Maddie has joined Art Every Day Month along with me, so today we decided to combine our artist endeavours with our commitment to being book fairies for Christine Mason Miller’s 100 Books Project. The result was a delightful “book fairy photo walk”.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upWG-nUlq3E&hl=en&fs=1&]
Our deepest fear
is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
(Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure
around you.)
We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fears,
our presence automatically liberates others.
– Marianne Williamson.
This quote has been on my mind a lot lately. I think I am afraid of my own power.
For the last several months, I’ve been thinking that I wanted to do something “fearless” at the end of this year and in my dreams that meant quitting my job and jumping into self-employment.
But then some things happened. I took an online break for awhile to re-examine what I really wanted. I pushed past some of the stuff that had been blocking me at work. I took charge a little more. I got a little more creative at work. I read a book called “How Remarkable Women Lead” and realized that I truly do love leadership and would miss it if I weren’t doing it any more.
It started to dawn on me that my desire to leave my current position was not really about being more fearless, it was about running away from fear. You see, I have a whole bunch of big opportunities at work right now – new staff to hire, a big new social marketing strategy (and a budget to go with it) – and deep down, it was scaring the crap out of me. It was calling me to move into a whole new level of leadership and (especially given the fact that I was dealing with some dysfunction issues on my team and 2 people quitting, as well as some frustrations with a consultant) I was quite sure I was going to fall flat on my face. It was more pressure than I’d ever felt as a leader, because now I was having to prove to the board that what I’d proposed and got funding and approval for was the right direction for this organization to take, even if most of my team members (and some board members, truth be told) were not standing behind me.
I’m still quaking in my boots, and I still might fall flat on my face, but you know what? I think I can do this. I think I have more leadership ability than I thought.
Trusting your own instincts, being bold in the face of resistance, risking failure and disgrace – it’s all really quite scary. I still have so much to learn about fearlessness.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have a clean, organized house,
I’m not one to ask for directions very easily, but I do rely heavily on maps. I like to figure out my own way of getting places, and don’t really like admitting when I’m lost. Every once in awhile, though, the road maps have their limitations and the only thing we can do is turn to someone who has prior knowledge of the area to point the way. One way or another, I find some wisdom to help find my destination.
When it comes to parenting right now, it feels like we have neither road-maps nor wise advisors. So much is changing so quickly in our world that there really aren’t any more experienced parents who’ve dealt with many of the issues we’re dealing with. I was a farm girl raised without a television, and now I’m raising city kids in an era in which they have more Facebook friends than were resident in my small town. When I was in high school, to do a computer exercise, you filled out a stack of cards with pencil marks in little circles. (Yes, I really am that old.) The output came in the form of a mile-long paper printout that took 30 minutes to print. Now my kids can take pictures with a computer they hold on their laps and put together elaborate videos and post them for all the world to see. When I was growing up on the farm, we had one phone in the house and we were on a party line. If a neighbour was on the phone, we had to wait our turn. Now my kids can not only send text messages instantly to their friends from the car, the mall, or wherever they are, but they can take pictures of themselves and share those in an instant.
When it comes to areas of faith, it’s not much different. One might say “well, just go to the ancient texts (ie. the Bible, for those of us who are Christian) – they are timeless road maps for all of life, including parenting.” But the problem with that is that the way of interpreting the Bible that my parents used isn’t entirely relevant for me anymore either.
This weekend, I heard Phyllis Tickle talk about The Great Emergence. She believes that every 500 years or so, culture goes through a huge shift, where very little that we believed in the past is relevant anymore. It starts with a shift in science, and with that comes a shift in the way that we approach faith. The last shift was the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago. First it was a discovery that the world was not flat, and then came a realization that if the world is not flat, then heaven and hell cannot be as clearly delineated as “above” and “below”. And if the world is not flat, then perhaps there are other things scientists have not been telling us. Perhaps that means there are things that our spiritual leaders have not been telling us either, so maybe it’s time to educate ourselves in scripture rather than rely on the church’s interpretation. That led to massive growth in the numbers of people who were learning to read, primarily because Luther and his cohorts introduced the idea of turning to scripture as the authority rather than the church. (I realize I’m talking primarily about Christianity, but Tickle suggests that these 500 year shifts are also apparent in Judaism and Islam and perhaps other faiths as well.) Hence the Protestant church was born.
Now, 500 years later, we have been faced with another significant shift in the scientific “truths” that we accept. Things like the theory of relativity, quantum physics, space travel, and the introduction of computer technology have dramatically changed how we view the world and our place in it. With that, says Tickle, comes another shift in the way we approach faith. If a human body is less literal than we once believed it was, and we can break it down even beyond the molecular structure to energy and strands of dna, then perhaps scripture can no longer be interpreted as literally as it once was either. Metaphor and narrative are becoming much more relevant. The “rules” of how we do church and how we interpret the world that many of us were raised with no longer fully apply.
Which brings me to parenting. My faith has shifted significantly since I was a child. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s my reality. I just can’t interpret scripture the same way I was taught in Sunday School, and I can’t give my children the same answers I got. Sometimes I wish I could (it would make life easier), but I can’t. It just doesn’t make sense to me to accept traditional teaching on issues such as women in leadership, loving same sex relationships, etc. I don’t even know what to do with “I am the way the truth and the life” and “no one comes to the Father but by me” when I see so much beauty and value and apparent access to a loving God in other faith traditions (not to mention creativity in the way God communicates with people).
That doesn’t mean that I don’t have faith in a triune God – it just means that it’s shifted. When I listen to Phyllis Tickle talk, I recognize that I am not alone in this shift. It’s happening to a significant number of people who are disgruntled with the traditional church and are just waiting for Luther to nail his thesis to the door.
But in the meantime, I need to parent, and parenting means trying to instill wisdom in our children. Sometimes I feel like all I have to add to their questions are more questions instead of answers. I don’t have a road map and I can’t pretend to them that I do. All I can do is muddle through and hope that we all emerge successfully (whatever “success” looks like).
(Note: This is a really rough paraphrase of Phyllis Tickle’s talk – to learn more, you can read the book. If you ever get a chance to hear her talk, do it – she is one of the most brilliant and engaging presenters I have ever heard.)
This is why I haven’t gotten much sleep this week. The green egg, milk, and oreos costumes are all from this year and the Tootsie Roll and elephant are from years past. (I’m happy to be able to share my old costumes with my lovely little niece – at least they’re still being put to good use!) And in case you’re wondering, Marcel didn’t go out as oreo cookies – he was just modeling it for the picture.
I can’t take responsibility for the green ham – that would be my talented friend Jo-Anne.