In Which I Finally Understood Easter After I Stopped Being Christian

One of the last times I visited my grandmother, she wanted to give me 'a little money' (I think it was $20 or so; she liked to tell me to 'get myself a treat'), and I followed her into her bedroom so she could get her purse.  Looking at all the family pictures on her dresser, I noticed one that wasn't a relation.  Neatly tucked in among the shots of my mother and aunt, sister and cousins, of my great-grandmother and my great-uncle and my nephews, was a small framed picture of Christ.  I didn't really think much of it until I was headed home, but it says something profound and significant about my grandmother's relationship with her faith.

She had, of course, all the other pictures of Jesus that Midwesterners have, the one over the TV, the one in the guest room, and so on.  But here was one that made a statement that defined her: Jesus was part of my grandmother's family.  He was not a remote and unknowable being, a distant mythical figure to be worshiped but never understood.  He was a friend, a brother, a father to her.  When she prayed, she genuinely believed that he heard her, and that feeling of being heard gave her comfort whether her prayers were answered or not.  Though, my grandmother's prayers were usually answered -- not because she was better than the rest of us, but because she knew what her God could give her.  She wouldn't pray for an end to a sickness, but for the wisdom of the doctors and the courage to endure.  She wouldn't pray for a good harvest, but for the strength to work hard and the skill to make the most of weather and circumstance.  When my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, she didn't ask God to take it away: she prayed for smart doctors, and her own courage, and her husband's comfort.  She understood that faith isn't about waving a magic wand to get what you want; it's about having support and comfort for your journey.

I'm thinking today about my grandmother's relationship with her gods because it's Easter, the most holy and joyful day of the Christian faith.  A lot of my friends like to mock it with faux-clever quips about zombie Jesus, but I can't really see my way clear to mocking something that meant that much to someone who's meant so much to me.

When I was little, I didn't really like Easter because it wasn't as fun.  Sure, there were eggs and candy, but Christmas had a TREE and PRESENTS and maybe even SNOW and time off school.  I left the Christian faith at 19, before I fully understood the idea of self-sacrifice, of making life choices for the love of others.  Within paganism, as I've chosen a path of duty and service, I've finally come to understand Easter, to understand why this story of incredible love and compassion is so powerful to those of the Christian faith.

My grandmother believed that once upon a time her God had looked forward to everyone who would ever be, and had known that someday she personally would exist, and he had asked his son, "I love these people.  Will you also love them enough to die for them?"  And she believed that Christ had looked forward, and had seen her (and everyone else who would ever be), and said, "Yes, I will."

In the Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, a character named Kevin Laine swears an oath: "Though he be a god, and it mean my death ... to this I will make my reply."  Later, another character references that promise and points out that you give a little leeway to a man who says that sort of thing, even if he doesn't quite know how he'll accomplish it when he says it.

That's sort of how I feel about the Christian promise.  I am not a Christian theologist, and I have my own ideas on the nature of free will and redemption that may or may not jibe with the Easter story.  But the gist of it is that one man said, "Yes, these people, I love them so much, even the ones I've never met, that I'll go through this horrible thing for them, just because of my own belief that somehow my sacrifice will make something possible for them that they couldn't have otherwise managed."  And...I have to give a certain amount of respect to a man who swears that sort of oath, even if the fundamental mechanics are sort of unclear to me.

If you've read Fionavar, you know what Kevin's reply was.  If you haven't, you should.  And it remains to be seen what Christ's reply really means in the long run; people have their own beliefs ranging from 'nothing' to 'everything'.  Maybe he never existed.  Maybe he existed as a man and teacher who's been expanded to the Son of God to fill a mythic role.  Maybe he was the literal Son of God.  I don't know.  I can't know.  Personally, I don't need to know.

But I do know that my grandmother loved him deeply, with all her heart, and that her love for him was profound and important enough to her to inform every single aspect of her daily life, to color every interaction, every conversation.  And just as I wouldn't mock someone's dead father, or dead brother, and just as I would be hurt by someone mocking my grandmother or the best friend I lost in 2004, I simply cannot find it in myself to disrespect her love that way.

I love you all.

In Which I Am Not Yet Highly Effective, But Getting There

I used to have a genuinely horrible job selling wine over the telephone.  Truth be told, I've had a lot of horrible jobs, but that one really took the cake.

The company wasn't the problem, the manager was.  He was the worst sort of self-improvement hypocrite, spouting Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, and Tony Robbins in between racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic jokes.  He insulted and belittled those beneath him, and he berated us because our inability to sell $400 cases of untasted wine to strangers over the phone was obviously due to a lack of personal character and commitment.

The job paid $250 a week, on which I could barely live, and transitioned to straight commission after six weeks.  I sold two cases of wine in the two months I worked there, so I essentially gave them two weeks of labor for free.  My 'shift' ran from 1 to 10 each day, but I was expected to arrive at noon for the daily 'motivational lunch', where we all gathered around the conference table to eat our lunches (and have the morality of our dietary decisions critiqued by a chain smoking alcoholic carrying a good extra 80 pounds) and listen to self-help tapes, especially Napoleon Hill and Tony Robbins, and be lectured on 'fake it till you make it' and 'no is never an acceptable answer to any question'.  I would then sit through a prayer to begin the day, and spend nine hours on the phone, because if I took more than 15 minutes for dinner when I hadn't sold any wine, I was subjected to insults and ostentatious disappointment.

One of Pat's demands, as well, was that I spend five minutes a day reading some 'self-improvement' book.  He provided a list, topped of course by the Bible and various professional motivation texts.  He was livid when my first choice was the Tao te Ching, and my second was the Art of War.  That 'commie foreigner nonsense' couldn't possibly teach me anything worth knowing, and at that point he washed his hands of me, despairing of my ever being a 'decent woman'.  He found out from a co-worker that I read tarot, and from then on he 'jokingly' began asking every day if I'd like to begin the prayer with a ritual goat or baby sacrifice.  Why did I stay?  Because I couldn't find another office job and thought I was 'too good to go backwards to retail', and while I was at least making the $250 a week I wasn't getting evicted.

Near the top of the list he gave me was Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People."  Without reading a word of it or knowing anything about it other than "Pat thinks it will make me a better person," I dismissed it entirely out of hand as another example of the self-improvement genre geared towards becoming a pushy sales asshole.  I wanted nothing to do with that Covey fuck, whose planners all carried a bunch of (to me) hollow affirmations about personal growth and goal-setting and time management.

Fast forward fifteen years, during which many people I did respect and appreciate have said to me, "I think you'd really get a lot out of that book." Finally, last year, I saw it in the Amazon Prime Kindle Lending Library and thought, "Is it really fair to let one bigoted asshole influence my reading decisions forever?"  So, I started reading it and have been working through it slowly, reading each chapter twice before moving to the next.

I won't say it's 'changed my life' or anything that dramatic, but today I had an epiphany:  what he was talking about doing was something that, in at least one area of my life, I'd been groping around trying to accomplish without fully understanding the transition or my reasoning.  At one point he talks about changing your focus from crisis response to relationship management, and I thought about the changes that we've been working on with the Guardians.  One of the big things that, after talking to the other Chiefs and our Director, we identified as a problem was that (primarily because of staffing shortages and shifts in paperwork management) many people often only interacted with a Guardian, especially with a Chief Guardian, when something was wrong.  Outside of crisis, they knew nothing about us, didn't have any reason to trust us except the reputation of the team.  The respect and trust accorded to me came from my possession of a green glowie and a laminate badge, not from a relationship and a history of personal integrity.  Other people's integrity and right action had earned me that trust, but we weren't working to strengthen those relationships the way we needed to be.  We can't effectively serve a community that doesn't know us as people.

We've been working to get back to that, getting the Chiefs out on patrol, getting our faces and our names in front of people so that they know *us* and not our titles, making sure that they feel comfortable talking to us on or off duty, about any issue even if it seems trivial.  Instead of spending a precious few off-duty hours hiding or relaxing in my camp, I've been taking more time off duty to peruse the merchants' wares, go to workshops, visit other camps, hang out with non-Safety friends, and generally make myself known when I'm *not* wearing green.  The effect is two-fold.  First, and most important:  I hope I never face a situation where people's lives depend on them trusting and listening to me, but with wildfires and increased animal sightings and weather oddities it's going to remain a possibility, and I'd rather depend on something more than "she has a piece of laminate that says 'trust me, I'm a Guardian' around her neck."  I want it to depend on "She has used her position with integrity, to act in the best interests of the membership, and I trust her as a *person* and as a Guardian, to know what is happening, have a plan, and do her best to help us stay safe."  Second:  I'm having more fun, making more friends, and ending each festival with less stress than I had when I started it, which tells me I'm doing something right.

'Doing something right' is the conversation I've been having with this book.  As I was avoiding it, I told myself that I'm pretty happy with my life (which I am, on the whole, even when annoyances and frustrations occur) and I didn't want to fight with some motivational asshat who'd dismiss my love-centered, joy-focused existence as meaningless and irresponsible.  It turns out that the parts of my life I'm happy with (the parts where I'm consistently aware of and acting in accord with my values) are the parts that already fit into the structure of the book, and the message I'm getting isn't "You're doing it wrong."  It's, "So far, so good.  Now, let's look at the next step."

So, what happened with Pat and the wine job?  Well, one day I'd had enough of the "Jerry's Kids" jokes and I told the Assistant Manager that they made me uncomfortable and I was pretty sure they were illegal.  He assured me that I could talk to Pat, explain how the jokes and the insults and the bigoted comments made me feel, and that Pat, who after all spouted words about positive thinking and affirmations and respect for the dignity of the individual for an hour each day, could be trusted to receive that information, think about it critically, and work with me to create a more positive atmosphere.  So, I did, because I was a naive young woman with very little professional experience.

What resulted was a screaming fight while I angrily packed the contents of my desk.  He insulted my character, I insulted his management style.  He called me an uptight dyke, and I lost my temper and suggested he'd been raised by chimpanzees.  He screamed a lot of things at me, things like 'filthy whore' and 'fat lazy bitch' and 'devil worshipper' and pulled out the termination paperwork he'd made me fill out during a 'personal counseling session' the week before, then said I might as well quit because 'worthless cunt' wasn't one of the options under 'reason for separation'.  I'm still not sure whether I quit that job or was fired from it, but he swung a golf putter at my head as I walked out the door.  Later, I sent a letter off to corporate detailing conditions in the Kansas City office and the circumstances surrounding my last day, and I cc'd it to the Missouri Department of Labor and the EEOC.  I don't know what happened from there, because I never heard from anyone connected to the company again.  I called a temp agency, who told me, "We were just about to call you!  A job opened up that's perfect for your skill set.  Can you start Monday?

The thing that really gets me is that if I'd read "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" when Pat recommended it to me, at the start of the job, I'd have quit right then and there, working at McDonald's or QuikTrip or wherever I had to, to get out of that situation.  Because I would have seen, halfway through chapter one, that there was no way I could work in that environment and keep that person in my life, if I wanted to stay true to my own principles and my own ideals.

Offense and Sensibility

I will probably offend you.

Hell, take the 'probably' out of it.  I will offend you.  We may be friends, you may be a stranger (I hope you're not my mother, because I use swears a lot), but something that comes out of my head is going to upset you.  I will be too radical, too logical, too emotional, too dogmatic, too spiritual, too feminist, too pragmatic, too conservative.  I will be not feminist enough, not logical enough, not compassionate enough, not spiritual enough, not patriotic enough, not pagan enough for you.

I will fail you, if you are reading this.

The thing to remember is that it's not about you.  Like most humans, I am self-centered (unlike many humans, I own it and am not ashamed of it).  I don't wake up in the morning looking for ways to upset people's applecarts, trying to figure out how I can piss off the greatest number of people before lunch.  I do not have the time and energy to seek out ways to be an irritant to others.  I do speak my truth as I see it, whenever I can find a way to do so with a little grace; that truth is sometimes clumsily spoken, and not always well-received.

Each of us goes through life faced with the constant pressure to choose whether we will speak our truths, or whether we will lie.  Some lie with silence, some lie with courtesy, and some lie by coating a wholesome truth in poison so that no one can swallow it.  The hardest thing I've ever known is to wrap just enough kindness around a sharp-edged truth that it can cut what needs to be cut without leaving gaping wounds.  It's a delicate art, and one I don't claim to master.

Into every attempt at that art, even at the best of times, comes baggage.  Old anger, old perspectives, old alliances.  New causes, new relationships, new expectations.  I cannot control what you are experiencing, and I cannot be responsible for it.  I can avoid deliberately incendiary language, deliberate attacks, historically loaded terms and ideas, but beyond that I can't take on the burden of another person's emotional response to what I say and do.  I can avoid knowingly doing things that piss off those around me, and I can be mindful of the effect of my words.  I can let others know how their words affect me; one of the most important truths you can articulate comes in listening, in repeating, in saying "Do you know that this is what I hear you saying?  Do you mean to be saying it?  If you don't, can you help me to understand what you are saying?"

When I speak of 'my truth' I am not speaking of 'The Truth'.  I don't know if 'The Truth' exists or not, or if I would recognise it if it did.  'My truth' is the reality of how the world looks from my place in it.  It's a composite of my perspective and my experiences, my privilege and my struggle.  The things I choose to read and listen to, the friends I select, the influences I bring into my life, all touch on and alter my truth.  My truth doesn't have to be your truth.  Neither do I have to accept that because you are passionate about your truth, I have any obligation to embrace it without challenge.

And when that happens, that challenge?

I will probably offend you.