Dear UUA - Get Fucked. Love, Andie

Those of you who are a part of my life on the "outs" (that is to say, beyond the world wide web) know that the last few months have been hard ones for me in regards to my spiritual self. Really, for the last year, I've been feeling a greater sense of disconnect from Unitarian Universalism and I've been trying to figure out what that means, seeing as how I am working on an MDiv with a supposed goal of becoming a UU minister. I kind of thought that maybe this stuff was part of my process, that I my identity as a UU would be stronger once it got tested by fire.

This quarter I registered to take UU Polity, and I dropped in two weeks in. I found myself angry while I was doing the readings for class. I couldn't stop thinking of the questions that UUism didn't answer for me, couldn't quit thinking of the ways in which we have totally disconnected from our history (and how we're not willing to admit that), about how lonely I felt at GA this summer, about how I felt totally voiceless and community less in a huge group of people who were supposed to be "mine." I couldn't stop thinking about how disoriented I felt in the midst of this denomination.

So I told myself that I would take this quarter to think about things, to think about what I was gonna do and how I was gonna do it, to figure out where I fit in, if I fit in at all. And if I'm honest, I'll tell you I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

and drop it did.

The one great connection that I had with UUism was my experience as a youth. The ways in which Continential youth programs were so summarily ended, with manipulation of the culture of YRUU and youth culture in general, through grooming, through fear, through the desire to create structures which won't trouble the water  . . .it seems to make clear to me that the UUA has little to no interest in empowering youth. 

I'm the GAP, ya fuckers, that you want so desparately to be "minding." I am a UU raised, not a come-outer. I am totally alienated. I became alienated the moment I aged out. 

If the UUA's only goal is to be a church for spiritual refugees, then they had damned well start owning that. Maybe they are . . .maybe dismanteling the youth program is a message: we do not intend to raise UU's. we do not intend to create multi-generational community. we do not understand well enough what we "are" except in negative theologies, and the positivity that came with youth communities scared us too much to handle.

Just be honest with me, Bill. Just be honest. Gini. Be fucking honest, UUA. You don't want me. you never wanted me. you don't want me and you don't want my friends, my comrades, my fellow young UU's. You want your complacent ex-Catholics.  Not your homegrown radicals.

so, peace out. The lutherans have been awfully nice to me . . .

Dispossesed

Being in my midtwenties, my primary anxiety centers around "getting my shit together." I am not alone in this - most of my friends are having their own varied experiences of this same central problem - what the fuck are we doing? The kids I hang out with, we've tried our damndest to de-centralize this problem, to call into question the inherent classism involved in that pursuit, to look at the impacts of race and gender and sexual orientation on the answers we do or do not arrive at.

But still, it persists. According to many in my social set, I have my shit together, or at least I am close to having it together. I don't feel like I do, but I guess I understand why it might look like that. Within the last two years, I went from being a transiant, dirty, coffee slinging, heavy drinking wanton hussy bike riding hipster to something approximating a liberal "adulthood." I bought a house, I've steadily moved "up" the ranks into exempt and pseudo-"professional" jobs. I have two dogs who I kind of treat like kids. More and more I'm looking at my romantic relationships through a long term lens. I have a mattress that didn't come from a dumpster or my parent's basement.

And I don't believe that this is success; or that it is selling out. And I do. I believe that it is both success and selling out. Its scary to look at my life and see both how it fulfills me and sustains me, and how it runs contrary to what I so loudly espoused in my youth.

Are these the last cries of a dying radical? Were my parents right - that with enough time and a little material comfort, I would leave behind all the crazy talk about anti-capitalism and radical inclusivity and become just another boring liberal dotting a landscape already inundated with boring liberals?

And the only place I'm finding salve for all this is in religion. And that's funny too, because I am growing further and further apart with the religion that, in many ways, was responsible for my initial politicization. But unitarian universalism doesn't feel radical anymore; it feels boring and liberal. There was a time (in my life, and in the life of the country and the world) when proclaiming the inherent worth and dignity of every human being was a radical statement. And it doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels like a shallow statement - a shallow statement I can get behind, but still . . .nothing deep, nothing that I can bite into and wrestle with.

Repentance

Ok, my small and clandestine blog reading public . . .first, the context.

Andie Lyons, aged 18, arrives on the campus of CU Boulder, somewhat unwillingly. She is a "legacy", which is to say, her parents met at a bar on University Hill and her brother pledged the Boulder chapter of some dumb fraternity and now, since she didn't get some stellar offer from some better place, she has become the fourth and final member of her family to don the gold and black of CU. Having been the black sheep for neigh on her entire life, she accepts this truth reluctantly and immediately begins seeking out the counter culture to the best of her ability.

The result? 1) UMHE, the progressive ecumenical campus ministry which will set her down the path that inevitably leads, some 8 years later, to the Iliff School of Theology and the beginnings of a masters of divinity.
2) A bunch of anarch-punks who will eventually set her down the path of cooking dumpstered potatos at food not bombs and getting arrested on a semi-regular basis for civil disobedience.
Surprisingly, despite the co-occurance of these two events, Andie manages to keep the lines between them sharply dilineated, and indeed, her politics and her religion interface rarely, and when they do, with somewhat explosive results.

Until now.

Because that's the lengthy lesson I'm involved in these days. How do I make this crazy radical energy fit with this deep spiritual longing that I feel? The xtian anarchists who spoke my call last summer were just the beginning. Since then, I've been trying to parcel it all out.

I've been arrested before this weekend, but I've never been arrested while wearing a stole, singing hymns, surrounded by other people of faith. My civil disobedience has happened in the arms of the anarchist community, which is (generally speaking) staunchly anti-God. And while I can thank this community for giving me any number of skills that came in handy this weekend at the Transform Columbus Day action, where I and 87 others were arrested for peacefully protesting a hate celebration, I cannot thank them for giving me the kind of remarkable spirit that was the most effective tool this weekend.

And it wasn't just the anointing and praying before hand; it wasn't the hymns being sung or seeing an ordained clergy member across the circle from me. It was the fact that the comrades who were by my side were people who know intimately the ideas of forgiveness and change, but who will not forgive without accountability. It was the fact that we could say, with our bodies and our freedom, that the people who gave us our skin color, our names, our culture and OUR FAITH are the people who wrought wholesale devestation on this continent. And we are not going to let that legacy continue. I did not choose who I am or where I came from, but I will repent for the sins of my people. And that rhetoric, that language, those ideas . . .they are shared by the people who sat with me and sang and prayed; by the people who stood behind us and willed God into that street; by the people at their homes who kept vigil; by the people who sat outside the jail and held our strength when we couldn't anymore.

I was blessed to be in a community of religious radicals. They exist. I needed to know that. Its in my heart, the images of those faces, the smell of that oil . . .it kept me strong this weekend. It will keep me strong throughout this process. This is a beginning, it's also a marker. The call has been renewed, it's echoes are sustaining me even in the midst of my barely concealed tears.

God, the Father

The zine I publish (in paper) called "Already Too Much; Never Enough" is usually about being a fat dyke. That used to be scary, to call myself that, to name it and own it and write about it. Lately, it's not scary. What is scary is this thing I'm doing called seminary. Since facing your fears in a public way is the only avenue I have to recovery, I've been working on a third issue dealing with spirituality. The tricky thing? It's also about alcoholism and addiction. This is a piece from the forthcoming "Already Too Much; Never Enough #3" If you dig paper zines, please contact me and I'll send you my narcissistic self aggrandizement.

PS- Sorry to 1) not have posted in so long; 2) post shit I'm writing for other things.

heart, al

When I think about religion, I think about my father.
Not, “my father in heaven” not my everlasting father, not God the Father (see: son and the holy spirit.)
I think about my Dad.
When I think about religion, sometimes, this thing happens to me where my body feels like it’s expanding from the inside out. Like a huge bubble is being blown up inside my chest and my head, shoving everything else out. It’s the feeling that makes my face start to water; not heaving sobs like crying, but like the saline is being pushed out of any available crack in my walls. It’s both totally uncomfortable and also kind of neat. I don’t think it’s the holy spirit or the presence of God. I think it’s a sort of incapacitating mystery, a huge desire to know and understand the answers to questions I have that I don’t want to have and sometimes didn’t even know I had.
When I think about my Dad, I feel the same kind of internal pressure. Like everything inside of me is welling up and expanding and pushing on the walls of myself. I don’t know why I have this feeling in connection to my father, I just know that I do. Maybe it’s the same need for answers, the same huge mystery. And then again, maybe it is just a hugeness of emotion for him and about him that I have never had reason to express, never had a forum to let loose.
So I want to tell you about my father, because somehow there is some link between him and religion, spirituality, how I understand God.
It was a minister who first said to me, “you are the spitting image of your father.” It rocked me when she said it. So long I’d been told I was a perfect replica of my mother, an idea which both comforted and suffocated me. The idea that I might in some way resemble my father, even if only physically, startled and scared me. And it felt amazing. And it felt like a doomed prophesy.
My memories of my father are few and far between. They are surprisingly more poignant than the memories of my mother. They are like stories I heard second hand and can’t get out of my head. They are rimmed in tragedy and endowed with incredible mystery. Always he was a strange being who I didn’t understand and who didn’t understand me. We were foreigners, and therefore our interactions were weighted and fascinating. I loved him desparately but didn’t know how to say so; we did not speak the same language.
And while there were moments when the only way I felt I could survive was to have him gone, fucking gone, from my life, there were also moments when his absence would have meant my annihilation. Our connection was and is tenuous, and crucial.
Everyone I’ve ever loved has been my father; I have learned though those love affairs how to talk to echoes of him inside of them. In many ways I have been successful; in others I have failed entirely. I imagine he will keep showing up in everyone I ever love. I am drawn to the brokenness which he exemplifies. I would like to learn how to stop trying to mend this brokenness and instead see the ways in which in truly makes us whole. I would like to learn to tell them and him how deeply I care; I would like to learn how to listen to them say the same.
I don’t know what it means that I remember my father like this; I don’t know what these memories say about how I see and know God. Its all tangled up though, I’m sure. Caught in the cross fire of damaged love and heartache.
And maybe the connection is just that- damaged love and heartache and the sometimes redemption we find in the midst of it. There is no rational reason left to trust that my father loves me. Not because he is a bad person, or because he never tried to tell me, or because he fucked up so irreparably. And not because I stopped trying to understand him, or because I stopped loving him so fiercely. Its not rational because I have no tangible proof, because sometimes when I talk about him I am talking about a stranger with whom I have shared uncountable strange intimacies. Like God, I can’t put my finger on who or what he is, why I feel so entirely bound up in and with him. I feel something palpably, but I have no evidence for it. He is the great mystery with whom I am deeply connected.
Agape is a greek word usually taken to mean the love of God for God’s people. The supreme and ultimate love. What is forgotten, mistranslated, ignored, is that agape is an irrational love, a dangerous love, a love that borders on uncomfortable. A love that has been damaged – that is prepared for damage, that anticipates it. A love that is defiant and crushing and lonely and terrifying. It is a love that suffocates and shoves everything – everything – out of the way, and somehow in the process of doing so, it creates space for the most special and sacred of things. How could something as massive and incomprehensible as God love in any other way? How could we, so broken and busted, feel the love of something so massive as God in any other way?
The love I have for my father is agapic, it’s epic. My love for him is untranslatable and foreign, but in many ways it exists more clearly for me than any other love I have ever felt. In the mess of loving and living with him, I have found the remarkable and the unexpected. When everything else gets pushed aside, I can finally feel the deepest parts of myself, the parts that have been aching to be felt.
And probably, he’ll never know this. Probably I’ll never really know it either. I keep thinking that with enough process conversations, meetings, chances to unpack it all – I’ll finally get it. Just as I think that with enough classes on theology, enough church services, enough conversations – I’ll finally figure God out.
And that’s the trick of it, what keeps it going, keeps it moving, keeps it pushing me forward. I keep thinking that that thing, that thing that happens, will shove it all out until it’s empty.
It’s never empty.

Please forgive me for judging you

My badass friend Dylan Scholinski (read his book "The Last Time I wore a Dress") edited and compiled a zine about a sign held by Christian protesters at Denver pride this year. A sign which read, "Please forgive me for judging you." Dylan asked me to contribute a piece to the zine. The piece I wrote follows. If you're interested in the zine in its paper format, please contact me at Andie.Lyons@gmail.com, or write at POB 40671 Denver, Co 80204


I’m not supposed to be religious. I am supposed to be a bad ass radical queer, all perverted public sex and outlandish politics. I’m supposed to be a tried and true lefty with a warranted skepticism for all things God related. I am supposed to sneer at Christians and hurl finely crafted rhetorically complex criticisms at them.

But I can’t. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that maybe you will think I’ve let you down when you read this and realize I am an apologist. I’m sorry that it might undermine your trust in me when I say I believe in things like grace, like forgiveness. I’m sorry that you might think I’ve given into some ridiculous ideology, that I might not have your back anymore. I’m sorry that I’m going to tell you that sometimes, the best we can do is ask for something that is impossibly given and remarkably unwarranted.

I’m not sorry to tell you that I think we, we the reckless radical queers, have done ourselves a disservice to dismiss so wholly the idea of God. I’m not sorry to tell you that sometimes our impassioned speeches beseeching the world for justice have done nothing more than perpetuate the alienation we want to eliminate. I’m not sorry that I am allying myself with ‘the enemy’ long enough to hear what makes their hearts so hard. I’m not sorry to mete out a judgment, upon myself and anyone else who has ever ruthlessly and unapologetically shit-talked people of faith. I’m not sorry that I think that sometimes we are assholes who snidely dismiss one unbelievable ideology while subscribing to another.

Please forgive me for judging you. Please forgive me for judging myself. Forgive me even though I don’t deserve your forgiveness. Forgive me because it’s the only way out, it’s the only way through. Forgive yourselves, even if the thought of doing it makes your stomach clench tight knots. Forgive everyone who has ever wronged you. Do it even if you don’t mean it.

Forgiveness is the remitting of an offense, an offense which alienates us from each other, an offense which keeps us trapped so tightly in our own self involved anger and resentment that we cannot see each other, ever at all. Offenses which have erected walls of fear, of misunderstanding, of trite answers to complex questions, of alienation and lonliness. Offenses which continue to fester unattended, and those which have scarred our faces beyond recognition.

Forgiveness is an almost impossibility. Its unreachable, just touching the tip of the tongue. Say it anyway. Say, “I forgive you.” Say, “I want your forgiveness.”

But be uncompromising. Demand accountability. Never let the sin of broken hearts and devastated worlds and scarred souls be removed or forgotten. Remit them; take them in and make them over, turn them into unforgettable lessons and avenues to something deeper and bigger. Forgive them. Own them. Make them yours and share them amongst yourselves. Give them new life.

In the midst of all that unfurling fucked up judgment, in the face of half-hearted forgiveness, there is grace. An unmerited favor that we can give to each other and ourselves. Grace is illogical, you have to talk yourself into it. Rationalize it however you have to. Because nothing transformative ever came about through simple structures and making sense.


I’m not telling you to turn the other cheek. I’m not telling you to let your face get smashed in. I’m telling you that it will happen; faces will be smashed. But what will you do with that devestation? How can you grow it into something that echoes with pain, never submits? How can it become that new thing you know can exist?


If we want to survive we have to create grace, the gentle lullaby made from vicious pain and the deepest of struggle. Its softness, its sweetness, is not an easy one; it is ringed in multitudes of emotion. This is not the easy way out. It’s not the simple answer. It is a resting spot in the middle of hell; a place to lay our heads until we can keep going again.

But what does it mean, then?

My life kind of fell apart a month ago. I mean, not really, not in the bigger grander scheme of things, but it fell apart enough to leave me pretty ripped up for a while; ripped up but totally ignoring the shreds, trying to cope through business. That's what I do, it's my thing. Usually the end result is self destruction of some sort: chaos sometimes, or a more quiet bleeding of the soul.

More troubling than having lost the longest term and maybe most significant relationship of my life (or, not lost, but changed in a sad way, maybe) and having the future of my job questioned, was the reality that the thing I call religion, the thing I sometimes dare to call faith -it wasn't doing a thing for me in the midst of all this. And I kept being reminded of that - of how my toolbox seemed so empty.

I struggle with ideas like providence, the idea that God would somehow have the time and energy to perfectly plan things in my life, whatever the motivation behind it. I don't buy that, but I do believe that things happen in a way that is not entirely disconnected, things happen in a succession that allows for growth and continuity. The best explanation I have for that is the idea that as we continue to learn things, we're more open and receptive to whatever comes next; that maybe those things would have happened or already did happen, but we didn't see them or attach the same significance, because X Y or Z hadn't happened yet. Not a divine plan, but still something mysterious.

I wouldn't have had this difficult but amazing relationship if all the other difficult and amazing relationships hadn't come before. I wouldn't have been ready to learn how to say what I needed and wanted from someone if I hadn't have had so many people ignore me when I said it before. I wouldn't have been able to see that sometimes it doesn't matter if its right or perfect or still in the middle, sometimes it ends anyway. And sometimes things being unfinished are exactly the way they're supposed to be. And sometimes things are never finished, and what does finished mean anyway?

Or, events are ways of reifying what we think we know. I say, have said, that my understanding of love and human relationships includes the idea that we are all busted and broken and trying to sort ourselves and each other out; not that we are unfinished and waiting to make each other and ourselves whole. I sorted a lot of who I was out; I was and still am whole.

What I needed, maybe still need, in the midst of all that, was some comfort. Sometimes UU's talk about the comfort of "other religions" with a hostile and condescending tone, as though comfort is some sort of bullshit pablum that we are too intelligent to need. That's a bunch of shit. We need comfort. And comfort doesn't automatically translate to easy answers, to pie in the sky, to an absolution of accountability. Comfort is something to hang on to, not the truth not the gospel not the end all be all. Its the little piece of land that you can find in the storm. It's still raining like hell and the wind is still bowling you over, but you've got somewhere to stand.

And I didn't find that. And it scares me.

Get yer own effing identity, Andie

I wanted to write during holy week, and then I forgot. Instead I had a couple of conversations, which was almost as good. I mean, I actually have no clue if anyone besides me actually reads this, so its not like I'm hoping to communicate or anything.

Ok, so, Holy week - big deal. I mean, maybe not to a lot of UU's, or at least, not in the way its a big deal for the xtians, but still, a big deal, right? On Palm Sunday I played ruthless games of can can with my UU babies and then sat down and talked to them about Easter. You know, like, why is everyone so happy if Jesus died? and why do they call it Good friday? and why are there eggs and bunnies and chocolate? Did Jesus have hard boiled eggs? was it his favorite food?

And it makes me kind of sad when I revert to the staid old answers about metaphors and what other people believe. Cos I bet you money that those kids woke up to giant easter baskets brimming with Ipods and shit like that, and they should know on a deep level why this day is important to so many people. They should know about it in ultural context, you know, the ways in which the holiday was totally lifted from pagan cultures and how easter has provided excuse to be total asshats to each other, but they should also know that its an intense and meaningful story.

I'm trying to balance, right now, the way that I use and understand Christian ritual and tradition as a UU. My social and identity formantion may have happened in YRUU, but my spiritual formation happened at an ecumenical and multi faith (read:UU) campus ministry in college. I did shit during Lent and holy week - went to Ash Wednesday services, went to Easter vigils - because my community did and because ritual is really important to me. One year I went on a silent retreat over Easter, and read the passion in all of the synoptic gospels, and I had crazy dreams about Jesus and me in Jerusalem during Holy week, and it was intense.

I'm not a Christian, though I pseudo-claimed that while I was in college (xtian UU), because I just can't get behind the apostolic creed and there are a lot of days I don't really believe in God, let alone Jesus being God. But there are so many things in that tradition that move and compel me, stories that are crucial to my understanding of the world.

But I don't want to be one of those jerks who just takes what works for me and leaves the rest. I want a more complex understanding of things. But I'm afraid of that too, because my community is pretty anti-xtian and I have problems with wanting everyone to like me all the time. Metaphor is such a modern concept, it's such a surface level thing. Oh, well, this isn't true but its a tool. Fuck that, I mean, fuck truth. why is truth so important?

I've been reading a lot about emergent church communities, and I want in so bad. I want one. All of them are really christian, like either from fundy perspectives or epicopalian/lutheran/catholic - high church stuff. I can't claim the belief systems that make up the foundation of those communities, but there is something about them that makes me ache, that I think would burn a hole in my heart in precisely the way I want it burned.

Im so committed to my UU identity, but right now my best friends in spirituality ways are lutherans and episcopalians. I'm alright with that, but it feels a little unstable and a lot lonely. I just don't want to be another religious fashion victim, you know? Falling prey to what's cool instead of what fills me.