The Intertwining Strands

When I wrote to family and friends in April 2008 to tell them I had renounced my ordination, I felt I needed to offer some kind of explanation for why I had taken this immense and unusual step. Explaining myself was not easy to do, in part because I could think of so many reasons, or categories of reasons, for why letting go of ordination seemed to be the right thing for me to do at that time.

Here's what I put in that letter:

"Of all the variety of reasons I could articulate for letting go of ordination--psychological, theological, ecclesiological, ecological, anthropological--front and center is my conviction, born of experience and reflection, that being ordained gets in the way of my being freely and fully myself as a human being on this earth. I have likened my being ordained to a piece of old clothing, once a favorite, now well worn and rather ill fitting, even constricting, and best retired or recycled. Perhaps it 'worked' for me when I was first ordained; perhaps not. Now it no longer allows me sufficient freedom and room to be myself. I no longer wish to be a "professional religious person," at least not a spokesperson for any particular religious entity; when I speak or write or make art, I want to speak or write or make art wholly and freely as myself on behalf of myself."

There's so much more I could say about that one paragraph (and the rest of that letter) now, from the perspective of nearly two years later. I see some things more clearly now; while some are still pretty muddy! But I've been thinking especially about that list of reasons: psychological, theological, ecclesiological, ecological, anthropological.

I remember making double and triple sure that I was being honest there, rather than simply trying to be clever or witty. So I went back through that list many times to be sure that I could authentically give at least a brief amplification for each term and how I understood it in relation to myself and my action. Almost as if it were a check list:

1. Psychological: "check" (that was the easiest one, since it was obvious that somehow I just couldn't make it work for me to be a real person and a symbolic religious one at the same time)

2. Theological: "check" (that was pretty easy too--in fact that's probably the one that got me started in the first place--chafing within the confines of traditional, credal Christianity, even in its more progressive forms)

3. Ecclesiological: "check" (that too was almost a no-brainer, and it relates back to both 1 and 2 as well as to an Episcopal priest's sworn commitment to "conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church")

4. Ecological: "check" (although I don't quite remember how I got that to fit so neatly--I think it goes back to number 2)

5. Anthropological: "check" (this was the most "out there" of the reasons--it had something to do with something I had read about the anthropological distinction between the role of priest and the role of shaman. Not that I considered myself a shaman, but I knew I didn't like being in the role of priest, anthropologically speaking--was not even sure I believe it ever serves the best of human purposes)

Over the months since April of 2008, I have veered back and forth in my efforts to simplify and summarize my reasons into one basic reason, so that I could more clearly and effectively tell my story. But I have a feeling that to boil it all down to one reason, or one primary reason is to risk serious distortion in order to run from ambiguity.

That my quirky personal story and my psycho-emotional development (and lack thereof prior to ordination!) form the primary reason behind renouncing my ordination, I have no doubt. And yet to say that it's only my "quirky personal story" tempts me to minimize the potential significance of my story for others and thus to conceive of the telling of it as a personal, private extravagance.

Would any art or literature or music ever come into being if every creative impulse got undervalued, edited and muffled in that way?

As I move along step by step, it is becoming increasingly obvious that my theological and ecclesiological questions represent issues that are very much alive right now for all kinds of people and for nearly every traditional religious community wise enough and awake enough to wonder what it will mean, and what changes will be required, to continue to exist in meaningful life-giving ways. (And my psycho-spiritual questions certainly highlight some of the issues and challenges for ordained people of all sorts.)

Perhaps it would be more faithful and more honest of me (and more courageous) not to force some over-simplification of my story and instead to honor the intertwining strands of it. Maybe they will sort themselves out more clearly as I go along, and maybe they belong together, forever intertwined.

At least one person has suggested to me that a holistic, interconnected understanding of life would push that question even further. "It may well be," she said to me, "that you find yourself desiring to express yourself and your story right now because there are so many people out there hungering for just this kind of story." In other words, it's not just about me and my story and some self-centered, self-serving love of creative expression (though maybe it's partly that!).

Hmmm. A kind of quantum physics meets Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" sort of idea? If we are none of us isolated creatures and all things are connected, both by shared atoms and molecules and by the energy-matter continuum, on some fundamental level, how could it be otherwise?

Dances with Snow

What strange weather we're having! It was forty degrees earlier this morning when David and I got up. Now I look out the window and big fat flakes of snow are falling, prompting me to check the thermometer again: thirty-six.

I love watching snow fall, at least when it's not falling thickly while I'm trying to drive a car on a highway with a long way to go to reach my destination. Maybe it's that snow still triggers some childhood delight; maybe it's partly because it amazes me that a snowflake, which is so near to being weightless, still has enough "gravity" to fall earthward (though some snowflakes, probably the driest ones, drift and dawdle their way down). Maybe it's knowing a little bit about the beautiful and delightful mysteries of snow crystals--that each one is unique, although more like countless unique variations on a theme.

I once gave my father, a guy who read, really read, Scientific American for fun and did the geeky math puzzles that were toward the back of every issue (am I making that up?), a book about snowflakes. I remember finding it in the Harvard COOP and thinking it was the coolest book! After my father died, and when my mother was moving house and trimming down her belongings a bit, I brought that book back to my house, happy to have it on my shelf.

It's a collection of plates from the photographs of "Snowflake Bentley," a Vermont gentleman, self-educated farmer and photographer who invented a way of photographing snowflakes and contributed greatly to our knowledge of their multi-variant designs. He also caught a few plates of frost on window panes--another marvel! Tree branches! Fern fronds! He's now the subject of at least one children's book and maybe even a museum in Jericho, Vermont, his longtime home.

As if that weren't reason enough to be entranced by snow, there's also more recent research that suggests that the molecules of a snowflake "know" how to go about building a particular crystal by communicating with each other through vibrations, almost musically, or dancingly!

Chet Raymo's book Honey From Stone includes the following lyrical descriptions of this phenomenon:

     "Careful studies have shown that on the atomic scale the snowflake is a frenzy of activity. The molecules of  water furiously wing their hydrogen arms like dancers in a tarantella. The electronic bonds between the molecules are made a broken a million times a second. Faults in the crystal . . . jump from place to place like unruly children in a teacherless classroom. And somehow, in the midst of this atomic caprice, the snowflake acquires and retains an ordered form.

     "Some physicists think that vibrations of the crystalline lattice are the instrument of communication, vibrations that are exquisitely sensitive to the shape of the crystal. If this is so, then the growing snowflake maintains its symmetry in the same way that members of an orchestra stay in consonance, by sharing the sound of the ensemble. The snowflake's beauty, then, is orchestral! The facultas formatrix is vibration. Nature shudders in its sublimity. Atoms dance to inaudible music. The cloud jams. The rock jives. The lake's still surface boogie-woogies."

And so it seems to be--as others, inspired by quantum physics, would also claim--all matter is energy vibrating! Indeed, everything is energy vibrating! Thoughts, moods, the stories we tell ourselves, what we believe about ourselves and our lives. And if energy vibrating, then far more malleable than we're apt to think. We can change the music, the tune, the dance. We can dance with the snow.

A Wu Wei Kind of Day

This morning I had an early appointment out of the house, which meant that I enjoyed the immense gift of being in the car driving past east-facing vistas as the sun was rising. When I left home there were pink clouds strewn across the sky; that was beauty enough all by itself.

My first view of the water showed intense gold gathering along the horizon where some small clouds were clustered, right where the sun would soon appear. I'm sure you've noticed how clouds  a sunrise or sunset all the more interesting and often more beautiful. I turned off the radio and CD player so that there's be fewer distractions from the primary event of the sun's rising (and the small matter of keeping the car in the appropriate lane going about the right speed).

And then came the sunrise itself--since I was alone I greeted the sun aloud without apology or inclination to feel foolish. I thanked the sun for its energy and warmth and for making life on earth possible. The moment of sunrise wasn't particularly dramatic, nor was it any more glorious that what had come before (it was all plenty glorious). But sometimes it's good to speak to the sun directly. At least I happen to think so.

My appointment was an energizing conversation with Susan Doughty of the New England WomenCenter. Susan is a visionary women's health care practitioner whose center bridges western and alternative approaches to healing. She told me about documented (even videotaped!) evidence of the principles of quantum physics at work healing disease, even at the level of cellular repair.

What she was telling me echoes what I've been hearing and reading from a variety of sources about the power of imagination and vision to create and to change our realities (providing we loosen our energetic grip on limiting beliefs and paradigms). Even Einstein almost a century ago could see the power of the imagination to move and shift energy (and everything in the universe is composed of energy, all vibrating at differing frequencies) and to get us places that logic just can't manage.

As I was leaving, Susan shared with me some of her own experience that so often we get where we want to get not through struggle, blood, sweat, and tears (I know, I know--it's not what we grew up hearing) but rather by holding a clear, full vision of where we want to be, what we want to have accomplished, how we want to be in the world, trusting that in some corner of the universe it is already a reality, and by doing our best to stay "in the vortex" (her words for it), in the flow of energy, of the river of life, not resisting but "going with the flow". It doesn't mean that we remain passive and take no action at all, but that we take actions that are in some sense "effortless". What she was saying is closely related to the Taoist principle of "Wu Wei"--literally, without doing, without effort, sometimes expanded to "doing without doing."

So there I was, driving home again, minding my own business on the highway, when I noticed the license plate of a car that passed me. It said: WU WEI. Who am I to argue with that?