[25] praying in tune [Rest and Bread; Wednesday, September 22, 2010]

[I gave the Reflection at Rest and Bread on September 22, 2010 -- feeling tired, hungry, and ill-prepared; I extemporized the second half of my Reflection and I think it went okay, though after the service was over I couldn't tell you what I said.]

¹First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ²for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. ³This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, ⁴who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. ⁵For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, Christself human, ⁶who gave Christself a ransom for all—this was attested at the right time. ⁷For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
(1 Timothy 2:1-7, NRSV)

We are exhorted to pray for everyone, even the rulers -- which I think also pointedly means, "even the people we don't like much."

Because there is one God and one Mediator -- and neither of them are us. In the prayer that Jesus taught us, we pray "Thy will be done" -- God's will, not ours. Yes, we are Called to be agents of God's Will here on Earth, but that doesn't mean we get to dictate the Plan.

Paul understands himself to have been commissioned to share this Good News. That there is one God -- and one mediator between God and humankind, which is to say, Christ.

We are not God. We are not even mediators between God and humanity. Now, many of us went on retreat in February to reflect on the topic of "prayer," and one of the things we discussed there was the idea that prayer changes God. The Jewish tradition that Paul and Jesus and most of the early Church had inherited was rich with a culture of arguing with God. And I support that. As does Paul, I think. After all, he lists intercessions and supplications in his prayer list.

But I think there's also an important lesson here about getting out of the way a bit. To remember that it is not all about us, that it does not all rest on us, and to shift our focus appropriately. Sometimes all we can do is pray, and sometimes the most useful thing we can do is pray.

One of the powerful images I have encountered for prayer is "getting in tune with God." Sometimes God is (or seems) out of tune, and that's where righteous arguing comes in -- but often we are the ones who are out of tune, and so we are exhorted to recenter ourselves in the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

"People they come together / People they fall apart"

So, Molly started a blog for her journey with cancer.

I was really struck by her entry "How You Can Pray for Me."  Excerpt:

So, every cancer patient needs a way of thinking about healing, and curing, their cancer. I read a great book many years ago, Love, Medicine and Miracles, written by a doctor who started a program in the 80s for “Exceptional Cancer Patients.” He found that the patients who were not just ‘positive’ but really had a deep imagination for curing their cancer, had much better outcomes—not all of them lived, but they had less pain, lived a lot longer, and many of them did survive.

[...]

For a lot of people, fighting imagery works—they imagine a little shoot-em-up video game inside their bloodstream, their affected organs. I’m so glad this works for them. It’s saved countless lives, given courage and confidence and faith where it was needed most.

But this is not very me. I claim to be a pacifist—well, I’d like to be. My family, on the front lines of my irritation and anger, when I get irritated and angry, know otherwise. But, I can’t personally invest in violent imagery to cure my cancer. I don’t think this cancer is evil, it’s an anomaly in my body, but it’s its own thing, maybe even good in itself—just misguided, misdirected, it’s something that’s where it doesn’t belong. It’s lost.

There are 3 or 4 or 5 ways things get out of the body (this is where it becomes apparent that I have not taken much science since 9th grade biology). Perspiration, excretion, and respiration come to mind. For the cancer to get out, it needs an exit point.

This is where the Holy Spirit Portal comes in. This is how I am praying the cancer out of my body, and how you can join me, if you wish.

First, you know (or maybe you don’t) that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity (Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit). Jeff Von Wald and the re/New team led an amazing worship at church last weekend all about the Holy Spirit, Hebrew name Ru’ach, Greek name Pneumos—the ancient word that means wind or breath. Maybe I can get Jeff to post some of the quotes they read aloud at re/New to describe the HS. Or maybe you’d like to post your own description below—please do!

Now, this is the prayer. Take a deep, deep breath. What you are breathing in is pure Holy Spirit. Doesn’t matter if you’re in traffic on Storrow, on the T at the end of a humid Boston day at rush hour with all kinds of interesting smells in the air, or in a dewy meadow in the early morning of Vermont. Underneath the human and industrial muck is God’s own breath. Breathe it in. Imagine it going all the way down to your toes.

Now as you get ready to exhale, imagine it as a vacuum, sucking out one or two or perhaps ten of my free-floating cancer cells. Let your exhale accelerate, and WHOOSH! Set the cells free. Send them away, tell them there is a place for them, where they do belong—not in any other human or animal body, perhaps in deep space. God has a place for them. Because Ewing’s cells are called “blue cells” I have been (smile) imagining that they are flying off to a distant galaxy to start a superrace of humanoids called the Na’avi, a peaceful people.

Do this breath three times. Hopefully it’ll help you, too—you don’t have to be a yogi to know how cleansing and grounding and healing it is to stop what you’re doing and breathe.

The good thing about a prayer like this, is that it doesn’t take long to do, and it feels complete. You don’t have to worry that it was “enough.” God knows, we all have enough we are worrying about already.

The part that made me cry, though, (for reasons unrelated to Molly) is from her post "The Best Part":

Here’s my takeaway—at least, the first of many takeaways from this whole experience:  I was ashamed to want surgery, to want relief. I felt like it was a personal failure to ask for it. But if I hadn’t, it would have taken many more months to discover and diagnose my Ewing’s. How’s that for a holy spirit portal?

[Explanation of why she began calling it a "Holy Spirit Portal" here.]

Apparently it's Advent already in my head?

[First Sunday of Advent is actually November 29.]

At Harvard T last night, a busker was playing "God of Grace and God of Glory" ("cure thy children's warring madness...").

Later, I also had "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" in my head ("Mild He lays His glory by, Born that man no more may die.").

This morning, I had "O Come, All Ye Faithful" ("Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning...") and "O Little Town of Bethlehem" ("Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.") in my head.

Is it bad that most all these songs blur together when I'm singing them in my head? (Not so much "O Little Town of Bethlehem," but...)

++

Yesterday I read a Magpie Girl post on The Imposter Syndrome, and one thing that struck me from the "Treatment Plan" was:

Trust the fear. I know this seems contradictory, but here’s what I mean: The more persistent that nagging voice is that’s calling you a con-artist, the more likely it is that you are actually doing exactly what you are meant to be doing. Know that the voice will get louder before it dies down, especially if you start ignoring it, but it will, in time, begin to give up the fight and let you do your work in this world fully and without doubt, second-guessing, and insecurity. Marianne Williamson said it most famously: “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?…Your playing small does not serve the world.”

(1) "The more persistent that nagging voice is that’s calling you a con-artist, the more likely it is that you are actually doing exactly what you are meant to be doing."

I push back against this to some extent -- in so far as I think there are voices inside us that tell us not to do things which we should listen to. Sometimes we're not as [smart, talented, whatever] as people think we are AND THAT'S OKAY. We shouldn't push ourselves just because other people want us to.

But that's my own bias speaking, because really she's talking about something else, and yes, the voices that say "You're not good enough to do this thing you want to do" is usually a gremlin voice and should not be heeded.

(2) "We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?…Your playing small does not serve the world."

Your playing small does not serve the world.

+++

Last night I was thinking of a Velveteen Rabbi post I'd read ("The View from Week 35"):

Being pregnant has been endlessly fascinating. Already it's has shifted my spiritual practices. My weekday prayer practice has morphed: I'm less likely to get out of bed and daven a full shacharit these days, but much more likely to make brachot at random moments of the day. I say a blessing every morning when I give myself an injection of blood thinner, and when I feel my son moving inside me. I wonder what bracha I'll make over breastfeeding, and whether I'll be able to sustain gratitude when I'm changing his diaper at 2am.

I talk with him constantly when I'm alone in the car -- I tell him about my day, about how I'm feeling, about the world we're bringing him into. In that sense, being pregnant feels a bit like I'm praying all the time, because the other figure I talk to when I'm alone in the car is God. Lately I find that I shift back and forth between words intended for the baby and words intended for the Holy Blessed One without making much distinction between the two.

Being pregnant has shifted my relationship with the liturgy. I've known intellectually for years that we call God ha-rachaman, The Merciful, but I hadn't considered what it means that the root of that word for merciful is the root of rechem, womb. I get distracted while davening prayers I've known by heart for years: one mention of God's mercy and I'm liable to be caught in contemplation of what it means that God is the womb in which creation is nurtured. It takes conscious effort to set aside those meditations and move on with the service sometimes.

I'm less likely to get out of bed and daven a full shacharit these days, but much more likely to make brachot at random moments of the day.

I think this particularly jumped out at me because I'm trying to develop a practice of saying grace* before each meal (which then begs the question of what constitutes a "meal" -- do I count snacks? obviously the answer is to adopt a more Jewish approach and say a blessing before I put anything in my mouth ... yes, I went to a gutter place when I wrote that -- but I will be disappointed in contemporary Judaism if no one's composed a blessing for that).

I'm somewhat hesitant about automatic rote things -- because I worry that they lose meaning that way; that we say them without thinking. But I am a really big fan of acknowledging God's presence and grace in all things -- and having prepared language for that really helps.

* "Dear God, we thank you for this food, may it bless us and nourish us. We ask your blessing on all those responsible for bringing this food to our table -- from the first farmers through to [the grocery store employees, the restaurant staff, these people who are hosting me, etc.]. We also ask your particular blessing on those who have no food and those for whom food is a difficult issue. (We ask all this for love's sake. Amen.)"

Yes, apparently my default language for this kind of prayer is plural even though I'm the only one asking (and am always doing it silently at that).

And "for love's sake" is totally taken from Laura Ruth.

"They were off my path so I never had dared"

(1) This post makes me want to see the movie Jennifer's Body.

(2) A friend of mine recently linked to this this NY Times article on prayer which has one paragraph which, as she put it, "basically plagiarizes inaccurately paraphrases closely adapts an excerpt from this 2008 news article" (and I'm here quoting from the 2008 article):

Among the most innovative -- and controversial -- aspects of the Siddur soon to be released by San Francisco's main gay synagogue is a prayer for "unexpected intimacy." The new prayer is intended for meaningful encounters with strangers, including, according to some involved in the project, anonymous sexual relations.

It is featured in the forthcoming Siddur created by Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, a 31-year-old synagogue in San Francisco affiliated with the Reform movement.

"In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night," the prayer begins, referring to the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. "He never knew the stranger's name, yet their encounter was a blessing, which turned Jacob into Israel and made him realize, I have seen God face-to-face."

The prayer, titled "Kavannah for Unexpected Intimacy," goes on to ask God -- "who created passion and wove it throughout creation" -- to permit the encounter to be a blessing "that allows us to both touch and see the Divine."

[...]

Ramer, who describes himself as "fiercely monogamous," stressed that the prayer was not intended solely for gays and lesbians. He also emphasized that it need not refer solely to encounters of a sexual nature, but to any exchange with a stranger that was deemed meaningful.

"Isn't this one of the things we're told the most, to honor strangers?" Ramer asked. "In an anonymous act, this is our chance to recognize the sacredness."

I have thoughts on the NYT prayer article, but I'm much more struck by the stranger-encounter prayer idea.  My friend suggests that the question we ask (and not just about sexual ethics) shouldn't be about Right/Wrong but rather should be, "How can this activity reflect and deepen the presence of God in my life and the world?"

[on prayer] "what do I love when I love my God?"

In reading Blake Huggins' recent(ish) blogpost "Prayer (still) does not change things," I found a lot which resonated with me (and some that didn't fit with my personal journey) and a lot to chew on.

I have failed to articulate any actual commentary in the time since I read it, so I am simply posting an excerpt.

if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer? If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?

This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa. If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way. And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not. If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously.

What can we do, then, in developing a theology of prayer but return to St. Augustine’s age old question in book ten of the Confessions: what do I love when I love my God? Is that not the ultimate question of prayer? Does that penetrating question not guide all our prayers and all our tears, all of our weak attempts to address that which calls us into being? To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, what can we do but re-inscribe that question into our own context and our own language?

[My note: See also Blake's earlier post in which he talks about (among other things) relationality in reflecting on the question "what is it that we love when we love our God? Who is it that we love when we love our God?"]

I must confess that I am not consistent in setting aside time for prayer or “quiet time” as they used to say at church camp. Yet I wonder if in some sense doing so might minimalize the power and potency of prayer. Here I want to be very clear: I am not suggesting dropping such exercises altogether, of course there are important and edifying. I’m just wondering out loud if hyper-emphasis on that alone misses the point of prayer. What if instead of being relegated to the mundane as some sort of chore one must undertake in order to reach a certain quota prayer (and here I am relying on Brother Lawrence and others) demanded a radical restructuring of one’s life in response to the always ever-present Spirit of God in the world? What if we lived life itself as an act of prayer rather than reduced prayer to mere daily exercise? What if prayer is simply (and complexly) the ongoing outworking of our reply to Augustine’s question, which is always left open as a question?

It is in this vein that I read Oswald Chambers when he writes, “It is not so true that ‘prayer changes things’ as that prayer changes me and I change things.” I do not pray to change God’s mind or to change reality, I pray because I myself am changed and transformed in the process. And because I leave Augustine’s question open as a question I am always answering (rather than a question to which I Answer) I stand with John Caputo, Derrida and the medieval mystics in saying that I do not know to whom I am praying, I do not know where my prayers and tears are directed. Yet I am (at my best) transformed and empowered to restructure my life as an ongoing act of prayer in response to the question “what do I love when I love my God?” Such a response is made palpable in my direct encounters with the other, encounters in which I am humbled to see myself as (an)other and encounters in which my normal, boring mode of being in the world is ruptured by divine grace, pushing me beyond a place of comfortability and into the realm of the im/possible where I see the other face-to-face.

I do not know to whom I pray, yet I continue. And in so doing I, a broken vessel, am made new again and again. In this way I can turn Derrida’s oft quoted statement (”I quite rightly pass for an atheist”) in my own direction: I quite rightly pass as one who prays. I seek to structure my life as an act of prayer itself insofar as such an act is an act of transformative response to the rupture of the divine event, of continually answering the questions of what it is that I love when I love my God and to whom, if anyone, my prayers are directed. These are open-ended questions, they are never nailed down and only loosely demarcated. My prayers are, like Augustine’s, prayers of a restless heart, of an unhinged being who does not know who he is and yet still seeks to understand from whence he came. My prayers are always already unfinished and any “Amen” that I utter is always already the beginning of my next prayer, my next attempt at answering or reformulating these questions.

Our prayers have no real discernible beginning or end, only movements or acts (as in a play) in between. This is, I think, precisely why Martin Luther King, Jr. said that to be without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without drawing breath. To be in prayer is to be in touch with the divine, something which never really ceases albeit something of which we may or may not be aware. The more efficacious prayer is — and here I turn back to Brother Lawrence — that one which is aware of one’s being in touch with something beyond oneself, something which beckons a tangible, sustained response; the most efficacious prayer is that one which heeds the call for response and allows oneself to be changed, both through the prayer and through outworking of the response. This is the sphere we should inhabit as those who seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God — a sphere of continual prayer, a posture of “praying without ceasing” as Paul wrote (I Thess. 5:17). So let us pray and let us continue to pray as together we work toward more faithful participation in the divine life.

"seeds of mercy and seeds of justice"

Watching tv at the gym this morning, I learned that Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt got baptized into Christianity by Stephen Baldwin while on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Spencer said that he saw that Stephen was surrounded by love and he was like, "Whatever you've got, I want that," and Stephen said "Jesus."

My second thought upon hearing that was, "And are you going to do the 'Give up everything and follow me' that Jesus asked of the rich young man?" But my first thought upon hearing it was, "Yes, that is supposed to be how we bring people to Christianity -- by living our lives in such a way that they say, 'Hey, what's up with that? Tell me more about that.'"

Later today, I was poking around the MethoBlog some, and I read one blogger say: "Jesus is a person. Not a product. Introduce me. Don’t sell me."

This same blogger quotes Seth Godin (from his book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us):

Senator Billy Bradley defines a movement as having three elements:

1. A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build.
2. A connection between and among the leader and the tribe.
3. Something to do–the fewer limits, the better.

Too often, organizations fail to do anything but the third.

People often ask me why I do so much church (I attend worship or discussion at at least 4-5 different places each week), and I haven't come up with a better answer than, "It makes me happy" (for which articulation I have my friend Meredith D. R. to thank).

My best friend's pastor has said two things about church that have stuck with me.
1) This is not the place we pretend to be well.
2) We go to church every week because we touch the face of God.

Cambridge Welcoming Ministries is my "home" church.

Last night, Prayers of the People took twenty minutes (that doesn't include the Pastoral Prayer or the Unison Prayer, though it does include the pastor repeating each articulated prayer back to the parishioner). CWM is not a large congregation. There were probably two to three dozen people present last night. But this is the place where I offer up all the joys and concerns that are on my heart. Sometimes I forget some. Sometimes I just lift up names because the "why" is too complicated and/or too incriminating. But this is the place where I can offer up all the prayers that are on my heart. And I could do that at my morning church, too (I was recently touched when a parishioner told me that she can't remember all my friends' names, but she prays for "Elizabeth's friends"), but CWM is the place that models for me that I can list a half a dozen names, complete with explanations, and can ask for prayers for the same people week after week.

I get cranky about "Passing of the Peace" turning into socializing time (that is what Coffee Hour is for!), but the times at CWM when a hug with someone has turned into an extended catch-up session such that I don't actually get to peace the entire congregation before we are reconvened for Communion feel right.

Last night, our Closing Hymn was "Bring Forth the Kin(g)dom of God" [see here for full text]. The last line of the last verse is: "Love our journey and love our homeland: love is the kin(g)dom of God!"

True story.

And in closing, CWM's unison Closing Prayer: "All this we ask in the name of Jesus. Feed us daily; hold us fast; calm our fears; and send us forth boldly, joyfully, and ever faithful in your spirit. Amen."

[Beloved] "and the mercy of the fallen"

At my Thursday young adult church small group, we've been reading portions of Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved. He talks about how we are the Body of Christ, and he uses the Communion liturgy -- taken/chosen, blessed, broken, given -- as a framing device.

Excerpts from Blessed:

For me, personally, prayer becomes more and more a way to listen to the blessing.  I have read and written much about prayer, but when I go to a quiet place to pray, I realize that, although I have a tendency to say many things to God, the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.  This might sound self-indulgent, but, in practice, it is a hard discipline.  [...]  To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear a voice of blessing --- that demands real effort.  [...]  It is not easy to enter the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: "You are my Beloved Child, on you my favor rests."  [...]  Often you will feel that nothing happens in your prayer.  You say: "I am just sitting there and getting distracted."  But if you develop the discipline of spending one half-hour a day listening to the voice of love, you will gradually discover that something is happening of which you were not even conscious.  It might be only in retrospect that you discover the voice that blesses you.

I was really struck by the idea of silent prayer as listening to the voice of love.  I'm familiar with the idea of listening to/for God during silent prayer, but I usually think of that as listening for God to tell you something, but of course just being in the Presence is valuable, and sometimes what God most wants to tell us is that we are Beloved.  (One could argue that what God always most wants to tell us is that we are Beloved.)

    My second suggestion for claiming your blessedness is the cultivation of presence.  By presence I mean attentiveness to the blessings that come to you day after day, year after year.  The problem of modern living is that we are too busy --- looking for affirmation in the wrong places? --- to notice that we are blessed.  Often, people say good things about us, but we brush them aside with remarks such as, "Oh, don't mention it, forget about it, it's nothing . . ." and so on.  These remarks may seem to be expressions of humility, but they are, in fact, signs that we are not truly present to receive the blessings that are given.  It is not easy for us busy people, to truly receive a blessing.  Perhaps the fact that few people offer a real blessing is the sad result of the absence of people who are willing and able to receive such a blessing.  It has become extremely difficult for us to stop, listen, pay attention, and receive gracefully what is offered to us.

I'd been thinking recently about how when people are really grateful to me and I respond by saying that what I did wasn't a big deal, that I diminish their experience, that I implicitly say that the thing I helped them with wasn't a big deal (even though that's not what I mean) and also that in refusing to accept their gratitude I was denying them the ability to give me a gift.

    Before concluding these thoughts about our being blessed, I must tell you that claiming your own blessedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others.  The characteristic of the blessed ones is that, wherever they go, they always speak words of blessing.  It is remarkable how easy it is to bless others, to speak good things to and about them, to call forth their beauty and truth, when you yourself are in touch with your own blessedness.  The blessed one always blesses.  And people want to be blessed!  This is so apparent wherever you go.  No one is brought to life through curse, gossip, accusations, or blaming.  There is so much of that taking place around us all the time.  And it calls forth only darkness, destruction, and death.  As the "blessed" ones, we can walk through this world and offer blessings.  It doesn't require much effort.  It flows naturally from our hearts.  When we hear within ourselves the voice calling us by name and blessing us, the darkness no longer distracts us.  The voice that calls us the Beloved will give us the words to bless others and reveal to them that they are no less blessed than we.

Excerpt from Broken:

Living our brokenness under the curse means that we experience our pain as a confirmation of our negative feelings about ourselves. It is like saying, "I always suspected that I was useless or worthless, and now I am sure of it because of what is happening to me." There is always something in us searching for an explanation for what takes place in our lives and, if we have already yielded to the temptation to self-reflection, then every form of misfortune only deepens it. [...] It is so arduous to live without an answer to this "Why?" that we are easily seduced into connecting the events over which we have no control with our conscious or unconscious evaluation. When we have cursed ourselves or have allowed others to curse us, it is very tempting to explain all the brokenness we experience as an expression or confirmation of this curse. Before we fully realize it, we have already said to ourselves: "You see, I always thought I was no good.... Now I know for sure. The facts of life prove it."

***

It's been a particularly dominant theme recently that people I love reach out to me first when they're in crisis. No matter what I do or fail to do in my "real job" (either now or any job I have in the future), this is reason enough for my being on this earth.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came,
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
-from "What I Learned from My Mother" by Julia Kasdorf

***

This morning I happened upon a Magpie Girl blog post, Quiten Down: How to Shut Up your Gremlins. Excerpt:

“Gremlin” is the term coined in Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. It’s a way of describing the little voices in your head that tell you untrue things. This American Life did a great piece on Gremlins called The Devil In Me. In the second act Nancy Updike asks people what the little voice inside their heads is telling them. The answers are at turns tragic, stunning, and most of all, utterly familiar. Go ahead and have a listen. We’ll wait…

Are you back? Did you hear your own Gremlins in there? I know I did.

When my life coach, Jena Strong, first suggested that I started working with my Gremlins, I wanted to throw the book at her head. I couldn’t pin my Gremlins down long enough to find out if they had girl parts or boy parts; I couldn’t read their name tags; and doggonit, they were LEGION! My Gremlins? They were very, VERY noisy.

Then Jen suggested that I take all the voices in my head and make hash marks. In any given day how many times did my Gremlins say something nice to me, and how many times did they say something negative? I tried this. After 48 hours I did not have one single hash mark in the positive column. The negative column on the other hand was quite lively.

Jen said that since my Gremlins were so very busy, maybe I should build them somewhere to go after work. After all, they did have my best intentions at heart. They were trying to protect me – to keep me from doing anything scary, or potentially painful, or too awfully adventuresome. So maybe I should give them a nice shag carpet and, in the words of Jena “sit them down and pour them a stiff drink already.”

So I did. I made them a crash pad in the charming urban-decay style. Wall paper, gilt mirrors, and battery operated twinkly lights…I spared no expense. As I worked on this mansion for the little demons, my un-namable Gremlins began to take dimension and shape. They became less ethereal, and more manageable. Soon the legion was happily ensconced in a pretty little Gremlin dollhouse.

Now that I was a full five feet taller than they were, I felt empowered. I could totally kick their butts. Like Jen says, if they misbehave I could just send them to paperdoll Gitmo.

I rapidly discovered I was not at all pleased that Gremlin Blythe had allowed the other Gremlins to propagate, so I made her put everybody on a neat little leash. The next step was to let the Gremlins take ownership of their own messages, so they didn’t rattle around in my busy little mind. I’ve always adored those little slips of paper that come in fortune cookies, so I cut a whole stack of them and put them next to a tin in the Gremlin dollhouse. Here are just some of the messages that filled that tin up in the first few hours:

“Where you are is not good enough.”
“You never get enough done.”
“Your passions aren’t strong enough.”
“You can’t climb out of this confusion.”
“You never finish anything.”
“WHIMP.”

Now, keep in mind that I have been writing, reading, and carrying around affirmations to counter these messages for weeks. But something about writing them down in their negative, shitty versions was totally empowering. Now they belonged not to me, but to this third person – the Gremlins. They weren’t mine to have and to hold, and they weren’t mine to carry. Now Blythe and her crew could tuck them away on their bookshelf and keep them dusted and alphabetized. Not. My. Problem.

I cannot tell you strongly enough how much of a breakthrough this has been for me. My noisy Gremlins are much quieter these days, and when they do start getting chatty I act like a staff writer from the Evening Post—I just make the report. The quote gets shorthaneded onto a slip of paper and tucked into their dollhouse. End of story.

***

Other posts from my browsing of the Magpie Girl blog:
* The Do Less Revolution - The Have-Done List.
* Sacred Commerce: on finding a new way to serve and sustain.
* Lessons from an Artist: On speaking with authority about what you do.