childrens clothing and the redeemed body

Yesterday we went to Pass it On, a children’s consignment sale that happens twice a year in Oregon. It’s a brilliant idea. Families can resell baby clothes (usually worn for a millisecond) and get back part of the profit. For us this is better than fair trade, better than organic. There’s nothing quite like reused and recycled.

The clothes were divided by sex. Since we’ve been waiting for this sale this is the first time I’ve really been able to encounter the deep gendering of clothes on the rack. There were some newborn “unisex” in the green and yellow shades but after that we faced two rows of basically blue and pink.

The boys section had mini Lakers track suits, fire engines, puppy dogs, lions, bears, button up shirts and every shade of blue imagineable.

The girls section was butterflies, bunnies, muted tones, ruffles on everything and rhinestones. I’m thinking, “I would never in a million years where this stuff! That would be humiliating!”

There was no mistaking when an item belonged to a girl. Even overalls had ruffles on the cuffs and there was a preponderance of pictures on the butts of these jeans. Some of the boys stuff could go either way.

I’m particularly aware of these sorts of dichotomies and feeling the need to assign them meaning as we prepare to welcome a child in the summer. I’m also reading quite a bit of feminist Christology in school. One of my supplemental readings this week is Beth Fekler Jones’ Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Ressurrection. Beth (fellow Dukie; this is her dissertation) argues that the feminist politics which seek to deconstruct gendered bodies is inconsistent with a doctrine of the resurrection. Instead of seeing absolute power at work in gendering or none at all, as the church we understand gender difference to itself be redeemed from the power structures of sin (misogyny) and its consequences (anorexia, genital cutting, slef mutilation, suicide) through the resurrected Christ.

I agree with Jones’ that in the church is one locus for the transformation of gender politics through our particular acts as a church. I appreciate Jones’ attempt to retain embodiment but also don’t want to be too cheery about the way sin works on the particularities of both the masculine and the feminine in our fallen world and our faith communities. In one sense, the gendering of our child to one extreme is present even in the clothing choices presented to her. These attempts at normalization are stiffling.

I also continue to be deeply troubled by the church’s failure to gender by allowing power-shaped identity to creep past the doctrine of the resurrection. The Wild at Heart movement, with its lonely warrior rescuing the maiden and preparing for adventure is the most insidious simply because it it is so wide-spread. But many others have also used the story of our faith to reify fallen gender identity. I could write a book with my thoughts about Eldredge. Suffices say that my thesis of discontent is located in the taking at face value disordered gendering as normative and then attempting to overcome masculine and feminine articulations of this culturally induced panic attack without ever parsing out what’s really going on here. Exurbanization, displacement from the private sphere, dislocation from food sources and production, culturally reinforced stoicism and removal from child-rearing are much more important to scour than to simple say “this is what is in every man’s heart.” Bullocks.

So, Babe Flo-Bix, we hope we can find for you a little space where your gendering will be dictated by love rightly ordered in a community of those who seek to call forth your redeemed self while recognizing that already sin is at work on your body. I pray we can help you see how Christ has made all things new and that the potential for this newness, while incomplete, can be practiced daily in our life as the church. I hope I can be sensitive to the ways the world tries to disembody you, declare your body evil and deconstruct your enfleshed self. I pray my response will be to guide you ever so gently towards the One who called you into being.

God help us.

Pictures from last month’s Obama rally

 

you say you want a revolution (paid family leave)

I’m thinking about going to the mattresses.

Like most of us, I work at a place that very often institutes policies and programs which I find extremely problematic. Part of this is simply living in a capitalist system where upper level administrators get paid six times what housekeepers make. Part of it is that we have federal policies in place that make it seem like what we’re doing is just like everybody else and is therefore okay.

So you have to pick your battles. One that I am contemplating is family leave policy.

Here’s the scoop. Federal law requires employers to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to their employees. The key word here is unpaid. The university where I work abides by this policy except that you are allowed to cobble together sick leave and vacation to get paid after you have a baby.

Unfortunately there’s a double standard. Typically, although not a written policy, faculty members (I’m not sure if male and female) receive a full semester (3 months) of fully paid leave. Plus faculty already get summers off and the university breaks when class is not in session. Staff have neither of these things. For me, when The Babe is born, if I took my cobbled maternity leave all at one time, our kid would be in child care at 8 weeks. As it is now, Jacob will work from home one day a week, me for two and I’ll use one “sick day” a week for a semester. I’ll get three weeks off before I head back to the office.

As you can imagine, I have problems with this. First, the staff policy means I can never get sick because my goal is to bank my days. Should I get cancer, have a really sick family member, I am screwed. And since vacation doesn’t roll over year to year, I get only those two weeks per year on top of whatever I can save up on sick leave. Also, too bad if you have an unplanned pregnancy or two kids close together. Since I’ve already used up my banked time, my child can never get sick because I won’t have any more days I can take off of work.

The real absurdity is the very idea of unpaid leave, particularly for people earning low income with multi-generational family commitments. We might make it work for my family (barely), but what about housekeeping, food services or physical plant workers. I am guessing many of those families couldn’t survive on one income for three full months.

Here’s the rub: my school’s policy is considered generous. This is the norm at most places and they mark this as “paid leave.” I feel like it’s going to be hard to express to my administration how barbaric this policy really is when they’re considered the best that we get in the US (most other Western countries provide one to two full years of paid family leave).

The most damning part of all is that only 4 or 5 women at my school get pregnant every year. Covering their salaries I would guess would cost approximately one half of one percent of two, maybe three upper-level administrators yearly salaries. Think I can talk someone into voluntarily contributing to the fund?

So what do you think? And what the heck do I do? What’s my case? How do I garner support?

Do any of you have experience with this in your own work places? Am I being ridiculous to try and fight against this when it is the gold standard? What’s the general experience of family leave our there?

Fundamentalism at the Equality Ride?

I really love Susan. She comes from a fundamentalist evangelical background and started to feel out of place in heterosexuality in high school. Being a Christian she felt like she needed to repress, that this was her “thorn in the flesh” moment. She did this for years, eventually moving here to plant a church. But after a while Susan found that she couldn’t hide her sexuality and be “fully human.” So she left the small Bible college she was attending and came out.

 

What I especially appreciate about Susan is how she still struggles with what the Christian faith has to say about homosexuality. All she knows is that there is something inside her that is incompatible with the sexuality the church believes she should be expressing. But she would never try to make the Bible work for her. She’s smart and astute; she doesn’t know if her choice to come out is compatible with Scripture but she certainly wants to figure it out.

 

It was this sense of progression and formation that made me think Susan was perfect for the Soulforce Equality Ride. If you aren’t familiar, Soulforce sends a group of young people on a bus tour to talk about gay and lesbian oppression on evangelical Christian college campuses. They strive for “open and honest discussion on these topics (as) the first step towards reconciliation” and they do this both formally and informally at the Wheatons, Gordons, Messiahs and Westmonts of the country.

 

But there are a couple of funny things about the project. Interestingly Soulforce rarely if ever has actual Christians on the ride. My friend Laura had the Ride visit Wheaton when she was there. She remarked that the Riders weren’t at all ready for the rigor of theological discussion and engagement asked for by Wheaton students. Instead there were a lot of stories, usually very emotional stories. Laura said it was strange that the Riders couldn’t engage in the way their audience needed to be engaged.

 

The other strange thing was learning that Susan is probably going to be rejected from the Ride because she told the leaders she’s not sure that homosexuality is not a sin. Soulforce said that a position that homosexuality is absolutely not a sin was essential to their mission and maybe this wasn’t a “good fit.” (This is also strange because I’m not sure that it matters or not if non-Christians think homosexuality is a sin. Sin is a theological term used by the church. I’m uncomfortable with Soulforce using that word.)

 

This seems problematic for “open and honest discussion.” The more I heard from Susan the more I felt like Soulforce was at odds with its own mission. Instead the group seems like they’re trying to convince others that they are right. The possibility of vulnerability to other opinions, a willingness to engage critically with disparate theologies and a willingness to allow people to be in process were totally absent. Essentially, this sounds like a missionary effort. It looks a lot like the worst parts of evangelicalism to me.

 

I’m ending with part of Susan’s letter that followed up on her closing-door interview. I think it’s such a poignant and helpful reminder of faith driven by non-violence. It’s reminiscent of the wild patience of John Howard Yoder that Romand Coles writes about: “vulnerable relations with outsider are integral to the otherness of the church that when this understanding of caritas is forgotten and unpracticed the church loses its otherness and is assimilated to the violence of the world. When Christians cease to engage outsiders with receptive generosity, they cease to let the church be the church; they lose sight of Jesus Christ.” That’s real pacifism, baby.

 

Here’s Susan’s gloss:

 

I think this is true non-violence: being honest in ways that expose our own vulnerabilities so as to draw others into our experiences, create understanding and acceptance, and break down the barriers that have been built because we have so often remained separate and immovable in our beliefs.   From here we can build relationships that truly reflect the love, compassion, and sacrifice that has been exemplified through the life and work of Christ.  

hi, I’m your baby.

Yesterday we got our first shots of baby Flo-Bix. It was pretty amazing to see that something was actually going on inside me and that I am indeed not just getting fat. It looks like we have a little yogi. I was able to identify “downward facing dog” (above) and “child’s pose.” We also got a great thumbs up letting us know that all was well inside.

Baby is now 11 oz and looks to be a week further along than we expected. We seem to be closer to 20 weeks than 18! The new date for baby’s arrival is August 17.

Lately we’ve been intrigued by the variety of responses we get when asked if we’re finding out the sex. When we say we’re waiting for the birth, most people say, “oh that’s great! What a wonderful surprise!” A few people though have given us the death stare. We’re not exactly sure why.

It certainly is an unusual choice. Some of our student nurses from the Alaska trip were telling me that they had only one woman who didn’t know the sex coming in to delivery and that was in a 3 month rotation per student.

We’re excited to find out the moment of. My friend Natalie sent me this great quote from Madeline L’Engle about her experience waiting to hear the gender of her baby announced. I thought this was so beautiful. I hope it will be like this for us.

A Glimpse of Kairos

In the heart and spirit we are less restricted by time. We are given glimpses of kairos in our own living, moments that break free of time and simply are. It is fascinating that music is so bound up with time and yet some of the greatest moments of music are the silences between notes. We all have moments of kairos, though we seldom recognize them till afterwards. One such glimpse that I remember with particular delight came after a long and very difficult labour when my doctor and friend dropped a small wet creature between my breasts, saying, “Here’s your son, Madeleine.” And I heard the angels sing.

Reading Resurrection with the Tlingit

Second wind! I started this earlier in the week. Kind of on the long side…

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When I left for Alaska last week I took Rowan William’s Resurrection with me. This is one of my favorite reflections on Easter and the one book I own with more passages underlined than not. It was a good choice for this particular immersion program. Resurrection provides naming for the particular ways Christians can better understand our place in confronting the way our privilege has exerted and has flourished at the expense of an Other’s culture, language, sovereignty, economic viability or freedom. Great for a trip that focused on issues of tribal identity, conservation, language death and our role in shaping the history of a people.

Williams starts by establishing the “pure victim” who is Jesus. While the rest of us are caught in the web of oppressor and oppressed (White Man, black Man, White woman, black woman), Jesus stands apart from these intricacies as the one who, “when he was suffered, did not threaten” (1 Pet). It is this victim who came not to condemn us, but certainly to judge. Jesus is our victim; it is I who put him on the cross. Jesus confronts this in each of us just as he confronted the disciples who returned to their nets. It is in this Jesus that we find the pattern for every other victim of our presents and our histories.

Williams writes, “The formulation, ‘Repent and believe,’ stresses that God’s forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and ‘return’ to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are” (14). The memory and the wound must be exposed through encounter. Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances reveal the disciples’ failure and desertion. But it is only as Jesus exposes this memory can it be recovered so that the faithless ones are renewed and sent back into this world. As we confront our historicity we too “learn to act and to hope.” The confrontation is a painful process and Jesus pulls no punch with the deserters. “Peter, will you feed my sheep?” Jesus implores of the one who “would never leave” him.

So we find ourselves among the Tlingit and Haida people where only 50 fluent speakers of the language remain, all over 60 years old. We find ourselves among a people wrestling with land rights, tribes mistrusting tribal corporations which the United State hoisted on them to ensure “proper spending.” We encounter the symptoms of cultural trauma: alcoholism, spousal abuse, neglect. We are walking through clear cut tribal-owned forests where white environmentalist sneer as the desperation for native jobs and resources crescendos. We are being handed “Pure Sitka bottled water” and “native Alaskan Chocolate” from Brazil, economic development that our over fishing and global warming have made necessary to replace subsistence living practices.

Here we are.

We heard stories and more stories, sat the feet of tribal elders, watched in hope as young people showed off traditional dances and stories, wept with women whose sons were bullied in school and waded through the heavy complexities of tribal culture clashing, sometimes violently with an encroaching Western world.

But one of the most fascinating exchanges of the week was with a white administrator of Mt Edgcumbe high school, a boarding school established in the 1970’s for students from around Alaska. If your tiny tribal community had no HS, that’s where you went. Native boarding schools used to be places of deculturation, where native students came to be Westernized. The early photos of students from the northern slope, people who had never spoken English at home, who spent the summers at the fishing camps looks just like my mom’s high school year book.

The woman leading us around was very uncomfortable with any questions that hinted at this kind of past. When one of my students (a native King Islander) asked, “what are you doing to help the early generations at Mt E reconcile the past of this school?” she essentially said, “not our problem.” There were overtones of “we don’t see color here” and a lot of wondering about where our questions were coming from. At one point she stopped her tour and unprompted said, “look, we are about looking to the future at this school. This is now a great school! Can’t we just focus on that?”

Resurrection came back to me again:

“No amount of the rhetoric of ’self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of self, the self as the memory of the crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens up our graves and gives back our past.”

I understand where the Mt E administrator is coming from. We all like to think we can forget about what happened and move on. But at the other end of every moment of colonial complicity there are a people who are deeply exposed to historic cultural trauma. This is happening in Iraq, it happened in the South with black people, it happened on the reservations and it is happening in Alaska.

The hope is that the one we crucified has risen. Jesus tells us to see in his reconciliation to the redeemed disciples hope for our complicity in the crucifixion/crucified. We have to remember the boarding schools, to engage in repatriation, to listen to the Tlingit language. These are acts of our remembering, not on our behalf but as people in the line of those whose choices brought us here, knowing that we have already made the choice for our benefit at the expense of others a hundred thousand times. To refuse this is to “be trapped in fantasy, in blindness to yourselves and to the reality confronting you.”

And somewhere in this painful confrontation our name is called.

One of the best parts of this trip happened when I wasn’t there. Part of our group was visiting a domestic violence shelter in Sitka which is run by this very hip, very inspiring Haida woman. She really loved the group, their questions, their enthusiasm. But one student, Brian, a freshman, really had her captivated. They talked for a long time after one of the women played a traditional song on the drum about emerging from the darkness of the ice cave. It was a celebration song.

After they talked a while the woman told Brian to hold on and she went and got a drum from her office. It was a beautiful drum she made out of hide and ligament. It looked like she spent a lot of time working on it. The woman said it had been in there a long time, that it was “waiting for someone.” The someone was Brian. She told him to take the drum as a reminder of all the he had to offer the world as he worked to address problems like domestic violence. It was a very moving event.

I think this was one of Williams’ “creative protests,” those moments that names the nameless, empower for the work of the Good and restore us to right relationship with those we have historically oppressed. I hope this moment is repeated in all my students, and in me, throughout our encounters with our selves and our past.

“My self is to be given away in love, not because it is worthless, but because it is supremely precious, given to me by the hand of God as he returns as my memory. Out of my story the Spirit of the risen Jesus constitutes my present possibilities of understanding, compassion and self-sharing. My identity as lover in the community in uniquely coloured by the loves which I have already struggled, failed, learned, repented.”

post-alaska tired

This trip is going to take a while to recover from. Blogging has taken a back seat to naps.

I’m adding some pictures to flickr (to the left) so you can check out a little of our trip.

In the meantime, our short updates:

-Heather-the-sister and Dave-the-boyfriend are on a plane to PDX as we speak

-Baby had a check-up today and heart continues to beat steady at 150 BPM. Ultrasound is next week so we should have some cool pictures to show. We’re waiting ’til the birth to find out the sex.

-I’m going to a Barack Obama rally with Heather and Dave on Friday here in Portland. I am VERY excited.

off again

Tomorrow I am leaving for 10 days in Alaska with my students from the Native American Plunge so no blogging for a while. This is our newest service-learning alternative spring break. We’re focusing on issues of health care, environment, language and tradition as they relate to native Alaskans in Juneau and Sitka.

This is my last time travelling with students. I’m excited to hit up my 47th state and even more so that I am not in charge. This trip was planned and will be led by our amazing Americorps VISTA, Laura. I just get to sit back and enjoy the 34 degrees of rain and snow.

Lots of great pictures when I return. I’m especially looking forward to seeing a glacier since we’re the last generation that will have them around.

Above is a picture of Sitka taken by the friend of one of our student participants.

things they don’t tell you about pregnancy

I should really be writing my Christology midterm.

Instead I bring you a list of things they never tell you about pregnancy.

1) You are actually two more weeks pregnant than your “weeks pregnant.” So get this. The40 weeks of pregnancy are calculated not from the date of conception but from TWO WEEKS BEFORE. I was technically in week one of my pregnancy even before I ovulated. I’m not sure why you get two bonus weeks (you start counting from your last menstrual period) but there it is.

2) If this is your first pregnancy, chances are good you won’t actually look pregnant until after 4 months. I’m 4 months next week and don’t look even close to what I thought pregnant women looked like at 4 months. Maybe a little on the chubby side but I don’t anticipate the dreaded maternity clothes for another month.

3) There is so much more that you aren’t supposed to consume besides the stuff you know about (and which I long for every day as I long for the Messiah) like coffee and alcohol. Also on various lists I’ve come across: bacon, cold cuts, salami, ham, unpasteurized anything, seared fish, raw eggs (no cookie batter?!), Caesar salad, swordfish, green tea and lots of other teas and herbs that cause you to go into labor.

4 ) A really depressing one. While everyone is different, in the first trimester you really shouldn’t gain any weight (I gained 5 lbs between week 1 and week 13) because you don’t need to be eating any more than usual (the baby is the size of a kidney bean). In your second trimester you only need to eat 300 extra calories in order to help the baby grow. This roughly a HALF A TURKEY SANDWICH. That’s it! In your third trimester you only get to eat an extra 600 calories, one sandwich. So much for eating for two.

I feel like I was supposed to receive some pregnant woman confidentiality agreement in the mail saying I will never tell the secrets of childbearing. Seriously, am I the only one who had no idea about these things?

Above is a picture of what baby Flo-Bix generally looks like today, weighing in at roughly the size of an apple.

Week 15: To test or not to test. Is it a question?

Last night I looked in the mirror and thought, “whoa! Where did that belly come from!?”

Looks like Baby Flo-Bix is starting to flesh out a bit. We’re up to a fetus the size of an apple floating around in there. I still cannot get over the strangeness of carrying around a four inch creature wherever I go. Most of the time I’m not even thinking about it and even when I do it still seems impossible. All the evidence of these things unseen has been external (ultrasound, Doppler). I think when this babe actually starts kicking around and I come to realize there’s actually something in there, I will be blown away.

One of the conversation any pregnant woman runs into time and again with her physician/midwife is around genetic testing. At our very first, 8-week appointment the doc sat us down and laid out at all the options we would have for testing over the next few months. As first time parents we listened intently and tried to think about what was best for our family. My thinking was, if we do have a fragile baby then maybe that means I will have to carry it differently or go on bed rest. Maybe she’s asking us this because the baby will need immediate surgery or I’ll need need to make dietary changes.

If you’ve been here before I’m sure you are shaking your head at our naivety. When I asked the doctor those questions she looked at me a bit in awe. “Um, no, well you wouldn’t do anything different.” “Then why would we want to get tested?” “You would, hmm, uh, need to decide if you want to….continue the pregnancy.”

Whoa. This woman who brings babies into the world for a living just asked if we would want to terminate my pregnancy because our child would be born with a sickness or disability. Once we assured her that we had no intention of ending the pregnancy regardless of outcome she told us genetic testing wasn’t something we needed to pursue. This conversation has been repeated at every other prenatal appointment (we switched to a midwife in SW WA) and hospital sponsored class we have been to.

What’s incredible is the moral neutrality presented in the option. When the care provider frames it as “information that you will need to decide how to act upon,” there is no expectation that you could make a wrong decision. Whether something as simple as a physical deformity like cleft palate or a life-threatening genetic disorder like trisomy 13, you can do what you want. I continue to be baffled by the idea that people inculturated to expect perfection and independence as their inalienable right would be morally qualified to make a decision about a child who will put these rights into question with every moment of her life.

One of the suggestions for early screening and diagnosis, an argument put out by Commonweal after the introduction of a 1st trimester DS screen three years ago, is that these tests help parents change their expectations about their birth and prepare them early for the new challenges of caring for an infant with a disability. I wonder, shouldn’t that always be our expectation? Should we ever go into a pregnancy “hoping for the best” as if “the best” meant the type of baby the world conditioned us to believe was our right?

To be fair, I would be truly devastated by a condition which caused suffering for our child, particularly something like trisomy 18 or cystic fibrosis. But our reaction to a Down Syndrome baby would be completely different. These friends we have with DS are wonderfully flawed and gifted individuals, just like any person. But this gets back to the central question: are we expecting in the way we should be expecting?

It will take a lot of grace and prayer for us to be ready to welcome a child with a fatal disorder like trisomy 18 and I pray every day that we won’t have to say goodbye to our baby within hours or days of its birth. At the same time, I don’t find myself asking God to protect us against a child with spina bifida, MS or Downs. It just feels morally wrong for people who were nurtured and discipled in L’Arche to pray in that way.

In my less faithful moments I am scared out of my mind about the hospital costs associated with a fragile child. I grieve to imagine the deep prejudice our child will face in a world that would have aborted him. But I also believe there is more grace in us than I know and that we have been prepared by L’Arche, our church and our family to say “yes” to whatever gift we are given.

So, should Christians be screening in pregnancy?