The Beautiful Backside of God

Yet again, our government has shown itself to be anti-Biblical: for mooning has been made explicitly illegal in the State of Victoria. From the first of July, anyone who pulls down their dacks and bares their bum in public risks two months in jail; if they do it again, they risk six months. And so a great Judaeo-Christian tradition has been outlawed. For, as we just heard, when Moses begs to see God’s face, God refuses. Instead, God announces that God will tuck Moses into a gap in the rock and cover him while God’s glory passes by. Then, when it is safe, God will remove the holy hand and Moses will see the marvellous moon, the beautiful backside of God. Most translations gloss over this glorious glimpse: but mooning is precisely what God does. And yet it has now been made illegal. So much for freedom of religious expression ...

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Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune … is in the good books with God. One of the problems with growing up comfortable and in the church is that it is too easy to think this. For we are the good guys: the right sort of people who never do anything seriously wrong. Insulated by our wealth and our privilege, we glance over at all those ghastly people whose lives are a mess, congratulate ourselves for our nice morals and clean living, and assure ourselves and everyone else that we belong in God’s house. For we are not sinners like them. We never rejected God; we belong in the kingdom. Yet, week after week, in God’s house we hear stories which should challenge our assumptions, and this week is no exception.

Greying, lined, direct, and doing the work of love

Some people I hadn’t seen in a long while came for dinner. “Wow,” said one, “You look so different from when I last saw you. You look so … so … old!”

“Maybe it’s my grey hair?” I suggested.

“Well, yes,” she said, cocking her head to scrutinize my face more closely, “but … it’s also the lines around your eyes.” And then the subject changed and we headed into the kitchen for a drink.

I’ve told the story a few times now, and the response is always the same. “God,” said one friend, “did you poison her dinner?” “What a bitch,” said another. Meanwhile I still think the exchange is hilarious. I do look older than when I last saw her. My hair is turning grey, I do have lines around my eyes. For that matter, I creak when I stand up, my back hurts, my skin is thinning, and hair is beginning to sprout in unfortunate places. So I tell the story because it makes me laugh, and I reckon it’s good to be reminded of my mortality.

I also reckon the story is a good gauge of hospitality. Were my guest’s words such a deadly insult that I should have met them with cold fury? Am I really so needy that everyone must forever pretend that I am young and beautiful? Am I really so important that I should be treated with infinite respect? Well, to all three questions: no, not at all, which is why, when it happened, I laughed. The words weren’t meant as an insult; we don’t need to pretend I am young and beautiful; and I’m not so important that anyone should ever pussyfoot around me and play nice.

Why is plain speaking so rarely acknowledged as a gift? This dinner guest is a dynamo, and has always been blunt. She has spent decades advocating for survivors of sexual abuse, and has regularly crossed swords with the most closed, patriarchal, unresponsive institutions in town. Over time, her words have shaken them up and made them more accountable, and have led to healing processes for survivors. But she has spent so many years talking back to stubborn powerful men on behalf of the marginalised that sometimes she forgets to sugar coat. If that is the price we pay for her to do a heap of thankless, costly, necessary work, then I for one am willing to take it on the chin.

I’m proud to know our dinner guest, glad of her work and plain words, grateful there are people like her in the world. And I’m proud of my grey hair and the lines around my eyes. They’re a record of years lived and babies born and stories told and laughter shared and good work, and she understands this. Like her, I’ve earned my grey hairs, I’ve earned my lines; I don’t need to hide them. And I don’t need my dinner guests to be nice. Instead, I like my guests to be big-hearted people, who are doing the work of love.

Oh Christ, is it you again?

It is possible that I drank too much at dinner on a weeknight. Friends were staying, more friends came to eat, and I had cooked for twelve. And a little boy had died. So there was wine to be poured and stories to be shared amidst food and grief and children and confusion.

It is possible that we all stayed up too late, drinking and talking and shedding a few tears. And then we headed to our beds, leaving the dishes for the morning.

It is possible that I woke with a hangover. My husband had left early for work. I crawled out of bed at 7.30, and crept down the hall to confront the mess. The debris of dinner covered every available surface; even the floor was a rice-scattered mess. My six-year-old was crying, ‘I don’t want to go to school.’ One houseguest stood at the sink, chatting, while his one-year-old clung to his leg, wailing. His three-year-old upended something noisy: no better way to get attention in a very full house. I grimaced and began clearing space to make school lunches.

At twenty-five to eight, there was a knock at the door. I knew that my other houseguest was being picked up for work, and so I ignored it. But then, as I stood there in a holey old singlet and saggy pyjama pants, bags under my eyes, hair standing on end, neither washed nor dressed nor caffeinated, I heard footsteps come briskly down the hall.

There was nowhere to hide.

And into the chaos bounced a bright-eyed woman, smiling, introducing herself, and naming our mutual friends.

A brother came to see a certain hermit and, as he was leaving, he said, 'Forgive me abba for preventing you from keeping your rule.' The hermit replied, 'My rule is to welcome you with hospitality and to send you away in peace' (The Desert Fathers).

I read these and similar stories, and I wonder. Did those monks exercise hospitality with children screaming at their ankles? Did they accept visitors with sinks full of dishes and eyes full of sleep and heads pulsing with hangovers?

Were I a spiritual giant, all vanity conquered and magnificent in my hospitality, I would have reached out my hand to greet this woman, and offered her a coffee. But I am not. Instead, I was a mother in a hurry, grotty, embarrassed, surrounded by chaos and clutter and screeching kids, who needed to get to school. And so I said, ‘I’d be delighted to meet you another time when I’m not in my pyjamas’, and turned my back. There was an awkward silence and a few muttered words, which I ignored, and then the sound of footsteps retreating back up the hall. Magnificent in hospitality? Not quite. Rather, it seems that I am magnificent in my rudeness.

I don’t really know what a spirituality of hospitality looks like for a family woman. We are charged with seeking Christ in the stranger, and welcoming all those who come to our door; but so many of our models and stories are monastic in origin. There is no question that I failed that morning, as I have failed so often. But compared to the humiliations and chaos of family life, I reckon the rigours of monastic life look like a walk in the park. How much easier to welcome someone when one's house is not overflowing with friends and shrieking kids!

So I need to balance the stories of hospitality with other stories: stories of monks who fled deeper into the desert; who closed the doors to their cells and ignored the knocks of visitors. I find comfort that they too could be rude, and abrupt, and ungracious. I need to remember that it is okay to assert some boundaries, to claim a small circle of privacy in the mess, particularly when the mess is caused by hospitality already offered to travellers and grieving friends. And I need to remember forgiveness: I can seek out that person soon, and explain, and apologise.

In any case, even those monks who are masters of hospitality experience ambivalence sometimes. In one of her books, Kathleen Norris tells a story that is close to my heart. A monk, charged with perfect hospitality, sees yet another person heading his way. As they approach, the monk seeks to welcome Christ in the stranger. But he is tired, and his heart sinks, and so he can’t help but mutter, "Oh Christ, is it you again?"

A gift from me to you

My daughter and I were riding down to Carlton on a Saturday morning. Every now and then, as we were riding, I felt a tickle above my left ear. Each time I’d give a quick scratch, trying to set right the choppy piece of hair that was so irritating.

We arrived and parked the bikes. While she went to her dance lesson, I ran errands. An hour later, I picked her up. We got back on our bikes and rode to our favourite café. As we were riding, I felt another little tickle. I scratched. We arrived, parked and locked up our bikes, then went and enjoyed our Saturday chat over coffee and hot chocolate. We went back to our bikes. I unlocked the bikes, put on my helmet, and felt a little tickle. I scratched. And flicked out a cockroach from my hair.

It landed on the footpath in front of half a dozen people, and ran around in dizzy circles while I hopped out of its way, scrubbing at my head and cursing.

My daughter is very kind. Had the situation been reversed, I would have collapsed laughing. She didn’t. Instead, she took a step back, then offered to hold my bike while I shook my helmet and swore and leapt to avoid the cockroach, which had some sort of perverse tracking device which drew it running back towards me over and over again.

This same daughter recently told me that I was indiscreet when we last had head lice. When I found them, I mentioned it to a couple of friends so they could check their kids’ hair. But when one of the mums said, ‘Oh! I thought it was the new shampoo that was making my head itch’, I got the giggles. And then I told lots of people, with great roars of laughter, and my daughter became quite cross. I explained that it was important to laugh at the minor indignities of modern family life. She said I was embarrassing her and her sisters, and I had to stop talking about it.

But now I’ve had a cockroach in my hair. How do I feel? Well, half a dozen strangers and my daughter saw me flick it out of my hair and onto the footpath, then hop around shrieking. I feel slightly humiliated, and sullied and unclean. So I am trying to think about it in terms of how she might feel about head lice. But, ‘You had lice?’ I want to say to her. ‘Well, I had a cockroach! Beat that!’

And actually, I don’t think the cockroach is my fault. So we have occasional roaches? That’s life in a warm city. That one wandered into the crevices of my helmet, then made little forays into my hair, is disgusting, but hardly a moral failing on my part. I find it hard to sympathise with my daughter, who has asked that I never mention head lice again. So we have occasional head lice? That’s life in primary school. That they occasionally make forays into my children’s hair is hardly a moral failing either.

But this is an opportunity to offer up my humiliation as a gift to my daughter, and as an opening to you. So I am telling you about the cockroach, that inch-long light brown glistening beastie, that I flicked out of my hair. I admit that it’s a plan which will probably backfire. When I tell her that I wrote about it she’ll blanch, and say I’m humiliating her all over again. She’s a very kind girl, mature and calm; but she’s also becoming a teenager. And what teenager wants a mother who is known for having cockroaches in her hair? How embarrassing!

Meanwhile you too may blanch and think, what sort of woman has cockroaches in her hair? Isn’t she embarrassed? Well, yes. But that’s the thing about tucking vulnerability into the crevices of stories: one must actually become vulnerable. And even if you blanch and I feel embarrassed I will keep on telling them, because the stories and the vulnerability build bridges which link together you and me.

Yes, this cockroach of mine is a funny sort of gift: a little bit weird, a little bit gross. You are free to ignore it, or to leap out of its way. As with all gifts, I can only offer it. Acceptance is up to you.

This post has been approved by an eleven-year-old.

The State Library and the Great Unwashed

I'm sitting in the State Library reading about public health, but it's hard to concentrate. Something smells, really smells: it is the penetrating odour of the great unwashed.

Stomach-churning tendrils ease their way up my nose and I push my breathing high to bypass the olfactory nerves. I look around, but there is no homeless person to be seen. No dreadlocks, no stained old coats, no sleeper at a desk hinting at the origin of the smell.

Annoyed, I turn back to my book. I have a few hours without my kids, and I'm using the time to learn about health and its relationship to social status; but this stink makes it impossible. How can I concentrate when the room smells of urine and muck? And where is the smell coming from?

I keep reading, and breathing carefully, and furtively looking round. Finally I realise that the person is long gone; only the smell remains. It rises from my chair. As my thighs warm the padded seat, the unleashed odours float upwards.

Revolting.

There are no other seats, and I need to read. My jeans are thick and easily washed, so I curse and turn the page.

There I sit: nice jeans, styled hair, warm leather boots, ethically made t-shirt; my heavy winter jacket is draped over the back of the chair; and I am reading that a poor black man in Washington DC can expect to live 20 less years than a rich white man living a dozen miles up the railway line in suburban Maryland.

As I tut-tut over the dying men of DC, a few real DC faces flash before my eyes. Uri, the lean Russian man who slept on the steps of our church. Miss Rosa, the recipient of a food charity program with whom I often chatted in a putrid stairwell. Melvin, the security guard, shot in the shoulder while patrolling our church car park, an injury so common in his milieu he never thought to mention it to his employers.

What a hypocrite! Here am I with all the money, leisure and opportunity in the world, thinking I have compassion because I will read about the social factors of health; but the latent smell of homelessness makes me outraged. Yet until I recognise that the smell belongs to a real person as individual as Uri, Miss Rosa, or Marvin, and as precious in God's eyes as one of my own children, my readings in public health will be little more than a self-congratulatory exercise; very much worse than useless.

In shame I say a prayer for compassion, inhale deeply, and stay seated.

A little humiliation is good for the soul

I was on my old bike, pulling a trailer heavy with child and labouring uphill when I saw that the council in its wisdom was watering the bike path. Eight rotating sprinklers ensured that two sections of path were being soaked at any given time; yet a sudden veer into the grass would take me straight into another line of sprinklers. The only way was through. I tried to time it to wet only my calves but misjudged a sprinkler’s rotation, and was promptly sodden from my crotch to my knees. I had to ride home looking for all the world like I had wet my pants; even my underwear was soaked.

Some mystics suggest that a little humiliation is good for the soul. It reminds one of one’s place in the world; it punctures one’s pretensions; it keeps one humble.

Lucky me – I am humiliated all the time. Like so many parents, I have generally relied on young children for my daily dose. It began at childbirth – the little poo that came out with the baby – and was quickly matched by the baby’s far greater poonami in a public place that shot up to her shoulder blades and smeared over my hands as I discreetly tried to clean it up. There were so many little episodes: the pregnant woman’s desperate need to pee seventeen times in an hour and the toddler who absolutely must piddle in the gutter right now; the mother screaming at the three year old and the three year old screaming at the supermarket. My oldest daughter was two when she first asked me to ‘dress more stylish’; how humiliating, to be chastened for one’s fashion sense by a person who had recently dangled her plaits in the toilet. I might have looked more chic had I not gone out so many times with a smear of snot on my black-clad shoulder, unseen until I left the house.

It reminds me of a local mum, when she and her husband first left the kids overnight. For the first time in years, she wore a strapless dress and dined at an elegant restaurant with friends. Halfway through the meal, someone pointed to her bare shoulder and asked, ‘What’s that?’. She turned and discovered a parting gift from her children: a louse. Humiliations galore!

Of course, these are only the physical embarrassments that children bring. More toxic, there have been times when my behaviour has been so abominable that I have felt sick with shame. My frustration, my filthy temper, even my violence – and always over the little things – have shown me how frail I am. Without enough sleep, without food at very regular intervals, without a bit of peace and quiet, I am absolutely unbearable – and without children, I might not have learned just how low I can go.

So I am grateful to the kids for the small humiliations, and the ways they have shown me up; and I am grateful to have learned that despite it all, I am loved. Yet the kids are growing up. I get more sleep, less snot and have better learned how to regulate my mood; and the humiliations seem to have dwindled. Am I at risk of being overtaken by pride?

On reflection, whether it’s wobbling on my bicycle and falling in slow motion into the gutter (my six year old laughed so hard she was nearly sick); or eating a rare candy, losing my temper, and having my eight year old ask quietly, ‘Have you eaten sugar?’ – well, I find I am quite able to humiliate myself without the children’s help.

It takes very little to tip me over: a steep camber on a road, a teaspoon of sugar on an empty stomach; clearly, I am unbalanced. It’s embarrassing, but what’s a girl to do other than look in the mirror, recognise the fact, and sigh?

A good humiliation used to make me feel physically ill; I suspect it was because it was so challenging. I had a puffed up ego but was empty inside; to burst the bubble was terrifying. These days, I feel more grounded, more humble. I am beginning to know who I am. I’m no giant, just a little person pottering along close to the earth; I have less distance to fall.

And so humiliation is losing its power over me. These days, I tend to see it as an opportunity. If I am humiliated by my own behaviour, it’s a chance to apologise, and learn. If I am humiliated by something that happened to me, it’s a chance to let go of my sense of self-importance: who am I that I can’t look silly sometimes? Often, I even find myself laughing.

A humble person can’t really be humiliated; and by taking the humiliations on board and letting them break through my pretences bit by bit, I am slowly getting there. Even wet from the crotch down, I wasn’t really embarrassed; instead, I imagined with delight the gales of laughter as I would tell a particular friend. So I think the ancients were right: a little humiliation has been good for my soul.

I was out walking, pondering these things and thinking I should write them down, when a bird anointed my forehead with crap.

(Disclaimer: Of course, this doesn’t mean that humiliating others is ever okay, nor does it mean that one should remain in an abusive relationship where humiliation is the norm. On the one hand, the world provides plenty of humiliating moments without our help; on the other, we do not need to seek out humiliations in some kind of cosmic self-flagellation. But those that do come our way... well, we can use them.)

"Humiliations galore!"

Better an empty house...

 

What do George Bush Sr and I have in common? Well, last week I was staying with friends. Ten of us were sharing a bathroom and, thanks to a raw foods meal heavy on the broccoli, I contracted food poisoning. The chances of the loo being free when I needed to throw up were slim, so my friends gave me a plastic container. Rather disconcertingly, it had measurements marked up the side, which is how I know I threw up almost a litre of broccoli and other raw delights.

I’ve never loved broccoli. Having been nose deep in the scent of partially digested florets for an evening, I’d have to say I like it even less now; and thus George and I finally have something in common.

Presidential comparisons aside, I was completely knocked out, and it took me a good two or three days to recover. As six kids – theirs and ours – swirled around me, I felt so apologetic.

I don’t know how many times I said sorry: for contracting food poisoning, for needing the vomit bowl, for throwing up, for washing the bucket out in their laundry sink, for needing to lie around for a couple of days, for being a bother, for being useless.

I could hear myself apologise again and again, and as I listened to myself I wondered. My friends are good kind gentle people, which is why I love them; and they treated me with a care far beyond the call of duty. They tried to take the bucket from me and empty it; they made it clear that I was to wake them at any time I needed them; they insisted that if I threw up on the bed or floor, they would clean it up. I wasn’t to do a thing other than be sick, and rest.

With such gracious friends, why did I apologise so profusely? Contracting food poisoning is hardly a moral failing. Do I think I am lovable only when I am active, healthy and useful, loading the dishwasher and hanging out washing and taking kids to the beach? Do I fear that my appeal will drop away the instant I reveal myself to be a sick, weak, vulnerable, embodied human being?

Yet it is our embodiment that has built the friendship. We’re not friends because of years of dry intellectual discourse; our friendship is based on walking together and sharing meals. It’s been years of swapping clothes and holding each other’s babies and giving each other a hug now and then; it’s being there for long hours when one of us needs to cry and the other has a safe warm room and some tissues. The very things that have cemented our friendship – our bodies which are flattered by similar clothes, our bodies which love good food, our bodies which walk and talk and relax at the beach – are what make us vulnerable. It is only because we can become bright with wine that we can be bent over by bacteria in our gut.

And I am the same person, well or ill. Better an empty house than a bad tenant, I said late at night, before cleaning out a warm bucket of sick; and, as I apologised for the bad joke, my friends who like me however I come looked directly at me, and laughed.