God is With Us

Seeing the Lord

June

I got home and took off my shoes, opened the front door to let in the evening breeze, and heard the hour chimed by the church bells at the Catholic church a block away. Back in my office, I place the vinyl record of my favorite Florence + the Machine song on the turntable and set it to spinning. In a little while I will go out on the porch to light candles and look at leaves and birds. A showoff with an intentionally loud truck wrecks the peaceful flow of the evening, but only for a few seconds. My beebalm is blooming on the plinth at the end of my front porch steps. My husband tells me he made a new pot of tea. In the yard, a robin hops along with a mouthful of nesting material. It is nearly midsummer, almost the Nativity of John the Baptist. The robins might be preparing for a second clutch of eggs this year. I remember seeing broken eggs in May after a storm. It is their way to try again. I hope this time the nest is secure.

Back at the bookstore, the area in front of the door is littered with nesting detritus from the imparticular doves who keep adding to their makeshift nest above the air conditioner. The doves are my friends and followed me to the shop after their first nest fell off the corner of the front porch. Unlike the robins, they are horrendous nest builders. They have a genetic memory of dovecotes and look to people like me, stability-seekers, to set them right. I’m glad that the air conditioner at the shop is sheltered enough to keep their haphazard nest together. I wish I could make them a house, but these days we have to avoid bats, which carry rabies in our area. I can’t risk drawing them near by making my little bird friends more welcome.

Sometimes I wake up and feel at peace with my freedom. I love where I live. I love being less than a block from the church my son joined, a place we can visit with him when the girls’ sleep issues make it impossible for us to drive the 45 minutes to the Orthodox Church. It’s good to sing the familiar hymns and talk to kind people I see around town and at various outlets of good works. It’s peaceful to go to church knowing no one in the room is attacking me online or talking about me behind my back or mad because I am a woman who thinks. Cortisol-free church is amazing. I can go and love God and people and not be on guard. No one is making fun of my children or whispering or pointing. They all know what disabilities are, they know that God loves everybody, and they act like it. I cry sometimes in relief as I walk the 350 feet down the sidewalk from my robins and my front porch and my beebalm to the church steps. I feel like a human, wearing my Sunday best, holding a child’s hand as we look both ways before we cross, making the Cross before we step through the red doors, listen to the scriptures read and opened, and politely assent to other people’s Communion. I don’t excommunicate myself from the church I belong to, but I like being there with my son as he has gone back to his cradle faith.

In the Orthodox Church, I am a nonentity, a used to be, a byword. It is very hard to be there, no matter how much I believe and love the faith. Only a few people are kind to me there. In my son’s church, I know most of the hymns by heart and can still chant the responses. There is an offering plate and an alms plate, and there are people who set out cake every week. I can go and return home before my other children wake up, and because they are less than a tenth of a mile away and guarded by locks and a dog and security cameras and watchful neighbors, they sleep safely while I walk down to a place of restful prayers.

I thought when we moved up here that we might build a mission, but no one seems to be interested. The churches that have extra clergy are focused on the opposite side of the city, as they are also wholly uninterested in disability ministry. I am grateful for the Greek priest’s kindness and his willingness to help us try to figure out a way to get my girls back to church, though he is overscheduled. The churches in town with more than one priest have expressed their opinion that disability ministry is unnecessary. It’s a nonstarter. I think I am tired of trying to start things with them anymore.

I’ve been Orthodox for almost thirteen years, and I thought I would stay so for life. I am no longer certain that’s a good idea. The only source of sadness and stress in my life these past few years has been from the Orthodox Church, from hateful and indifferent and ableist and misogynistic treatment. I am confused when people are kind to me there when I show up to events, because the kindness surprises me. It’s at odds with the general indifference. It’s at odds with the snide comments I have tried to weed out of my attention. When I can show up, with massive effort, I am sometimes treated kindly by 1/5^th or fewer of the people. But it’s really hard to try to communicate with the others, the ones who don’t like me or who just don’t care. I know only about 5% of the people in online Orthodoxy are abusive, but they did their damage. I have my scars, and they ache when I have to go to church knowing someone in the room was writing emails to my priest about me.

I am not exaggerating when I say we have had to leave churches before due to death threats from fellow members. Yes, the last move for that reason was five years ago, but that doesn’t make ongoing, intermittent stochastic violence less alarming. When you have had a little neoNazi catechumen stand next to your little kids in a field one Sunday afternoon as the children played on a bounce house, then seen his comments maligning you with all manner of imagined evils, accompanied by unstable Nazi propaganda, posts about guns, and watched him lather himself into a froth with other haters on a rightwing “Orthodox” influencers page decrying the need to weed me, “a Marxist infiltrator,” out of the church, the need to save the church from me, the mom standing next to them in the field with her little kids, because they equate me with the Bolsheviks who killed the Tsar (if you don’t follow the logic, trust me, there is none) and so justify violence against me–the mom standing next to them in the field at church–as the solution, then it really hits differently when some smallminded bubba decides to raise the specter that I am destroying the faith from the inside (or whatever bullshit this particular small man has imagined). I am so freaking tired of private meetings with priests and bishops to explain my faithful living. Do you know how obnoxious it sounds to admit to almsgiving and praying? It feels like someone has gone to Saint Brigid and demanded she account for all the butter that God replaced after she gave it to the poor from her mother’s stores or all the riches she gave out from her father’s cupboards, which God restored in blessings. Like, I feel like a 100% total asshole trying to tell people that actually, I am devout and show it by how I care for the poor and pray a lot. I would rather they hate me than make me pretend to be worthy.

I don’t believe in worthiness. I believe in mercy.

That’s why I took in my mother for hospice even though she couldn’t stand to be around me, even though she asked me to leave the room because I was overwhelming. I loved her anyway. I cut off all my hair when I took her in, because I was breaking it to shreds in grief as I cared for her those last days. It was a kind of gnashing, of hair rather than teeth, because even then when I had given her everything I could, I was not a good enough daughter for her. She probably saved me by being a hot mess, because her dysfunction meant I was mostly reared by my stable grandmothers. My mom loved to listen to music and to dance, and that probably saved me, too. I remember her too-young face, singing along to the record player, on her knees in front of me, her nonspeaking, barely-eating little girl who terrified her. She used to love that I looked at her with unconditional love, and later it freaked her out. I don’t give by halves. I give what I have, and if that’s love, it’s given.

I had to put her funeral on a credit card.

I paid it off last year.

Earlier this week I was scrolling through my ebooks and realized how many series I had bought with the credit card points from my mother’s funeral. She would have liked that. She loved to read. That was another way she saved me. She would take me to the library where my grandma worked, and the women in the back stacks who prepared the books for circulation would read to me. Books were magical because people could say the same story over and over, and I treasured the few picture books we owned. I loved hearing the stories the librarians read me in their little private story times in the back stacks. My mom would read me, A Great Day for Up and Two For a Teapot. The pages would fall out, and she would tuck them back and read again. They were my only books for several years, graffitied hand-me-downs from uncles and cousins who had outgrown them.

The library had books that held together. My first “job” was as a library volunteer, restacking books since I was so adept at alphabetical order. I read as many books as I could get my hands on. I was not fast because I sounded everything out in my head, but that habit of speaking in my mind gave me a strong sense of narrative and a lasting love of storytelling. I always read for the ear and write for the ear. My teaching is lyrical because it is also for the ear, to open the ears, to help people to hear that God is with us. I ache in my soul to share the stories, but you know how it is. It’s almost never a woman’s turn to speak in church. Where women’s voices are welcome, I have no standing. I shrug and look around my shop at all the books, solid, welcoming. I have a place here, at least, among the storytellers.

July

The Clergy-Laity Congress was eye-opening. I went with a mission to tell people about the new curriculum I’m editing to release next month. That gave me enough motivation from love to overcome my reticence from CPTSD and autistic burnout from the still-crumby average treatment I had experienced from Orthodox people. I winced, I had adrenaline, and I went anyway. But it was not bad at all.

In fact, the CLC might have finally shifted the average over to positive again for the first time since the terror campaigns against me these past ten years. Since I am a gestalt reasoner (an autistic pattern recognizing way of thinking that allows me to see both the forest and the trees, to read a room and make insightful connections), unfortunately my impressions can be shaped negatively by averages when most of my interactions with a group are negative. But my friends and colleagues in disability ministries and creative pursuits and general good-deed-doing in the church were there, and they were kind and collegial to me. Also burnout has made me unable to mask and also more aware of how disabling autism can be for me sometimes. So when I saw a meeting that I thought would be great but that I wasn’t invited to, I realized that I was making an autistic assumption that I wasn’t invited. I asked a friend if I could come, and it turns out I was welcomed. Because I navigate by gestalts and having the lay of the land, I feel rejection when I don’t understand what is going on broadly, even when I am not actually being intentionally excluded. Noticing this, I took a broader view of the patterns going on at the CLC and listened when my colleagues told me good news about budget lines being added for accessibility going forward. I was able to understand that many people were working in tandem across several disparate ministry areas to put into place the infrastructure for all of us to work together to make the Church more accessible and inclusive over time. Whereas before I might have simply been discouraged that there aren’t actual accessible options in some curricula, this time I saw that people were getting started with the best practices they could access, with the goal of making learning more inclusive and accessible going forward. Also, because I had been so isolated by my own grief and distrust due to past mistreatment, I did not realize how absolutely vital the work I have been doing is to the efforts. Other people aren’t *trying* to not include; they literally lacked the curriculum that showed them explicitly what was needed. In the absence of accessible examples, they were dumbing down materials rather than raising supports or trying to apply the advice to teach to the senses without understanding the absolute centrality of gross motor movement and the vestibular, interoceptive, and proprioceptive senses to memory and learning. This time I could see between the lines, the pattern that they only lacked a little, which little was encapsulated in the very curriculum I had brought to promote at the conference.

I also recognized that we all really do have a place in the church, in the great kindness, interest, and respect the Hierarchs showed to us at vendor and exhibitor booths. It really matters, when you are out in the wild, having to survive in a good but incomplete world with patchy connections, to have your archbishop want to see how you are helping disabled kids pray. That mattered. It mattered so much.

Something I realized is that I feel represented by the hierarchs in the Greek Orthodox Church, because they listen to us. They listened last year at the Gathered Conference, and they are still listening. They care about people with disabilities and everyone else, too. When they were praying for the Ecumenical Patriarch, one of the longer parts added to a Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, I found myself weeping. It was such a weird moment, not one of the poetic bits of the Liturgy that usually move one to tears, nor even the side-along songs about the love of God that overlap some other greetings and prayers. Rather, I felt in those moments standing among so many with my sore feet that they were actually trying to live that life together of mutual love that St. John the Theologian shows us Christ commending again and again in his Gospel.

I still have more to my calling than meets the eye, and I still feel the need to explain to people that a women’s diaconate of service is not the bogeyman of a girl poking her face through a hole in a painting of priesthood. But I also felt that my here and now is sacred. So many people received the good news of the coming curriculum, and those who asks for examples and heard them were glad with me about the teaching bringing the good news to all abilities. I felt for the first time in a long time that what I have been doing matters. It helps that my family has a place locally to go and thrive, whether or not the rest of them wind up staying with me in the Orthodox Church. They have the faith, and my faith bears fruit in their lives, too. That is not a truth I need to minimize to fit anyone’s narrative. (My husband has certainly never asked or pretended that I am not a leader; he helps me break through the gaslighting and minimizing of women’s faith and my faith and leadership in particular.) I can shine my light, and no one is taking it away from me. That’s not how light works anyway.

Also, honestly, perimenopause has helped, too, because it has allowed me to weed out from my attention the unserious charlatans who try to justify their own tyranny by attacking me and other women teachers and leaders. They seem transparent, their relational violence paltry and gauche, their cruelty unmasked the more with my growing inability to tolerate it with anything but disdain. So when I was standing there telling people about the God With Us High Support Sunday School curriculum that is on its way, I wasn’t feeling threatened or harangued by haters. I didn’t feel like someone was about to come and smack my hands and take all my work away from me again. Instead, I stood in my booth that my family paid for, to tell people about good works that my family paid for, to give away free resources that my family paid for, to share a curriculum that both a generous grant and mostly my family paid for, and I shared the fruits that have been tended in my family and in my place and heart these many years. I was standing there as a matriarch, sharing the joy of learning that my husband listened to and discussed with me and encouraged me to share and that my children rejoiced in over so many years that now they can teach the Gospels and saints’ lives themselves, and I could offer a beautiful experience and good and useful tools to those who came by because I have vetted the tools in my shop and in my teaching and in my home. I got to show up as myself, and instead of people trying to knock me down or kick me in the teeth or minimize or gaslight, instead I found fellowship and joy and the gift of other people of goodwill wanting to learn and share about all the good fruits of faith, hope, and love that were there on display in my booth and the many others. I guess this year I stopped apologizing for being weird, stopped asking permission, and showed fully up.

The responses I received by speaking with authority were encouraging. I was able to genuinely greet people because I was no longer hiding. Look, I know it sounds weird for someone who regularly writes about her *feelings* online to say she was hiding, but what I had been hiding is my leadership ability. I have a heck tonne of it, whether it’s called boldness or radio voice or teaching voice or autonomy or authority.

We live in a culture that continuously minimizes the contributions of women. Part of this is that the nonsensical narrative of male authority and leadership in a post-industrial world that wants women as maids and accessories rather than humans, requires that women be treated as subhumans. This is not a “traditional” approach by any stretch of the word, but people have very short memories when they stop thinking. Propaganda doesn’t only replace real histories with false ones in order to frame their novel, inventive abuses of power as returning to a glorious past; propaganda more importantly and primarily teaches people to stop thinking at all. When you don’t examine the things people say, it’s very easy to forget that they are lying to you. Take the current version being pushed of a “traditional” family, where women are treated as property and maids and orgasm-less sex bots who “submit” to their husbands (including being treated like sex dolls rather than participants in mutual coupling) and are expected not to express any tendencies towards excellence apart from performative ones in the kitchen, in keeping up appearances, and presumably in sex work for their entitled “leader” husbands. These women are expected to make their husbands feel like the king of their castles by behaving as base servants (courtesans, charwomen, cooks of the medieval castle sort), not as queens.

Actual Tradition for the European-heritage white women being sold this bill of goods looked quite different. Women were the economic powerhouses of pre-industrial Europe. Women made the beer. Women wove the cloth. Women and men tended the sheep and tilled the farms. The Pauline reference to being equally yoked meant something when sick or stolen or absent oxen meant that a man and woman would literally yoke themselves to till their fields together. Gender roles were different when it came to wars, because men would tend to go out onto the fields while women managed the people during sieges. Beyond that, no “traditional” man would have treated his wife as a stupid piece of property. He would have valued her intelligence and charm and ability to converse with guests and teach the household (including in matters of faith, which she would largely have managed), and he would have known the obvious truth that her weaving, from which we have the epistemological origins of “woman,” as in “weaving man,” was the reason that their entire extended family, village, and region prospered.

Was there still misogyny before the mass production of cloth? Yes! Was it in the context of a generally more egalitarian world? Also yes. Men also took responsibility for their own violence when there were damages to be paid when they hurt women or children. Was the culture of my ancestors still violent? Definitely. But it was also wiser, closer to the land, built on community, and enriched with long traditions of medicine, craft, community, hospitality, and everyone having a place. There were many great queens in the old country, though few took up the sword like men, because everyone knew that you didn’t have to be a man to lead. Some people of both sexes were leaders. It was the obvious truth that people lived with. If a queen rather than a king commanded the armies, maybe there were more lewd jokes about who might be in her tent at night, but no one complained when she brought home the spoils of war or formed treaties or otherwise prospered her people.

In matters of faith, priests were few and far between, but Christianity was not rare. Women kept the faith and taught the households they led, instructing family members and workers, having bards perform saints’ lives after banquets, teaching hymns that everyone would sing while they worked. The obvious leaders of faiths were the people who kept them; priests or priestesses were there for rituals as needed, but the daily lives that passed along any faith, including the Gospel, were the primary expression of belief. Almsgiving and instruction and prayers were largely women’s work, which does not make them less important.

I’m thinking of this today as I wrap up this meandering essay that I started a month ago with my feet pointed in two opposite directions. Then, I was uncertain if I would be able to navigate my strong faith with the realities of my family’s needs, because I couldn’t see whether it even mattered to other people whether I stayed. I love the Orthodox Church and faith, and I am bi-liturgically fluent. I speak the Ur language of the faith and know several dialects, and I’m fluent in both of the traditions I find myself in. Today is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, a saint dear to me since infancy. Her contributions have been minimized as have the stories of the other women disciples. Yet, there she is, showing us the meaning of fidelity and courage and how to place one’s hope on what is not yet seen.

The disciple who knew Jesus best and loved Jesus dearly, our John the Beloved Disciple and Evangelist and Theologian, spends far more time than the other evangelists showing how Jesus spoke with women. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to St. Photine (the woman at the well), the story of Lazarus is framed not by Lazarus but by the love and friendship of Martha and Mary, Martha and not Peter is the first to confess Christ for Who He is, Christ has deaconesses serving him at their tables, Martha’s generosity is so great that we hear that the poor are always with us in her home, and of course, we have the women at the Cross (which John would have witnessed since he’s the only man among the disciples who didn’t flee) and the big moment of seeing the risen Lord, our Mary Magdalene. “I have seen the Lord!”

Yet we live in a time when few people hear that Christ is risen from the lips of women in the liturgical assembly; even this proclamation has been taken from us, though I like to think that there must have been a time before the resurgence of the idea that women are monsters and deformed men (1200s) and before the invention of the idea that God made women to serve males (1980s) rather than to proclaim the Gospel (Psalms, Gospels) and before men’s wars destroyed the participation of women in public worship by brute force (Frankish court, Crusades) that for centuries Christians heard that proclamation differently.

When the light of Christ was brought out to the people, the clear voice that sang was a deaconess standing in for our foremothers and especially for our Mary Magdalene, singing to her brother clergy, “My father, I bring you glad tidings of greatest joy. The Lord Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! Alleluia!” And then, when the priest sang, “Christ is risen!” and everyone sang back in response, the order of faith was as it should have been. The woman who had seen the Lord was believed.