On age, wine, a nun’s cell, and what is it to leave

I am writing this post from a nun’s cell at the Mary and Joseph Retreat center just south of Los Angeles. There is a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a sink, a night table and a lamp. I have also had several glasses of wine, from various bottles, all of them an unchilled white.

I have spent the last hour or so in conversation with four ministers, all of who are under 40, perhaps even under 35. This is an anomaly for me as a professional. In my Tuesday morning staff meetings I am joined by a woman in her late 40’s, two women in their 50’s, another in her 60’s and one in her 80’s. I am 24 and a Director of Religious Education.

After discussing veganism and radical culture and the pros and cons of having a pulpit to literally preach form (as well as the elephant in the room), I found myself discussing age, and how I make it a problem. Initially I thought the church would accuse me of my youth, and while that has happened from time to time, it is more a problem of me thinking I am not capable, with my shield of incompetence being my age.

What is it that makes us feel fraudulent?

Is it our age, our experience, our chosen path, our peers, our profession, our dreams – as we have lived or denied them?

I haven’t smoked a cigarette since Sunday evening, I haven’t watched TV since Sunday night. I have been eating yogurt and ice cream but not eggs or meat. For two days I have awaken to clouds and a light rain. I have used the internet once since Monday morning (today is Wednesday night) and I will not use it again until tomorrow night. Those around me remind me of my uncle, my mother, my middle school crush. The clock on my computer is stuck in a time zone that keeps this reality in the past.

What is it to leave the world in which we live?

What is it to tomorrow, leave here?

On my way to…

Later this morning I head off to Palos Verdes, California for the Winter Retreat of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) and the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) of the Pacific Southwest District (PSWD). (I included all those lengthy titles and their acronyms to give you a flavor of the world I work in.)

The program topic for the retreat is trauma response, an area where I am always glad to gain more resources and knowledge. And while it will be nice to have the opportunity to process this topic within the space of a retreat center and its gardens, I find myself wondering – trauma response? What kind of a retreat does that make for?

Leading up to this trip I have been thinking some about work, and how we care for ourselves during times of rest. I work in a church and am strongly considering entering the ministry some years down the road. Several years ago a good friends mother described the ministry as something you do when only after you have tried to answer every other calling since in ministry those you serve will devour your soul. While this may be an extreme way of framing the work of ministry, it highlights the reality that those working in helping professions run the risk of burn out.

For me the tendency for my job to come home from work with me, the possibility of getting late night phone calls from families, or urgent emails from volunteers, is compounded by own tendency to form an addictive, or at least dangerously habituated, relationship to nearly everything I do. Over the last eleven years or so this has manifested in my relationship to food, drugs and alcohol, pain, zombie esque TV watching, reading and rereading mediocre historical fiction novels, and yes, work. (And J. just pointed out that I am blogging when I am supposed to be getting on a plane, so perhaps we should add that to the list.)

Okay, so I have to stop blogging, pack, pay my rent and go to the airport so I can restore my spirit and learn about trauma. Monday is my day off. Usually I sleep in, waste time and go on a hike, so this rushing to work to relax feels a little odd in the rhythm of my week.

I don’t have easy answers about work, over work, burnout, rest and rejuvenation. But I think it is something we should all think about – as part of living fully, authentically, and sustainably. My minister told me earlier this month that ministry isn’t being successful, it is being faithful. I wonder what I and those around me are being faithful to in the work that we chose to do, the people we chose to serve, and through the ways that we learn to minister to our own needs, dreams, desires and ambitions.

Vegan cupcakes take over my world

If you have been in communication with me over the last month you have probably noticed that I have been distracted by vegan cupcakes – making cupcakes, icing cupcakes, eating cupcakes, preparing ingredient shopping lists for cupcakes, and reading aloud from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

J. and I were given this wonderful book on New Years by friends in Philadelphia. That very night we discovered that cupcakes go very well with champagne. Since then I have made cupcakes for my youth group at church, cupcakes for friends and coworkers, and cupcakes for coffee hour. We’ve had dulce sin leche cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes with cookies and cream frosting, and vanilla cupcakes with lemon butter cream icing. Neighbors borrowed our new book and made chocolate stout cupcake, and I borrowed their pastry bag to have a go at the art of frosting cupcakes.

Joy was spread around the world.

This morning I was pleased to read an email from a friend with a link to the article Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism, a delightful NY Times piece on Moskowitz and Romero and their forays into a world of vegan baking that is both pretty and punk.

A quick internet search shows that we are indeed in the midst of a cupcake movement. There are gourmet cupcake bakeries and cafes opening from New York and Beverly Hills to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Sydney. There are sophisticated cupcakes, arty cupcakes, wedding cupcakes and even cupcake lawsuits. And of course, there are cupcake blogs, including vegancupcakes.wordpress.com, which means that my new favorite book has a companion narrative unfolding online.

Now what does the current cupcake craze look like? Magnolia Bakery in NYC, which opened over 10 years ago, markets the old fashioned cupcake. Yet this dessert venue stays open late into the night and weekend customers often wait in a line wrapping around the block. Citizen Cupcake in San Francisco pairs their desserts with cocktails. Cupcakes are clearly no longer a mere birthday ritual confined to the assigned seating of elementary school.

In a 2004 interview, James Gray, a cupcake baker from Dozen Cupcakes in Pittsburgh stated, “A cupcake becomes a blank canvas and it can be anything you want it to be.”

So, how do you like your cupcakes? I, like the authors of Vegan Cupcakes like my single serving desserts to be vegan and delicious. While some of the cupcake bakeries, such as Dozen Cupcakes, do feature a few vegan options much of the current cupcake craze still seems to center around butter, cream and eggs (sometimes organic). With so much energy currently being put into cupcake choice as a statement of identity, and so much flavor, creativity and style available in vegan cupcakes, why not have more on the menu?

And now, I think there might be one more cupcake waiting for me in the kitchen.

In Melting Snow

Last night it snowed. I live in Tucson, Arizona, so snow is a bit of phenomenon. While walking to a restaurant yesterday you could hear people laughing with delight, and see children writing their names in the snow on the ground, next to saguaros and prickly pears sleeping under this most unusual blanket.

Today, of course the snow has been cleared away in a bath of sunlight. Mondays are my day off, and I thought, why not take this most beautiful day to start a blog.

I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while, partly inspired by the writings of an old friend, petitpoussin. My ambivalence about a blog has been much like my ambivalence about a tattoo. What will I get, where will it go, what will it mean?

Like many people I have an old relationship with writing. As a teenager with mental illness writing was in many ways my salvation. And I was good, though of course with that lovely disclaimer of, “for her age.” As I grew up and learned to live with my depression I stopped writing. I didn’t know what to say when the genre of confessional no longer seemed to be my only identity. I became a bit of an intellectual, a bit of an activist, and a bit scared to try to know myself in that intimate fashion that comes from being a writer.

But here I am, starting a blog. There will of course be the requisite posts on my life, politics, feminism, poetry, and that which makes me incredibly angry. I hope to also link to and post about what is new in progressive religion. In my work as a Director of Religious Education with children and youth I see how central spirituality is to the human experience, how important it is for us to explore our faith development, and how hard it is for us to articulate where we are on our own paths, and where those paths fall in relationship to religious tradtion.

And thus my blog title – Ranting and Rejoicing. Cause while there is so much that is painful, hurtful, and just plain wrong in our world, there is also, beauty, love, and those moments of wonder that help us truly feel alive.

Blogging for Choice

Today, on the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is National Blog for Choice Day. You link to other blogs writing on the topic here. You can also read some of my favorite posts on the topic here and here.

The pro-choice movement is obviously a complex phenomenon that encompasses issues of health, privacy, race, class, freedom, and more. I’m not about to tackle all of that right now. A lot of my recent thinking about the pro-choice movement comes from an interview with Katha Pollitt in the current issue of Bitch Magazine. Here’s some of what she has to say about (re)framing the abortion debate:

The pro-choicers have let the antis set the terms of the debate. We are on the defensive. We don’t say, Look, it’s okay for women to postpone motherhood to get an education, to get established at work, to find a mate, to grow up. It’s okay to only want one child. In fact, it’s okay not to want children at all. Instead we defend abortion by emphasizing extreme cases – rape, incest, dangerous pregnancies, anencephalic fetuses – and we defend the moral agency of women who choose abortion by talking about what a difficult, serious tragic decision it is. And sometimes that is true. But sometimes abortion is an easy decision. (See how cold and frivolous that sounds? You’re not supposed to talk like that!) If you are not ambivalent about the pregnancy you might not feel so sad.

I present you with this quote to highlight what I hope is obvious: there is not one monolithic narrative to the pro-choice movement, nor is there one archetypal experience for women who have had abortions.