The banana in my belly

Many of you have heard the news elsewhere, but for those of you who haven’t, here it is: Liesl and I are expecting a little girl in July.

At just about twenty-one weeks, she’s the size of a banana, or an heirloom tomato, or a grapefruit, depending on which week-by-week description you read online.

Our journey to this exciting place has been a long one. We talked about becoming parents early in our relationship, but because of differences in age and temperament, the answer then was “not now.”

Instead we moved from Michigan to an apartment in Anchorage, and Liesl began classes in aviation maintenance. A year later we moved to a house in Eagle River, and then in 2009 we moved to Girdwood, where Liesl had found work as a mechanic.

Then a few years ago, two of my doctors asked, on separate occasions, “Do you want to have children?” This time, our answer was, “Well, maybe.”

Many long conversations later, we were ready to say, “Let’s try.”

As I’m sure you can imagine, “trying” was much less exciting—and much more expensive—than it is for straight, fertile couples. But it has its own magic—the magic of science, I’ve started calling it.

We’ve had wonderful medical care, both here and in Seattle; some of you, when you heard the news, said, “Aha! That explains it. All those trips to the doctor—and visits to Seattle.”

Now that I’ve broken the news here, I hope to write more about this amazing experience of creating a whole new person; holding this secret has contributed, I believe, to my bad case of blogger’s block. At least, that’s what I’ve told myself!

Photo by Robin_24

Blogging out loud

I find myself wanting to explain what it’s like to grow up as a conservative Evangelical woman and how difficult the transition into leadership is from that place. . . . We were told to keep silent in church. . . . To go from “you must be silent” to finding your voice can be a long, arduous process.    ––Carol Howard Merritt

With this post, my blog takes a leap forward. This weekend I enabled the setting that will share my posts on my Facebook wall.

It has taken me a long time to find the courage to take this seemingly small step.

When I started blogging, I disguised or omitted details that might help people figure out who “Nagoonberry” was. I felt compelled to write––like ministry, it’s an inescapable calling for me. But I didn’t want to publicly claim Nagoonberry‘s words as my own.

I worried about how my parents would react if they found my blog. They are Plymouth Brethren, and I am a Unitarian Univeralist. They believe in loving the sinner, but hating the sin, and I am the sinner. They worry that I’m going to hell; I don’t believe in hell (other than those we create). Our relationship is complicated and strained, fragile.

I wanted to protect Liesl’s privacy, too. She works in an industry that’s not known for being progressive and open-minded.

Then Kenneth Sutton asked me to freelance for UU World. I could have accepted his invitation while remaining anonymous here.  In the end, it felt more straightforward to let UU World readers know that Nagoonberry was my personal blog.

Liesl has become increasingly comfortable with being part of Nagoonberry, and with being reasonably “out” at work.  I think she believes some version of “those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

This summer I resolved my fears about my family finding my blog. I’ve finally figured out that in relationships worth having, we share our true selves, not sanitized proxies.

The fears that remain are part of the arduous process Carol Howard Merritt describes. Most writers wrestle with an inner critic who says, “No one wants to hear what you have to say.”  For those of us who grew up with the admonition, “Let your women keep silence in the churches,” the struggle to trust our voices is exponentially more difficult.  Pieces of that history linger, long after we’ve found ourselves in positions of leadership, even after becoming ordained ministers, preaching out loud, in public.

In the end, I decided that writing without intentionally trying to reach an audience is not all that different from sitting in a Plymouth Brethren meeting room, my head covered and my ideas silenced because I am a woman.

So hello, Facebook friends.  I’m Heather Christensen, and I blog at Nagoonberry.

We thought Harold Camping was a liberal

Every once in a while something happens to remind me of just how strange my religious childhood was.

We didn’t have a television.  We listened to Yankee games on the radio.  I remember at least one year in the 80′s we listened to the Super Bowl on the radio.  And we listened to Family Radio.  Every Saturday morning we tuned in for Big Jon and Sparkie.  The dramatic stories on Unshackled were another favorite.

The president of Family Radio is Harold Camping.  That Harold Camping.  The one predicting the end of the world as we know it, the Rapture, on May 21.

But here’s the thing.  We thought Harold Camping was a liberal.  We (a sub-group of the Plymouth Brethren) were the faithful remnant.  Harold Camping was part of “Christendom,” which had sold its soul.  Camping’s salvation was questionable.

I’m a long way from home.

For so the children come

Within the last year I learned of a UU tradition of linking Christmas with dedicating infants and young children.  Our theology, however diversely we articulate it, teaches us that the divine spark lives in all of us, and so the birth of each child is an opportunity to celebrate incarnation.

This past Sunday we celebrated a Rachel Sabbath, which focuses on improving maternal health and universal access to family planning.  Our middle hymn, from Singing the Journey, was “For So the Children Come:”

The chorus began: Each night a child is born is a holy night: A time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshipping. Each night a child is born is a holy night.

Cool, I thought.  This must be what some UU congregations sing at Christmas when they’re dedicating babies.

But then the narrator read the words to the first verse:  For so the children come, and so they have been coming, always the same way they come, born of the seed of a man and a woman.

My heart fell into my stomach.  Always the same way they come?  Born of the seed of a man and a woman?  How did these words that sound like a bumper sticker on a right-winger’s car  find their way into a recently-published UU hymnal?

I recovered a bit during the second verse, but then came the third:  Fathers and mothers–sitting beside their children’s cribs–feel glory in the sight of new life beginning.

Sure, this image doesn’t have to read as exclusively one father and one mother at each crib.  But after the first verse’s jolt, it felt that way.

I spoke to our minister about it after the service, and she said that she’d noticed the language, too, as we were singing it.

In 2005 when Singing the Journey was published, one writer could say, without irony, “This is an impressive piece of writing even now, but especially for the time in which it was written. There isn’t a phrase or a sentence that seems out of date, even today.”  He was speaking of the same Fahs text, this time used as a reading in the older Singing the Living Tradition hymnal.

Five years and four months later, some Fahs’ words are now outdated in congregations where children do not always come in the same way.  Where members have wrestled painfully with the fact that it’s not as simple as “seed of man plus seed of woman.”  Where our children our children often have two moms, or two dads, or one parent, or adopted parent, or foster parents, or live with their grandparents, etc.

The times they are a changing.  How do we invest our resources in these changing times?  In printed hymnals, expensive to produce, expensive to replace?  Or in more flexible formats, ones that allow us to pivot, and move in a new direction when old words are hurtful rather than helpful?

I’m not against hymnals.  Far from it.  I love the comfort of familiar words sung again and again over time, gathering memories as we sing them.  I guess I’m arguing for sustainability–and not just saving trees by not printing hymnals.  We need to invest in media that reflect our living tradition, that support our singing along the journey into the future.

Lucky in Love

Coming to terms with spinal cord injury is a life-long endeavor.  Lately I’ve noticed that my partner is talking about it simply as being unlucky–no one to blame, no need to find a reason why it happened.  Just unlucky.

But we’ve also been talking lately about ways in which she’s been really lucky.

She was lucky that her mom is a disciplined, detail-oriented person who taught her the excellent self-care habits that have served her well through 30 years of paralysis.

She was lucky to meet a teacher who joined forces with her mother to fight the public school system for the things she needed as a student–things like making sure the sidewalks were plowed in the winter.  Her mother and this teacher were my partner’s most faithful cheerleaders, telling her repeatedly, “Yes, you can.”

And more recently she has been lucky enough to find a master aircraft mechanic who was able to imagine that someone with paraplegia might actually be an excellent mechanic, who decided to give her a chance, and who was willing to learn from her about what it’s like to live life in a chair.

This is her boss last Sunday.  He crawled into the laundry closet on top of the dryer, reaching down to the bottom of the dryer to attach the gas line, and up to the ceiling to attach the dryer vent.  I didn’t get a photo of him leaping out nimbly from behind the washer (before we stacked the dryer on top).

We also had heavy lifting help from a new neighbor who has become a very good friend.  My partner doesn’t feel comfortable with very many people–the result of a lifetime of being treated badly by people who can’t handle the chair.  But this new friend is someone she has trusted from the moment she met him, and he and his wife have become treasured friends.

Lucky in love, indeed.