It might be the end of the world as we know it, and I'm not sure how I feel...

This is quite the time we are living in, isn’t it?

Our lives, individually and collectively, have been turned upside down.  Nothing is the same as it was three weeks ago.  Many of us are “working from home.”  Kids are home from school.  Activities and events are cancelled and postponed.  Nothing is normal.  I was in the pharmacy the other day in my small town, and there are plexiglass barriers separating us from the people working at the cash. I could never have imagined that I would ever see something like this in my town.     

We see friends walking by (from a distance) and can’t hug them.  I haven’t seen my daughter in person and up close for over three weeks because she works in essential services and she does not want to spread anything to us.  I haven’t seen the little children that I love for more than three weeks, and I MISS THEM SO MUCH.  We aren’t supposed to go where people gather: church, the beach, work, school, the mall, even walking on a busy street.  We don’t know when this will end, and we don’t know what our world and our society will look like when it does.

In my personal life, other changes add to the overall aura of uncertainty and anxiety.  My mother had a stroke on Christmas Day and was moved to a nursing home not long ago.  We haven’t been permitted to visit her in person lately, so she has had to do her settling in without us there to help her.  I can only talk to her occasionally on the phone, and it isn’t the same kind of conversation that we used to have – ranting, chatting, confiding, discussing.  Our conversations now are mostly me reassuring her that we are still here, even though we are not able to visit her in person, and that we love her and miss her.  I miss hearing her cheerful “Hi dear!” and I miss our daily conversations.

Another major change is that my husband has accepted a call to a new ministry in another city.  That means that over the summer, he will be moving.  We decided together that while my mom remains in the nursing home here, I will stay here as well.  This change will be significant – for the past 35 years, we have lived in the same place and shared the responsibilities of raising a family and running a household.  We don’t know how long it will take to find a place for my mom to live in the new city, so we don’t know how long this physical separation will last.

In the meantime, we are inundated with information.  The news is almost exclusively full of COVID-19 updates – how many new cases, how many dead, how many recovered – and reminders about social distancing, social isolating, quarantining, and for the love of God, WASH YOUR HANDS!  We are reminded daily about all the things that have been taken away from us, even temporarily, about where we can’t go and what we can’t do.  We hear consistently about groups of people who defy the advice of health professionals and end up infecting other people.  We read dire reminders about the added dangers of forced isolation to children and women in abusive families.  There are posts and articles about how to keep busy, how to learn new things, activities that you can do at home to keep busy, virtual tours and concerts and exhibits and church and almost every other thing you can imagine.  The sheer amount of information is overwhelming, and we don’t know who to trust.  Is the planet really healing itself because of the sudden drop in greenhouse gas emissions?  Did Hong Kong really see blue sky for the first time in years?  Who has the time and energy to sort through all this information to find the truth?

We are learning a lot about ourselves.  We are learning about how important it is to wash our hands.  We are learning how often we touch our faces.  We are learning about how social or unsocial we normally are.  We are learning to be patient.  We are learning about faith, and hope, and how strong they are in us.  Some of us are rediscovering how much we love our kids and our spouses; no doubt, some of us are discovering the opposite too...

We are smorgasbords of feelings.  Fear of what might still be ahead.  Anxiety at all the unknowns.  Concern for people we know who are still working in essential fields.  Sadness and grief at events cancelled, inability to be with family during times of loss or celebration, separation from those we love.  Frustration at hoarders who have created shortages of necessities such as cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and flour.  Frustration for feeling forced to become hoarders despite our best intentions.  Anger at the people who are still disregarding orders from government and from health experts and refusing to separate themselves from others, while we have sacrificed visits with those we love for the greater good.  Loneliness.  Depression.  Inadequacy.  Impatience.  Serve those up alongside the gratitude we feel at having homes where we can comfortably isolate ourselves, with people who, by and large, we love.  It is spring (although it is slow in coming here) and Easter, and if we take the time, we notice the return of our resident groundhogs and yard birds, the appearance of tulips in our gardens, and the gradual disappearance of the snow and ice.

We’re all longing for things to go back to “normal.”  But what is “normal” going to look like?  I think it’s safe to say that we will not be going back to the way things were.  Will anything positive come out of this experience?   That remains to be seen, but I hope so.  There are many reports of people helping their neighbours, looking out for those in need, generosities and kindnesses extended where they are least expected.  Some parents have reported that they have rediscovered their children during their enforced time at home, and they now realize that they have been missing important parts of their family life.  We all know now how dependent we are on farmers, grocery store workers, custodians, and others who we have overlooked previously.  I have read hopeful comments that this pandemic has taught us that we CAN change our lifestyles to use less greenhouse gas, and that we SHOULD re-evaluate our work/family life balance and our reliance on capitalism, big business and corporations.  I would like to think that we can reasonably expect that our society will be more open to considering some of these changes post-pandemic. 

But I wonder how far our generosity and willingness to change will extend.  I have no doubt that many of us will make changes in our personal lives.  But will we as societies and governments be willing to make large scale changes to meet goals such as, for example, the Millennial Development Goals?  These goals were adopted by UN signatories in the year 2000 to eradicate poverty worldwide, and were considered achievable and realistic by the year 2015.  And yet, in 2020, there has been no noticeable progress towards achieving these goals.  Will the level of international cooperation mean that sincere efforts to resolve wars and conflicts become reality instead of just rhetoric?  Will it mean that refugees and displaced persons find homes?  Will people living in poverty in our own communities find meaningful work and lives?  Will our governments introduce measures such as universal basic income? 

Will our obsessions with fame and wealth change?  Will we be more open to more equitable sharing of our financial and material resources?  Will the subjects of our hero worship change, or will we still hang on every word and action of celebrities?  It astonishes me that we will not take action or support a cause or even engage in intelligent behaviour such as social isolation until celebrities tell us to – even though scientists and doctors (you know, the ones who actually KNOW these things) have been telling us for weeks.  I really hope this focus on celebrities to influence our lives and our societies changes. 

I’d like to think that we will come out of this global crisis in a better world.  But if we look at history, we will note that the end of the 1918 pandemic seguéd into the biggest party in history, the Roaring Twenties, a decade of excesses and frivolity.  That decade-long party led to the crash of the stock market and the Great Depression, which only ended when the world went to war again.  And after the tribulations and deprivations of the war, consumerism became the new standard.  Will we learn from our mistakes in the past? 

I don’t have any answers.  I can’t contextualize my fears and worries and thoughts.  I am not a theologian or a philosopher or an economist or a politician.  I am trying to keep the small picture in the forefront: live through today, make some goals for the week, and that’s it.  But sometimes the rest of it all comes crowding in. 

Be safe.  Be smart.  Don’t take risks.  Check in with others, especially if you know they are vulnerable, or if you are feeling vulnerable.  I know it’s hard.  I know it’s lonely and isolating and inconvenient and depressing.  And I know we are all doing our best.  But I hope we can find small ways to cope, small gratitudes and beauty, and meaningful ways to connect.  And one day, maybe sooner than we think, we will emerge from our homes, breathe the fresh air, hug our friends and family members, and life will go on, hopefully in a better world. 

Even the statue of George Stanley is staying safe.

I DON'T KNOW IF I AM A FEMINIST

Recently, my online life has included some discussions about feminism.  Specifically, I saw a post about a book called Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices.  I commented on the post that I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about the premise of this book, given that for many of my years as a Stay-At-Home-Mum, it seemed that the traditionally female domain of the kitchen, and the skills that went with that domain, were denigrated by more “progressive” feminists.  I wondered if it was ironic that activist, feminist women were now attempting to reclaim the kitchen as a place of female/feminist power (I’ll tell you a secret – SAHMs know that the kitchen has ALWAYS been a place of female power!).  There were some supportive comments, but there were also negative responses to my ponderings.  One friend said that this was all in the past, and another dismissed my personal experiences as “pop-feminist nastiness,” claiming that feminism has always supported and fought for the principle of being a SAHM. 

  

There was also a fair amount of online discussion about the halftime show at the Super Bowl, and how it was supposed to be empowering for women.  I won’t regurgitate that discussion; suffice it to say that many of my online friends disagreed with my perspective.  Most of the comments were respectful and we agreed to disagree, but I also apparently lost a Facebook friend because of my opinion.    

These interactions about feminism and what I have been told it is supposed to mean for me bothered me.  So I have a couple of things to say before I move on.  

First some background.  I was not raised in a radically feminist household.  By that I mean, my mother did not preach feminism to me.  However, she worked in paid employment outside of the home for many of my growing up years through the 1970s and 80s, and she and my father were very much equal partners in their marriage, in every way that I was aware of as a child – economically, parenting-wise, decision-making.  I was never made to feel “less” because I was a girl, at least, not by my parents, and I was free (and supported) to make my own life decisions about university (I went) and marriage (I did). 

When I got married and had children, my husband and I decided together that I would be a stay-at-home mum.  I did some casual work here and there while our children were growing up, and A LOT of volunteer work, but for most of my adult life, I have been a SAHM.  We were fortunate that we were able to make that decision, although I won’t lie, it was not easily financially; however, I have absolutely no regrets with the choice that we made.  I WANTED to be home with my children. 

Feminism has been a good thing for many privileged, white, middle to upper class women in Canada.  It hasn’t been so good for women of colour, Indigenous women, or low-income or uneducated women.  In fact, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, which boasted intellectual giants such as Doris Anderson and Judy Rebick (both former presidents), imploded once immigrant women and women of colour such as Sunera Thobani, Dolly Williams and Teri Brown demanded their place at the table; the irreconcilable tension that was created between women of colour and white women from the privileged classes was one of the main factors in NACSW’S dissolution.   

Feminism has not always been friendly to women like me either (white and “privileged” as I am), who chose to stay at home with their kids in an era where that was not necessarily an acceptable decision for feminists (even though feminists have always talked about the freedom of women to CHOOSE for themselves).  In fact, the statements that feminism has always advocated for SAHMs, and that any perceived tension between the two is in the past are patently untrue.  Simone de Beauvoir, the icon of second wave feminism, said “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.”  More recently, women such as Camille Paglia and Elisabeth Badinter have written about feminism and its antagonism toward motherhood.  As recently as 2017, feminist writers picked up on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s report that SAHMs were one of the biggest drains on the economy of Australia, with resulting articles acknowledging that feminism is not actually about choice, and suggesting that women have “employment responsibilities,” and that it should be illegal for women to stay at home once their children are in school.  Yes.  ILLEGAL.  Emma Johnson, an American business journalist, published a list of twelve ways that SAHMs hurt gender equality, suggesting that SAHMs need to suck it up and make choices that benefit the greater good (and her personally, of course).  All you have to do is type “feminism” and “stay at home moms” into the Google bar to find a wide range of articles, blogs, and posts by and about women who feel that feminism has let them down (one that I re-read recently is here), or that denigrate SAHMs.  

Personally, I have been told by a feminist that I was not contributing to society because I did not have a paying job.  I spent years volunteering (working for free) in schools and community groups that my children were part of, unlike many “working” moms; in fact, it was overtly suggested many times, mostly by other women, that because I “didn’t work,” it was expected of me.  I have been to countless social functions where women who had careers had nothing to say to me; after all, if I’m a SAHM it must be because I can’t get a job since I am uneducated or stupid or have nothing to say about anything other than my children; at least I could always talk sports with the men.   

So here we are again in 2020.  Once again, in the past couple of weeks, my personal experience as a SAHM has been dismissed by a feminist, and another feminist has mansplained to me that I should have found the overt sexuality of the Superbowl half-time show empowering, without really any explanation of how exactly it is empowering to an overweight 55-year-old who doesn’t dance very well.   

So. HERE’S MY POINT. You can talk ideologies, and theoreticals, and principles, and empowerment.  Feminism has been good to you and you have adopted its tenets, terminologies, and philosophies.  Fine.  That’s great.  That’s your truth, and it’s the truth for many women.  You can discuss and disagree with me about some of the ideas about feminism.  That’s okay too.   

But IT IS NOT OKAY to dismiss and deny the very real actual not-so-positive experiences that other women have had within the framework of feminism, at the hands of people who call themselves feminists.  By doing that, you are guilty of doing the exact same thing that generations of men have done, which is belittling and trivializing and denying the lived experiences of women.   

These attitudes and this dismissiveness… this is why, even though I fully support equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities, equal choice, and political, economic, and social equality for all women, I personally have a great deal of difficulty embracing the feminist label.  

My existential church crisis

This is a really long post, and yet, I feel that there is so much more that I should say.  But this will have to suffice.

It’s Sunday morning, and it’s a little overcast.  For the vast majority of my life, Sundays at this time would find me sitting in a pew in a church somewhere.  But today, like most Sunday mornings over the past couple of years, I am not in a church.  I am not having a crisis of faith; I hold to the tenets of faith that I believe define Christianity; I just don’t see those tenets being reflected in “worship” and “church.”   I guess you could say that I am having a bit of an existential church crisis.

I think about church and faith a lot lately.  My dad was a Baptist minister, and I was born and raised in a tradition of church and faith.  If you know much about me, you know that my faith is a significant part of who I want to be, how I want to act, and how I want to live, even if most times, I fail spectacularly at living and acting the way that I want to (I'm in good company there: even the apostle Paul complained that he was not always able to do what is right and that he kept on doing the things that he knew were wrong!).  I was brought up believing that church – going to church and being part of a church community – was an important part of faith.  I am proud of my traditional Baptist beliefs (even if denominational theology and practice have veered away from what I believe), and my peace-making Mennonite heritage.

Until recently, I would not have been able to imagine my life without church.  My relationship with the church and the people in it has shaped me unimaginably.  I have had innumerable life-affirming and life-changing experiences through the church.  I have also faced the downside of Christian community, through betrayals and small-mindedness.  All of these experiences are a part of who I am today, warts and all.

My positive memories of “church” growing up are a mash-up of music, food, families, community.  Church choirs since I was about 10.  Professional and amateur musicians in churches sharing their gifts of music.  Invitations to share in family meals and events, both happy and sad, ordinary and extraordinary, with individual church families, and the collective church family.  An instant sense of “belonging” to a community, even if we had never been in that particular church before, based on a set of common traditions.  Camping, in a variety of settings, from lavish Keats to primitive Shänti, and everything in between (literally: as a kid, I spent time at almost every Baptist camp between BC and Manitoba).  And always, food.  So much food.  Breaking bread together, a biblical act of living as community that breaks down barriers and fosters intimacy.  Potluck suppers, so much a part of church life growing up, especially in Baptist circles, and always wonderful, but probably more so in Kitimat Baptist Church, largely populated by German immigrants, with some Portuguese families thrown in for good measure (I wrote about Kitimat here).

I attended a Baptist college for a year.  We had classes in faith, Baptist principles, church history and basic theology, and learned about leadership and faith.  It was a lived experience in community-building, getting along with others, growing and learning together.  We shared intense grief when we lost a classmate in a car accident.  And most of us rebelled and questioned.

I also had bitter experiences in church.  One instance that affected me deeply occurred when I was an adolescent. The church where my dad ministered voted to fire him after a congregational meeting, apparently because some people (who didn’t even attend the church) demanded that he preach fire, brimstone and damnation sermons; he refused.  Ironically, this meeting took place while I was innocently babysitting some of their children in the basement of the church.  My parents hardly ever talked about this incident, so I had to piece it together myself.  It gave me a deep (and I mean deep) distrust of church leadership – deacons, search committees, and so on – which continues today.  Subsequent interactions with other search committees and deacons, now that I am married to a minister, have done little to heal me.  Years later, the congregation asked for my parents’ forgiveness, but they never sought forgiveness from me or my brother.
 

As an adult, I experienced rejection from a congregation because I supposedly had “serious spiritual issues,” after I openly shared that I often question and I don’t believe in easy answers.  At another church I attended, the congregation changed its governance structure to eliminate formal committees because apparently no one wanted to commit to serving for a set period of time.  One committee, which actively led the congregation and the community through issues of social justice, decided to remain a traditional committee.  Instead of celebrating the dedication of these committee members, church leadership labelled this committee “resistant.” 

I have survived discussions about whether Christians should wear charm bracelets, whether Hallowe’en is evil, the Rapture and the Second Coming, the acceptance (or not) of LGBTQ/homeless/divorced/and other marginalized people within the walls of church buildings. I have been a part of congregations who have worked very hard to ensure that nothing would change (in one congregation, a deacon in his 40s often bragged that his hairstyle had not changed since he was in high school... very symbolic of his leadership).  And I have been part of congregations who are always seeking to remain relevant and meaningful in their larger communities. 

Church has changed a lot over my lifetime.  When I was a kid, no one would have dreamt of welcoming openly gay people sitting in the pews, let alone preaching or otherwise leading a congregation.  Women deacons were rare, women ministers even rarer (although Canadian Baptists were a relatively early denomination to support the ordination of women, apparently they did not do a fantastic job of following through with actions; even today, in my informal survey of Maritime Baptist churches, most ordained women ministers are associates, not senior ministers).  Ecumenicism, although historically a strong Christian tradition in Canada, was not overly common anywhere I lived, and I do not recall much active interfaith cooperation.

These changes are good and healthy.

However, I have issues with other changes in North American churches.
 

I recently took a university course called “Religion in Canada.”  It was an interesting reminder that “church” has always suffered from fragmentation and differences of opinions, and that faith has never been a totally effective way of dealing with schism or disagreement.  Churches have been struggling to remain relevant since the beginning of church history.  One of the things we discussed was the conflict between native spirituality and Christianity in the early days of post-contact North America.  To vastly oversimplify, native spirituality assumes that all beings are intrinsically good; the European Christian concept of “original sin” assumes that humans are naturally evil.  If you think about it, you can see how there were bound to be conflicts based on the lack of understanding of each other’s basic beliefs about humans.  I am not a church historian or a theologian, but I am quite sure that Jesus’ ideas about how humans should interact with each other have been vastly corrupted over the centuries by those who were more interested in power and authority than they were about their faith.  I do not think that it is too late for us to learn from some of the precepts of native spirituality about how we should treat each other and what our faith should look like.

Right now, churches represent a diversely wide spectrum.  At one end, there are churches and denominations whose liturgies and worships services have not changed for decades or even centuries.  (There’s that old joke about how many Presbyterians (or whatever) it takes to change a lightbulb.  Answer: CHANGE?!!!???).  At the other end, there are denominations that are trying so hard to be everything to everyone that they end up being nothing to anyone.  They have no theology; some of them even welcome and celebrate avowed atheists as their “ministers.”   “Worship services” now involve guest speakers, who might or might not be Christian, who come and talk about “issues” in our society with small group discussions following their talks.  Evangelical churches sing “worship songs” that are really just nonsense words repeated ad nauseum about how much I love you God over and over and over again that make us feel really good about ourselves and our intimate (in some cases, even creepy) relationship with Jesus, while their worship bands perform on the stage at the front of the auditorium.  Our attempts to be “relevant” have made us ridiculous; Disney themes as choir anthems, and pizza and beer instead of bread and wine make a joke of our faith and our commitment. 

Frankly, at this point in my life, I get nothing out of attending worship services.  I almost always leave feeling frustrated and alienated and sometimes even angry.  I have spent a fair bit of energy asking myself if I am just whining because church and worship no longer fulfill me.  Maybe I just need to be less traditional and more open to new ways of doing things.  But the drastically dropping attendance rates in North American churches, along with the rise of people who say they are not Christian make it abundantly clear that I am not the only person who feels alienated from the church community. 

Millennials are to blame for falling church attendance, according to much that I have read. Their parents were already beginning to have a lackadaisical attitude towards church, and now millennials are too busy, too lazy, too self-centred, and too focused on things like social media and self-care to attend church.  Much energy is being put into trying to bring millennials back to church, which is maybe part of the reason that some churches are becoming much less church-like and less Christian, and more like  social clubs.  Except that it isn’t working.  Churches are, by and large, failing in their weak attempts at being relevant.

Rachel Held Evans was a millennial, evangelical rebel, a popular cultural icon among young Christians, who died suddenly several months ago.  In the introduction to her book Searching for Sunday, she outlined issues that millennials have with church.  She wrote:

“We’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power.  Millennials want to be known by what we’re for... not just for what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith.  Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.  We want to talk about the tough stuff – biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice – but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers....

… when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and... not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.... [C]ontrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans....

… Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity... we’re looking for a truer Christianity, and more authentic Christianity.” (xiii-xiv – emphasis is mine)

I’m not a millennial, but that sounds like the kind of church community that I want to be part of.  A church that is authentically and unapologetically Christian, with space to explore the deeper questions of life. 

We need to re-evaluate what “church” and “worship” should mean.  Worship is the very heart of our understanding and practice of our Christian beliefs.  We need to rediscover the sacred, the mystery and the value of worship.  We can and should learn from other faiths and spiritual practices, and in fact, Christians throughout history have adopted and adapted many practices from other faiths.  We should work together with other faith groups to create a world of respect and love and acceptance.  But I am Christian, and I want to worship regularly in a Christian church that upholds Christian faith traditions.  I want a church that teaches what it means to live authentically.  I want a church that takes its worship seriously and expects its congregation to take it seriously.  I want a church where the leaders are unapologetically Christians, not atheists or wishy washy spiritualists, who are dedicated to helping other Christians learn about the faith and live out their faith. 

I don’t think I’m the only one.