those of men. My stepmother was annoyed by these women. She thought they were obnoxious. My father said, “They have to be.  That’s how you get things done.  The leaders of revolutions can’t afford to worry about manners.”

That was in the seventies. In 2004, I took a summer course in the Gospels at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. Our teacher, a Lutheran, was a famous Gospel scholar who believed that his ideas mattered far more than those of his students. The class met for four hours a day. The teacher lectured for four hours straight. Students weren’t allowed to speak. If we raised our hands, he ignored us. Finally, a small group of us -- both women and men -- started calling out our own ideas, ignoring the fact that he was ignoring us.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I was one of the noisy ones.

One day he lectured about the Canaanite woman, about the two different versions of the story in Mark and Matthew. In Mark, the woman’s less noisy and annoying, more polite. Our teacher said that her abrasive behavior in Matthew is a lesson about how gracious and loving Jesus was to pay attention to her even though she was so unpleasant and persistent, so rude. 

After class, I went up to the teacher and said, “Her daughter was sick. Come on:  how could anyone blame a frantic mother for trying to get healing for her child? Of course she did whatever it took to get Jesus’ attention!”

The teacher looked at me. He sneered. He said, “Well, Susan, I’m sure you don’t have trouble with obnoxious women.”

He may have been an expert in the Gospels, but he missed the point of this passage.

The point is that we need to be persistent, sometimes even obnoxious, in insisting that everyone matters. We need to be persistent in our faith that there is enough to go around, that even crumbs will multiply to feed multitudes. We need to be persistent in insisting that all of God’s children deserve a place at the table and a generous portion of daily bread.

Amen.

Joanna Russ

I was sad to learn -- somewhat after the fact -- that renowned science-fiction author and critic Joanna Russ died at the end of April. She was a wonderful and vastly important writer, and it's a huge loss to the field and to her many friends.

I've taught various of Joanna's work over the years, and it never fails to inspire heated class discussion and unusually good work from students. In fact, two of the best papers I've ever read were responses to her novel The Female Man. My somewhat conservative Nevada students, even or especially the women, argued passionately with the book, but it resulted in some terrific writing. (We get a lot of "I'm not a feminist" disclaimers around here from young women who don't quite realize that they owe their voting rights and access to higher education, among other things, to the very hard work of many of their foremothers.)

That was many years ago. I should teach the book again, since I'm constantly looking for ways to slice through student apathy and disengagement. Anything that inspires discussion is a blessing.

I never met Joanna personally, but I absolutely treasure a note she sent me praising my story "Ever After." I was incredibly moved that anything I wrote had meant so much to someone I so admired.

Rest in peace, Joanna. You'll be missed.

Jangle Bells

Readers please note: In this post, I express a number of minority, and perhaps heretical, opinions. If you disagree with me, that's fine, but please don't flame me for having a different take on things.

Okay, so: The last few days have been a bit stressful. Yesterday my sister called to talk to me about closing out Mom's estate before the end of the calendar year, which the lawyer had recommmended. I hadn't seen this coming, and although the procedures she outlined on the phone weren't that complicated, they sent me into a tizzy. I went totally into scarcity space: hyperventilating oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-starve-to-death-in-a-cardboard-box mode.

On the face of it, this makes no sense. Why would one feel a sudden surge of panic on learning that one's acquiring several thousand unexpected dollars? At the time, I couldn't analyze it past the point of recognizing that financial matters always send me into a cold sweat. To calm my nerves, I went to the gym and swam for an hour. That sort of worked, although the perky Christmas music in the lockerroom left me with the strong and un-Christian urge to take a flamethrower to Frosty the Snowman. (I heard two other women complaining about the music, so I wasn't alone in my reaction.)

After the swim, I managed to get more of a handle on why I'd gone off the deep end, so to speak. After this, there will be no more estate. This is really the end, finis, the last money I'll get from my mother, and it's coming at the darkest time of the year, and on the heels of a conversation Gary and I had with a financial advisor who told us that I have to work for at least another fifteen years; I'd hoped for only ten. (And yes, I know: at least I have a job! And I'm indeed grateful!)

Once I'd figured that out, I started organizing my Christmas packages to the East Coast. It always amazes me how long wrapping takes; I'd economized -- probably unwisely -- by packing the wrapped gifts in old boxes we had in the garage, which meant that I had to wrap the boxes in plain brown wrapping paper to cover old Amazon labels and so forth.

I thought I had enough brown wrapping paper. I did, sort of, but only if I covered each box in two or three pieces of the stuff, which led to lots of fun with packing tape -- our only roll was playing "let's hide the end so you can't find it!" -- especially since Bali and Figgy had gotten into my study and were prancing through boxes and wrapping paper, getting themselves stuck to the tape, and so forth. The upshot of this ridiculous situation was that I spent all night wrapping two frigging boxes and went to sleep in a really bad mood.

I woke up this morning, feeling only marginally less cranky, to find the promised e-mailed documents from the attorney. I printed them out, ran around getting stuff notarized and mailed (the post office lines were shorter than I expected, and the boxes should arrive next week), and dashed home for lunch. I called my sister to tell her that I'd mailed the legal stuff, and discovered that she'd just been in a minor car accident -- she'd skidded into another car in snow -- and was very shaken up, despite no damage to people and only minor damage to cars.

That conversation made me a few minutes late for my beloved annual mammogram, which I've been superstitiously nervous about because my mother's breast cancer was diagnosed the Christmas after her father died. (This was in 1987; obviously she survived it, although the cancer was far advanced even though the mammogram supposedly caught it early.) No one I know enjoys these procedures, anyway: a friend who refuses to undergo them says, "I'll let them do that to me when men start having annual cancer screenings in which their testicles are smashed between two plates."

I don't agree with this sentiment, but I sympathize. Even for modestly endowed women like me, mammograms hurt. Also, I recently taught Barbara Ehrenreich's scathing and brilliant Welcome to Cancerland to my freshman-comp class, so her critiques of breast-cancer culture were fresh in my mind. Ehrenreich is deeply alarmed by the consumerization of breast cancer, which normalizes it and helps transform it into a rite of passage rather than a huge injustice perpetrated upon women's bodies by environmental toxins. (My completely non-activist mother's first words, after her diagnosis, were, "Well, that's what I get for living in New Jersey all these years." Even she got the environmental connection.) Ehrenreich cites studies that call into serious question the efficacy both of current screening methods and current treatments, and points out that if people gave their money directly to cancer research -- rather than supporting runs, walks and rallies with large overhead costs, or buying pink-beribboned teddy bears, jewelry, etc. and so forth -- we might make more headway against the disease. She's especially withering on how the rhetoric of breast cancer, with its pink everything, infantilizes women. In short, she thinks women are being lulled into complacency, whereas anger at the situation might result in more effective action (think Act Up).

Ehrenreich dislikes the color pink. So do I. So does my friend who refuses to get mammograms, who was ecstatic when I told her about the Ehrenreich essay. She hadn't known that anyone else felt the same way.

So I was thinking about all of that while sitting in the very crowded waiting room. I waited over thirty minutes, and finally all of us in the outer waiting room were summoned into the inner waiting room, which was warmer and more comfortable. There we found a large bin of hideous pink plastic Christmas ornaments in shiny purple mesh gift bags. A beaming hospital employee invited each of us to take one home.

I saw pink. Channeling Ehrenreich, I said to the beaming hospital employee, "I have a question. Wouldn't the money that went into manufacturing these ornaments be better spent on actual cancer research?"

She didn't even blink. "Yes. Yes, it would." (Good for you, lady!)

I gave her a brief overview of Ehrenreich. A woman at the other end of the room looked interested and asked me some questions as she cradled her pink ornament. Everyone else ignored us. ("If we don't look at her, maybe she'll go away.")

The hospital employee told me about various hospital projects that do contribute directly to research. Good for them! She and the patient with the ornament decided, between them, that the point of the ornaments was to "give people hope." Hey, if a tacky plastic ornament gives them hope, good for them. I, personally, don't find Christmas trees festooned with kitschy reminders of serious illnesses profoundly hopeful, but we all know how weird I am.

Finally they called me in. I got squashed. The tech was very deft; everyone was very nice. This is the place I always go, because they're very deft and very nice, and the one time I got called back for further scrutiny of an "area of concern" (which turned out to be a shadow), the male doctor was immensely kind and spent much more time talking to me than the situation actually warranted. That interpersonal skill is worth dumptrucks of plastic ornaments.

I went from the mammo place to the gym, where I worked out for forty-five minutes on the elliptical, traveling 3.3 miles and burning 350 calories. I was very pleased with myself, but leaving the gym, I discovered the lobby festooned with pink and white balloons and "See Pink!" banners, as more and more people (including musicians with instrument cases) piled into the building. Some kind of breast-cancer fundraiser was underway. The club staff assured me the money would go to research, which makes me wonder if the refreshments and music were donated.

I blew my workout on three yummy cookies from the tables piled high with treats. I went home to find more treats from my sister: a box of chocolate-dipped fruit. Yum. Goodbye, workout.

At least, thank God, my sister's okay after her accident. And Gary and I will now have a slightly larger financial cushion during my sabbatical. And -- this is the really exciting news -- I just performed my first felted join in a knitting project, and am thoroughly enchanted. No ends to weave in! Yay!

Better

My voice isn't entirely back, but it's mostly back, and I feel somewhat less like a sodden sandbag than I did yesterday.

I learned yesterday that one of my short stories, "Gestella" -- my eco-feminist werewolf story, and one of the two or three darkest things I've written -- is being reprinted in an urban fantasy anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale. The volume, as yet untitled, will be published by Tachyon. I'll post more when I get more info.

In the meantime, the small advance will allow me to buy myself a Christmas gift of, heaven help me, yet another backpack bag. I now own an embarrassing number of these things, but I'm still looking for the perfect one, and for various reasons, I think this one will address a number of problems I've had with others. Namely: I think it will hold what I need it to hold without being too heavy (unlike my otherwise beloved Baggallini Brussels bag, which was doing a number on my back), and it looks like the straps are both thick enough not to cut into my shoulders -- I hate the skinny straps on most women's purse-backpacks -- and adjustable enough to ensure a snug fit.

If it works out, I'll let you know. If not, I'll return it and continue the quest.

Auburn

I apologize for the blurriness of the previous photo. It was dusk, and my camera doesn't zoom as much as I'd like. The deer were lovely, though, trust me!

The retreat center's lovely, too. Tranquil grounds and clean and comfortable rooms: very nice! Last night, I walked to a restaurant across the street and treated myself to salmon. Then I came back to my room and knitted until ten, when I went to bed, feeling very peaceful. I was hoping to wake up early enough to go out for a real restaurant (with real coffee), since I suspected the retreat center coffee would be too weak for me.

I woke up at 1:30 a.m., not feeling peaceful. My throat felt like someone had scrubbed it with steel wool and then stored the steel wool in my sinuses. I lay awake until 2:30, sneezing and coughing and feeling rotten about making so much noise (because it's a silent retreat center, you aren't supposed to make noise even during the day, and this was the middle of the night, and there was someone in the room next to mine), and then finally got back to sleep. I woke up again at 8:30, with just enough time before the retreat started to shower, dress, pack, strip my bed, bundle up linens and towels for laundry, and remake the bed sans linens, as instructed.

So much for breakfast and real coffee.

Luckily, I had Power Bars with me. Also, it turned out that the retreat center coffee was just strong enough for two mugs of it to stave off my usual caffeine-withdrawal migraine, not that I felt terribly awake. And the tranquility of the building was still lovely.

Our retreat met in a small room, since it was supposed to be a small group: seven people plus two facilitators. Four people didn't show, so it was three people and two facilitators. This gave us time to talk, which was nice, but it meant that we missed out on the diversity of experience and perspective we'd have had with more participants. Also, the material presented was really basic: Grief 101. I'd expected that, but I'd also expected that we were going to do exercises or rituals that would help us work through specific issues. That turned out not to be the case. Most of the day was talk; we did one prayer ritual in the chapel, but most of that was talk, too, except for lighting candles.

The upshot is that I didn't come away learning anything new, or learning new ways to process anything old. We also never got to the one thing I really wanted to talk about: the effect of grief on physical health. That's okay. It was still a pleasant day with nice people, and a Grief 101 refresher isn't the worst thing in the world, especially as I head into my first holiday season without my mother.

I wish I'd been feeling better physically, though, and I do wish the group had been more diverse. There was one man who'd just lost his wife, and me: the other three people (including two facilitators) were older Catholic women, one a nun, who were considerably more theologically and politically conservative than I am. At lunch, for instance, they insisted that the man sit at the head of the table, while bemoaning the fact that Kids These Days don't do anything right. I, one of the Kids, sat there thinking, "You're kidding me, right? I haven't really just been plunked in a time machine and transported back to the nineteen fifties?" (Had there been any round tables in the room, I'd have suggested moving to get around the problem, so to speak.) We also had a conversation about how too many people don't observe the proper purity laws before taking communion; you can guess where I came down on that issue! On the other hand, this particular group seemed supportive of the idea of ordaining women in the Catholic church, so that was refreshing.

If there'd been more participants, especially some my age or younger, I probably wouldn't have wound up feeling like a wild-eyed radical. In PSR courses in Berkeley, I often play the role of terribly conventional suburban square. I guess all of this is good for me: exposure to different viewpoints, etc.

The drives in both directions were not only painless (I hit only a tiny bit of construction yesterday), but breathtakingly beautiful: autumn foliage along mountain rivers with blue peaks in the distance. That may have been the most healing part of the trip. That, and seeing the deer.

So I'm glad I went, although not as glad as I'd hoped to be. I'm grateful I'll be sleeping in my own bed tonight, even if I have Heaps o' Grading to do tomorrow. I just hope the blasted cold or allergy attack or whatever it is eases off soon!

World's Most Annoying Day

I had an 8 a.m. doctor's appointment today. This is already bad news, because I'm profoundly not a morning person, although this doc has limited hours, so I have to take what I can get. I woke up on time -- before my alarm, even -- but, staggering around in my six-hours-of-sleep fog, managed to leave the house late anyhow, after giving the cats two breakfasts. The cats didn't mind, but it was still a little embarrassing.

In the car, I realized I'd left my watch at home. No prob. I could get the time from my phone.

Got to the doc's office at 8:15; I'd called to say I was late and to ask if I should reschedule, and they told me to come on in. The receptionist shoved a sheaf of paper at me. I see this doctor every six months for routine monitoring of my eyes; there's a family history of glaucoma, and at one point my pressures were a teensy bit high, so even though my pressures have been splendid for several years now, she wants to see me every six months. I thumbed through the sheaf, signed a few places I had to sign, and then said, "I'm not here for any new problems, so I'm not filling in most of these questionnaires, okay? This is a routine visit."

I passed back the papers. Someone else behind the desk gave me a lecture about how I had to fill in the forms for insurance reasons, but no one gave me the sheaf back. So, with a shrug, I sat down and waited to be called into the exam room. In the meantime, I e-mailed Gary about giving the cats two breakfasts. He e-mailed back to say that I'd also locked Bali in the downstairs closet.

I'd been in the examining room maybe two minutes when someone with a grim expression rushed in, waving the sheaf, and barked, "You have to fill these out, or your insurance won't pay for this visit!" Ooooooooh. It's one of those: one of those "jump through these hoops or we won't pay" games, which has nothing to do with health at all. So I scribbled some stuff on the forms.

The exam went splendidly. My pressures were great. But because I'd been given dilation drops, I couldn't see very well when I left the office, even though I was wearing sunglasses. No problem. I'd go to the gym; on the way, I'd stop at my garage to get the smog check required for my car registration, which expires in a few weeks.

The smog was fine. Results are reported automatically to the DMV, so I e-mailed Gary to ask if he could renew online for me. Before I'd even gotten to the gym, Gary e-mailed back to say that he'd tried, but couldn't, because the DMV website thought my insurance was out of date, even though it isn't.

I went to the gym and worked out on the elliptical for half an hour. At my locker afterwards, I realized that I'd forgotten my toiletry kit. No prob: the gym supplies toiletries, and while they aren't my first choice, they'll certainly do in a pinch.

Getting dressed, I discovered that I'd left at home the guard ring that keeps my wedding and engagement rings securely on my finger. No prob: I'd just be extra careful about making sure they stayed on (and to alleviate any suspense, I didn't lose either today, thank goodness!).

So clearly, I'm having a really bad post-menopausal Senior Moments day. I'm already annoyed and frazzled, not to mention still half-blind (the dilation lasts about ten hours after the ten-second exam) when I get to work and decide to stop in to say hi to a friend. We're chatting about an acquaintance from another state -- an artistic friend from a liberal state; these details are important -- who blew through town a few weeks ago. This woman's quite the fashionista, and my friend says, "Oh, yeah, she loves to do makeovers on people. She had some interesting comments about you. She said, 'Susan should grow her hair out and wear real bras so she won't look like a dyke.'"

I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped. I know I sputtered. The comment was so bizarre, inappropriate, and both personally and politically offensive -- not to mention ignorant and wrongheaded (tell us how you really feel, Susan!) -- that all I could do was squeak out a few entirely inadequate responses. "Why does she care what I look like? Gary likes my short hair! And I wear the bras I can find that fit, dammit!" I'd have said more, but I realized that a male student was standing behind me in the hall, waiting to see my friend and looking mortified. I think he'd overheard the bra comment.

Oh, dear.

Furious, I made my way to my office. In the time it took me to get there, my friend had e-mailed me an apology for her insensitivity in even repeating the acquaintance's comment. I appreciated that, but was still struggling with about seventeen layers of response to the unwanted feedback. I should probably mention here that El Fashionista is quite a bit younger than I am: very professionally successful, but (I'm guessing) of the generation that's been able to take feminism more for granted than my generation could. In any case, I came up with a list of the things I hope I'd have been able to say to her face if she'd delivered the insult to my face, and e-mailed them to my friend (with a note saying, "You probably don't want to send her these, but you have my permission if you want to").

I struggled with whether to blog about this, but I think her comment was one of those canary-in-the-mine indications: something that most people wouldn't say, but that -- if anyone says it -- means that too many others are thinking it. So, for anyone who's ever seen a woman with short hair or funky undergarments and made assumptions about sexual orientation (or even offered unwanted fashion advice!), here's the meat of the e-mail I sent my friend.

1. It is impossible to determine sexual orientation by hairstyle or undergarments. Honest. The only way I “look like a dyke” is if I’m actually having sex, right at that moment, with another woman.

2. Why does it matter if someone who doesn’t understand point #1 mistakes me for a lesbian? Being a lesbian isn’t a horrible thing, and I’m not on the market, so it’s not like I’m misleading potential lovers. My husband knows my sexual orientation, and he’s the one who matters (and for the record, he likes my hair short: so do I).

3. If Woman A is checking out, and making comments about, Woman B’s undergarments, whose sexual orientation might we idly wonder about? Not that it matters, since sexual orientation doesn’t determine personal worth, and somebody else’s sexual orientation isn’t our business anyway, unless we wish to sleep with that person. I’m just sayin’.

4. Yesterday when I got to the gym, I saw a woman blow-drying her long hair. When I left the gym, the same woman was still blow-drying her long hair. I thought, “Geez, I’m really glad I don’t spend time blow-drying my hair or putting on make-up I then have to take off. There are enough timesinks in my life as it is. If I did that stuff too, I’d never get any knitting/writing/practicing done.”

5. Fashion’s fun when it makes people feel better. It’s harmful when it’s used to judge them.

There's more I could have said, like, "Honey, women have fought and even died for the right to wear no bras at all." I didn't say that. I didn't tell the story of the first time I got my hair cut short, when my mother stared at me in distress and wailed, "You look like a man!" and I snapped back, "Not where it counts, I don't." (That ended that conversation.) I didn't talk about how it's nearly impossible, even with my minimal mammary endowments, to find bras that don't a) have torture-device underwires and b) cost $20 apiece, which is why I wear sale sports bras and those nifty stretch camis I found at the dollar store. (I bought one, took it home, determined that it fit, and went back to buy every single one in my size.)

I did say that I'm praying for El Fashionista, who must be very insecure and unhappy to have to make comments like this. El Fashionista is smart, funny, supremely talented, and mostly kind, in addition to always looking fabulous. It makes me very sad to think that underneath all that, she's insecure and unhappy.

I was afraid my friend might be offended by the e-mail, but she wrote back agreeing with me.

Classes went fine, for a wonder, but when I got home, the DMV website still wouldn't accept my insurance info, which means that tomorrow I need to call them and might need to go there in person.

Yuck. Crummy day, yes?

But it's now a holiday weekend, and my birthday weekend. Yay!

Gospel Moms

Continuing today's theme of posts about mom(s), I'm going to write a bit about church this morning. Then I'll be done for the day, I promise (especially since I have work to do for tomorrow!).

This morning we observed the feast of St. Mary the Virgin. Our rector, a former Jesuit, talked in his homily about how, growing up RC, he had no use for Mary, because in her supposedly pious, meek goodness and acceptance, she offered no help with his life or the life of the other working-poor families in the parish.

Yep: me too. Of course, anybody who thinks about it for more than two seconds knows that the real mother of Jesus had to be one strong, spunky lady, especially given how young she was. Our rector told us that he's spent time in Latin American base communities that believe, and act, from the faith that Mary is their sister or their mother, a peasant woman with dirt under her nails and the willingness to raise an extraordinary child under difficult circumstances with nothing approaching adequate preparation.

He invited us to "Reject the sweet, meek and mild," to come up with an image of divine motherhood that helps us in our own struggles. For me, that's easy. My favorite mother in the Bible -- heck, one of my favorite characters in the Bible, period -- is the Syro-Phoenician woman. She never gets a name, but her scrappy advocacy for her child gives her the courage to confront Jesus and, essentially, to startle and shame him into helping her.

As a statement of tranforming and transformative faith, I'll take "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the master's table" over "My soul magnifies the Lord" any day. Mary stood there and said "yes" to the angel who'd sought her out. If you're working with the Mary-meek-and-mild model, it's difficult not to imagine her simpering like a debutante presented with a prom corsage, and even if you work to recover her as spunky peasant (with appropriate sympathy for her straw-strewn birthing suite and the challenges of raising Toddler Jesus), her role in this scene still seems essentially passive and acquiescent (at least to me: YMMV!). The Syro-Phoenician woman had to run down the street to chase after Jesus, who initially wanted nothing to do with her, and bargain like a fishwife for her child's survival. Mary said yes to the Annunciation sweepstakes. The Syro-Phoenician woman (how I wish she had a name!) used her wits and courage to wrest a blessing from a God whose first response was, "We don't serve the likes of you. Get lost."

Who's a better model of dissenting discipleship?

None of that was in our rector's sermon. What was there, though, was a moving meditation on the power of base communities, where people use Bible study and personal friendships to "organize for liberation," and a suggestion that since our parish is dissolving, we might think of forming some ourselves.

Since I'd come back from Berkeley thinking about home-based ways of doing church, this appealed to me mightily, and also seemed like more than a touch of grace.

Modest Needs

Here's tomorrow's homily, on one of my favorite Gospel passages. I've preached on this one before, but because we're doing an infant baptism tomorrow, I had to find a way to tie that in. And when I found the Modest Needs article, it fit perfectly!

Here are the readings, although I only discuss Genesis and Matthew.

*

This morning we’re here to celebrate a baptism, to welcome Elena into our church family and into the Body of Christ. A baptism is, among other things, a party, and since we usually have a lot of guests at these occasions, those of us who are regulars want to put our best foot forward. We want to make it easy for everyone to praise and worship the Host of the party, our generous and merciful God. Like any proud relatives, we want everyone to love him as much as we do.

This morning’s readings don’t make that easy. Things start out well enough, with the lesson from Genesis. While it’s true that Joseph’s brothers are somewhat less than admirable for having sold him into slavery, the point of the story is that he forgives them. Furthermore, he discerns in their actions the hand of Providence: because they sold him into slavery, he is now in a position to provide for his family during a time of famine. Responding to betrayal with love and generosity, he transforms pain into blessing. Surely that is how we want everyone in God’s family to act, and surely it is how we strive to act ourselves.

But then we get to the Gospel. Jesus, our beloved and gracious Host, is not having a good day. In fact, he seems to be doing his best to embarrass us, since he tries to drive away a desperate woman seeking healing for her sick daughter. Not only does he tell her to get lost, but he does so in the most insulting terms possible. “Sorry, you’re not one of us. I’m not here for people like you. It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Various scholars have done Olympics-worthy somersaults trying to soften this. The word for dog, for instance, might better be translated “cute pet puppy.” I don’t know about you, but I find this interpretation completely lame. Being called a pet puppy is very little comfort when the puppy’s being deprived of needed nourishment. “What a cute little dog. Let’s starve it!” Oh, Jesus! How could you behave this way in front of guests?

If Jesus isn’t being a very good role model, though, the desperate, unnamed mother is. She’s chased Jesus down in the streets, even when the disciples tried to shoo her away; she’s nothing if not persistent. And she’s smart. When Jesus insults her by calling her and her daughter dogs, she doesn’t argue the point. She doesn’t say indignantly, “I’m no dog!” as I suspect I’d do in her place. Instead, she uses Jesus’ words against him. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” All right, Jesus: if I’m a dog, let me have what all the other dogs have. It’s not like I’m asking for much. We’ve all seen you heal people; a mere crumb of your power will make my daughter well.

And Jesus, astonished and probably abashed, finally responds the way we want him to. He finally starts behaving in front of company. “‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”

This anonymous, outcast mother is the only person in the entire Gospels who wins an argument with Jesus. She forces him to reconsider his ministry, to realize that he’s called to heal everyone. As a result, she’s directly responsible for widening the circle of God’s love. In this lesson, Jesus teaches us that God is capable of changing his mind about who deserves help. That means we can challenge God, or human conceptions of God, when they seem too narrow, and it means that we can change our own minds too, widening our own circles of mercy. The Canaanite woman, meanwhile, teaches us that sometimes persistence and street smarts are necessary to get what we need, and that it’s all right to argue on our own behalf -– yes, even with God –- when our cause is just. And, finally, this Gospel passage reminds us that often it takes only crumbs to help people who are hurting, to transform pain into blessing.

I thought of the Canaanite woman last week when I read an article about Keith Taylor, a Tennessee English teacher who started a charity called Modest Needs to help the working poor, people without the safety nets of savings accounts or government assistance. Modest Needs offers one-time checks to help cover expenses: $65 to help pay for auto insurance, say, or a hundred dollars to help pay for new eyeglasses. Taylor started out with a personal website asking people who needed small sums to write to him. In 2002, he set up a system where anyone can log onto the website and donate money. Donors can choose the kind of recipients they’d like their money to help: the elderly, say, or single mothers, or victims of domestic violence. Each grant request is carefully screened for genuine need.

According to the article, “the average Modest Needs grant of late is $560 and goes to those who need help with a month’s rent or a doctor bill or money to fix a car to get to a new job. The check goes not to the recipient but to the bank, business or landlord that needs to be paid.” Last year, the organization awarded more than $800,000, helping over 1,500 people. Seven out of every ten recipients later become donors.

One of those donors is a woman named Brenda Fallon. In 2005, Modest Needs gave her $29.95 for hormone shots that she believes safeguarded the birth of her daughter Ciara. “A year after Ciara’s birth, Fallon read a story on Modest Needs about a woman who became a donor after receiving money for an appraisal to refinance her house. ‘I thought, “they saved my daughter’s life. I should be giving too.” I’m embarrassed I didn’t do it sooner.’ She now contributes $10 a month.”

For most of us, $29.95 is a mere crumb, and yet it saved a child’s life. Ten dollars may seem like a crumb too, but it is more of a sacrifice for Brenda Fallon than it would be for many of us. And the crumb Brenda Fallon donates every month will surely help someone, or many someones, enjoy feasts they might not have known otherwise.

The Canaanite woman in the Gospels is never named, but I think her name just might be Brenda. And I wonder if, like Brenda Fallon, she went on to give to others in direct response to what she had been given. How many people did this woman of great faith, and her daughter, go on to comfort and help heal?

We don’t, and can’t, know. Although the same story occurs, in a slightly different form, in the Gospel of Mark, neither narrative tells us what happened after the healing. We don’t know how it changed the Canaanite woman’s life, but we can be sure that it did. She has not only had her daughter’s illness healed, but been welcomed into the family of God, surely the most healing moment of all, both for her and for the One, and the ones, who welcome her.

And so this is my hope for Elena this morning. I hope, and know, that she and her family will find a warm and joyous welcome here. I hope that, helped by all of us in her new family, she will grow into her faith basking in God’s love and in the gifts God has so generously bestowed on all of us. And if she endures times in her life when God seems to be behaving badly, I hope she will be persistent in reminding God -– and the people around her -– what she needs. I hope she will advocate both for those she loves and for those too often unloved by society, but always loved by God. And I hope she will remember that even a crumb the size of a mustard seed can help transform pain into blessing, giving those it feeds a taste of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.

Surprise!

Here's today's homily. The readings are Genesis 18:1-15 and Matthew 9:35-10:8. Note that I'm not using the optional end of the Gospel, which is hard to square with Father's Day. I've preached on that text before, but elected not to this time.

Happy Father's Day to all!

*

Some of you may have seen the news story last week about the Father’s Day celebration at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. A weedy sea dragon -- an 18-inch creature with a long snout and a sea-horse body -- is pregnant for only the third time ever at a United States aquarium. Sea dragons are threatened, so this is great news, but what makes the story really unusual is that the sea dragon is one of only three species, along with sea horses and pipe fish, in which the male carries the eggs. The pregnant sea dragon is the dad, not the mom.

This is a useful cautionary tale, a reminder that just when we think we have God figured out, She throws us a curve ball. Through most of the animal kingdom, females give birth. We consider this right and natural. The weedy sea dragon teaches us that natural is whatever works.

Abraham and Sarah learn the same lesson in today’s reading from Genesis. They’re both very old: Abraham is one hundred, and Sarah is well past childbearing age. When God tells them that they’re going to have a son, Sarah laughs. This can’t be. It isn’t natural for a couple so old to have children. But sure enough, she goes on to give birth to Isaac. As God has so pointedly asked Abraham, “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?”

The Bible is full of people who think they know the rules and then watch as God turns those rules upside down. This happens repeatedly both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. Old people don’t have babies. Surprise! God only loves and rewards people who follow very particular purity laws. Surprise! No one comes back from the dead. Surprise!

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus himself -- God’s biggest surprise -- is explaining the rules to his disciples. He’s teaching them how to care for his flock, how to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near. He tells them very specifically where to bring this good news. “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The good news is for family only.

This morning’s lesson is from the ninth and tenth chapters of Matthew. Over the next two months, we’ll hear other lessons from Matthew in which Jesus shares prophecies, parables, and promises. In all of these stories, he’s the head of the family. Father and Son know best.

And then, on August 17, we’ll hear a lesson from the fifteenth chapter of Matthew. A Canaanite woman -- a Gentile and outsider -- comes to Jesus desperately seeking healing for her sick daughter. He tells her that she isn’t part of the family. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says, echoing today’s Gospel. When the distraught mother keeps begging for help, Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”

The mother shoots back, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.”

Jesus -- astonished, and probably a little abashed -- tells her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” Her daughter is healed instantly.

Surprise! Jesus just broke his own rules. He included someone who wasn’t supposed to be part of the family. His definition of family has grown. The Canaanite woman is the only person in the Gospels who wins an argument with Jesus, and she’s one of my favorite Scripture characters. She teaches us that love trumps law, and that when we’re acting from love, it’s okay to argue with God about the rules. She teaches us that God can change his mind.

Over the past several decades, we’ve seen radical reinterpretations of family. The traditional extended family of three generations living under one roof gave way to the traditional nuclear family of two parents with two-point-five children. That version of tradition, in turn, has been transformed by a variety of practices, driven both by necessity and desire: single-parent families, blended families, families with two parents of the same gender. Medical advances have brought us situations that would surely make Sarah laugh: women giving birth past menopause, mothers with quintuplets, a grandmother acting as surrogate biological mother to her daughter’s twins. These changes have forced us to wrestle with legal, ethical, and religious dilemmas. What’s right? What’s fair? What’s natural? What does God want us to do?

Based on the well-established Biblical record of God changing the rules, it seems to me that we’re called to do what works. None of the families I’ve described, even the most “traditional” ones, look anything like the kinship structures described in Genesis. And it seems to me that the ultimate litmus test of true family, in the Bible and in our own day, is love.

At the hospital where I volunteer, there are strict rules against giving patient information to anyone except immediate family. Meanwhile, in my visits with patients and their loved ones, I’ve come up with my own rule of thumb. I never guess at relationships, because whenever I do, I’m invariably wrong. If I introduce myself to the sweet white-haired lady in the bed, and then say of the sweet white-haired man sitting next to her, “And this must be your husband?” she’ll tell me -- surprise! -- that he’s her brother, cousin, son, next-door neighbor, attorney, or parole officer. These goofs can be very embarrassing, so I’ve learned to let the patient fill in the blank. “And this is your . . . .?” In the process, I’ve met countless devoted companions who weren’t, legally, family. Patients arrive with neighbors, with former spouses, with their children’s former spouses, with roommates, with same-sex partners, with their children’s same-sex partners, with the same-sex partners of their former spouses, with pastors, and with a variety of caretakers, both paid and otherwise. This dizzying variety proves that, indeed, nothing is too wonderful for the LORD, and it’s taught me that family are the people who come to our bedsides when we’re sick. Love, not law, is the ultimate arbiter of kinship.

The medical staff knows this as well as I do, and we’ve all learned to bend certain rules. Some months ago, a desperately ill patient came into the ER. He was accompanied by a sobbing woman half his age. She was one of the aides at the nursing home where he lived; she loved him like a father, and couldn’t bear to let him come to the hospital alone. When I explained the situation to the nurse and asked if someone on the medical staff could speak to the aide, the nurse cleared his throat and said, “You mean his daughter, don’t you?”

During another shift, a female patient was frantic because she couldn’t reach her husband at home to let him know where she was. A nurse pulled me aside and said, “Actually, he’s a patient here too. He’s on the other side of the wall from her, but they aren’t legally married, so because of HIPAA, I can’t tell her that he’s here or give her any information.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. But then I realized that we weren’t that far from the woman’s bed, and that the nurse had been speaking quite loudly.

The female patient smiled at us. “Thank you. Please tell him I love him.”

The HIPAA rules are slowly adjusting to human reality. Doctors now ask their patients for lists of people, family or friends, who can be given medical information. Our laws always change to reflect our loves. I believe Jesus would approve. I know the Canaanite woman would.

So, this Father’s Day, please think of all the people who have fathered you, whatever their gender or relationship. Reflect on how they have shown you that nothing is too wonderful for the LORD. And then tell your fathers, whoever they may be, that you love them.

Amen.

WisCon, Day the Third

I woke up at nine this morning feeling very groggy, with only an hour to get to my 10:00 panel. It turns out that there's a nasty stomach virus going around WisCon -- there are warning signs everywhere instructing people to wash their hands -- and I suspect I had a touch of it yesterday, although I was better today.

So, when I got to the 10:00 panel on "Narrative and Politics," I was tired, still a bit under the weather, and was in the procss of gulping down a power bar and my first cup of coffee. I suspect that fatigue, blood sugar and any lingering virus account for my responses to what happened.

It was a very smart, lively panel, with very smart, lively, and intimidating panelists: Eileen Gunn, Caroline Ives Gilman, L. Timmel DuChamp, and Pat Murphy. I felt very outclassed by the company, who've all published more than I have and are far more famous, in addition to being hyper-articulate. (Many of my acquaintances consider me hyper-articulate, but these women leave me in the dirt.) At the beginning, I was fine; I thought I was holding my own reasonably well, and audience reaction supported this. But early on, Timmi read a statement by Chip Delany about narrative, and the ease of falling into certain oppressive narrative patterns (men = human, women = less-than-human, etc.). She asked for our reactions to it.

I've known Chip since 1984. I've hung out in his living room; he introduced me to one of the guys I dated before I met Gary. I consider him a friend, and I hope he considers me one as well. But I had a funny Chip story that I thought pertained to the topic, so I told it.

In 1994, when I was in grad school, I taught a personal-essay class. Chip had just been hired as a tenured professor at Amherst for big bucks. As a grad student, I wasn't making big bucks, and I was at an institution that treated grad students like cockroaches. At some point during or immediately after his visit to my class, Chip and I got onto the subject of identity politics, and he told me -- I believe in so many words, although I may well be misremembering this -- that he was more oppressed than I was, because he was black and gay while I was white and straight.

My reaction to this was more or less, "Um . . . I'm female. You're male. I'm making two cents an hour doing journeywoman work in a field where I have a good chance of never getting a job; you're tenured and making $70,000 a year." I don't think I had the courage to say any of that, or to add that Chip was hugely famous while I was hugely obscure. At least within the field where we were working, the academic study of English, he had immensely more privilege than I did. Context matters.

Okay, so that was the personal story I told. My analytical point, which I went on to explain, was that I don't think competitive oppression is helpful. I believe that everyone's both oppressed and oppressing: the challenge is to use our own experience of oppression, whatever that might be, as a way to feel compassion for the oppression of others, rather than to play the "more oppressed than thou" game. Chip and I, unfortunately, didn't do that; but to me, the anecdote illustrates the danger of totalizing identity categories rather than looking at individual lives. It seemed to me that Chip's critique of conventional narrative structures was doing exactly that: books that are oppressive in one sense can be liberating in another, and it's important, if possible, to pay attention to both those things instead of rejecting the text wholesale because of one problem (as the person on my previous panel had done with Tolkien). Although, of course, in another light, the anecdote supports his point: it is indeed easy to fall into oppressive patterns!

So far, so good. We chatted about many other things; I brought up the healing power of narrative in trauma, and although the other panelists brought us back to fiction, a woman in the audience raced up and gave several of us free copies of Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy's The Mind's Eye: Image and Memory in Writing about Trauma. How completely cool is that? I love WisCon!

The panel wound down: time for comments from the audience. At which point, a young woman of color stood up and absolutely blasted me for the Chip story. I'd responded to a piece of analysis with a personal story, and furthermore, I'd appropriated both Chip's narrative and the Obama-Clinton conflict we've been hearing about for the last year (white woman versus black man), and I was responding to theory with emotion, and . . . I don't remember what else. It went on for a while. My critic was obviously very intelligent and hyper-articulate, and also clearly loathed me on both a personal and political level.

In retrospect, I think she was probably projecting onto me problems she's had with other white women. I'm used to this kind of thing in the classroom, where teachers can become the symbol of every authority figure the student has ever hated, and normally I'd have handled it better. But my guard was down: I was at WisCon, which has always been reasonably safe, and I was physically vulnerable.

I replied by saying a) that I'd been telling my own story, which had happened to me in 1994 and wasn't connected to the current election, b) that I had in fact offered analysis too, c) that one problem with literary theory is that it's traditionally punished emotion, especially in women, and d) that criticizing women for being emotional is a classic anti-feminist strategy.

I offered this in small snippets, as most of the rest of the panelists tried to change the subject. In the meantime, I found myself on the verge of, and then in the middle of, helpless and humiliating tears, although I think I stayed coherent. Another audience member tried to respond and said to me, "I was going to start out by saying something really mean about you, but I won't." (What the f***?) He got cut off because there was no more time. Meanwhile, my critic had left, so I had no chance to talk to her to try to sort anything out (although it probably wouldn't have helped).

A few people, especially my friend Janice Mynchenberg, came up and said nice things to me, which helped. The guy who'd decided not to be mean to me came up and made several very useful points, the first of which was, "Parables are tricky. Need I say more?" He also pointed out that my critic had responded so emotionally to my personal narrative that she hadn't heard the analytical piece, and that she -- like Chip -- had focused on race and gender and completely dismissed class, which was, for me, the most important factor at that moment of my professional life. We also commented wryly on the fact that the panel had talked about whether conflict is necessary in narrative: evidently the answer is yes! ("Is violence necessary?")

I was still feeling very shaky, though. Inez, who'd heard the whole thing, swooped down and bore me off to her room, where she gave me tissues, a power bar and a glass of water, and sympathized with me. (When I pointed out that the critic had made some valid points, Inez said crossly, "My job right now isn't to be reasonable. My job right now is to be on your side. I'll be reasonable in a few minutes.")

I started feeling better. We went to lunch, which made me feel much better. We returned to the hotel and I attended Maureen McHugh's delightful GoH reading. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to more panels, and Maureen's reading had ended early, so I did a circuit of the art show and saw Ellen Datlow. We had fun trying on hats; Ellen complimented me on my beautiful silver-gray hair. Yes! Cronehood has its advantages!

I also saw Eileen Gunn, and asked for her feedback on what had happened. She shrugged and said, "She was right. You should have said, 'Thank you, I didn't think of that,' and not gotten into a debate."

Oh, dear. Well, I still don't think that either of us was completely right. I also think that dismissing the critic would have been far less respectful to her than trying to engage in the conversation; I apparently merely came across as defensive, though. There are several fairly discouraging lessons here about what it's safe to talk about at WisCon -- especially when one's physically vulnerable -- but I was getting a headache and decided not to tax my brain further. The main lesson is probably simply that one must never dare say anything negative about an icon, especially one who belongs to multiple minority communities. I kept trying to emphasize how much I liked and respected Chip, but that probably didn't get through.

Aaaaargh.

In any case, instead of going to afternoon panels, I went back to my hotel, read a bit, took a nice nap, and then called both of my parents, who love me even when I'm politically incorrect.

After the nap, I changed into dessert banquet clothing (the new shimmery shirt with black jeans), took myself out for sushi, and then headed back to the Concourse to meet Inez and Nita. They were the third and fourth people in the dessert line, and had saved a space for me. And then Inez handed me a little box and said, "You're going to be mad at me for doing this, but remember that I'm getting my economic incentive check and that my school is paying for this trip. You have to read the note before you open the box."

The note was a beautiful two-page letter about how much my friendship and mentorship have meant to Inez and how much she values me. It made me cry. (She told me she'd cried while she was writing it.) Hey, you know women: we're emotional.

The box contained a piece of jewelry from the art show, a gorgeous Celtic enamel cat brooch made by Catherine Crowe. I'd admired the pin but hadn't bought it, not least because of its price. It was a supremely generous gift. (Inez also bought herself some earrings that we'd both loved.)

The brooch also went beautifully with the shimmery shirt, as I hope you can see at least a little bit from this shot. I love it, and Inez loved the fact that I love it, and so we were both very happy.

The three of us pigged out on yummy dessert, listened to excellent GoH speeches, and networked. One of the women at our table is interested in my views on fanfic and wants to include me on a panel she's doing next year; another woman at our table works for a seminary and wondered if I might be interested in teaching a summer course for them about writing and healing. Yay!

So it turned into a good day after starting out as a difficult one. I've stayed up far too late, because I'm wired from coffee and too much chocolate and my afternoon nap. Tomorrow I'll go to the SignOut, but at some point I have to figure out how to pack everything. Eeeep!

Beautiful Dead Animals

Okay, Dear Readers, this is a post about disturbing stuff. Consider yourselves warned.

Let me begin by saying that I'm not ashamed to be a carnivore. ("Top o' the food chain! Top o' the food chain!") I eat meat and wear leather. I know and like people who hunt, and I have no trouble with hunting if people do it responsibly and eat what they kill. In fact, I often think that those of us who eat meat ought to be reminded where our food comes from by having to, oh, kill a chicken once a year. I've eaten and enjoyed venison, and I understand that hunting can be a very important part of culling animal populations (although those populations are often out of whack because of other ways humans have messed with the food chain, but never mind). I know that most people who hunt are sane individuals who are rigorous about gun safety. Okay?

Okay.

Today Gary and I went shopping. I needed a new pair of hiking boots for Kaua'i. Usually we go to REI or Patagonia for that stuff. REI and Patagonia are, of course, populated mainly by NPR liberals like us, who trek into the wilderness to improve their cardiovascular health and take pictures.

But last week, Gary had said, "Oh, there's a big new outdoor store that just opened. We should go there to look for your boots." So this morning, I suggested that we try out the new place.

The new place is Cabela's. It's huge. And it's full of dead animals.

When you enter the gigundo building, the first thing you see is a taxidermy exhibit of African animals, including an elephant, a lion and a leopard. That bothered me so much that I made a beeline for the shoe department, where a stuffed turkey and a stuffed wolf, among other critters, watched me shop from their wall mounts. There were more deer heads (and bodies) in this place than I could count, but I know that deer become real pests in places they overpopulate. Also bearskin rugs from formerly live bears. Those were hanging on the wall; I don't know if they were for sale.

Some of the animals bothered me more than others. I eat turkey, but who eats wolf? Much less leopard? (Excuse me: Aren't most big cats endangered? Am I missing something?) Gary told me later that he'd seen lots of stuffed fish -- okay, I can deal with that, mostly -- as well as a stuffed polar bear. Polar bears are definitely endangered. I'm sure this one was either a clever fake or had been killed before the bears became endangered (or had been killed in self-defense in some Alaskan village) but it still bothered me. The store cafe serves game meat like elk, and that bothers me less.

I found a pair of hiking boots, although the selection of women's shoes wasn't very good. I wandered around trying to find Gary, and instead found myself blinking at displays of what looked like hunting camouflage for infants. (Turns out I wasn't hallucinating. Now, class, let's discuss gender stereotypes. Look at the baby boy wearing a camo t-shirt that says, "This is what a real hunter looks like." Now look at the baby girl wearing a camo dress -- with lace and ribbon -- that says, "Cute as a button.") The store was mobbed, and there were lots of kids.

I finally found Gary, who told me that the gun and ammo selection more than made up for what the women's shoe department lacked. He also said there were lots of toy guns, and lots of kids playing with them, presumably so they'll be ready for their first .22 when they're eight and their first hunting rifle when they're twelve. (Yes, I know: most hunting families are obsessive about gun safety for kids, and good for them.) Also, the store sells blowguns: what the hey? Are these used for hunting? (Silly me! I should have checked on Google before I wrote that question. Yes, blowguns are used for hunting. Also fishing.) The store also sells archery equipment, which is really kind of cool. Gary and I agreed that anybody who can sneak up on a deer and kill it with an arrow has our utmost respect: that takes skill and also gives the critter a fighting chance, unlike hiding in a tree until the beastie shows up and then blowing it to Kingdom Come with a high-powered rifle.

The store had an archery range -- Gary told a funny story about a salesman trying to teach a ten-year-old girl not to shoot her arrow straight up in the air -- but no shooting range, thank goodness. There were laser guns people could use for target practice, though.

It all made me very queasy. I kept thinking about the leopard. I kept thinking about the couple Gary and I met about ten years ago who were in Reno for a Safari Club International convention. The woman told us brightly that one of her life goals was to kill a leopard. The man explained that the organization's very active in wildlife conservation: they don't want leopards to become extinct, because then there won't be any left to kill. (Okay, he didn't exactly phrase it that way, but that was what I heard.) Gary and I just looked at each other. Why would anyone want to kill a leopard? If it were attacking you, okay, you might have to, but why would you pay big, big bucks to fly halfway around the world to find a leopard and kill it?

I don't get it.

Killing deer for food in your own neighborhood, I get. Really, I do. But the "Fly to exotic non-Western countries! Trek through gorgeous landscape! Find beautiful animals -- and kill them!" thing just goes right over my head.

When we were leaving the store, I said, "I don't think I want to come here again."

Gary said, "This is the mainstream. Welcome to America."

I said, "I'll stay on the margins, thanks. The next time I need hiking boots, I'm going to REI or Patagonia."

As we were leaving the parking lot, we passed a group of Goth kids headed towards the store. They were dressed all in black, and one of them, a tall young man, was making rat-a-tat-tat shooting motions with his hands while the others laughed. Gary said, "Don't worry. I don't think the store sells semi-automatics or assault weapons, so if they're planning to shoot up their school, they'll have to go somewhere else."

I don't buy into stereotypes about Goths, who are consistently among my best and most personable students. I'm sure the kids were going to the store to write an article about it for their school paper or something. But it was still a disturbing image.

Meanwhile, speaking of hiking and disturbing images, the other day I took a walk on the paved paths that wind between the housing developments in our neighborhood. There are strips of wild land here, and we have coyotes in these parts, so when I see the remains of small animals, I usually figure some coyote has just had a meal. But yesterday I passed a dove or pigeon that had been shot and was lying dead on the asphalt. A little later, I passed a lump of fur that looked like the tail of some animal (I'd say fox, but I don't think we have those here). A little after that, I passed a doll lying on a rock. Sometimes people find toys and put them on rocks or walls where they'll be visible if kids are looking for them, but this doll looked odd because it seemed to be doing a pushup: it was lying face down, but with arms extended, so it was propped up on its hands.

I picked it up and turned it over. The doll's face had been burned off.

Cute as a button.

Gahhhhhhh.

I wonder if I'd be less sensitive to all this if Brianna Denison hadn't just been murdered.

I've never felt unsafe on the paths between the developments before -- for one thing, there are almost always folks walking dogs there -- but I have to admit that this time, I turned around and hightailed it for home. The walk was just starting to feel a little too much like a horror movie.

Behold Eck!

One of my first SFnal memories is of watching a TV show about a frightening creature who scares people at first, but who's then discovered to be friendly and misunderstood. I'd remembered that the creature's name was "Eeeek" and that it was an electricity monster, but when I mentioned it to my mother, she said, "Oh, that was Eck. You loved Eck." So Gary Googled it and learned that the creaure appeared in a 1964 Outer Limits episode called "Behold Eck!"

We rented it from Netflix and watched it the other night. It's unbelievably cheesy early SF, of course, with laughable special effects, but none of us had trouble understanding why Eck would have appealed to me so.

Eck's actually a two-dimensional creature trying to get back home to his own dimension, but he can't see right in our world and needs special glasses to find the doorway back. The hero's a kindly optometrist who defends Eck against the people who want to destroy him, and makes the glasses for him.

I was a strange, lonely kid, and I wore glasses; my vision problems had been diagnosed when I couldn't see the blackboard at school. This is part of why I only learned to read at the end of first grade, rather than earlier.

A TV show about a strange creature who needed glasses must have been thrilling to me, although I also must have seen that episode in reruns in 1966 or 1967, since I didn't have glasses yet in 1964.

See the reflection of Eck in the good doctor's glasses? He even has four eyes!

Watching the episode as an adult, I was irritated no end that everyone automatically assumed that Eck was male, and that his voice was male. (The Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark told a very similar story with a gender twist.) And the plotting was ridiculous. But Gary and I were both charmed by the idea of a hero optometrist. Somebody could easily update the SFX and turn the story into a feature film, given how much plot business we didn't get to see.

When I was a little girl, I undoubtedly accepted the default male gender as automatically as everyone around me did. Samuel R. Delany tells the story of reading children's picture books to his daughter Iva -- who's quite a bit younger than I am! -- when she was three or so. He became annoyed that the animal heroes were always boys, but he couldn't find a book with a girl protagonist, so he set about making his own. He bought one of the Corduroy books for Iva and painstakingly set about whiting out all the male pronouns and replacing them with female ones.

But the minute he started reading the book to Iva, she protested. "That bear's not a girl, Daddy. It's a boy."

"No, Iva, Corduroy's a girl. Look: it says 'she.' And she's wearing the same Osh-Kosh overalls you're wearing."

"No, Daddy, it's a boy! It has to be a boy, 'cause this is a picturebook, and the animals in picturebooks are always boys."

These days, of course, the rules aren't quite as stringent, which is a Good Thing. But if somebody decides to redo Eck, give us a girl this time, okay? Or -- wait. Would it seem sexist for a female alien to need help from a male human scientist? Maybe Eck's male and the optometrist's a girl? But then they'd have to fall in love, so that's no good.

Hey, I've got it! Eck and the optometrist are both female! And they can fall in love if they want to, but they don't have to.

Obscure Nerd Note: This time around, I caught a pun in the episode's title. In Latin, "Ecce Homo" is "Behold the Man," and "Behold Eck" seems to be playing with that. Also, the title can be read either as a command to the viewer to behold Eck, or as a command to Eck to see more clearly. As my sister commented, "Somebody had fun with that one!" And yes, Eck can probably be read as a Christ figure, since his going back home will save the world.

The story as it currently exists won't bear quite that much weight, though.

Art and Prayer

When my father lived in coastal Mississippi, he was just a few blocks from The Walter Anderson Museum of Art. I went there often when I visited him, and fell in love with Anderson's beautiful drawings and designs for pottery and textiles, one of which you can see to the left.

During my last visit there, the week after Christmas in 2005, I realized that Anderson would be a good source of inspiration for one of the characters in my fourth novel (not in the sense that I'm basing her on him, but that she herself learns of his work and is inspired by it). This, of course, affords me the happy opportunity to put off actually writing the novel by doing research on Anderson. Writers love this stuff.

I'm currently reading Chistopher Maurer's Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson, and have become more fascinated by him than ever. He was a brilliant but troubled man, twice hospitalized for severe psychiatric problems -- including violence towards both himself and others -- who spent much of his later life living in seclusion on Horn Island, away from his wife and children. This must have been more than a bit of a relief to his wife, Agnes Grinstead Anderson, whom he'd hurt both physically and emotionally; her devotion to him and his work, despite the pain he caused her, is deeply moving -- to me, anyway, although if all this were happening now, surely he'd be arrested for domestic violence, or she and the kids would be whisked away to a shelter, or both.

In effect, that's what happened anyway, without the intervention of police. But as much as I abhor domestic violence, I'm glad his wife loved him and stood by him. Rather a contradictory position for a feminist, I know, but there you have it.

She wrote her own memoirs of life with him, Approaching the Magic Hour, and I want to read that next. And then I want to read his Horn Island Logs. And then I want to read the memoirs his children have written -- they and his grandchildren still run a family pottery business -- and watch various documentaries about his life, and then I want to go back to Mississippi and see the museum again and go back to Horn Island myself.

See what I mean about the research? Of course I can't do all of this: I need to stop at some point -- soon -- and resume work on my own novel.

Anderson was passionately, lyrically in love with nature, and believed that the artist was a kind of co-creator, that nature couldn't realize itself fully until expressed in art. He loved animals, although sometimes he treated them not much better than he did people (more often from neglect than outright cruelty). He had a special affinity with cats, "thou who carryest the sun for a head, a serpent for a tail, and for feet four flowers which follow thee wherever thou dost go." After he died, his wife forced her way into a locked room in his studio and discovered that he'd painted the four walls and ceiling of "the little room" with a joyous mural of creation, a visual representation of Psalm 104.

Among other things, reading about Anderson has reawakened my hunger to become more involved in visual arts. (The clay class starts next Monday! Yay!) Coincidentally -- or not -- this month's Episcopal Life has a story about Sybil MacBeth's Praying in Color, about using simple drawing as prayer. I've done a little of that myself, although I didn't realize there was a book about it, and I'd like to do more. If I'm feeling very brave, I may even scan some of the images and post them here.

As I think I've probably mentioned here before, my mother's dad, Jerome George Rozen, and his twin brother were fairly prominent commercial artists; among other things, they painted covers for pulp magazines, which means that I come by my genre leanings naturally! I took oil-painting lessons when I was a kid, and certainly felt encouraged in art both by family and teachers, but I let it go -- electing to pursue a field where there was less family competition -- and now I feel shy about it. Drawing prayers is a way of giving myself permission not to be skillful, since God knows what I meant to put on the paper even if I don't have the technique to get it there.

Elsewhere on the prayer front, I've discovered an online version of the Daily Office with very convenient, easy-to-use versions of Morning and Evening Prayer. The site includes optional audio clips for hymns -- although the music sounds like it's played on a kazoo -- and external links, so readers can learn more about the places mentioned in the world cycle of prayer and the churches mentioned in the denominational cycle of prayer.

Oh, and I called my spiritual director, after not contacting her for oever a year, and she welcomed me back like the Prodigal Son. She was overjoyed to hear from me, and we'll be getting together soon.

I'm doing my homework!

Dear Anonymous,

I'd address this to you by name, except that you didn't leave one. So please know that I mean no disrespect by calling you "anonymous." It's the only name I have for you, so it's the one I'm using.

In one of my recent posts, I complained about the fact that some people are rude to Christians, and/or ignorant about Christianity, at WisCon (which, for those of you just coming in, is a feminist science-fiction convention held every Memorial Day in Madison, Wisconsin). Here's the comment you left:

The whining about not feeling comfortable as a Christian is disengenuous at best. Seriously, you can do better.

Here's what it's like to really be uncomfortable in Wisconsin:

Did the people of the state say they wouldn't recognize your marriage because you're Christian?

Did people follow you around threatening to rape or beat you because they thought you were Christian?

Did you feel unsafe at the local hospital because the ONLY place in the area that the ems folks take rape victims is a Christian sect hospital? A hospital where ONE person is allowed to prescribe emergency contraceptives? And if that person's not on duty or sick or something, no emergency contraceptives can be prescribed for you there. Period.

Feel safe?

How about if you can't legally marry your beloved because the loving Christians of the state of Wisconsin voted to make it illegal?

How about if you can't cover your beloved with your medical insurance as straight, married folks can, because the state doesn't allow it. Feel safe?

Thinking about adopting? Anyone likely to discriminate against you because you're Christian?

When's the last time you felt really threatened because you wore a Christian symbol? Men following you around threatening you because you walked with a friend?

The Episcopal Church in the US is way better than most Christian churches in the US about gay and lesbian rights. But pretending that you really feel unsafe in any way because you're Christian in this country is misrecognizing serious threats to other people.

The great state of Wisconsin may not have jumped up and down to welcome your Christianity to a convention, but they didn't threaten your basic civil rights, either, or did they? Did the state government come threaten you? The local police?

Get stopped for driving while Christian the way our black citizens in rural Wisconsin sometimes do? Get arrested for nothing because you're Christian?

The whining by Christians is dishonest. Freedom of religion doesn't free you from criticism or scepticism. It does free you from abuse and discrimination by the US government. When's the last time the US government discriminated against you because you're Christian?

You're right: the US government hasn't discriminated against me personally becaue I'm Christian. (Christians in other countries have been discriminated against, even killed, but of course, I don't live in those places.) But then, I never claimed that it did. All I said was that that some people at WisCon were uncivil on the subject. Whatever "whining by Christians" you're referring to, I wasn't doing it. I'm not "Christians." I'm one, specific, individual Christian who was kvetching about a specific, individual, localized situation. (Criticism and skepticism don't bother me, by the way: bigotry does. Let me define my terms here: "bigotry," in this context, means assuming that all members of a given group are the same, rather than being individuals. Jerry Falwell and I couldn't be more different.)

Is being treated dismissively and rudely as bad as being threatened with rape, murder, or denial of civil rights? Of course not. Does the fact that I wasn't, at WisCon, threatened with rape, murder, or denial of civil rights mean that I should resignedly accept rude behavior from people who are reacting from fear and partial knowledge?

As far as I can tell, you think that the answer to that question is yes. (If I'm wrong, please correct me!) I think the answer to that question is no.

I don't think it's ever okay to treat people as less-than. Your position appears to be that only people threatened with rape, murder, or denial of civil rights have the right to be upset about being treated badly, and that anyone else should be grateful to merely be insulted and dismissed, because things could be so much worse.

Seriously, we can all do better than that.

There's no doubt at all that things could be much worse, for both of us. Have you ever been a victim of genocide in Rwanda or Darfur? Been an AIDS orphan in Africa? Lived in a cardboard box in Haiti? Lived in one of the many countries where women still don't have access to education or political power, or where no one at all has reliable access to food, water, or medical care? According to this logic, neither of us has the right to complain about anything, simply because we live in the U.S. I suspect we agree that the conditions I've just described are hideous, and that we all need to do whatever we can to right and prevent them. That doesn't mean that we can't also be upset about other things and work for other causes (not all of which, of course, will strike our fellow citizens as important).

Part of the subtext of your comment -- and again, please correct me if I'm wrong! -- seems to be that as a white straight woman, I can't empathize with the terror felt by people of color or sexual minorities. For whatever it's worth, here are some of my own experiences of being terrorized:

* Being beaten up nearly every day in junior high school by black bullies because I was white. This didn't, by the way, make me hate or even distrust all black people, although I can't say I was fond of the bullies; it did make me very grateful to the brave, decent black kids who stuck up for me (the mostly-white teachers weren't doing zip). It also means that I'm not entirely clueless about what racism feels like, even if I haven't been on the receiving end of it my entire life.

* At age nineteen, being trapped in an apartment with a hallucinating alcoholic who was throwing furniture at me and howling, "I'm going to make you bleed!" I screamed for help; I know the neighbors heard me, but none of them even called 911. Luckily, I got away without physical injury: lots of other people -- of all genders, ages, sexual orientations and ethnicities -- aren't so fortunate. The laws against domestic violence, welcome as they are, haven't kept it from happening.

* Five or six years ago, having my house repeatedly vandalized because my husband and I had put up campaign signs urging people to vote against a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as being only between a man and a woman. Our first sign was stolen; we put up another; it was ripped down; we put up another further in our property, which was also ripped down; we put one on top of our garage, whereupon we heard a crash as somebody threw a ladder against the house to rip that one down, too. The woman from whom we were getting the signs -- who's lesbian and knows we're straight -- was concerned enough about all this to call the police, who called us to ask if there was anything they could do to help us. We told them we didn't think so, but thanked them for offering. And sure, it was only getting signs ripped down: but believe me when I say that we worried plenty about arson and rocks through windows. The police told us we were right to be worried about that. So even though I'm straight, I know what it's like to be scared while sticking up for minorities.

Oh: and, by the way, yes, I have been chased and threatened with rape -- merely because I was female.

I'm not saying any of this to try to make you feel sorry for me: I'm indeed very privileged, and have also been very lucky. But all of the incidents I just described were "really uncomfortable," as I define that term. Were they "more serious," in the sense of being scarier and more physically dangerous, than being snubbed at WisCon? Of course. Am I grateful that nothing worse happened at WisCon? Of course. Does all of this mean that the bigotry of a few people at WisCon is okay and that I should feel fine about it?

No.

See, here's the thing. My experiences with terror have turned me into someone who never wants anyone to feel terror. My experiences being belittled and put down have turned me into someone who never wants anyone to feel belittled. My experiences being made to feel less-than have turned me into someone who never wants anyone to have to feel that way.

What this means is that I'm firmly opposed to genocide, hunger, poverty, sexism, racism, homophobia . . . and having people be snarky about my faith -- without having any idea how I practice that faith, how I define it, what it means to me -- at WisCon. I can be opposed to all of those things at once (indeed, my faith emphatically calls me to be opposed to all those things at once) because all of them are wrong.

But not everyone who's been terrorized or belittled responds this way. One response -- one I've seen before, and which your comment appears to fall into (please correct me if I'm wrong!) -- runs something like this: "Only people who've been terrorized or belittled the exact same way I have count, and they're the only ones who deserve support, and they're the only ones I'm going to support."

This kind of thinking is very human and understandable. It also has some unfortunate logical consequences: 1) It means that those who subscribe to it are in some sense actually invested in suffering, which has become the only way they recognize worth, and 2) It means that the very worthiest allies are those who've paid the ultimate price and have died for their positions or as a result of their identitities.

Martyrdom is heart-wrenching, and the martyrs who've been produced by too many causes -- the Martin Luther King Jr.s, Oscar Romeros, Matthew Shepherds and Teena Brandons of the world -- are heart-wrenching symbols. Their stories can, and often do, help rally people to action. But dead people, by definition, are really bad at the everyday, undramatic, behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating political change. They can't stuff envelopes, sign petitions, lobby their elected representatives, write letters to editors, have persuasive conversations with friends, put campaign signs on top of their garages, or vote.

This means that they aren't the most effective allies. The most effective allies are people who haven't been killed or incapacitated. The most effective allies, then, aren't always those who've suffered the most.

There are lots of different kinds of Christians. I'm one of the ones (and we're a sizeable group) who believe in separation of church and state, in civil rights for everybody, in feeding the hungry: in love, rather than hatred or fear. I'm one of the Christians who don't believe in burning witches. I don't believe that everybody has to agree with me to be saved: I think the world would be a really boring place if it worked that way, and I think God is far too big to be contained in any box constructed by humans.

In my work as a volunteer ER chaplain, I've advocated for homeless patients even though I've always had a place to live. I've advocated for patients who were sexual minorities even though I'm straight. I've advocated for non-white patients even though I'm white. I've advocated for prisoners even though I've never been in prison. And yes, I've also advocated for Republicans, conservatives, and fundamentalist Christians -- even though I'm a liberal Democrat and proud member of the Christian Left -- because their politics weren't the point. Their suffering was the point. I don't want anyone to suffer, and I'll try to alleviate suffering however I can. That's what being a Christian means to me. I can't do everything, and some of my efforts are undoubtedly pretty pathetic, and even the good efforts don't always work. I try anyway.

Some of the hospital patients I just listed, if asked, might say that I couldn't possibly be a good advocate for them because I myself wasn't suffering enough, or because I didn't share their particular identity politics. I advocated for them anyway, even the ones who clearly didn't like me. I'd do the same for the people at WisCon who were rude to me.

That doesn't make the rudeness okay.

(Because of my volunteer work, I was particularly struck by the description of the terrible hospital in your area. Is there nothing anyone can do to advocate for change in that hospital? Lawsuits, letter-writing campaigns, letters to hospital administrators? Is this a situation where the hospital feels it can do whatever it wants because it's in an isolated area without much competition? Has anyone talked to the media about this stuff?)

One of my goals in educating the rude people at WisCon is to make them feel safer. Christians aren't necessarily out to get you. You don't have to flee in terror every time you see a cross. We don't all burn witches.

And so forth.

My young female university students often comment that they aren't feminists. In response to this, I always ask, "Does that mean that you don't appreciate having access to higher education or being able to vote? Because, you know, earlier generations of women who called themselves feminists paid very high prices to give you the right to those things. Some of them went to jail; some of them died. So please never take your rights for granted."

That usually makes them think. I'm glad I can make them think, but I'm also gladder than I can say that we've made at least some headway on the feminist front, and that my female students can, at long last, take some of their rights for granted.

Won't it be wonderful when sexual minorities and non-whites and practitioners of every faith can also take things for granted? Human rights? Civil rights? Civil behavior? A certain level of personal safety?

Isn't a world where we can all take those things for granted the world that all of us should be working for?