swelly belly & sleeping ovaries . . . who knew?

I'll be taking a hiatus from contemplating the diaconal ordination liturgy while I'm recovering from surgery. As some of you already know, I had a laparscopic supracervical hysterectomy last week. So I thought I'd offer an update.


It wasn't an easy decision. I was coping with my symptoms, but with ten years to go until menopause, the prospects for making it to my fifties without the bleeding becoming intolerable were slim. I could wait, but I'd still need major surgery to have my tubes tied so I could go off birth control pills. And if the fibroid tumors continued to grow, I might lose the option of a laproscopic procedure. Taking out just the fibroid would actually be riskier than a full hysterectomy and there was not guarantee that others wouldn't quickly take it's place. So . . .


I checked in at 6 a.m. last Wednesday, was home by noon with a lovely pain-killer cocktail on board. In the weeks leading up to the surgery I'd been teary and cranky a good part of the time--mostly from worry, I think, about whether I'd made the wrong decision--but as soon as the surgery was done I was calm, peaceful, relieved. No more bleeding, worry-free sex (well, the promise of it), and the freedom to ditch the birth control pills I've fretted about for the last five years since my mother died of breast cancer--done and done.


I'm not recovered, of course. I have "swelly belly." The four tiny incisions scattered on my torso don't reflect the healing that needs to happen inside, so I look pregnant--especially when I've been up and around too long. And after a several nights of waking up drenched in sweat, I did a little research on the internet and learned about "sleeping ovaries." Although mine were left alone, the disruption of the surgery can put them into a kind of shock. They should "wake up" and start pumping out hormones in a few weeks or so. It's also possible that going off of bc pills after 15 years has something to do with this. The pills could have been masking some perimenopausal symptoms, and it's going to take a month or so for my normal hormonal rhythm to reassert itself. Luckily, the only emotional expression of this hormonal hula has been a brief moment of rage when hot grease popped and burned me while I was fixing dinner last night--exacerbated by the fact that I really shouldn't have been up fixing dinner, no doubt.

But here's the kicker. I really expected to feel miserable after this surgery--what with losing my girly parts and all. Before the surgery, I speculated to a friend that this would be a Lenten experience full of digging around on the dark side, threshing out issues of identity, femininity, and OMG I'm OLD! Instead, I feel liberated. Probably some of that pre-operative weepiness helped me process any sense of loss connected with this. And now, the positive effects of being forced to slow down and rest are having an interesting effect.

It started before the surgery, actually, this urge to do creative things. For many months, I've been in a receptive mode, mostly intellectual--learning my new job at the college and doing formation for the diaconate. Normally a voracious reader and learner, I realize now that so much learning has been overwhelming me. Too much information, not enough time to digest it. That's the input side. On the output side, most of my activities have involved pushing paper (at the college), doing missional activities (Holy Trinity), and engaging in intense relational work (Holy Trinity). None of these "outputs"--as Spirit-filled as some of them are--create a tangible finished product . . . which may explain why being forced into days in the recliner--deprived of my usual routine, social contacts, and busyness--I'm giving in to strange cravings:

• I dropped an impossibly boring online class in the Old Testament in favor of a couple of trashy novels--mind-candy thrillers that have no redeeming intellectual or spiritual value.


• I'm dreaming about my own garden, not the church's.


• I'm rediscovering "worthless" activities: an old cross-stitch project, skimming magazines, crochet. (Because I'm slightly concerned that my renewed interest in crochet may, in fact, be an unmasked symptom of perimenopause, I'll be writing another blog entry--Things I Promise Never to Crochet--as a sort of insurance policy against the possibility of becoming a bonafide church lady.)


• I want to make things--with my own two hands.

Perhaps a psychotherapist would interpret this as a combination of regression (avoiding responsiblity in favor of fun) and womb-grief (needing to create things since I can no longer create a person). And maybe they'd be right. But it feels more like someone hit the reset button. And the new message goes something like: Slow down. Relax. Enjoy.

Redeeming Evangelism

You are to make Christ and his redemptive love known, by your word and example, to those among whom you live, and work, and worship.

For my non-Episcopal friends: this quote from the examination of diaconal candidates is as close as most Episcopalians come to uttering the e-word, evangelism. If you'll pardon the pun, the idea of evangelism scares the hell out of us. Which, of course, is exactly the goal of those who love us with signs like this one:

I'm organizing a coup to take back the word evangelism from those (mostly old-school) folks who perform it with equal doses of carrot and stick. "Jesus loves you, but if you don't love Him back . . ." What? He's going to make sure I never love anyone else? Candy-coated threats make Jesus sound like a stalker.

Equally troubling, on the other end of the seesaw: magic Jesus. "If you accept Jesus into your heart, you'll spend the rest of your life riding horses on the beach in soft focus." Once a young drug addict came into our church drawn there by the early morning organ music--like a line from the song Sunday Morning Coming Down. I prayed with her, sat with her in the front pew through as much of the service as she could handle before her withdrawal got too bad. She'd been out of jail for 24 hours and had already gotten high again. "I don't understand!" she despaired. "When I was in jail, I prayed the sinner's prayer like they told me. Everything was supposed to be different." Pure cruelty, if you ask me.

So how do we show someone redemptive without forgetting about the love part? What would that look like? Redeem comes from the Latin redimere--to buy. And most of the definitions of the word convey the sense of re-purchasing: buying back something that was once owned. I think this has something to do with the restoration of relationship--with people, with God. But human relationship is too often cemented by fear. We've all known people who don't have friends; they take hostages. And relationship through threat is the primary tool of the abusive spouse. God's version of relationship is different--cemented by the love of the Creator for the created. It's that relationship that we're trying to get back to.

I like how Huston Smith puts it in his book Why Religion Matters: "All human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them. Searching for an image of the divine that will fit, they paw over various options as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, matching them successively to the gaping hole at the puzzle's center."

As an evangelist, what shape of God am I'm offering, what kind of puzzle piece do I proclaim in word and (more) in deed: loving? vengeful? manipulative? compassionate? simplistic? partisan? judgmental? forgiving? . . .

Please, God, let me live into a shape that's You.

ashes, ashes

I hit the wall about three hours ago: holy exhaustion.

Yesterday was Fat Tuesday: four hours at my paying job followed by a long day cooking our church Mardi Gras meal then partying with the motley crew that calls Holy Trinity home. There we were together--the homeless and the sheltered, the unemployed and the overworked, the hungry and the overfed--trading beads, eating gumbo, answering seasonal trivia questions (what's the only time of year Baptists have more fun than Episcopalians?) and dancing to zydeco. One young man, working out his life on the edges of survival, walked the ten cold blocks to his apartment and back just to invite his downstairs neighbor. On his way he told a woman coming in: In there is a little bit of paradise.

Today, I stood with a Lutheran pastor, offering ashes to bewildered bystanders in the STA Plaza--a part of our public "ashing" which began with a liturgy of repentance in front of Riverpark Square. Not too many takers in the bus plaza. Our fellow ashers had better luck in the skywalks and outside the mall. Life is scary for a lot of folks who frequent the bus plaza--two women (one in a collar) with sooty crosses on their foreheads are just another uncertainty best avoided.

Tonight, at Holy Trinity, we served our weekly meal to our neighbors: an oddball mix of homeless folks, single moms, street-roving kids, and elders. Too often our guests are lonely, hurting, broken-hearted. Before dinner, we did a brief liturgy of ashes with an explanation of the Ash Wednesday tradition, then offered our guests a smudged cross on forehead or hand. Paul, our priest, spoke of sin as broken relationship. Ashes, he said, are first a recognition that we are not God. And they remind us that we are all made of the same dust by the same merciful One. Lent is a time to connect with God, to repent and restore our broken relationships with God and with people. These marks, he said, are a sign to each other that says we are in this together. Together we sang: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

The thumb makes the mark--two strokes of Christ's suffering. The voice speaks these hard words: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Some received their mark with their eyes closed, some with eyes upcast beyond me. Some met my eyes intently with a look that I can only describe as recognition. And then we gathered at table, a memory of those agape feasts of the early church, a meal where all were fed. And on the face of the other, the cross--a common mark reminding us not just of sin and redemption, but that we are the "other."

So yes, I'm exhausted. Because how can I fathom my own sinfulness? I turn toward God and even in the turning find myself facing away again. What should be Love is too often love. What should be for the Other convolutes into Self. How can I embrace the solidarity required of this faith: we are all--God and people--in this together? But what really wears me out with a beautiful, blessed kind of exhaustion is how--in spite of us, in spite of me--Love washes over it, over us all.