a prayer in my pocket

I've written about religion and spirituality on my blog a few times, but I often avoid talking about it: it's polarizing and off-putting to some, and it induces eyerolls in others. I tend to be of the mindset that it's best to show, not tell, when it comes to my beliefs. But being a progressive Christian is who I am and it defines my entire worldview, so yesterday I decided I'm tired of not being real. When I was in elementary school, I was the kind of kid who organized a protest and marched to the principal's office demanding that gender discriminatory policies in the lunchroom (yes, really) be changed. I'm just getting back to my loudmouth roots, I guess.

A few weeks ago, one of the ministers at my church used a pastoral prayer that was like a beam of light coming straight for me. I asked her for a copy, and I've been carrying it around with me ever since. It's adapted from several prayers written by the poet, theologian, and social justice crusader Theodore Loder, and it encapsulates everything I love about my church: activism, radical hospitality, unbounded love for God's creation.

So here it is, the prayer in my pocket and in my heart today and all days. Maybe it will stir something in you, too. The word "kindom," by the way, isn't an error - it's a beautiful reworking of the idea of a kingdom to mean a community of brothers and sisters united as one. As my oldest daughter says, "God is in the face of everyone I see, right, Mom?" Yes, God is.

a Big Easy hope.

Pictures from home lately have made my social media feeds a beautiful winter fairyland. I love this part of winter - technically, almost-winter, but no one in the upper Midwest judges seasons by the date on the calendar - when the snow is crystalline and pure. Come late January, as the white has turned to sludgy gray and everything is iced and barren and forlorn, winter feels endless and unforgiving. But in December there is still hope in the air and wonder at the magic of it all.

We wondered what Christmas would be like in Louisiana. "I bet people don't get as into it here," Jason kept saying, almost hopefully, his Jewish uneasiness with all things Santa bobbing up above the surface. It's easy to see why Germany and Scandinavia have the richest of holiday traditions, both Christian and pagan, that so many of our Christmas memories are wrapped in. The need for the light-in-the-darkness metaphor doesn't feel so urgent when it's warm enough to take a dip in the apartment complex swimming pool.

But though the need may not be as urgent, the checkout lines at Target prove Christmas is big business here. It just looks a little different than what we're used to. In typical New Orleans fashion, the brighter and kitschier the better when it comes to holiday decorations. Subtly twinkling lights reflecting off snowy trees aren't a possibility even if subtlety were a welcome trait, so instead lawns are filled to overflowing with inflatable tidings of good cheer.

I started the month of November overflowing with good cheer, too - happiness about making real progress on my writing goals, excitement about the upcoming holidays and spending my favorite time of year in a new city. And then sadness crept into the corners of everything: ugliness and violence on college campuses, terror in Paris, continued horrors in the Middle East, mass shootings here in New Orleans and around the country. Another cancer diagnosis and looming weeks of surgery, radiation, and recovery for my mom. Overwhelming feelings of dread that kept me up at night and zapped away all the drive I had to spend the month being thankful and motivated. My momentum and energy deflated like those sad Santas you see facedown in the grass, waiting for someone to come and make their bowlful-of-jelly bellies jolly again.

But time marches on, and December, the month and the meaning, has been looming large on the calendar for quite some time despite my own feelings on the subject of making merry. Everyone here seems to agree that the only way to properly ring in the season is at Celebration in the Oaks, which is City Park's massive light display. It opened the night after Thanksgiving, and car loads of locals were lined up on City Park Avenue by dusk. We had just dropped our houseguests off at the airport after a week of turkey and football and all-American revelry, and we decided to peek into the festivities from across the pond.

It was pinch-me-I'm-dreaming balmy and as soon as they were out of the car the girls took off running into the warm air, eager to shed the weight of "be on your best behavior" they'd been shouldering all week. Jason and I ran along behind, laughing at their squeals of joy every time they spotted a new display through the veils of Spanish moss: flamingos and swans standing guard over the pond, trumpets and trombones dangling from branches, a pirate ship headed straight for a mermaid sitting next to a treasure chest of gold, a pelican with mouth wide open to catch a jumping, flashing fish. You know, all the typical Yuletide emblems, sparkling with brilliance amongst the fully-leaved, blooming trees, just like the Christmases of my Minnesota childhood. "Let's hide under these pine trees!" the girls kept shouting, no matter how many times I reminded them that they are palms.

There were just two displays that we could actually get to from our side of things. One was a giant wire Santa and his sleigh, a garish beacon beckoning the season and simultaneously bidding farewell to the line of traffic slouching towards Bethlehem, or at least towards Canal Street.  The other was a stand of trees with Chinese paper lanterns and strings of lights to look like jellyfish. We darted in and out of the trees and across the field towards Santa, yelling and laughing and panting for breath. A line from The Perks of Being a Wallflower kept echoing in my head: "and in that moment, I could swear we were infinite." My grinchy heart was big and light for the first time in weeks. It was like the sticky, firefly-lit nights of summer when the world is vibrantly alive and everything feels possible and you can no longer remember how it felt to believe - truly believe, in the depths of your February despair - that it would be cold and dark and colorless forever.

When we piled into the car, still laughing, to head home, I wanted to cling to that sweet-smelling summer night feeling, so I popped in the mix CD I had made for our car trip when we moved down here in late July. "Is this 'Dog Days Are Over'?" Lorelei asked from the back, and the girls sang along at the top of their lungs, the lyrics miraculously bubbling up in their brains after months without hearing them. "Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father," they sang as we drove past the brightly lit tree lot on Pontchartrain Boulevard, already overrun with customers. "The dog days are over, the dog days are done. Can't you hear the horses? Because here they come!"

Happiness does hit you, in the words of Florence and the Machine, like a bullet in the back sometimes, especially when you've turned your back on the idea in the first place. Anne Lamott, one of my writing idols, said it much better than I ever could: "This is the time of year when in every wisdom tradition and religion, we ask ourselves, Will the Light really come again this year? Will there REALLY be Spring? Left to my own devices, I think, Probably not, or 50-50; but faith tells me that no matter how sick and in trouble the trees look, things will be okay, that we are all connected, that if we light a few candles, scatter some seeds, plant some bulbs, try to help as we can, stick close to each other as we prepare for the end of despair, that there will be enough light, buds on the trees, hope. And hope always catches us by surprise." I'm still struggling in that winter darkness to get to that 50-50, to believe that the dog days are over and Spring will come at last to our sick, troubled world. But nights under jellyfish lights swaying in trees that have never lost their leaves in the first place, in this town of endless hopefulness even amidst terrible grief, make me feel connected once again to that which is infinite, and for that I am thankful.

tradition, tradition

Last night at sundown we welcomed the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the beginning of the High Holy Days. It's a beautiful time of year, and I look forward to it every fall that I've gotten to celebrate it, which is somewhere close to fifteen at this point. But it still doesn't feel like my own tradition.

Jason and I made the decision to raise any future children as Jews back when we joined an interfaith couples' support group before we got married. It's a choice that we're both still confident in, but it comes with inherent challenges. The challenges are perhaps more obvious for me as the daughter of a UCC minister, but the differences are actually not as significant as you might think when we hold shared beliefs in the importance of faith practices in our daily lives, the need for prayer, the importance of membership and contribution to one's community (and community of faith), the sacredness of the natural world, and the value in a life of charity, humility, kindness, justice, service, and truth.

What's hard, though, is that so many of the traditions of Judaism are practices that occur within the home, and I have no model to follow. Our small Jewish community in our hometown is loving and kind, but there are only five or six children in the congregation including our own, so there isn't a religious school I can count on to help to teach our daughters the ebb and flow of the religious year. Jason also grew up far away from extended family and mostly in towns and cities without a large Jewish population, and in a household that, though definitely Jewish, was mostly secular in its day-to-day life, so he has little to fall back on when it comes to tradition and religious family practices.

Some of my strongest connections to my religious identity come from my memories of traditions from childhood: setting up the creche piece by piece as we opened our Advent calendars, hymns that we always sang at certain times of the year, the simple supper before the somber Maundy Thursday service. Sometimes, the need to do this right or risk my daughters growing up without a sense of their religious identity feels like I'm standing on one foot, holding my other above a wineglass, like Jason did in our wedding ceremony, but I have to balance ever so carefully to keep it intact.

But this family is an interfaith one, and I know that's something to celebrate rather than tiptoe around. When Phoebe was blessed at my lovely little church, just like Lorelei was when she was a baby, my minister spoke about how lucky she would be to grow up in a family rich in tradition on both sides and with the benefit of two parents lovingly navigating a path towards faithfulness together. It sounded much more eloquent than it feels to live it, but we try to embrace it as a blessing and an opportunity. So we muddle through together and try to teach them what we can with the tools we have. And every year on Rosh Hashanah, we perform tashlich together, cast the worries and fears and wrongs from last year out into the water, and let the hope for better things to come wash over us anew.