When church and the yoga studio are kind of the same place

Worry not. You didn't miss anything. I'm not going all Eastern religion on you. Sometimes I go to church on a Saturday (actually, I always go to church on Saturday, who am I fooling? I am married to the Jim Bob Duggar of Korean Adventists. Saturday morning, a-churching we will go!). Then I go to yoga on Sunday. And the church and the yoga studio? I've realized they are not so distinct from the other.

Yoga starts and it is hot as all get out. That's the point. You get all sweaty betty and your muscles loosen and hey! look! You're contorted like a seahorse, you flexy lexi!

Church can be equally steamy, or it's freezing cold. There is never a happy medium at church, have you noticed this? Either your make-up is melting off your face and the choir is passing out under its robes or you are shivering your tochis off and you no longer wonder why elderly women always wear seven cardigan sweaters on top of one another in July. It's because they spend so much time grocery shopping and at church. Which are also the same thing: the frozen food aisle and church.

Once you get into the yoga routine, you are trying mightily to keep your third eye open, and I don't even know what that really means, other than the yoga instructors always say it when we're supposed to Be Mindful and Have Awareness. Awareness of how many women in the studio are wearing lululemon athletica and how I'm wearing Target yoga pants from 2001? Oh sorry, not that?

Everyone knows church is a fashion show. It will always be a showcase. The hats, the bags, the shoes, the dresses. I have nothing new to contribute to this, other than that I've lived in four different regions of the country: Midwest, Midatlantic, New England, Southeast and it is all the same. Except in the Midwest. People sometimes wear sneakers (white! ghastly!) to church and that is pure blasphemy in the South.

By the time we're really into the vinyasa flow of the yoga class, the instructor will say something like, "Yoga is all about showing up. You show up for your practice and that is enough." I always internalize this because this is often the point in the class when I do a faceplant onto my mat after attempting crow or eagle and then I remember I'm not a flying species. So I can hear the yoga teacher offering these platitudes for the class while totally looking straight at me (maybe with her third eye?), like, Hey girl. Points for trying.

Back when I was a reluctant churchgoer in the Haus of Catholicism, my old man told me that once I made my first communion, I had to go to church every week. And that happened. Every week for a long lot of years. You pretty much had to be hit by a stray bullet to get a church pass when I was growing up. When I got to college, I still went to church. I can't say for sure if it was the Catholic guilt or if it was what my dad said, about having reached a part in my life where I was grown up enough to have to do something like go to church on a weekly basis. I'd like to think that somewhere I've always believed that we gain a blessing just by showing up. Sometimes our church practice, like our yoga practice, is just lazy and sloppy and tired. Sometimes we're feeling strong and secure in our pew or on our mat and we're smiling even when the sermon or the vinyasa runs a little long or gets a tad repetitive. Showing up. It takes courage, doesn't it? For church where we sing and sit and listen and pick the play-dough out of the carpet that we foolishly brought thinking it would occupy our children when really it is occupying our time in the wrong way. For yoga we sit and bend and starfish out next to the guy who is sweating out the garlic he ate for lunch.

Church and yoga studios are, for all appearances, neat and tidy places. But they are in the business of doing very messy work. We sit on parallel seats, be they pews or mats, and we try to stay quiet except for when we're not meant to be quiet, as with singing or heavy breathing. We follow our cues like good little boys and girls but then the past week's stresses come pouring out, sometimes without warning. Something strikes us as true in a sermon or something pinches a muscle that we overexerted this week and the real messy stuff comes uninvited. And yet, this is precisely where it should be.

Because beyond the climate control and fashion show and the whole attendance policy is this sacred space where hurts are dealt with and minds are allowed to focus or run wild and people grapple with the eternal and the right now.

At the end of a yoga class, the yogis bow with their third eye and utter a Namaste. Sometimes they clap. Good job. I've been enriched by you practicing alongside me. Even if your lululemon swag offends me with its cuteness and your sweat is now all over my mat.

At the end of a church service, we usually close the service with a blessing and a song. The difference I see is that the work was not just about what happened here in the service, but ultimately, about what Jesus did for us; this worship was just a response to that glorious sacrifice, that eternal expression of perfect love.

We all need our sacred spaces where we feel a sense of predictable and orderliness but aren't afraid to deal with the untidy business of life, either. The most important part, in my view, is that we be changed by the sacred, that we not file the experience away as another class, another worship service.

I want always to be changed because of what Jesus changed for this world and by what He is preparing for us in the next. I strive to be changed by showing up, no matter the weather inside or out, and no matter what I'm wearing on the outside or what's happening to me on the inside.

Change me, Lord. That this little body might be something of its own little sacred space. Hot and cold, strong and weak, fancy and sloppy, totally neat and one giant mess in need of your grace.

That Half a Doughnut Girl

I want you to think I am That Half a Doughnut Girl. I want you to believe that I would be that person that skates by the box of doughnuts in the workplace kitchen, pauses, and then says in a lilting voice, "Oh, how nice! Who brought doughnuts?" Because I want you to believe that I would pause for long enough to appreciate a doughnut doughnation to the workplace. And that I wouldn't just bust open that box faster than you can say Hot n' Fresh Krispie Kreme and maul that glazed pastry like a barracuda tearing through its prey. I would so like to impress you as someone that would think of others in the workplace and would only cut myself half a doughnut and LEAVE THE OTHER HALF right there. I wouldn't even have to THROW THE OTHER HALF AWAY so far down below the three months of maggot-infested yogurt and coffee-ground compost so she wouldn't end up eating it later. I would just have the willpower to do that and not mow my way through a whole row of soft pastry. My lands, why are doughnuts so delicious and evil? And further, why do I struggle still after these twirty two years to want people to think me something I am not. Because I am anything but a half-a doughnut girl. I'm more like a two and a half doughnut girl. And then I am the girl who wakes up the next morning with a wicked stomachache but runs a 5K anyway, while watching re-runs of the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" on the treadmill, laughing out loud at the gym, not really caring that I am That Girl Who Laughs Out Loud at the Gym because--Will Smith. Such a multi-dimensional comic actor. I am also the girl who forgets people's birthdays, who doesn't always make great pains to recycle, who can never get her eyeliner quite straight.

The girl who can't walk away from eating the whole doughnut might not be struggling, however. This is what I'm learning more and more. Sometimes the person who spells the word definitely with an 'A' isn't struggling with this. Not at all. Even though she spells it wrong like that every.single.time and drives us spelling superiors to throw bananagrams at her head. It's just not a struggle for her. At least not now it's not. Because what I'm discovering is that girlfriend might be wrestling with her Creator over much deeper issues, over matters that are buried much more inextricably in the heart. Sometimes we want to impose the priority of a struggle on someone else, to rank for a brother what he should be learning to make right first when he's busy about making a whole different sort of amends. We are all dancy-prancing around the fact that overweight bro should maybe really consider trying paleo because, you know, it worked for someone else who was struggling with carbs "just as bad."

Who do we buncha doughnut eaters think we are?

I own the whole doughnut girl inside of me. I know she can do better, eat better, build up her willpower muscles. I can't exorcise every demon at once, though. God's working with me and He has his hand over me, this I know for sure. Oftentimes, He's working to remind me that He's doing the same with others and their half-a-doughnut boys and girls inside, too.

He's not done with me yet, and for this I am so so thankful.

Strange pilgrimage

A couple of weeks ago, our scooter had died its ninth death and we were back to being a one-car family so we all dropped Loverpants off at work. I didn't have a plan and with a full day ahead in the company of two children who would gladly hook their veins up to the Netflix drip for hours, I needed to take them somewhere. Loverpants' office is south of where we live, so we just sort of kept driving south. I ran one of those desperate ambiguous searches on the GPS, and every local attraction we had covered, thoroughly, with ample proof from the gift shops.

Up popped "Depot Railroad Museum," a mere 30 mile drive in Stevenson, Alabama. Because, unknown town in the deep South that celebrates a heritage of the railways?  That might be really fun, or scary, but no way could it be boring.

We got off the exit in Stevenson and I can't explain the questions I was trying to reconcile while my children went uncharacteristically quiet in the backseat. When abject poverty is thrust in front of you, you might do what I do which is be absolutely overcome with curiosity and denial.  When I come across places in America that have not only been forgotten but battered and left behind like an old dog, I am as interested in the story here as I am wanting to wish it away, wanting to refuse to believe that people in my own country, people who are my neighbors to the south are pushed this far to the margins. We are not talking just the occasional busted sofa on the porch but whole roofs collapsed and trailer park after poorly tended trailer park with signs that children, maybe even many children, live there.

I search myself. Like the simple explanation for all of this is tucked away inside of me and I can look at the boarded up windows of businesses and not only understand it, but explain it away. Just as I did when my mom drove us to St. Augustine's hunger center once a month and we served the same people month after months for years, oftentimes people wearing the same clothes, and the same long, tired faces. My childhood assessment had this poverty thing all boiled down, tied up neat with a bow. The world, this city, this church just needed more food and more jobs helps and more people who cared, and maybe a few more mops to scrub all the dirt from the floors. Nevermind the systemic forces of addiction, recidivism, violence and abuse that cycle through generations and plow plow plow through communities whose voices are muffled, whose housing is redeveloped, whose very existence is terribly inconvenient to someone like me, someone who wants so badly to reduce this down to something of an aphorism so that it doesn't make me feel so dang uncomfortable.

***

I want to teach my children that uncomfortable is rarely a negative, and so often it is the only feeling that prompts real and sustainable change.

***

The railroad museum in Stevenson, Alabama was hilarious and beautiful and impossible to capture. It resides right next to train tracks and a historic hotel (now function hall) that rattle and shake as the train passes by.

Stevenson, Alabama shook me up, too. The Main Street is a wide boulevard whereby one could shoot a canon in the middle of the day and not fear for hitting anyone or anything, save for the occasional delivery truck to the lone furniture store. Up and down the side streets are decrepit houses, rusted out trucks parked on lawns. I want to know more and I want to unknow what I already knew.

Our trip to Alabama was the last day before school began for Baby Girl. I had hoped to have done something significant that would sparkle in her memory like a well-crafted scrapbook page. Instead, we took a tour of what was effectively the dusty high school yearbook of Stevenson High School, class of 1919.

Then I thought, I really hope my kids remember this day, and not necessarily in a good way ("Wow, Mom was such a nutter! She took us on the craziest field trips!") or bad way ("Wow. Mom was such a nutter. She took us on the craziest field trips.") I just want them to remember that they had fun and ate junk food with their mom when they were little, but also that they explored and asked questions and did the unexpected, but not the insignificant.

***

Over the weekend Baby Girl said, "I really want to go back to that place in Alabama where we explored. We should go back and see that train museum sometime."