Musings

Crossing Thresholds

I went to the ocean to cross a threshold. To honor, through sacred ceremony, the transition I made when I moved here two months ago.

Transitions, even when they’re as good as this one has been, are complicated. Old habits and old stories don’t die willingly. It’s easy to impose our old framework onto the new realty, reacting to triggers that are no longer there and engaging defense mechanisms that are no longer necessary.

At least once a day, someone asks me if I’m actually as happy here as I seem to be on social media. The honest answer is a resounding YES. I don’t do false advertising. The past two months have shattered my limited ideas of how happy it’s possible to be, of how much joy I can hold in my body. And, as I have stretched to accommodate the super-abundance of goodness that is suddenly available to me, as I have asked myself incredulously at least 72 times a day, “are you sure this isn’t too good to be true?” I have come face to face with my staggering capacity for self doubt. I have realized how reluctant I am to trust goodness because I’m convinced it’s a scam. I have learned that letting go of an old, defensive, and suspicious way of being doesn’t happen overnight.

Since my arrival in California, I have been craving a way to formally mark this beautifully messy coast to coast transition, to honor it in my body. So, with the help of my amazing spiritual director, I dreamt up a ritual. On special, biodegradable, dissolvable paper, I wrote down my old story, the one I no longer need or want to inhabit, for the last time that way. On a separate page, I wrote down all the limiting beliefs and untrue stories I tell myself, cut it into a giant papery spiral, and wrapped it around my leg to represent the ways in which I feel chained to a past that no longer serves me. And, finally, I wrote a new story, a story with lots of room to grow into, a story full of magic and mystery that I am ready to claim as my own.

This morning, I gathered my papers and headed to Ocean Beach. I could think of no better way to symbolize and embody the idea of releasing than standing with my feet in the surf, letting the water greet me with its savage embrace and pull away anything that wasn’t nailed down (literally. The Mighty Pacific also stole my flip flops. Oops.) – again and again and again. Because being made new is a process, not a once and for all event.

When I was dreaming up this ceremony, I had envisioned a sunny, postcard worthy day. The ocean had other ideas – better ideas. Rain and wind made the experience colder and wilder than anticipated, but meant that I had the glorious entirety of Ocean Beach all to myself. I had expected the kelp-like strands of paper I’d wrapped around my ankle to gently dissolve in the water over a few minutes – instead, the savage undertow tore them from my leg in a single motion, putting an abrupt end to any temptation to wallow. And then, in timing so perfect, I wouldn’t have even known how to ask for it, the clouds began to part precisely as I was standing with my feet in the freezing surf, reading my old story aloud to the sea for the last time and dropping the page in the waves. The vivid demarcation of clouds, sun, sea, and sand mirrored the very dividing line I was trying to honor – past and present, old and new. To seal the deal, as I turned around to walk back to my car, a giant wave came out of nowhere and gently slapped me on the behind, drenching me from the waist down and causing me to burst into maniacal laughter on the deserted beach.

It was beautifully imperfect and perfectly beautiful. Messy, real, raw, primal. I walked away from my ceremonial moment with sopping wet pants, puffy eyes, salt encrusted shins, furiously frigid feet, and no shoes to speak of. I emerged from the sea reminded of the power of symbol and creative ritual action to support us in our healing and totally dumbfounded by the wild wisdom of the Earth. Ceremony, be it in a cathedral or on an abandoned beach, isn’t a magic bullet – it’s a touchstone. Something we can recall and return to, a reminder of our commitment to change and of the support that surrounds us if we’re brave enough to ask for it.

I am wildly grateful. And ready to be made new.

Prayer unboxed

My prayer life does not fit in a box. For the past decade, my prayer practices (or lack thereof) have stumped an impressive succession of spiritual directors. “Just sit in silence!” they proclaimed, as I lamented that I didn’t know how to pray, that nothing was working. “Try the Ignatian Examen!” they encouraged, when that failed. Inevitably, these interactions would conclude with my all time favorite conversation stopper: “Just pray the Office!”

Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

My inability to have a traditional prayer life is not for lack of trying. To my immense frustration, sitting in silence takes whatever anxiety I have and ratchets it up 65 levels. My mind just does not get still on command, no matter what mantra or image or meditation app I use. More to the point, using force to get my overactive brain to shut up only makes me feel crazy and broken. The Examen sounds nice in theory, but when you already have a guilt-driven conscience and have your confessor on speed dial, a nightly review of your shortcomings is more tortuous than contemplative. And the Office? I would love nothing more than to be one of those magic unicorn people for whom praying morning and evening prayer straight out of the book comes easily. I have tried. I’ve put in the hours. But forcing my way through canticles littered with relentlessly masculine language simply is not life giving for me right now. For me, the Office is not the prayer panacea everyone seems to think this.

I am, you might say, a difficult case. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

The amount of shame I have felt about my “broken,” “dysfunctional” prayer life over the years is staggering. Christians, especially clergy and seminarians, are really excellent at spiritual one-upmanship when it comes to prayer practices. We all like to think we’re doing it right, that we have, through our virtuous striving, gained access to some secret spiritual knowledge and have a god-given duty to impart it to the unenlightened masses. I have spent too much time wondering what’s wrong with me and searching, desperately, for a magic fix, for the one prayer practice that will just work when I plug it into my life.

I have finally come to the conclusion that the magic fix does not exist. More to the point, my prayer life doesn’t need to be fixed at all – because it isn’t broken.

I just needed to be ok with breaking the rules.

I needed to stop letting other people dictate how I experienced God.

The first time I mentioned to someone – hesitantly, timidly – that the hours I spent swimming laps at the pool had become my most valued prayer time, I was told, with chilling condescension, “Oh honey, no. That’s exercise, not prayer.” As though I was a kindergartner who had mixed up my p’s and q’s.

We not only diminish each other when we try to put fences around how and when and where we’re allowed to experience the divine, we also diminish God. God doesn’t give a damn about fences. God wants to go where there is need, where there is energy, where there is desire.

What if we gave ourselves permission to do like Jesus did and break some rules? What if we gave ourselves permission to let everything be prayer? To take devotion out of the box and stop worrying so much about whether we’re doing it right or what other people might think?

I have by no means “figured out” my prayer life. I don’t especially want to, because I want God to keep surprising me. But one thing I have learned is that I can only still my mind if my body is involved. Involved in a much more appreciable way than fingering some prayer beads or shuffling through a labyrinth, which is what the permissible canon of praying with one’s body tends to be. So I pray by moving – by running, swimming, cycling, down dog-ing, and handstand-ing, using physical intensity to find mental release. I take literally the Psalmist’s command to “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and meet God with joy and gratitude in wild cooking experiments and shared meals with friends. Above all, I pray with my breath, channeling the power of ruach, of Spirit through my own lungs, inviting the divine presence to fill me, to hold me, to cleanse me. God provided me with a body, and I can only deduce that I am supposed to use it as a vessel to experience the divine.

You will never hear me tell you how to pray. There are more than enough shoulds, expectations, and shame in our lives without me adding to the pile. But I’ve had enough anguished conversations with fellow seekers who can’t seem to make the prescribed toolkit work for them to know that I’m not the only one who needs an invitation to break the rules. To take prayer out of the box. To set aside our anxiety about getting it right and open up some space for the Spirit to play.

If you’re a magic unicorn person who is perfectly content with praying the Office (or any prescribed equivalent) – wonderful! Carry on. But if you, like me, have ever wondered, in shame or silence, what the damn secret is and how to get in on it – you are not broken. Your prayer life is not defunct. Even if you don’t think you’re praying, you are. You just haven’t given yourself permission to call it prayer.

So, I dare you: break a rule or two. Take the lid off the God box and throw it away. Throw away your shame while you’re at it. Make some space. Get bigger. Don’t worry so much about what other people think. You already have everything you need.

Resource Links for Teaching Liturgy with Youth

This space is devoted to exploring what I call “ridiculously authentic living” in all unusual hats I wear in life: Episcopal priest, breathwork practicioner, triathlete, and regular old human being. Among other things, I write about emotional honesty and fully embodied participation in whatever it is we are experiencing.

In my professional life as a priest, that kind of authenticity shines through most clearly in the way I teach liturgy with youth. We lead best when we lead from our truest selves, when we stop trying to fit into prescribed molds and take the risk of sharing what gives us joy. For me, that’s liturgy. Liturgy is the place where everything comes together for me, where we get to show up exactly as we are and experience grace beyond our wildest imagining.

Over the past three years, I have tried to channel my excitement about liturgy into a set of creative and adaptable teaching resources designed for use with middle and high schoolers (but flexible enough to use with adults or mixed age groups). I share them in the hope that they might be useful for you in the communities that you serve.

If you found this site through Building Faith, welcome! This corner of the internet is a place where I share sermons, reflections on the messy beauty that is embodied life, and resources for integrating our minds and bodies. I hope you’ll take a look around and, if you like what you see, subscribe to my newsletter!

Teaching Liturgy: Resource Links

• Liturgy Evaluation: a way to see what people already know about liturgy and how they experience worship. An excellent way to open up a conversation – and a great tool for church leaders to get constructive feedback from the people in the pews!

• Teaching Scripture through the Liturgy of the Word: allows youth to learn more about the Bible in the way they most frequently experience it: in church! Puts learners in the driver’s seat by letting them pick their own readings and design their own service.

• Sanctuary Photo Scavenger Hunt: a fun way to familiarize youth with liturgical space (they will love it, if for no other reason than that they get to use their phones!)

• Nicene Creed Mad-Libs: teaching the Creed in a way that’s relevant and interesting is a real challenge, and this silly activity is a great note to end on. If you have an overly serious or sulky group, this is for you – it’s impossible not to laugh while talking about our belief in the “resurrection of the garbage” or our savior who was “crucified under Lil Pump.”

• Prompts for Holy Week Emoji Stories: the only thing I love more than the Sunday liturgy is the liturgical extravaganza that is Holy Week. Unfortunately, no confirmation curriculum I’ve found offers a good way to teach about these holy days that are at the heart of our faith, so I had to improvise. Give each youth (or team of youth) a prompt for one day of Holy Week and have them sum it up using exclusively emojis. Bonus: it’s yet another phone-positive activity!

Cracked Open: a Reflection on Maundy Thursday

To say that I am enthusiastic about Maundy Thursday foot washing is the understatement of the century. It would be more accurate to call me a rabidly passionate lover of foot washing. In seminary, I wrote a hundred page thesis on Maundy Thursday, the majority of which is devoted to lambasting people who don’t wash feet or don’t do it right. I am, you might say, zealous for the cause.

I have never had a problem with feet, never understood why people squeal with embarrassment, hide their feet in mock horror, or insist on getting a pedicure before taking off their socks in church. For years, I could not fathom why someone wouldn’t want to get their feet washed. I have preached my fair share of stern sermons making it very clear that, when Jesus tells us to wash each other’s feet, it’s a commandment, not a suggestion. Every year, I bared my feet with pride.

And then, this summer, something happened. A callus on the soft pad of my foot attracted my nervous attention. Spurred by boredom, restlessness, or aimless anxiety, I picked at it. I suppose I subconsciously thought that, if I was diligent enough, I could remove the callus by sheer force of will and strength of fingernails. As I excavated deeper and deeper, the callus turned into a crater. Eventually, inevitably, I struck live flesh. Propelled by mad instinct, I didn’t, couldn’t stop. Within no time, what had been a healthy foot with a small callus was a mangled pulp of infected flesh.

I have never been so ashamed in my life. For as long as I could, I pretended everything was fine. I did my best to cover up the gaping hole in my foot, wearing sneakers even though it was August. When I could no longer walk without excruciating pain, I finally admitted I needed help. I swallowed my pride, limped to the doctor, and allowed another human being to take my shame in hand, to examine, clean, and bandage it. As I explained to the polite physician’s assistant what had happened, I was convinced she would recoil in horror, mock me, or have me parceled off immediately to the nearest psych hospital (to her endless credit, she did none of the above). I felt broken, exposed, and completely unhinged – clearly, normal people don’t rip open their own appendages with their fingernails out of boredom.

Even after receiving medical care, the veil of shame still hung heavily. The antibiotics I received would treat the infection, but the wound was still so painful that I was forced to buy a pair of crutches – which, in turn, meant that I was forced to fabricate a false explanation for why I was hobbling around on crutches without a visible cast or splint to show off. I couldn’t possibly tell the truth about what I had done. The crutches, it transpired, were such a spectacle that I retreated even further into shame, taking three days off of work to hide and recover. It took two weeks for me to walk normally and without pain again.

Nearly a year later, I can count the people who know what really happened on one hand. I never quite figured out how I was supposed to mention, in polite company, “oh, by the way, I’m a compulsive skin picker?” Like so many of the private wounds that torture us the most, skin picking is a topic that our society has labeled as taboo. Despite the fact that millions of people suffer from the same compulsive need to shred their own flesh, few doctors will diagnose it, few therapists know about it, and no one really knows how to treat it. Skin picking is an awfully lonely business.

This year, for the first time ever, I don’t want anyone to touch my feet on Maundy Thursday. I don’t want someone running their fingers over the scar on my sole, which still burns with the memory of shame. I don’t want to be asked what happened. I don’t want to be exposed in all my messy, broken, raw vulnerability. 

Which means that this is the year I need foot washing most of all. This is the year it might really mean something to me, not in theological abstraction, but in my own body. Because what Jesus wanted, when he knelt before his disciples, towel in hand, was to get right to the heart of their shame, their woundedness, their secret pain. He wanted to take their brokenness in hand and love it, not in some fluffy abstract way, but physically. Skin to skin. Body to body. He yearned to touch his friends’ most vulnerable, fearful places and say, “even this is not too broken, too twisted, too gross for me to love. Not even close.”

That is what Maundy Thursday is all about. A chance for us to experience in our own bodies the sweet reassurance that no secret pocket of shame is too much for God to handle. For most of us, our deepest wounds have nothing to do with our feet, so we have to use our imaginations. Perhaps what we need to offer to God’s embrace is our shame around infertility, depression, chronic disease, addiction, or something else entirely. Perhaps the wound that’s crying out for healing doesn’t fit into the tidy box of a label or a diagnosis. The point is, no matter what we think is “wrong” with us, we are never too broken for God to love. And that the way we heal is not to hide, but to open. Today, this extraordinary, holy Thursday, cracks open normal space and time to create a space of safety, where we can be Christ to one another and experience the grace of being seen, touched, held with infinite love. Let the water dissolve your shame. Let the hands of your neighbor cradle your vulnerability. Let the towel embrace your pain. Tonight, you are seen. Tonight, you are loved. Tonight, you are whole.

Active Recovery as Life Skill

There are a great number of things I wish had been a part of my formal education. Like how to fold a fitted sheet. Or how to check my tire pressure (let’s be real: I still don’t know how to do either one of those things…). But atop the list of lessons in Being Human 101 that somehow never gets taught is: how to recover from an emotionally intense situation under pressure. It’s well and good to say that, when you’re emotionally overheated, you should go take a walk around the block to cool off. Or close your office door and take 5 deep breaths. Or, in an emergency, hide in a bathroom stall while you collect yourself. But what we never seem to hear about from meditation and self help gurus is what to do when you are 0.2 seconds away from actively losing your shit…and you’re standing in front of your colleagues, about to give a presentation. Or standing at the altar about to celebrate the Eucharist in a church full of people who often confuse clergy with God. What do you do when your blood is boiling and you can’t take a time out? 

The trick is learning how to put your intense emotions in time out while you finish whatever it is you need to do – without shoving them down and repressing them indefinitely. It’s a terribly tricky balancing act. But it is possible. And actually, the place where I have honed this skill is not in church, or even in my breathwork practice, but on the running trail.

I have decided that 2018 will be the year I finally complete a half marathon and an Olympic distance triathlon, and so my life has turned into an endurance cardio extravaganza. In becoming a certifiable Crazy Person who gets up at 6:00 am to run in sub-zero wind chills, I have discovered the crucial importance of active recovery: learning to let your heart rate return to a sustainable level after an intense hill or a sprint interval – without actually stopping. This part of training basically amounts to torture. After grinding my way up a gnarly hill, my first instinct is to fling myself onto the ground and roll around dramatically. It is most assuredly not to keep running. And that is precisely why athletes train: to learn to push their edge, to increase their tolerance for intense discomfort, and to find a way of dialing down the intensity while still moving forward. In other words: you intentionally practice feeling like you’re going to die over and over again until your body and brain learn that you’re not actually dying. 

Whether or not you have any interest in taking up endurance sports, the concept of active recovery is useful to every human being who ever has a feeling. It’s especially applicable to those moments when all we want to do is scream and throw things, but instead have to function as professional adults. Here are a few of my go to active recovery strategies, adapted from my athletic pursuits, that (thus far, at least!) have prevented me from punching anyone on the altar: 

1. Assess what you can control in the situation. The answer may well be “not much,” but there’s always something that remains yours, even when the shit is hitting the fan. It might be your fists: go ahead and give yourself an A+ for keeping your hands to yourself. It might be your feet: can you stay in the room instead of running out in protest? You win. It might be your facial expression: resist the urge to death glare and award yourself 100 points. Focusing on what agency you do have is typically much more productive than mentally reciting the 502 things you wish you could do, but can’t.

2. Breathe. Your breath is always on the list of things you can control, so use it! Your breath is your superpower: free, invisible, potent, and always available. And because I despise it when people condescendingly tell me to “just breathe,” as though it were something I hadn’t successfully been doing for three decades, let me break it down. The following are some super sneaky ways to make your breath work for you without anyone noticing that you’re working some powerful magic:

• Count: track the length of your inhales and exhales. Start with 3 counts in, 3 counts out, and see if you can work up to an exhale that’s twice as long as your inhale. The point is to make sure you ARE exhaling – when we’re super stressed, we clench our bodies and forget to release air, just like we take on more and more intense emotion without a release valve. Plus, long exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system, help switch the body out of fight or flight mode, and lessen the sensation of “oh my God, I’m going to die.” Win. 
  
• Ground: feel your feet firmly on the ground and send your breath as far down into your abdomen as you can. You can even imagine your breath flowing all the way down to your toes, connecting you to the earth. It’s a great trick for getting out of your head and into the present moment.
  
• Visualize: this simple exercise is my absolute favorite, tried and true breath technique to keep myself from killing people in the middle of Mass. Visualize a strong magnetic line running vertically through your torso. With every inhale, imagine that your breath is drawing in any bits of energy that you’ve given away to other people or situations, anything that’s distracting you from being in your body at this precise moment. Your breath becomes a kind of energetic vacuum cleaner, restoring you to yourself. This one a speedy and silent way of reclaiming your power when you feel totally helpless in the face of anger or anxiety. 

3. Commit. Promise your intense feeling that you will tend to it as soon as you possibly can. Actively make a plan and then follow through. Ask yourself, “what would feel good RIGHT NOW?” and make a mental note. Chances are, by the time you actually have time to deal with your feelings, the lessened urgency will make it harder to pinpoint what you need, so do it now. What I typically want is a forceful, physical release: a long run followed by a full breathwork session with lots of opportunities to scream. You do you. Figuring out what you need and learning to offer it to yourself is another of those crucial life skills I wish I’d learned a long time ago.

4. Forgive. Not if, but when you crack and find yourself yelling, swearing, or exploding…take responsibility for whatever harm you caused, make amends as needed, and move on. Don’t bludgeon yourself with guilt. That serves no one. Offer yourself as much compassion and forgiveness as you possibly can. And yes, I definitely did save the hardest one for last.

None of this is a magic fix. But these tools are ways to feel a tiny bit saner while the world is spinning out of control. And, over time, those little snippets of sanity start to add up and make a difference. 

On powerful feelings in a world that doesn’t know what to do with them

So often, when we feel something forcefully, we judge the crap out of ourselves. “This again!? I thought I was done with this. I don’t have time to feel this way.” And we deny the Feeling the right to exist. Or, we confuse the Feeling with the story we’ve always told about why we feel that way and what it means. We feel a surge of anger and are transported right back to our childhood. We feel sadness and assume we have to cry, or we can’t cry, because that’s just the way we are. Or perhaps we rush to categorize the Feeling, to put a label on it, to make it less amorphous, more manageable.

What if, instead of all that, we did something truly radical? What if, instead of raising our defenses, we softened and made space for the Feeling? What if we welcomed it, held it, and truly felt it, with as much compassion as we can muster?

These days, I am learning that, when we do this difficult work, not only do Feelings pass more quickly and leave less destruction in their wake…they also have so much more to teach us.