love and other reasons for change,
abigail

when we moved into that last house
i swore i'd never move again
because i hate moving
but i hated other things about that life
more than i hate moving.

so now that it seems fitting to use the phrase
"the rest of your stuff"
about things, furnishings, wedding rings
i am warming to the possibility
that this one more painful part of the process is coming to an end and
I'm going to get it
get this
get it
wrong or right
i'm going to get it.

There are these things we say to one another and given a change in context, a change in place or face or space a simple phrase can mean different things: same words moving through the space between us, moving meanings impossible to pin down
Get it, take it
from me
take it, get it?
I got you
I've got you
right where...
I want you
Its all there,
get it, take it
one last chance to take it
take on
take hold,
hold it!
hold on,
I've got you.

hold on, I've got you.

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You'll make it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can't go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I'm painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I'll sing along

Last night on the phone abuelita told me she doesn't want me to suffer. She wants to buy me a coat, some rain boots, anything to protect me from the weather, but only because she doesn't trust her voice to be like a windbreaker against the storms in my heart (even though I do). I told her I'd call if I find the coat I need.

PHoff gave me a copy of this article. The Konica Bizhub messed up the back page and it was so dark I could barely read it toward the end... but it wouldn't have made it any easier to read had it copied well...

Till Disrespect Do Us Part

Couples therapist John Gottman predicts marriage futures.

By Kathryn Robinson
MY HUSBAND TOM and I fought most of the way to the Dr. John Gottman lecture.

I don't recall what the argument was about. I vaguely remember he was annoyed that I hadn't gotten the Subaru's headlight replaced, which I guess I must've agreed to do. I was annoyed that he expected me, a car dope, to accomplish something even remotely automotive. He carped that I wasn't parking in the best lot. I carped that he was checking his BlackBerry for email instead of talking to his wife. And he'd forgotten something in his office, dammit, so we were going to be late to the "Making Marriage Work" lecture.

As it turned out, we weren't late: A knot of people clogged the Town Hall entrance, waiting to pay $50 a couple--during a recession--to hear the nation's pioneer in relationship science dispense the marriage secrets he'd spent a career uncovering. Thirty some years ago, as a young clinical psychologist, he set out to study the relationship dynamics and concurrent physiological responses of married couples. One newlywed pair at a time would spend a full 24 hours in a lushly appointed apartment with a placid view of the Montlake Cut, discussing matters of both agreement and conflict, while Gottman wired them for heart rate and brain function and numerous other physical variables.

Over months and years Gottman and his grad students tested and retested these same couples, gradually amassing a pile of data on the behaviors that make marriages work--and those that make them weak. As the study ripened and some couples divorced, the scientist began to see that certain behaviors could reliably predict a split. Upon this data, Dr. John Gottman built a research institute, a self-help book empire, a thriving therapeutic practice, and an esteemed academic name. His therapeutic superhero skill? Divorce Predictor.

"Is that like horse whisperer?" Tom asked as we found seats. We looked around, suddenly self-conscious. Our marriage seemed pretty healthy to me, aside from a short list of ongoing differences--we call them Fight A, Fight B, and Fight C--and the occasional argument about nothing, as in the car ride over. Generally we dwell in a playful, enriching, and loving union.

But just being at a "Making Marriage Work" lecture felt like wearing a name tag that said, "Hello! We're Circling the Drain!" Of course the one couple we knew in the huge hall happened to be sitting just across the aisle, and looked equally busted when we said hi. "Dragged here, too, were you?" Tom joshed, socking the husband manfully on the shoulder. We all smiled, admitting it was the wives' idea, but that both husbands were genuinely interested in what this Gottman had to say. Plus, the man told us, they had just received jarring news from the marriage front. "You remember our neighbors, the Smiths?" (Not really "the Smiths," you understand.) We did--great people, very solid, together forever. "He had an affair. The marriage is done."

The lights flickered and we stumbled back to our seats. The Smiths? I read my own thoughts in Tom's expression: If it can happen to them, is anyone's marriage safe? Could the Divorce Predictor have seen that one coming?

Couples once aired resentments--with foam baseball bats.

The good doctor spent the next two hours establishing that yeah...he probably could have. Gottman told his audience that four neon signs herald marital doom: criticism ("There is no such thing as constructive criticism"), defensiveness, the "shutting-out" Gottman calls stonewalling, and contempt. Of these, contempt--the act of relating to one's partner from a position of superiority, whether by calling him an idiot or correcting her grammar--is the most destructive and the number-one predictor of divorce. Not only does contempt eat like sulfuric acid through a marriage, it's physically destructive. Emerging research reveals that contempt among intimates measurably corrodes the recipient's immune system. Couples who practice these sorts of marriages Gottman calls the Disasters.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Masters, who through a thousand positive moments build a culture within their marriage of appreciation and respect. They look for things to praise in their partner. They say, "Thanks for doing the dishes tonight," and "You look so sexy in that color."

It's no great mystery how the Masters do this, Gottman explains; it's Friendship 101. They ask their partner questions about their desires and dreams, then remember the answers. They learn to identify their partner's bids for emotional connection, then respond in kind. Unlike the therapeutic modalities in vogue when Gottman started his research, where couples were urged to air their resentments with each other--sometimes employing foam baseball bats for emphasis--Gottman found that what makes marriage work is precisely the opposite. Relationships work to the extent that partners are gentle with each other.

Gottman spoke with candor and wit--the wise elder statesman in a city unusually crowded with relationship experts, sociologist Pepper Schwartz to sex columnist Dan Savage. Make no mistake, Gottman declared: Crappy interactions happen in all marriages, good and bad. Successful marriages are not bastions of romantic bliss; they're pretty good partnerships peppered with regrettable moments. Indeed, 69 percent of the married couples he studied wrestled with the same problems the entire life of their marriage. Fight A, Fight B, and Fight C. The only difference was that the Masters dealt with them functionally and respectfully.

At the end Gottman opened the floor, and a man asked if there was a variable to predict good marriages. "There is," Gottman said. "Men who are willing to accept influence from women." From across the aisle my friend caught my eye. He means men who work up interest in a marriage lecture because they know it means something to their wives, I heard her thinking. Tom looked at me and dramatically rolled his eyes.

And took my hand.

I can follow him, mostly.

I get a little stuck on Eucharist because Holy Communion happens every Sunday and we don't get a choice about that--even if or when it seems like we might. What is more, communion happens every moment, every hour, every day every week for us.
So every week we have the choice about whether or not to drag ourselves up to the altar.

It is just one more example of the way the life-giving choice happens to you, you turn around and feel like you never really made it, it made you.

so I'm working it out, hoping the poems will explain it to me:

I love you so much
The blood will always be there
soaking in around and through us, the everyday every day, and sometimes in the sweaty brow of your midnight body twisted in bedsheets,
like in a dream:; :; :;
one thought connects to another without making any real sense, but this is not a dream;
It is a restful choice, for body and blood
like a ribbon unfurling,
from some one body to another,
chalice to lips and then out again, when we whisper the words we know will cost
us, everything:
--I love you so much--
in honesty and hope
this is only a wasted moment,
a fantasy, or harmful
if we disconnect from all that we have learned--:
about choices.
Sometimes we make a choice.
Sometimes a choice makes us
Because it is
who we are, who we want to be, who we were made to be,
called to be: among the living.
if you ever doubt heaven exists let it be
because I am not there,
I am here with you
always.

so here, watch this sad little video for someday you will be loved. it may make your stomach hurt.

I once knew a girl
In the years of my youth
With eyes like the summer
All beauty and truth
In the morning I fled
Left a note and it read
Someday you will be loved.

I cannot pretend that I felt any regret
Cause each broken heart will eventually mend
As the blood runs red down the needle and thread
Someday you will be loved

You'll be loved you'll be loved
Like you never have known
The memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved

You may feel alone when you're falling asleep
And everytime tears roll down your cheeks
But I know your heart belongs to someone you've yet to meet
Someday you will be loved

You'll be loved you'll be loved
Like you never have known
The memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved

these days, when i hear the songs that were written in the language of love i am suddenly able to understand them. the trees so boldly in love with the wind in their leaves, the spiders at home in their webs, the dogs willing to run, fetch and always return, the way diamonds reflect light and sun shines through a window all make a little more sense now because they are all confessions of love,
a message meant to concede that love shows up in the oddest places and tiniest spaces, between all the living, moving parts of the hopeful machinations of a God whose first creation is love.

love is such a complicated confession. i tell you about the scent of a redwood tree in autumn and i am confessing that i love that tree, and i love to tell you about the tree, because i love you. these confessions are a wading into the waters of repentance, i take your hand and tell you i am turning toward you, away from the days when i was afraid to tell you about the smell of a tree. i am asking you to trust me, knowing full well that this is a drastic change in the way i have used these words before, that trust is always a risk and i am asking you to endure nightmares about betrayal, fend off the monstrous absence of proof, and you may at any moment climb to the top of the very tree that started all this trouble just to make sure heaven doesn't exist because i am not there...
because
sometimes the words are just so deep down
at the bottom of my shipwrecked heart, in a tiny box, that is impossible to pry open. and if the words were to surface, if you or i could raise the titanic vocabulary of the way i had hoped things would be, well, that would change everything--i know because Hope tells me this is true.
but the pressure is so great and the fear so strong the words crumble on the way to the surface, they cringe in the light of sunset as we stand on the on the sandy beach holding onto mere fragments oxidated, disintegrated, and my hands shake and i can't breathe because on the way up i was moving too fast and breathing too much and i got the bends... it is undeniably overwhelming.
it takes a certain strong kind of man to look at me and my too many little pieces of broken lines, rusty thoughts, salty, barnacled inarticulate hopes and dreams and appreciate

that this is the best thing that has ever happened to him, that i am the best thing that has ever happened to him, because it is an offering, a confession, priceless, irreplaceable, proof of the serious weight of my story, and it is enough to change how he feels his own.

those Avetts, they know how this happens and they are very helpful.

when you can't say love to each other anymore, you have to leave the place you called home because you were just calling it that, even though it wasn't. the real words for it, the strong words like hate and anger, were buried under an ocean of denial, along with the words

I and love and you

Three words that became hard to say.
I and Love and You.
I and Love and You.
I and Love and You.

TO ADDRESS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

We proclaim with one voice as national spiritual and religious leaders that violence against women exists in all communities, including our own, and is morally, spiritually and universally intolerable.

We acknowledge that our sacred texts, traditions and values have too often been misused to perpetuate and condone abuse.

We commit ourselves to working toward the day when
all women will be safe and abuse will be no more.

We draw upon our healing texts and practices to
help make our families and societies whole.

Our religious and spiritual traditions compel us to work for justice and the eradication of violence against women."

* * *

then there is also this thought I'm working on, a part of my self, my story, haunting me, like a ghost of an idea about falling and failing in love, jumpers, flight and fight and all these other ways we move into love and out again.

there was a moment yesterday, crossing the aurora bridge, the one famous for all the jumping from its trestles, and I thought of flying instead of falling.

I thought of the birds, like swallows, moving wings once or twice and then stealing through the air without moving a muscle. Chins up, wings folded, toes curled, feeling the power of the one thrust propelling them toward the next tree.
I straightened my back, closed my arms straight down my sides, and stretched my neck toward the sky, blue and filled with the cold of autumn against my face. I had pulled back against the wind of fear, and it lifted me up higher than it ever has so I could rest against it for a moment and slide myself between clouds like bed sheets or warm water.

I thought of all the times and places to fall in love.
The truth is that these days I am better than I've been in years. Old friends tell me they see me again, the ways I used to be and new friends say it is nice to hear me sing along, to see me play along, bounce down the sidewalk, smile honestly, weep it out, and hold on to myself.

But there are moments, when I feel so alone.
In those moments I think of all the missed opportunities: the chances we didn't take.

if you stop taking advantage of the chances to fall in love, they begin to disappear, they are replaced by anger, dead ends, silence, yelling, screaming, hating... you begin taking risks to fall in love. I began to let myself fall for hurtful things because that was all I knew and all that was offered and so the falling in love became more like suicide jumping. I was falling for anything, everything and not just falling but jumping and hurling, hurtling, hurting,
like a kamikaze fighter pilot, heading straight into death, fearlessly, gracefully and powerfully into the pain (to cause it, to feel it)... but not honestly, or hopefully and not in a healthy way--only silently, secretly, furtively, dangerously, thinking only of saving my marriage, not myself.

then there was one night
i sat on a park bench, smoked two cigarettes, drank a can of simpler times lager
and then

i called a friend who said haven't you been through enough?
i called my dad who said you can feel guilty if you want to but you didn't do anything wrong.
i called my sister who said it sounds just awful.
i called my mother...
and by the grace of God she said
don't ever give up hope
but i heard her say
Love can happen to anyone, anywhere, it can happen over and over again. The way birds migrate toward warmer weather, or return for a break from the heat of things with full bellies and nearly grown babies. think of love following you, waiting for you, wanting you, even when you are moving from one warm place to another, trading trees for oceans, not life for death.
you needn't go about love like you're on a suicide mission. that is not hopeful, not helpful.
so
here is a list of things to look out for, excerpted from a pamphlet published by planned parenthood:
"Does your partner...
Threaten to harm you, pets, or himself?
Blame you for everything that goes wrong?
Lie or break promises to you a lot?
Ever say, "you make me get this angry," or "I can't help being so mad with you around."?
Expect you to do everything he says?
Ignore or dismiss your ideas or the things you want to do?
Get jealous when you spend time with family or friends?
Seem very overprotective or ask other people to watch over you?
Call you all the time?
Accuse you of flirting or getting romantically involved with someone else?
Keep you from having money of your own?
Force you to have sex when you're asleep?
Get angry and threaten you when you don't want to have sex?
Force you to have sex without protection against pregnancy
Hurt your genitals or any part of your body during sex?
Criticize your sexual performance or use sex as a way to punish you?
Only care about his own sexual pleasure?
Refuse to take full responsibility for the abuse?
Refuse to get professional help?
Become more and more abusive?

if you answer yes to any of the above, you are in an unsafe relationship."

Don't rush forward. Get some space, take a deep breath, that might be all you can do for now. But the day will come when someone will offer you help, hope...

because there is more out there and you have not missed your chance to be loved, you just aren't loved by that person, and that doesn't mean you are unlovable altogether.

one day
there will be a different yes because there will be a different set of questions...

"Do you talk openly about your feelings and tell the truth without fear?
Do you listen to each other's ideas?
Do you solve problems and disagreements together?
Do you each have friends, interests and activities of your own, and ones that you share?
Do you respect each other's privacy?
Are you proud of each other's talents and accomplishments?
Do you talk openly about your sexual needs and desires?
Do you protect each other from unintended pregnancy?
Do you always have each other's consent for sex?
Do you help take care of each other?
Do you have disagreements without becoming violent?
Do you respect each other's belongings?
Do you feel closer to your partner as times goes on?
Do you feel happy when you think about staying together?
Do you solve problems together more and more?"

Well, do you? Do you want to? Do you know you could, would, will?

Don't ever give up hope. Look for the next chance, take the next chance to be loved but if you feel yourself falling too far, too fast, don't forget
hope is a set of wings, a warm updraft, a curl in your toes and a lift in your chin, hope does not search the horizon for an enemy, watch the ground for signs of life that must be snuffed out, hope does not increase the speed of disaster, hope turns falling around and failure takes flight...

bring a branch from the olive tree, my dove:
my heart has been afloat too long now.
When you arrive, carry in your mouth the proof,
tell me
there are trees again
bursting from the horizon.
Tell me silently that the earth reaches out her arborized hands, and leafy fingers,
hoping to hold you up, proudly (loving your tiny toes curving around her fingers)
where you perch and play
and perform your miracles.
If there is solid ground again, a place to make a home,
I know you will tell me and you will bring a bit of it
wordlessly, weightlessly
leave leaves with me, my peace, my piece of home.

but i thought it would be fair to let you know i won't be installed this Sunday. I'm taking a leave from my church family to attend to my troubles.
because
there are words we have begun using about ourselves that are really scary words and now they have begun to mean new things (which are not less scary, just less fearful):

violence doesn't mean hatred like it used to; now it means i have to notice there are safer ways of being (with or by) myself.
abuse doesn't mean hatred like it used to; now it means crossing boundaries made of barbed wire: both of us got hurt and we have to stop that right away.
afraid doesn't mean weak anymore; now it means i am listening to my heart.
a threat doesn't sound so ridiculous anymore; now it is a signal for me to begin letting go of the confusion hanging over my head. i am giving up the seeing-stars after-shock, wrapped like a gauze bandage over my forehead, like a blindfold, which was only supposed to be some kind of cure for a broken-home dizzy spell.
coping doesn't mean we're able to do this; it means we were merely surviving because hurting is all we could manage.
move doesn't mean new place;
leave doesn't mean abandon, that is just what we were always most afraid of.

so i wrote this little poem about all these words that i am having so much trouble with.

this word

A scrap of muslin tied to my tongue with one running thread of hope
hiding underneath and then showing
against the worn down knit of who I was
jumping over the muscle and skin,
loose, rising
with each wily hurdle:
over the barren landscape, its discrepant hanging snags, and wild fray.

Not only in my mouth, but a false loose covering
the down on my skin
catching against and weaving, over, under,
each inch of the patchwork cover:
grasses tangled with wild flowers in a wind
a comb caught in curls,
nerves straining when my heart pulls away
--your fingers in the weave of my sweater--
and tighten down, the desire--mending hopes

as sinews strain and capillaries flushed with blood: writhing
twine twisting in and around itself for strength
just before the gravity of the moment snaps the twisted cord and splinters hollow bone.
I am free but I am broken:
all this time
I spent
knotting the bedsheets together, stringing sentences like a rope.
I strung together the pieces of the fairytale, hoping the language would
make my escape for me,
only to find I held them so tightly, the words refused.

Down and out with nothing but time
to heal.
The needle and thread slide in and out now between moments,
Wrapping me in pricks and drawing blood: this resurfacing and strengthening.
Shaking and confident and smooth to the touch
I try to hold on
Still.

But why here?
I'm going to plant a tree here. I live here, I work here and though I know the soil in California better than I know the soil here, though I respect the California native Banana slugs, though I have delighted in Californian riparian woodlands encroaching or shading over Bouganveillias in my home town, though I was willing to fight back the blackberries and Vinca Minor there in ways I have been unwilling to do so here, I am beginning to trust the way the rain will come when Seattle grass begins to brown and cedars go to seed. This is where I am right now, and I know trees will grow here.
So I'm going to plant a tree. Here.
The theology that is just a branch, just the beginning of an idea, I clipped from another time and another place is ready to put down roots. My ideas about God and God's people are ready to be grounded in this location. My theology is daily changing and being changed by the people and problems of this time and place. It seems to me that my little branch of theology needs the nourishment offered by questions posed here and now.
I will have to dig a hole for my little tree, the way they dig for a building's foundation: find a spot and dig deeper than anyone expected. Maybe even put up a temporary barrier to protect the hole, and those who come around to look down in it. On the friendlier days we have talked to each other. They usually ask, "why are you doing this in Seattle? What was wrong with California--you know people there."
And I respond as transparently as I can, "I just fit in better here. I am more readily accepted here. They understand my love of children and are more community oriented. They are like a city but also like a small town. I think it is a good place to try new things. It is good for me to be rained on and greyed in and I am learning to appreciate sun, the water and the trees in new ways. I think I could be here a good long time. Besides, it wasn't until I got here that I decided to stop wandering around and put down roots and there is no way of knowing exactly when and where to start digging--sometimes you just have to start."
"How long do you think you will be in Seattle? Would you ever go back to California?"
"Sure, I would. But I want to put down roots so badly and this is where I am right now. I want to invest here, to reach down and grab up and give back in this place and the only way to do that is to be here now, fearlessly and graciously. I want to contribute, to say something meaningful and that won't happen unless I discover the local currency. I don't worry about getting out or back to Cali, this is good soil."
So I resume digging. I dig a deep hole and sort out the rocks of hardened hearts from the fertile soil, dark with nourishing elements like curiosity and mystery. I never had to do that in California; I wasn't ready to do the work of local theology there. Now I look down, bow down, to the differences, respect them enough to sort them, carefully and with love. I will have to or my theology will never put roots down deep enough. I decide which of the hard parts and hardened hearts to deal with now or leave in place knowing that the roots of my local theology will navigate around them.
I get down on my hands and knees, not with a shovel, but with my fingers and tenderly grapple with the hard parts of the people close to me. I know some of the fears and habits of the local people: the way they are afraid to tell their children "no", wonder what will happen if they don't recycle every can and bottle. I see the way their hearts and money are spent on their dogs and boats and second homes in Island County. These, the stony bits mixed in with the fertile soil, are not a loss, but neither are they to be ignored. They must be turned over and looked under. I will have to make judgments about those hard hearts and stony faces I am sorting through, I will have to take them into consideration as I plan to set a theology into this place. I will mourn, surely, if I can't find their beauty. Sometimes it seems there are more rocks than soil but those times are so far few and far between.

The question of water and wind
This place and these people affect the growth of my theology. This place invites me to relinquish all that I know about God to the holy water and spirit wind here. I set it down and let weather, neighbors, dogs, babies and music come close to what I have hoarded so boldly. When it is time, I search out the right tree and get it in the soil. I know a lot about trees, and yet, it will never be enough because it is impossible for me to understand all the ways each branch interacts with the elements in this location. There is no formula to determine how the leaf buds shudder in the ruach of the local wind, or roots will soak in the waters from the local font.
I recently heard a story of a church that unearthed a giant baptismal font during renovation. The day of their first post-renovation worship service they baptized babies in that antique font but because it wouldn't fit in the newly renovated sanctuary, they lugged it out onto the sidewalk and did the liturgy there. I want to ask the pastor of this Capitol Hill congregation how this reveals his theology of baptism that allows for naked babies to be dipped in a giant font on a busy sidewalk.
As for the congregation I serve, we have a small bowl-like font, a smallish metal trough and a giant, coffin-sized trough. They are all three employed with equal fervor and regularity. We exchange stories of our interactions with the font on a pretty regular basis. I like to tell a story of the night I tripped and nearly fell face first into the small, waist-high bowl. I heard one recently about two sixth graders washing their faces in it. The font is central to our theology, but also to our daily lives.
We all have stories about it interrupting our routines and tempting our children, calling them to dip a finger in and then lick it off, just to see if baptism tastes like they remember. The taller kids walk by and put a whole hand in, just to check if it might be good for swimming in, and then wipe the water all over their best dresses, their hair, or their baby brother. Parents hold their four year olds over it so they can stare down into it, hoping to glimpse fish or pennies or God. I have never seen any of these behaviors in other churches. I have never before seen theology worked out like this, around a font so tempting and present because of its location, its place, its central role among us.
Recently, I asked my pastor if I could use the giant font for a Vacation Bible School game. We both considered how this would affect the adults and children in our care. The children are ever increasingly familiar with the font. They have played in it before--during baptismal liturgies younger siblings often spend so much time enjoying the water that the whole family ends up soaked. But do they see an affirmation of baptism in the precious asperges as a soaked big sister runs to embrace a grandfather who flew in from Florida to attend? What would happen to their idea of baptismal sacrament were the font carried carefully onto the front lawn and filled with fully dressed children soaking, wiggling and cheering for their friends to run to the waters, and jump in? What kind of water is in this trough, in this place, that calls theology to be informed or adapted by a scene like this?

A sort of arborist
If we understand that theology comes to us locked in a seed, only to peek out after a blazing wildfire, we understand what growth will cost, how much energy it takes to respond to a harsh environment in constructive ways, what we must do to harden the outer bark just enough to protect xylem and phloem, veins and structures. I have landed in this place, these fonts, these winds, which will beat against my theology and I must let it happen.
Theology grows stronger if I let the voices I know, both near and far ask questions about the varied fonts and Spirit they know personally. I become a sort of arborist, reading the details of the lives in my care, watching how the differing theologies grow near to each other or far apart and why. I look for signs of health, growth, disease or decay.
Theology grows, moves and gathers strength from the winds of change. It either shelters kindly or crashes down through the roof of the house if the roots are too shallow. Theology has branches and little bits at the tips that fall away at the end of the growing season. Theology bears sexy little blossoms, which wait patiently for the breeze and bees to disseminate its tiny totality.
If we learn to appreciate the variety of theologies like we appreciate the power of the seasons in a forest ecosystem, we will be better prepared to acknowledge substantial theological hardship as it comes and goes. We will see that certain trees suffocate in certain climates and dominate in others because of wind and water. Theology is the same way and happens according to the smallest components connecting, gathering fodder, and gaining strength by standing against indeterminate forces.
The problem with trees, is the same problem with theology: transplanting is difficult and not always in everyone's best interest. Of course seeds transport well, with or without a human to carry them, seeds are fragile and hopeful but they are not the whole. The whole tree, the whole theology will not do well if it is dug up and moved too far and left alone. So it is best to prepare realistically and imaginatively, or come humbly with the seeds of a local theology and hold them loosely knowing that they are to be scattered and may not survive.
One part tree hugger and one part theologian, I am predisposed to the task of planting in the best of conditions, and nourishing the seedlings of theology, all the while knowing that I don't have any say really in how well a thing will grow. Trinitarian theology grows best in conditions of heightened community. Rupture, and repair are to theology, as they are to the bark of a tree, evidence of growth. They are evidence that we are in the presence of salvific community, that we are gaining, changing, responding to outside forces like water and wind, that call us to be more ourselves, to put down deeper roots (reaching into the dark and unknown) and risk putting forth tender leaves and blossoms. There are choices to be made and freedoms to be exercised in order to grow a local theology. Doing local theology means extending roots and branches fully into the spaces we perceive between our location and God's. It is in this reaching that we find how close God is.

One tree or one branch
I know that in the process of doing local theology there will be erosion of the soil, bending of the trunk, pruning of branches and grief when an old growth theology falls hard. It is hard to determine if local theology is just one tree in a forest of theologies: biblical, covenantal, feminist, reformed, Muslim, etc. Perhaps these are just branches of one system. Either way, they work together, live together, move in the same wind and grow in the same sun, from the same soil.
There are certain things I do, as a budding theologian, that are part of formulating and living a theology that is self-aware, taking into consideration my locatedness, vocation, gifts and struggles. My coworkers help me to see how my style of relating informs the relationships that affect my theology most. Recently, a coworker's wife shared with me her husband reports back to her when our pastor/boss and I occasionally experience mismeeting. He tells her these stories because it is in my struggle to be understood by other theologians that he recognizes his own.
For example, I have both loved and hated our weekly staff meetings because I am often invited to share my perspective. My perspective on ministry is colored by my expectations that I will work against oppression; that others will work against oppression; to hear and to use inclusive language; to be hopeful rather than condemning of the mistakes coworkers make; to think creatively about the future of what happens in the church building, and in this particular neighborhood, with an eye for those who are not already a part of our community; to deepen relationships, in order to deepen faith; and to take risks in order to create a safe place for other risk-takers to land should they be in danger--that is what I think it is to lead. Though these are not so different from my coworkers' expectations, they have been formed by my very personal experiences of particular oppressors, my own mistakes, certain neighborhoods and specific relationships that my coworkers will never fully understand.
The Parish Administrator, our minister of outreach and lead Pastor are all highly sensitive to concerns like mine and I am learning from the way they voice their own concerns. They seem to have a relational style very different from my own, if not a theology that differs significantly. And yet, week after week, I am able to exegete, both the text and the congregation, in light of our locatedness, and explain myself in a way that builds bridges. The strategy here is to tell the truth as I see it, to listen humbly and be honest when I am too angry to do so.
When I offer the children's word I try to tell the truth as I see it. I offer a thorough exegesis in a non-threatening tone. In age-appropriate language I offer them a taste of prayer-infused preaching so that rather than sum up the week's lesson, which I am very much afraid to do, I simply choose to lead them in bowing heads and offering a question to a loving God. When I write Sunday school curriculum, I think first of the questions the students have already asked, problems they already face. Then, when we are together for the lesson, we begin the work of integrating their experience of God, what they have been taught about God, and what they hope to find out about God from me. As we work out our theologies, we ask a lot of questions and are intentional about leaving space for more.

The mini(s)tree
It is my hope that we will do the work of local theology together for the duration of my ministry. I plan to be ordained so that as the lives of my parishioners intersect with sacrament and struggles, I will be allowed by the larger church to preside and participate. But I am also aware that the ordination journey is as important to the local theology as is the ordination itself.
The ordination process is a process that affects the theology of all participants. Committee, candidate, sponsoring church, the candidate's family and friends are all called to be honest and even angry at times but to always tell the truth in love, and ask difficult questions that will change the way we live theologically together. My call to be a ordained as a female minister of word and sacrament (whose particular interest is in the faith formation of children and families) is a call to action for those in my sphere of influence. Sometimes it elicits anger and highlights doctrinal differences. At other times it unites and validates those who have been othered over against hegemony.
I have chosen to move far from the Presbyterian congregation that is sponsoring my ordination. This geographical distance has called my home congregation to wonder how I will repay them for their support and how the distance between us will be bridged. How many and which trees will have to die in order that we may build a bridge of solid timbers? They have been curious about my motives and discernment processes. One woman in particular feels a heavy burden to be especially available by phone for me in ways she has never offered other candidates and admits that this very particular kind of connection to me has changed the way she is in relationship with me, with our church, and with God. The members of my sponsoring congregation are those who stand over the hole I am digging, the tree I am planting wondering what will come of all this digging, planting, questioning and hoping. They watch my theology change as a result of my surroundings and warn against certain influences and celebrate others.
Not only has my home congregation been called to the struggle but also those who write me a pay check every month. My position in the Lutheran Church has called into question the ecumenical motives of the church as it employs someone who maintains a theology very different from theirs. They love me deeply and each one of them has adopted a different way of working out the meaning of our theological differences.
Both churches have ecumenically informed theologies with deep roots. Though these roots may mean that transplanting is impossible, it also means that these old trees will bear new leaves, if not heirloom fruit, faithfully and in turn. These theologies, though locally informed and reformed by my very participation, are reaching deeply down into the fertile soil of tradition. Those roots reach down deeper than their most recent political agendas and even deeper through the habits that have yet to stand the test of time. As a result, we are learning to form a theology that works for us and against us in different seasons, like wind and water against a tree, according to what we need. And we see that even a local theology will speak of God: the God we experience, the God that is One in the here and now and forever.

the reasons i write are many but now, one less.

and the last time i heard

your voice was all there was--no grammar, no diction, no shame, no way to edit--and i

remember it well because it was the most solid thing i have ever heard, it said

i don't know

and then it said my name.

So here is what I really think about her, myself and you (really the pronouns are pretty exchangeable because this is as much a confession as it is a description) I have observed and participated and so this is what I tell myself about the women in my life, and yours:

When I say I wish I could just like her, it is easy to assume that I am saying
I don't like her because I have decided she is empirically
unlikable.
What I am actually thinking is a thought about my failure to
believe the reasons
and trust the logic
around your admiration or need (or love?) for her.

I want to understand how you choose your friends, how you commit in the ways you do; I want to know what works and what doesn't because I am tired of making the same old mistakes over and over again.
And I want you to see that you do commit, in unconventional ways, in your ways, which are wonderful ways that fail sometimes because relationships are wonky.
You do make promises and keep them.
You do love, and you love well.

Her accusations sound so true because she is seeing you clearly, from her perspective, which is just as valuable to you as any other.

You are not giving as much as you could:
if your father hadn't been so broken hearted, you would be a different person--last month, this month, every month, in your last relationship, in this relationship, in future relationships.
If your mother hadn't overworked your own breaking heart, well, you know how different things would be...

You have made promises you haven't been able to keep:
you are human and you failed.

You have not shown her the love you should have:
You intended to love her well, you started out really appreciating her and then things sort of fall apart on your end
You abandoned her, you stopped feeling the same desire for her, you just didn't have the energy to sustain the excitement you first felt for her.

I know you know all of that but I also know that sometimes you like for someone else (me) to confess that I know it too
When I say it, in my voice
the voice that usually tells you lovely things, hopeful things, funny things, even painful things you hear the sad parts in a way that remembers the love I feel for you, the hope I have for you, the fun I have with you, and the pain that we have borne together. When you hear my voice you are conditioned to think of soft places to land when
everything falls apart,
future and longevity and trust and light.
And that is why I think sometimes you like to hear me tell you things you already know

Not that we are blaming your father's failing heart and your mother's unhealthy habits;
you are a grown up who can take responsibility for your choices
but I just want us to be clear about what you are taking responsibility for
we are not excusing your failing or boredom with her
instead I think I just want to point to your faults in a way that
makes room for them to stand,
for them to be real and holy ground.
I want to connect them to the best of you, so that you can be integrated, so you can see that your greatest failures are the fertile soil for your greatest triumphs.

Your commitment to your father took you away from the promises you made to her
And your fervent avoidance of your mother exhausted your ability to be present with her.
But relationship with your parents will always come to bear in a big way on your most intimate relationships. Those intimate relationships need to account for the father factor, to absorb the shock of it and allow graciously for you to experiment, risk and be angry about it. Also, those relationships need to respond with love to the degree that you share your life, as your mother's child, the degree to which you are willing to reveal or submit your story to query at any given time. Those relationships will also, if they are open to it, reap the benefits of the love lessons you learn from being the person you are.

Your old patterns of behavior around making promises and loving well in--fits and starts, the rhythm of your desires, are not yet elongated enough to carry you through the exhaustion and rejection you have experienced recently.
so your wise and burning desire for deeper companionship,
the fundamental desire that kept things going as long as they have,
is abandoned in the heat of the moment because
the one who cares so much for you
suddenly comes up short, and bold with a machine gun mouth spitting out
truthful accusations in rapid succession
and the rejection at hand (coupled as it was with an accurate description of your greatest faults) displaces your tiny hope that this care was
the deep and lasting care you longed for.

Of course you are guilty, but what good are the feelings of guilt if you don't learn from them, if you don't separate out what you are guilty of and what she is guilty of?

The guilty feelings should not lead you to punish yourself, but to discipline yourself and the first thing you should disallow yourself is to fall into the masturbatory nature of narcissistic guilt that says
This is ALL your fault. Because really, you are not that powerful around here, you are probably not the biggest thread in the tapestry of your community, and you are most definitely not the biggest snag in it--let's leave that descriptor for really awful stuff like sin, depravity, mental illness, rather than one single person, its easier to work with if its bigger like that.

I know you know about that.
Whether you believe it or not, you will be careful when you point to her faults and failures, because you have trained yourself all along to be compassionate toward her.
But I'm not convinced you know yourself or care enough about yourself to recognize what she did that triggered your boredom, anger, frustration and ended in your behaving in ways you regret.
Nor am I convinced that you know enough about yourself to know admit that
You must have shown her a lot of care.
You
encouraged her
to search for healing,
to tell the truth,
to see clearly,
to love passionately,
to ask for more of you
or else she wouldn't have done any of that and you wouldn't be so ambivalent about the brokenness of the relationship right now.
Something about you was so strong, maybe even stronger than ever before because you made the best of this opportunity to be so:
you made space for her,
whether she used that space lovingly or not, she moved into it, toward you. For that movement and all that encouraged it, we should be grateful to both of you, but not naïve. We should mourn the loss of a relationship that fostered that kind of behavior, but not in a way that wishes idly to change the past.
Things have been said that have hurt so much,
there has been a brisk trade in shame and
sloughing off of responsibility.
There are profound weaknesses and
wounds that need time to heal, to shrink, to forgive.

Talking about it may not be the answer, just yet. Exposing a wound to the light will not necessarily slow the healing process but it often makes the scarring worse. Maybe a few protective measures will help, a certain retreating to safer territory,
humility and a season for mourning are in order.
The truth is, these wounds may never heal because no one knows what will heal them or what will reopen them. The trick is to live boldly, honestly, hopefully, knowing that when they do reopen the pain will send its message that it is time to find a safe place to cry over how badly this hurts. And to remember that pain is pain: it always leaves a mark, and healing,
well, as for healing
that is the greatest miracle.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be . . . where I'll be

Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head Ah ooh