Holy Impatience (otherwise known as the Ankle Monologues)

Last week, in a burst of courage, I emailed my doctor saying "don't you think my ankle is taking, oh, well, just a little bit too long in healing? It having been a year already?" and he emailed back "yes" and within an hour a podiatrist called me saying "could you come in for an appointment in an hour?"
(Kaiser Permanente definitely has the internal communications down pat. Thumbs up for that, KP!)

So I went in, trembling, and grateful that I hadn't had more than a minute or two to think about what might actually be wrong with my ankle. Because, well, my ankle was last year's problem - I was done learning from that mistake. Sometime last winter the physical therapist dismissed me to self-scheduled aftercare, and said it'll be slow but sure. So I filed "ankle" in the back of my brain, settled into the self-abnegating practice of Holy Patience, and simply postponed everything I wanted to do, like hiking Mt. Bald, and Mt. Tam, and Tennessee Valley, and the AIDS walk.

I'd learned a lot of spiritual lessons, of course, like grace and humility and new priorities. So many lessons, in fact, that my ankle seemed to be, by now, not much more than a collection of Ideas and Learnings, of Humblings and Challenges. The ankle had ceased to be anything much like an ankle. I no longer thought of it in terms of leaps, or turns, or waltzes, or climbs. I'd even stopped thinking of it in terms of ligaments or tendons, strength or stretch.

It took some good friends and family members to gently push me and say, basically, "you deserve to have a working ankle." I went ahead and emailed the doctor, all but assuming he would answer "You're not spiritual enough. Practice patience." So it was scary when he agreed - "yes you deserve a working ankle."

My ankle is Not Okay, and if the steroid treatment doesn't loosen scar tissue, I could need surgery. That's scary.

What's scarier is to think about how quickly I shut myself up, shut myself off, denied myself the hope of a healthy ankle, and sanctified it under the name of the virtue - Holy Patience.
Impatience is holy too. Check out some psalms. That's the virtue I need to practice today. Today I need to push, demand, stand up for myself, and stop apologizing for the air I breathe. I need to know that I am good enough to deserve healing, and that, being a paying KP member, I am entitled to a doctor's care. Maybe I'll even get brave enough to ask God for some healing, although I'll have to get over the hurdle of wanting not to take up God's precious time.

Today I invite you to take a look at whatever it is you consider a virtue... and wonder about its counterpart. Could the opposite be a virtue, too? Patience - Impatience. Humility - Pride. Diligence - Playfulness.
I wonder....

Eco-nut

I'm feeling hedged in, a bit. Partly I think it's a case of Nature Deficit Disorder. Normally during this time of year I cope with the shortened hours of the day by spending plenty of time well-bundled up and working up a sweat on the hiking trails... but my ankle is still healing and it's hard to keep warm when you only go about 1.5 mph. I have a longer leash, now that I can walk nearly 1/2 mile per day, but that doesn't quite do the trick.

Partly, though, it's the seminarian's conundrum: so much thinking, so little action! Our ethics class (on food systems) read Animal Vegetable Miracle together and I am practically hopping up and down with the pent-up desire to DO the local-eating, mad-farmer-for-fun thing, but hopping is hard on one foot, and gardening is hard work too, and I'm barely finding the time to keep my basil plants trimmed.

On Sunday I preached yet another incarnation of my manna sermon, going off script to tell stories from last summer's Presbyterian Hunger Program Roadtrip. I compared the US' food system to Egypt and the food movement (an amalgam of the locavore-gleaner-community-gardening set) to the Hebrew people setting out into the wilderness. I want it too. I want OUT of the enslavement of Egypt, the cheap bad food that's poisoning us. I want to no longer have any complicity in the enslavement of my immigrant brothers and sisters in unspeakable field labor conditions, or in the dumping of cheap corn on the international market, destroying traditional agriculture worldwide.
But it's nice in Egypt, because my food is delivered to me by the industrial food complex. It's convenient. I don't have to get my hands dirty. So i'm still here, idly wondering when I'll get around to getting the heck out.

What's interesting is how much my ethics professor's prodding DOESN'T affect my desire to get out of Egypt. She writes long lists of things we should feel guilty about on the board, and I get stubborn and reactive and dig my heels in. Don't you dare try to guilt-trip me out of my time-honored ways. When I leave, I'm running not away from guilt but toward a better life. When I leave, I'm leaving for love and joy.

Still on crutches?

Five & 1/2 months ago, in a liturgical dance rehearsal, I tore a ligament in my ankle. I've been the butt of many a joke since then but it's finally starting to work a bit better. I do half an hour of physical therapy a day, ride a bike daily for 6 minutes exactly, and sometimes I walk without crutches. I have a cane, a very stylish little thing, and tap around with that sometimes. I walk slowly around the house, completely unaided. But I've never made it to school without crutches. The one block walk up a hill is just too far to manage. So every day I continue to receive oh-so-sympathetic comments, mostly along the line of "I can't believe you're still on crutches!"
Believe it, people.
But I don't want to complain. It may feel ridiculous, but my recovery is only a little bit slower than scheduled. We're moving forward. Mountains (or at least big hills) are in my list of goals for the end of 2010.

And other than the stretch-before-dancing lesson, I've learned a lot of other important things from the experience. For example a bit of patience, and not being ashamed of asking for help. Priorities, too. At least for the first few months, the crutches slowed me down so much that there were just not enough hours in the day to do all the things I wanted to. So you decide. What's important? I move slower now... I take my time. I used to bounce everywhere, and bounce off walls in the meantime, and I can't really do that anymore. I asked a friend what the difference felt like to her and she said "it's easier to connect with you when you're not jumping up and down." Point taken. It's also easier for me to connect to things myself. I went to the beach last weekend, and between concentrating on the difficult work of walking on sand and bugging my friend to slow down to my pace, I found the time to notice the sand beneath my feet. That sand was frikking beautiful. Not just a PT exercise, it's amazing, colorful, pebbly stuff, and different from any other beach. They say when one sense is taken away, the others sharpen. When speedy/unencumbered motion is taken away, perhaps, the looking-listening-paying ATTENTION parts of me get strengthened.
So I've been richly blessed. And am willing to keep waiting. But I have my eyes on the prize, and won't stop pressing forward... I WANT TO SKIP AND JUMP!

size doesn't matter, but what about position?

Tomorrow I'll be performing my liturgical dance in class. I'll give you a beat for that to sink in, because if you've seen me recently, you've admired my pretty blue crutches and my intimidating medical boot. It's been two weeks since my injury, and a slow healing.
But yes, tomorrow I'll be performing a solo dance. From a seated position.

The first Sunday of these weeks of injury, I sang in choir seated (while the rest of the choir stood). That felt ridiculous, so ever since, when I sing, I've been standing up on crutches. Tiresome, a little wobbly, but there is just something you lose when you sit down. A little volume and power, and a lot of the sense of actually being there.

I practiced a sermon (Fallen Grapes, below) in a chair and just about boiled with frustration... for a couple of reasons. One is expressive. You can't lean, sway, or get up on your toes for an important point when you're seated. The other is a funny thing about authority. Think about it -- in most churches the preacher is elevated, either theater-style on a stage, or medieval-style in a pulpit. In some cases you are as high as five or six feet above the congregation (in cathedrals, even more). They do this to you because they believe something in your words will be out of the ordinary, even divine, and worthy of greater attention. When you are face-to-face on a level plain, there is no such implicit expectation.
When I preached in class I asked for a stool, and someone scoured the building and found me one. This way I was able to preach from the pulpit -- for which I was grateful. It was exactly the same height as I would be standing, but somehow it still limited me. I stood up on one foot for the last minute of the sermon, possibly frightening my more anxious classmates. I had to -- there was too much energy coursing through me, and like electricity it needed to be grounded to the floor, and reach up to the sky.

Dancing while seated will be an interesting adventure. Apparently (and ahead of time, mind you), I inspire my classmates. If I can do this awkward task, they feel they can get over their hesitations and just dance. I'm hoping I will be able to "just dance" myself, forgetting all the turns and leaps I've left out of the choreography, forgetting what is not and focusing on what is -- hands, arms, back and head are all working perfectly well. I have to let whatever dance (or sermon, or poem) I have within me have its place, even when the legs don't cooperate.

Number one comment I get about my singing is... "such a big voice from such a little body!" I like surprising people with that. And usually I use body language and position to extend the Authority and Presence that my tiny body doesn't give me naturally.
But it is hard to be made even smaller than I am, not in body but in position, by being sat down when I want to stand, by having crutches in my hands that keep me from gesturing, by slowly slowly hopping places instead of striding confidently. I guess I have to be even more hidden, more secret, and hopefully more surprising, as I lose the external supports and only have the core of the message that I bring.

Dancing with Broken Bodies

On Saturday I was out in the driveway, rehearsing a dance project for my Liturgical Dance class. The project is to be a dance for Pentecost. I have created a set of red/orange/yellow flags to whirl around as if the Spirit descending in tongues of flame, and I was enraptured by their motion through the air. Looking up at the flags in the early evening light, I neglected my lower appendages, twisted my ankle, and tore a ligament.

The irony in this situation is incredible. I gave a minor speech in class and have been writing a paper on my purpose in the dance project: to display the beauty of the Body of Christ via the unity of dance.
I have several elders of my church in mind, who through hip replacements, arthritis, or plain old deterioration are no longer to participate fully in the liturgy of the church. Our worship involves a choir processional and recessional, and a few cases of standing up and sitting down, but there are elders who cannot participate in even these simple movements. In honor of them, I wanted to choreograph a dance that we could all participate in from any position, whether seated or fully moving around the room. I (as lead dancer) would begin the dance very simply with arm movements, and as the dance progressed I would slowly incorporate more and more of my own body into the motions, until side by side we would have healthy and young bodies dancing freely alongside older and broken bodies, and all in the same spirit lifting our prayers to God.

The thing is, I expected to be the "youthful and energetic body" in this scenario.

Now it seems I will dance my way through my own healing process. Today, I'm doing the arm movements from a chair. In a few days I may do them standing still. By Pentecost I may be able to pick up the fire-flags and let them fill the air with the sound of a mighty wind... but I will probably have a big black plastic boot on my foot as I do so.
Where I thought I was preparing this dance in order to tell OTHER people that they should honor the inherent beauty and dignity in their own bodies, broken though they may be, I suppose I can take a taste of my own medicine, slowly relishing the little bit of motion i DO have in my foot, and perhaps allowing someone else to be the dancer who, with whole and full body (although all of us are in some way broken) takes our prayers into the flags, the flames of the Spirit. It doesn't matter who carries our prayers to God; they are carried, by any vessel no matter how broken.

“...we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 4:7).
After my recent humblingexperience of emptiness (see: preaching) ... I figure I ought to trust the process.