Introduction: Sea Change

A page from the little book I made for my November dreamboard, and a chapter from the book I am drafting this month, tentatively titled something like Edge Dwellers: finding your way to a new kind of faith.

Introduction: Sea Change

There’s was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy
They say he traveled very far, very far
Over land and sea
And then one day, one fateful day he came my way
And though we talked of many things, fools and kings,
This he said to me:

The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return.

Nature Boy
Nat King Cole

Once there was a girl. This girl was a good little girl. She was a Christian girl. It’s true that she was a bit of a mutt, having been raised in a Lutheran church and sent to a private school run by the Pentecostals. The latter were rumored to be found swinging from the rafters. In proper religious circles this was just shy of snakes handling, but still, she made the cut. She had, after all, prayed the prayer and studied the catechism, filled her memory verse chart with shiny silver stars, and taken first communion. She got up at 6am to be a teenage prayer warrior and responded to altar calls in the school gym (for what reason she was never quite sure.) She even sang in the choir.

After a while this girl grew up. She went to more private Christian schools and got letters after her name. She met people who thought that the Holy Spirit was still afoot, and she learned about healing and prophecy and things that, frankly, acted a lot like magic and miracle. She met a wizened old man who everyone called a guru, but who called himself “Eugene.” When the girl talked to Eugene, his faced curved upwards into swoops because he smiled at the questions that only made other people look worried. He told the girl lots of stories, this Eugene, and some of them the girl seemed to remember like a mist in her memory. She thought she might have heard them once a long time ago. Only the stories were more interesting when Eugene told them. (When Eugene told them it was they were full of trolls and fairies, she was sure of it. There! Behind the sackcloth and ashes!). The felt she might be a part of these stories, and that maybe that everybody got to play, that things weren’t quite as scary as they were meant to be–or maybe they were more so–but the ending was even better than she had first understood, so the scariness of being in the story was worth it.

Eventually, the girl became mostly grown up. She got herself a job and house and a husband. She even graduated from two cats to two kids. Being the good girl that she was she worked for the poor, and volunteered to teach Sunday school, and spent all her time serving and serving and serving some more. (For which she got many kudos…and many requests for still more service.) She was doing all the things she was meant to do, dotting all her “i’s” and crossing all her “t’s.”. The rules in the church involved never being quite good enough, and always striving to be better. The girl wasn’t sure what to do about that, because sometimes she felt just fine, and everyone told her that couldn’t be right. So she tried to follow the rules and she worked on being holy. But something kept worrying at her, like a burr in her socks. Nothing fit quite right– everything was too big or too small. She could never nibble on just the right amount of Alice’s cookie, or she was always gulping down too much of the liquid from the curious little jar. She kept trying to find the Christian “perfect,” to be buttoned up properly and know all the right things to say. Finally, she realized that she could never truly accomplish that elusive goal. The girl decided the next best thing was to go on an adventure. So she ate enough of the cookie to crawl through the little door in the rabbit hole, and that made everything Far More Interesting.

You see the girl had found that she wanted to do what she was created to do instead of what she was supposed to do. (It was a fine line sometimes, quite hard to decipher.) So the girl forged ahead into the territory below the rabbit hole. She got ordained, which was against the rules. Then she took her ordination and she walked away from her church, which wasn’t so much against the rules as it was just plain foolhardy. You see, she had loved her church very much, but things had stopped making sense. Her soul was getting anemic. She had to find her way back to the story with trolls and fairies.

I am of course the girl-grown-to-woman. I was the good Christian girl who earned her pedigree via degrees and discernment groups and ordination processes. I am the one who’s career path went social work-homeless ministry-associate pastor. I am the one who read Brian McLaren’s The Story we Find Ourselves In, said “ah ha!” and then left her church. And I am now, among other things, the one who is ripe with ritual, eager to eat with the heathens, and full of priestessy things.

These are my stories. Well, my stories and all the places my stories intersect with many other wonderful stories, many of them bigger than my own. Hidden amongst them there are hypothetical trolls and fairies–wonders unaware. You might not see them at first, but they are there hiding in the spaces between the words.

I don’t know yet, what stories I will pick or which will come to live in this volume. But it is my fervent desire not to write anything here that is not true. Too often in the past I have cooled my words so as not to produce sparks, or hidden my passions under language I thought would go over better in the church-y milieu. But hiding what I really believe in the hope of avoiding an argument left me feeling displaced. My pledge then, to my own heart and to you dear reader, is to be as transparent as possible. My soul says, “Write true things.” And I reply with a phrase from the liturgy of my childhood, “Yes, with the help of God.”

By true things I do not mean things which are purely factual. I am not much one for facts, living so often as I do in the realm of memory, which is faulty; or in the landscape of spirit, which is numinous as best. Quantitative methods do not do much for us here, in the realm of the soul. What I do feel quite fondly towards are what Sabrina Ward Harrison calls “the true and the questions” – those things which are true for me, those which are true for you, and all the bit in between that lead us to wonder. I promise to try to stay there, in that world where questions are Queen.

In a world ripe with “I wonder,” there are a great many things of which I am unsure. If the church can be repaired. If theology can or should be systematic. If “Christian” will ever be a name I can wear without cringing. But this I believe:

The Light is never extinguished.
Jesus loves those on the fringes.
The Muse, she is a foot.

It doesn’t matter if you are unsure precisely what these things mean. It’s okay to be in soft focus around the edges of things. But if any of these ring true to you – if some small wave of recognition surges there behind your breast bone, or catches a bit in your throat, then you are in the right place now. We are meant to be here together—you, I, and the great Divine. And the stories we tell here should be about those things: Jesus, edge dwellers, illumination, inspiration, and the lost bits of the Divine. These are the stories that right now, in this season, will guide us to fertile ground.

Yes, this book is full of stories: things I’ve loved and that have given love to me; places on the journey that have swelled ripe and full of life. All the tales of lost and found that helped me on the way. You might be on the way too. You might find directions for the trip you’ve set out on. You might reconnect with the God you once knew, or find the God you’d never known. Something might ring with you, and you might pack it in your overnight bag. Or you might swallow the whole thing, hook line and sinker. Truthfully, I don’t really know. But I am sure, somewhere in these tales, magic happens – or maybe its miracle – and I think you might want that too.

When explorers used to set sail into the New World, they would take the old maps with them, and draw new ones along the way – making notations, filing in the blank spots. On the edges, where they did not know what lay beyond, they would scrawl “Here There Be Monsters.” You are on the edge of a map, looking across an uncharted sea. But I am here to tell you, there are no monsters here, but instead companions. We may be few in number, but numbers are slippery things and of little import in the end. I am sure there are enough of us here for good company. Set sail with us. Come along.

Posted in Soulcare, Soulstories
Tags: dreamboards, edge dwellers, Soulcare, Soulstories |