134 pages

English

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Stubborn Grace , livre ebook

Skinner House Books - Kate Landis

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134 pages

English

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Stubborn Grace is unique in that it portrays the ways in which progressive religious community can support and hold space for people with mental health problems, without shame or avoidance but instead with grace.

Kate Landis is unflinchingly honesty and funny in the vein of Cheryl Strayed and David Sedaris but with a raw tenderness all her own.

Kate Landis doesn’t shy away from serious topics, but Stubborn Grace is ultimately a hopeful and encouraging memoir of mental illness.

I grew up in church, in an American Baptist church specifically, where my dad was the music director and my mom was a deacon. I left in my late teens, after surviving major depression and a handful of suicide attempts, and became an activist and a rabble-rouser. I was so angry at religion for requiring conformity of belief—why couldn’t I go to church and question the doctrine? But I missed the all-ages community of congregational life. I really missed being reminded that I wasn’t the center of the universe. Gaining perspective, asking hard questions. . . . Where did adults go to wonder why humans exist? To talk about what happens when we die? Without a congregation, life just seemed like small talk. Alone, I couldn’t fill the hole that abandoning spirituality left behind.

Through activism, I found a spiritual community with justice at its core. Now I get to be a minister in this tradition I love that makes my life sing. I’m young, but I have experienced a lot of life: divorce, depression, abortion, friends dying, falling in and out of love. Through all of it, my spiritual communities have held me up, and so I know that church is more relevant than blacksmithing at Colonial Williamsburg. I know spiritual communities have what people are hungering for: a place to ask big questions, be accepted just as they are, and be reminded of wonder and awe.

All around me, people are busy being spiritual but not religious. I tried that for a few years myself, drawn in by the lack of required early morning activity. I read Buddhist books and practiced yoga on cold linoleum floors, joined circle dances and equinox rituals. And it was interesting, but I didn’t grow. I wanted transformation, and what I got was more like a spiritual practices grab bag. But I had so many more questions. I wasn’t after a prepackaged set of theology. I wanted a mystical journey, not another book to read.

Off on my mystical journey I went, on backpacking trips and in silent meditation, watching the sun rise and set. I tried to listen to that still, small voice of holiness. But I was more like Bilbo Baggins than Jesus, thinking about lunch instead of divine union, while at the same time my ego obsessed over how much weight I could lose if I skipped meditation and kept hiking. All that alone time was less about finding spiritual meaning than about me creating God in my own image.

I needed to be pushed out of my comfort zone, needed my cockiness challenged, needed people of different beliefs and backgrounds to chafe me like sand chafes a pearl. I needed a group to search alongside who would remind me that while I was a part of the universe, I wasn’t the universe. I needed a spiritual community.

I spent five years pawing through the grab bag of spiritual practices before I fell in love with Unitarian Universalism. No easy answers, plenty of mystical journeying, but in partnership with other seekers. People who push me to grow while loving me just as I am. Plenty of reminders that I am not the center of the universe, plenty of time out of my comfort zone, and more pure joy than anyone expects to find on a Sunday morning. I am a part of a historic faith that is constantly changing, always adapting to fit this time and this place. I can’t seem to convince anyone that worship should be in the afternoon, but otherwise I am so grateful to be spiritual and religious with my church community.

Plenty of people are mad at God because of toxic spiritual experiences from their younger days. They learned that their same-gender attraction was wrong, that Jesus cried if they masturbated, or that women need to keep their lips zipped in church. Christianity has really done a hatchet job on the psyche of many people who were dragged to church as kids. I’m really sorry if that happened to you—it sucks and it wasn’t your fault and you deserved better. If anyone told you that you didn’t fit into God’s kingdom, they were full of shit. The spirit of love adores every inch of you, whether you are rocking the suburban working-mom life or going to amateur drag nights every night, hoping for your big break. If your minister said you weren’t saved, I am sorry—they are the one who was lost. They made up a God who coincidentally shared all their bigotries. Maybe it was self-hate or maybe they just didn’t have a mind big enough to take in the reality of an all-loving presence. But whatever the reason, it was their baggage. There is nothing about you that God doesn’t love.

When I was eight or nine, I learned at church camp that to get an all-access pass to heaven, I needed to be saved. Being saved meant accepting Jesus, and while I thought Jesus was pretty great, I wasn’t ready for an exclusive relationship with any personal Lord and savior (it’s not you, Jesus, it’s me). Because the version of Jesus they were selling meant no more questions. These well-meaning teenagers, charged with saving souls over summer break for minimum wage, believed that “God works in mysterious ways, so trust and be saved.” And I am more the “God works in mysterious ways, so let’s poke at the mystery until we get the information we’re looking for” type.

The weird thing is, my religious beliefs keep saving me even though they continue to change. Jesus still saves me on a regular basis, like when I remember him saying that “the meek will inherit the earth” right before I say something snide to an authority figure. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” especially those who remember not to challenge cops at protests and stay out of jail. I check in with Jesus pretty often, and so far he doesn’t seem to mind that I also talk to the Buddha and Mary and my dead grandmothers. The summer camp version of Jesus was too small for me. I can’t believe that our holy ones are jealous and petty. Humans have the market corned on those traits.

This book is about how my faith keeps showing up for me. It’s salvific but not set. I am saved again and again without walking in lockstep with any one religious tradition. As you can read in the following chapters, I have bumbled through life making mistakes, hurting people, messing up. And yet salvation follows me, loyal and unconditionally loving. God still shows up for me, even though I am far from a faithful servant, even though I constantly have questions. I screw up, and God says, “You’ll get ’em next time.”

I wrote this book in order to be rich and famous— Ha, kidding! No one gets rich off writing books about spirituality. Well, except Elizabeth Gilbert, but Eat, Pray, Love had hot sex scenes, and this book does not. Sorry about that. But I wrote this book because spirituality is the thing I think you have been longing for, that sense of greater meaning. Wonder and awe. A sense of your place in the world that is bigger than what you do for work or what you buy or the exotic places you have traveled. You are a part of an interdependent web of all existence. You are holy and good down to your very marrow. Your resilience and kindness and patience and intellect are blowing God’s mind. Did you know that? Is it time to explore it?

I don’t believe in Hell, so I can’t coerce you into checking out spirituality with threats of eternal damnation. But my life is roughly a trillion times better because I have faith that there is more to this life than what I can see and understand. I bet your life will be too.

Introduction

1. The Incomplete Castle

2. The Family Curse

3. Emma and Wilma

4. It’s All Jimmy Carter’s Fault

5. Choose Jesus . . . or Else

6. Sadness the Chimp and the Evil Katieo

7. Mad Dog the Angry Adolescent

8. Technicolor Romance

9. Psych Hospital, Version One

10. Off the Roof

11. Electric Hallelujah

12. Sharon Jumped

13. No Resurrection for Cool Girls

14. Great Jobs I Got Fired From

15. The Patriarchy Always Knocks Twice

16. Good Choices, Bad Reasons

17. Stealing Junk

18. Accidentally Stealing

19. Two Pink Lines

20. Big Sister God

21. Starting Single

22. Once Burned, Twice Shy

23. Fasten Your Theological Seatbelt

24. Like in Washington?

25. The Dalai Lama Says I’m Okay. My Niece Disagrees.

26. Refusing to Be Enemies

27. A Streetcar Named Dignity

28. Good Guys

29. Ferocious Love

30. Heaven Is a Place on Earth

31. Riding Horses to Heaven

32. Spiritual Safety Rails

33. But You’ll Die!

34. Jazz Hands for the Prodigal Son

Benediction

Sujets

Publié par	Skinner House Books
Date de parution	01 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781558968585
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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