Blogging Spring Break

Hey everyone...I am on my break right now and I realize that I haven't written much in a while. I have been enjoying life and there has been a lot going on. I thought I would write an overview of what is going on as best as possible. So "Adventures In My Own Apartment" and "Living in the Question" are things that I just wrote as a basic update as to where I am at right now. Please start with Living in the Question, as that has more serious prayer requests, while Adventures in My Own Apartment is meant to be a more fun update. I love and miss you all!

Living In the Question

I have a lot of mixed feelings about heading on internship for next year. However, I realize that I feel quite ready. I LOVE being a student, however, I feel like I am at a point in my theological development where I need to put the books aside to develop a theology that is rooted in people's concerns a lot more. So I have felt kind of antsy this semester in this regard.

However, I won't forget trying to buy a shirt a few weeks ago. It was then that I realized that I wanted something that would be attractive enough that screamed that I was datable. But I also wanted something conservative enough that someone would not question a female pastor wearing it. This seemed to unleash a lot of my worries that I have about being a single woman in public ministry. The realization that for some jobs one has work clothes and then they go home and change before going out on the town, and that I will never be able to take "off" being a pastor is a big fear that I have. However, I am finding that I want to learn how to grow into this in my own ways as well.

I interviewed with 5 different places for my internship in the fall. There were two churches that I did not like enough to serve. The first one was a church in Iowa which seemed like they had a lot of good ministries and a good pastor. However at the end of the interview, they mentioned that they required staff to say that sexuality can only occur between a man and a woman in marriage. Interns were considered staff. I truthfully and diplomatically answered that I am in favor of gay and lesbian rights, but that I have been able to work sucessfully with people who have different opinions. However I went away realizing that I would not be able to feel like I could ethically say what was expected of me. And I realized what a small world it is that when I first talked to my mother afterward, she was heading out to lunch with the person that I interviewed with.

The other church that I can not serve was with a large church in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The location would have ensured visitation from my family during football season, however there were reasons why I could not serve there. The pastor seemed like a good, sweet man. However, it did not sound like our visions for ministry were similar enough for me to have it be a pro-active experience.

As for the churches I am willing to serve? A large church in Vegas, where I felt that the pastor seemed really awesome and someone I would enjoy working with. He said that they were not a reconcling in christ church because he thought that the inclusion was too limited to sexuality in that statement, which was something that I found awesome. And it sounds like that there is a lot of good creativity and energy at this church making it a good potential internship site.

There was an urban church in Everett, Washington that was not interviewing, however I decided that this would be a place that I might enjoy doing my internship. I am attracted to the urban setting. I am also attracted to the fact that there are a lot of people who do not go to church in the Washington area, which sounds like it could be really exciting in terms of trying to make connections between secular culture and Lutheran culture to communicate the message of the gospel.

Not on account of the weather, my third choice is in Fargo, North Dakota, where I would be doing joint campus ministry and parish ministry. The combination of the two sounds really exciting to me. I honestly think that a lot of my interests in ministry would go over very well in a campus ministry setting as I even though I am a little tired right now, I am academically driven. And I think that this would be a context where BOTH my passions for popular media and social justice could be expressed well. However, I am petrified of the idea of having to drive in ice, snow and wind!

I also interviewed with a mission start in Arizona. Its a retirement community that I would serve. The congregation sounds like a very healthy community that is very outwardly focused, which really appeals to me. Because its a retirement community, most of the church activities would happen during the day, and I would have my evenings off. On one hand, this sounds appealing to me as I do enjoy doing my own thing. On the other hand, there are not a lot of young adults in this community at all which is a source of concern for me as well. Even though I enjoy my own space, I do like socializing with people around my age. One of the reasons why the apartments are working out so well for me is because I actually am surrounded more by people in their late twenties and early thirties. The dorms seemed like a weird combination of a retirement community and people who were freshly out of college, so the apartments are working out wonderfully in this regard. On one hand, there are a lot of couples around here which is hard to be exposed to at this point in time. However, I have made friends with a lot of the singles in the apartments. I have also learned that it is not so much of an issue of if people are married or in a serious relationship, as much as how they go about it, as I have found that there is one couple in the apartments that I enjoy and tolerate being around. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that I do like to be social with people in my age group. This is a fear of being in Arizona. However, I have the attitude that I can do anything for a year as well. So we will see where this goes.

I am supposed to find out sometime in April where I am going in the fall, and it is unnerving. Usually by now I have started to make summer plans, but right now I haven't. I realize that I want to go to the Twin Cities for awhile this summer, but I only want to make one trip back to the midwest. Will I be moving to North Dakota and driving to MN, or will I be moving to Washington State, Vegas, or Arizona and taking a plane ride back? Will my fears be driving in the winter or getting sunburnt while trying to find other young adults? My lease goes till June, and ideally I would drive to my internship site in July after moving out of my apartment, having time to get settled and to get to know the area before internship starts in August, but I would need to negotiate this with an internship supervisor.

This is all unnerving! I realize that I am kind of living in the question of where I am going to be and what kind of ministry I am going to do in the fall. I seriously request all of your prayers at this point in time. I am nervous, but I am ready to serve the church. And I have moments where I could stand to be a lot more calm about knowing where I am going to be. I promise that I will write at least a paragraph on my blog and make an announcement on my facebook status when I know where I am going! However, I really need a lot of prayers about this right now.

Yet, I was watching my copy of "Shakespeare in Love" the other day and one of the lines in the movie really resonates with me and my situation here: "It will all work out, I don't know how, its a mystery." I trust that God is in control as I have been able to make it this far by faith. Yet it is unnerving living in the question.

Adventures In My Own Apartment

I actually have my own apartment this semester, which I LOVE. I have never lived completely on my own before, and I find that I enjoy it quite a bit. Cooking, cleaning, paying bills---these are all things that i have done before, but for the first time I am the one who is in charge of everything and I absolutely love it. Its not without its challenges, my first night in the apartment I did not have any heat in my apartment and it was really cold that night. Then there was the day that my shower rod fell out of the shower and then when I went to go to my closet, the closet door fell out. There was also the day that I lost my apartment keys after doing a major grocery store run after being in a psychotherapy appointment. I wound up making phone calls from a friend's apartment and having my landlord let me into my apartment for much of the weekend before I got a new set of keys. So its not like it has been a flawless experience by any means, but it is an adventure that i quite enjoy.

In living on my own, I have become more aware of what my own quirks are. I have found that I absolutely love being by myself on the couch while playing a DVD after a long day. The new found addiction I have is to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." (thanks to netflix i am in the middle of season 5).

I have found TV shows that I enjoy before, but for some reason "Buffy" reminds me of being a young girl again, as it is the sort of story i would have been obsessed with when I was younger. When I bring this up, I often hear other women say "isn't Angel so hot?" And while he is not bad to look at, he is not the one I would have crushed after as a young girl. In high school, I often imagined that I was like Buffy, finding ways to heroically save the day. And in high school, I would have had a huge crush on Giles, the really smart, bookish librarian who is also really sweet as he appeals to my brainy side that wants to be treated like a lady. I would also have had a crush on Spike, the vampire who specifically wants to be bad, but seems to often reluctantly do the right thing, and as the bad guy sometimes he is able to get away with more blunt observations that everyone else is reluctant to say.

While these are some interesting observations I have about my reactions to other people's reactions on my interest in the show, the real reason why I am drawn to the show is because of Buffy. Buffy fights for herself, and she is the one to be more likely to save the guy, not the other way around. She is no damsel in distress. I have often imagined being like Buffy for as long as I can remember. When I told my mother this, she said that it reminded her of the book The Paperbag Princess. I scored a copy of this book as it seemed fitting to have it in my apartment as I adore the fact that the princess goes to save the prince and when he does not like how she looks while doing this, they decide not to get married. That's more of the way that I have tended to imagine myself being. Being bookworm and a movie buff, sometimes I have to suspend some of my feminist tendencies for certain genres. (I am clearly not a fan of the damsel in distress) And its refreshing not to have to do this for "Buffy". And I love that the plot lines tend to be more of a fantasy plot as well as I have always loved stories of magic and adventure, and battles between good and evil. The evil vampire theme reminds me of my love of stories about evil witches as a young child.

So the show reminds me of being a young girl again in a good way, as it reminds me of a lot of the things I gravitated towards as a young girl. And there is something symbolic I think about being addicted to a show about a strong woman who can fight for herself in the first time that I have my own place.

I also find that I like it quiet quite a bit around here when the TV is not on. It is not only easier to work that way, but it is really pleasant when it is quiet. I have been able to lose myself in thought over my studies and I have been able to get into my own world of imagination again. I have developed ideas for some creative writing pieces that I would love to pursue, however my academic studies seem to take a vast majority of my energy for writing for right now. Yet, when I do listen to music, I notice that I listen to a lot of classical music. I was telling someone the other day that when I listen to Mozart, my cyncism about romantic love fades away, because there is something about listening to Mozart that makes me feel like I am near to one of the most beautiful things in the world that I have never tired of at all. My apartment could use to have nicer floors and bathroom tiling. Its obvious that it is a lower income apartment. But when I am listening to Mozart I feel like the richest woman in the world.

I love having my own kitchen as well. No roommates to have to deal with at all. I find that I love to work in my kitchen when I get the chance, as I find the process to feel very thereputic and healthy. I find that I generally like to keep the kitchen pretty clean, willingness to not pick up after myself indicates exhaustion, which I was feeling a lot before the break. Fortunately, I do not have enough dishes to let them pile up for more than a day. The exception is if I lived only off of wine, as I have plenty of wine glasses as a result of a nice birthday gift from my brother and several trips to Napa. I eat a lot of homemade hummus, because it is cheap. However I feel classy doing this in my own kitchen while listening to Mozart!

It is also liberating to not feel like I need to leave when I do not feel like talking to people. Its nice to have a place where I can make my own cup of tea and light a candle while I am working. However, I still find that I study outside the house sometimes as I have too many possible introverted adventures in my apartment that come in the form of my netflixed Buffy DVDs and my New Yorker that come every week, novels in my bedroom, things that I want to make in my kitchen.

My favorite Rogers and Hammerstein song is "In My Own Little Corner" from their "Cinderella". Cinderella sings "In my own little corner, in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be..." There is something about that which makes me think of having my own apartment. I am never lacking for adventures here, as I enjoy having my own little corner that I enjoy living in.

However, I am always willing to invite people inside as well, but it feels nice inviting them instead of merely trying to coexist with them. I make sure that I always have ice cream and wine, as the intent of them is to have something to offer in hospitality. However, it is nice that these are things that I don't complain about enjoying by myself either.

Ethical Autobiography

I just wrote this ethical autobiography for my ethics class at PLTS. I thought you all might enjoy it:

I confess to having a major addiction in my life right now: Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I know that my weekend is approaching when the next few DVDs of the show arrive through my netflix account. Once all my school work is done and my apartment is clean from my week, my favorite thing to do is to sit down and to find myself imagining that I am in Sunnydale, California where Buffy Summers is fighting supernatural forces of evil, with her specialty being vampires, with her friends assisting her in this battle.
I mostly started to watch it to understand why some of my friends back in MN think that the show is just amazing. You see, on one hand, I feel like I should be appalled. I worked for Pace e Bene, a non-violence organization last semester and I believe fully in nonviolent conflict resolution, and feel like I should not support Hollywood images of redemptive violence. The idea of dividing the world into “good” people and “bad” people (even if they are mostly portrayed by fictive vampires) is not a worldview that I generally uphold. The other thing is that my major in college was sociology where I found that my true passion was for examining gender and media from a lens of sociology and cultural history. While I do find it refreshing that the primary fighter is a strong female figure, it does follow the common Hollywood problem of putting women in “types” when they are together as her friend Willow is a very intelligent woman and Cordelia is a very beautiful woman. Its as though a woman can not be both. From a feminist perspective, there is also the problem with the eroticism behind the vampire violence as well. What can I say? I have a heart for justice and I have been trained to be immensely culturally critical.
I guess that this is the side of me that many people tend to see as I really have strongly called to be a voice for justice in the world, and in the realm of my ministry. From this perspective this does not make any sense. However, from a few other perspectives about my life journey, it makes perfect sense.
You see, I have always had a strong inclination to enjoy the world of fantasy. I was able to sing arias from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at a very young age, and I have adored both the glorious music and the story of magic that accompanied it my whole life. I have also always been an avid reader, reading any books I could get my hands on and spending my money on books. As a child, I absolutely adored C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and any stories about evil witches that I could find. In high school, I adored Arthurian legend from the lens of Marion Zimmer Bradley and T.H. White. In college, my obsession was for Tolkien and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books and the movie Labyrinth. Stories about magic, other-worldly creatures and travels to magical lands have always been incredibly appealing to me. I honestly love the fantasy section of the bookstore and some of the amazing things that can be done with these types of stories on the screen in our digital age.
Yet , when I started to really see that I had a heart for justice in my surrounding world, this is something that I did struggle with. A common motif in these sort of tales is to portraying characters as either being definitely good or bad. Occasionally, there are exceptions to this, and occasionally characters are portrayed as both, but this is not a paper on the literary analysis of these tales. I have often heard the argument that these characters in these stories, like the vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are pure evil and therefore the violence in these stories are justifiable. However, when I analyze this on my own, my Lutheran theology says that all people tend to be both saints and sinners, both good and evil. Is the portrayal of one type of creature/character/ or person as pure evil in a story truly helpful in terms of the way we want to categorize the world? The way I have personally come to understand this in my own way of thinking of dealing with issues of injustice is to view actions as being bad, but people not necessarily being evil. An example is that when George W Bush was president, I was strongly opposed to the militaristic actions that he took, but I made an effort to be opposed to his actions as a president instead of being opposed to George W Bush as a person. Because of this idea of good people versus bad people, these kinds of stories often involve at least one intense battle of some kind in the climax of the story and the denouement is frequently the resolution of this battle. This is something that I know that I have had a strong tendency to struggle with in my love of these kinds of tales, which includes my current obsession with “Buffy,” when I advocate for nonviolence in my surrounding world.
I have made sense of this in my own sense of ethics by realizing that I do not like what I consider “realistic” portrayals of violence. To me, this means that I tend to handle it better when one of the characters involved are not human, but happens to be something like a vampire, an evil witch or any other fictitious creature (at least to our own sense of awareness). And I generally prefer a comic portrayal of a sword fight or a fist fight over the use of guns and bombs. There is something that is more artistic about this on the screen as it has a lot more dance-type moves. Because when I observe these more dance type moves, it seems like something that can be portrayed on the stage as well.
In considering the stage, it makes me also think of some of the decisions that I had made about my life in my youth that I found to be incredibly ethical decisions for me at the time. You see, I had done a lot of theater when I was in junior high and high school and I have a deep respect for good theatrical movement as a result. I was always taking acting classes and I performed in a numerous amounts of plays. I found that I loved it quite a bit. I loved the process of bringing a story to life before an audience. Even though I tended to be exhausted afterwards, it really did thrill me quite a bit. Initially because I had a lot of enthusiasm for theater as a teenager and encouragement to pursue it, I strongly considered being a theater major in college initially. There were a lot of reasons why I decided not to pursue theater professionally even though my love of it has never gone away, which is why I never wound up taking a single theater class in college.
In my mind, there were some very ethical decisions not to do this. To begin with, I wanted to be a strong role model for young women and felt that the images of empowered women in plays and movies are incredibly minimal, even though I love many of these stories for one reason or another. My other ethical argument against this was that I did not want to join the masses of people who were hoping to break into show business somehow who often were unemployed and/or living in poverty when they were dreaming of making it on stage. I was privileged to receive a college education at a good liberal arts school, and I wanted to do something that would enable me to make more of a difference in my surrounding world.
My problem? My other strong interests were in literature and creative writing, and I found that I spent a lot of time on vocal music because it was both enjoyable and easy for me. The thing is that these were other strong artistic pursuits which left me back to the ethical dilemma of my economical argument that I had before in pursuing anything in the arts professionally. And while I found these pursuits to be very spiritually rich for me, I did not feel like I was contributing anything good back to society either as I had no desire to teach in the arts.
I finally ended in a sociology major because I felt like I was really exploring issues of poverty, racism, and injustice in more detail in my sociology classes than I was able to in any of my other classes. These were the issues that I felt like I ought to be pursuing with an undergraduate degree. I think that on one hand, it really was a vocational calling to be dealing with justice issues more directly. On the other hand, I found this to be an ethical issue as well. It was an ethical imperative for me that these were issues that I had the tools to really explore these issues of inequality in our culture. I guess that I had a deep sense of utilitarianism in me, as I wanted to find something that not only I enjoyed, but also could benefit more people than just myself in the long run no matter what I did with this degree.
After I settled on a sociology major, I started to pick up a music minor for my own pleasure and to be very active with Amnesty International because of this imperative and sense of urgency I felt to be addressing issues of inequality in our world. However this was around the same semester that September 11th occurred. I did view this as a great tragedy to our nation. However, I had a dream a few nights before September 11th, where I saw some buildings tumbling to the ground and I was helpless as to what I could do. In the background, I heard a commanding, gentle voice telling me these words over and over again, “TELL MY PEOPLE I AM A GOD OF PEACE.” Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion, but it was one that I felt mandated to bring because of the dream I had. It was then that I found another reason to stop the intensity that I had with my music books, as I realized that my voice was still being used, but in a way that I had not expected.
After that, working for justice and peace became a really central piece of my life. It came with some high consequences of my losing some supportive friends who did not like how far I took this, and it caused me to break off an engagement and while I did pursue some interesting projects, they were not always the kinds of things that tended to land employment right away.
I still struggle with a lot of the same questions now as I did then in asking questions as to whether products are fairly traded, what various companies practices are, ecological effects of driving my car, stressing nonviolent conflict resolution, etc. However, while I still have these same ethics, I feel like I approach them a lot differently now than I did when I was in college. I really feel like in college and in my early twenties I made sure that MY perspective was heard and I did have a strong tendency towards self righteousness in the way that I did live up to my own sense of what was right. In a way, I think the rest of the world seemed “wrong.”
I jump ahead 6 years later now since I have graduated from college. I do not want to talk about it in detail, but not long after college I had a near death experience in a car accident and I was completely disabled for a period of time. In this time, I had to depend a lot on other people and I was determined not to let my disabled body make me be a negative person. Maybe that is one of the things that transformed my ways of approaching these kinds of issues quite a bit, as I found myself committed to building bridges with all of the people surrounding me, not just the people who seemed to think like me.
Also since then, I have grown into this sense of really wanting to serve in parish ministry, which affirms this need to build bridges with people as well. I think that deliberating ethical ramifications of things like the products that I buy, my environmental impact on this earth and being a voice against violence in this world is important to the way that I deliberate my place in the world. However, I do not view it my role in pastoral ministry to impose my own opinion on other people, but to find ways to help people deliberate these issues out. If they come to similar conclusions that I have, then I think that finding ways to take action as a congregation is appropriate. But I realize that there is a diversity of opinions that people can have as well, and I have come to have a deep reverence and acceptance for these varieties of opinions.
And as my heart has grown to accept a large variety of opinions on difficult issues, I have found that I have been able to revisit parts of myself from a different ethical perspective than I did before. It leaves room in my life for a perspective that includes speaking against war and violence in our world and an obsession with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”