church – little thoughts

church unity and social media bubbles

Posted on 2021-04-11 by kristinabean

It’s becoming fairly well known these days that the algorithms used by social media tend to lock us in to an ever-shrinking bubble, where we only see things that already align with our views (unless we purposefully join groups we disagree with to seek out different views). I hadn’t really thought about it much until I logged on to Facebook early this month, after about half a year with almost no social media, and belatedly realized that I hadn’t seen a single puzzle piece or “light it up blue” post for Autism Awareness day. No ableism, no “search for the cure”, no questionable medical advice – nothing.

If I had taken my Facebook feed as an accurate microcosm of the culture around me, I would have thought that everyone had finally started listening to #actuallyautistic voices and started to see autism as just a different way of being human. Obviously, that isn’t the case (living in the real world and reading news from other sites makes this pretty clear) – but it is the snapshot of the world that Facebook filtered out for me.

It was a really enlightening moment for me. This is what happens to people who keep reading articles and liking posts and joining groups that are all on one side of the political spectrum: they see more and more of what they like, and less and less of what they’ve avoided, until they begin to see the whole world filtered through those beliefs – which makes it easier to perceive anyone who doesn’t share those beliefs as ignorant, deluded, or extreme. It happens with “natural wellness” as well, until people who just wanted to incorporate preventative herbal remedies into their lives find themselves surrounded by reasons to avoid vaccines (which are medically tested in large numbers of people) and go on restrictive diets (which are not).

As uncomfortable as it can be to deliberately seek out articles, groups, and people with whom we disagree, I believe it is fundamental to balancing out our own beliefs and perceptions of the world. Even more than that, I think it is essential that those of us who are Christian do this; I don’t see how we can endeavor to create any kind of unity within the church otherwise. The unity that Jesus prayed for before the crucifixion, that Paul beseeched the Philippians to pursue – this cannot exist unless we are all willing to do the hard work of engaging with and listening to those with whom we disagree.

Lately, I’ve been reminding myself that God loves everyone, and that all of God’s creation is fearfully and wonderfully made. That means God loves the autistic person who struggles with social interactions and communication, and God loves the neurotypical parents who wishes their child were normal – without needing to change either of their neurotypes to make them more worthy of God’s love. God loves the black person pushed to the margins of society by systemic injustice, and God loves the white person who has profited from their race – without needing to change either of their skin colors. God loves the woman who has been told all her life that she can’t share her love of God from the pulpit, and God loves the man who has benefited from centuries of misogyny – without needing to change either of their genders.

I’ve been reminding myself that while God will always call us to growth, to increased wisdom and righteousness, and to greater closeness with God, God will not require us to become someone we were not created to be. God may ask us to deny ourselves so that we can love each other better; God will ask us to repent from our sin and become a new creation in Christ; but in all this God is leading us more deeply into our true selves. We may be only shadows of those selves now, but those shadows still show the shape and form of who we will be.

I believe that God does not tell autistic people that they are welcome as soon as they can stop stimming and look God in the eyes. God does not tell black people that they are welcome as soon as they straighten their hair and accept a lower place on the social ladder, or tell refugees that they need a job and a good grasp of English before they can enter God’s kingdom. God does not tell women that they must give up their desire to preach God’s word, or abandon their careers, or ignore their gifts of leadership.

(Following these lines of thought out further, though it leads me into tempestuous cultural waters, I would argue that God does not call gay people to sacrifice their romantic and sexual desires (unless a particular individual is called to celibacy like a straight person might be), nor does God call trans people to deny their gender and obey social expectations based on their sex at birth. God created us – with difference, with diversity, with disability – and all parts of us can reflect God’s image and bring God glory.)

In fact, if I am to fully grasp the scandalous immensity of God’s love, then I have to go one step further. I have to recognize that God does not simply love us in all of our human diversity: God also loves is in all of our human sinfulness. Even as God hates injustice and oppression, God loves the people committing it and wants them also to repent, and make restitution, and be reconciled to God.

My love is not this deep. I want to write people off as hopeless, beyond redemption. I want to take revenge mercilessly for the horrifying oppression and injustice I see – or I want to abandon people to their own ignorance and bigotry and discount their opinions as worthless. It is easier this way: to stay in the safe confines of my own little bubble, on Facebook and even in reality, to assume that my beliefs are right and leave the outside world to its own devices. In the face of these tendencies, what I pray is that I would trust in God’s vengeance, in God’s ability to weave justice and mercy seamlessly together, never weighing one soul as higher in value than another, and clearly seeing all our actions and all our intentions. I pray that when I work for the coming of God’s kingdom here on earth, I would strive to right wrongs and undo injustices and throw off every yoke, as Isaiah and Mary both sing – but that I would also strive to make room for repentance and new beginnings. I pray that I would value a unity that makes space for all God’s created people, in all our stages of growth, as we become more fully ourselves and more deeply God’s, and that I would always listen and love even when I vehemently disagree.

This means that when my pastor says something I disagree with – something that I think perpetuates injustice along gender lines, for example – I can not in good faith simply leave the church and find another. If I care about unity and if I care about love, I have to take that uncomfortable statement as an opportunity to open a discussion about justice and mercy and God’s crazy boundary-destroying love; to listen with love in my own heart to ideas that could hurt me; to remember that no person is so far gone that the mercy of God cannot reach them; and to take the chance that I might be the one whose beliefs are wrong or misinformed.

And it may mean that I need to find some groups on Facebook that I might be uncomfortable in 🙂

information, sqt

{sqt} – internalized ableism

Posted on 2020-02-13 by kristinabean

I’m joining the quick takes link-up today at This Ain’t The Lyceum with a rather more serious topic than normal. Head over there for the rest of the regular varied line-up.

Disability is innately challenging in various ways (hence the term disability), but it is also socially challenging because the surrounding culture is not designed to accommodate disability, typically misunderstands, and frequently actively stigmatizes it. When a person in a wheelchair can’t navigate safely down the sidewalk because someone left one of those electric rentable scooters lying across the width of it, for example, that is a challenge posed social ignorance and carelessness, not an inherent challenge of the disability. When people assume that a disabled person’s life will be less meaningful, less joyful, or less worthy, just because of the disability, that stigma and misunderstanding add a significant challenge that is not actually part of the disability itself: the burden of proving oneself to the community instead of having one’s potential and value automatically acknowledged. And in the face of that assumption, repeated over and over again, the disabled person may even begin to believe it themselves, in what is called internalized ableism.

I can really only speak for myself and the disability I know well, autism. But for me, internalized ableism is:

…scratching my arms till they bleed because it’s more subtle and socially acceptable than flapping my hands in the air and I really just don’t want anyone to notice that I’m different and struggling here, please. (Just realizing this and giving myself permission to flap and stim in other more obvious ways has reduced my self-injurious stimming a lot, actually.)
…laughing at everything that is probably a joke so that I’m not the clueless person who doesn’t get cultural humor. (I laugh when I’m nervous or overwhelmed too. I hate this. I hate that my emotional responses don’t match up to what they “should” be and I have hated it ever since an adult got angry with me as a kid for laughing in an “inappropriate” setting. Internalized ableism is often learned through emotionally significant childhood events; it often speaks to the heart with cruel, cutting hate.)
…acting like I know things, even if I’m not totally sure, if it seems like everyone else knows already – only admitting ignorance if someone else does, because then I’m not the weird one who might not be worth bothering with.
…believing I can’t serve God in any meaningful way because I’m too anxious to build relationships and share the Gospel with my neighbors/coworkers/homeless people/etc.
…trying to get my kids to act “normal” instead of helping them live fully into the way God made them, disability and all, because I secretly (subconsciously?) think displaying their disability will hurt their chances of friendship, community, inclusion, and happiness.

Limerick standing at the edge of a lake, arms raised mid-flap. I never want him to think he has to stop his excited flapping to fit in and make friends. I never want to cut out his natural and beautiful expression of happiness, and in so doing damage the happiness itself. So why do I try so hard to do that to myself?

…doing everything on my own without asking for help, because I think asking for help for disability-related reasons either means I’m a useless burden on the relationship or lazy and immature and relying on my disability as an excuse.
…assuming that the people I do rely on (particularly my husband, at this season of life) resent me or see me as a burden, or would do so if they understood the reality of my disability. I felt this years before I had a diagnosis: I knew that I was different, that I didn’t process things “normally”; that I had struggles no one else I knew had; and I thought this made me deficient and broken and that anyone who really knew me would stop loving me because it would be too much work. And that is just with Level 1 Autism. I can only imagine how internalized ableism, if not actively combatted, could bring down smothering waves of anxiety and depression on someone whose support needs are higher, either physically or emotionally.

In short – internalized ableism can rob the disabled person of joy, shut down their authentic self-expression, replace their faith and hope with fear and despair, and reduce the blessing and the gift they can be to the communities they are a part of. I don’t have a great solution for eradicating it, and I think it can only be done hand-in-hand with eliminating more generalized ableism in society – disabled people are going to pick up on the attitudes others have towards them, and especially as children can easily internalize those attitudes.

The following chart is, however, a well-written, sensitive, and helpful guide for evaluating your own attitudes toward disability. It’s aimed towards the non-disabled reader, but I honestly found it quite helpful in unearthing my own internalized and self-directed ableism as well.

Where on the chart do you see yourself? What has led you to where you are now in your understanding of disability, in either yourself or in others?

Has internalized ableism been a part of your life? If so, what does it look like for you? How do you move past ableism and learn to walk with joy in the fullness of who you are as a disabled person, beautifully and wonderfully made by a good and loving God?

musings

response to a sermon on worship

Posted on 2020-01-192020-01-19 by kristinabean

I can definitely be an over-sensitive perfectionist, but I don’t think it is irrational to be hurt by a sermon about the role of the body and communication in worship that doesn’t even mention disability. There wasn’t anything technically incorrect with what was preached, but everything had to be translated, contextualized, or rephrased if it were to be relevant to the life of someone with a physical disability or social communication disorder. And it just leaves me feeling so unwanted in the church – feeling that people like me can never fully participate in the body of Christ because of issues with how our own bodies and brains both respond to our environments and express our emotions.

It is important to give the best of ourselves to God: all of our mind, heart, and body, as the gospels say. For the Israelites of Malachi’s time (the source text for the sermon was Malachi 1), it was important to offer the sacrifices according to the law instead of just giving Him their leftover and damaged animals, and it is good and right for us to remember that principle and follow God with singleness of mind and whole-hearted devotion. Translating that to the lived reality of worship music during Sunday service is not so clear-cut, however. I remember when I was in high school and thought I knew what was best for worship music: what types of music would best glorify God and lead people to honor and meditate on Him – and I wrote about it in a public forum, and I received the most graciously pointed rebuke I have ever been given for my arrogance. Fifteen years later, I am more aware of the diversity of the body of Christ: how each of us responds in a different way to different words and styles of music; how each of us can offer worship in a unique way; and how when we worship together we all must bend and accommodate others, both sharing from and holding back on our individuality so that we can worship as a unified body.

It is for this reason that I participate in the musical worship at our church, although it is difficult for me in multiple ways. I wear ear plugs so I can tolerate the volume; I sit on the end of a row so I won’t feel overwhelmed by the people around me; and when it’s really bad, I try to sit in a small area just off the sanctuary instead of going outside so that I can still be part of the service. I sing even the songs that I don’t particularly like (although I will skip lines that I feel are theologically inaccurate…), and when I can’t sing I try to meditate on the message of the songs. I don’t expect the worship service to be tailored to my preferences and needs, and I often find great beauty and encouragement through music I would never have sought out on my own.

When a pastor tries to tell his congregants how to worship, however, with the fear hanging over their heads that if they don’t get this right they will be guilty of offering their secondhand, broken leftovers instead of a worthy sacrifice, it is reminiscent of the same arrogance I had at sixteen. Jesus told the woman at the well that the time was coming in which God’s people would worship Him in spirit and in truth – so the way we move our bodies during a praise song doesn’t matter if we are centered on God and praising Him. Additionally, to imply that there are right and wrong ways to physically conduct oneself during musical worship – and then not to say what those ways are because everyone should know – is to pave a straight and smooth path to anxiety, shame, and a sense of inadequacy for anyone in the congregation who struggles with reading social norms and expressing feelings in an “acceptable” way.

I am positive that if autistic and intellectually disabled adults were moving and responding in worship in an expressive way that felt authentic to them, someone in the church would call it disruptive and try to make them conform to a more “normal” behavioral pattern. This same attitude is just as toxic in reverse, when it lands on people who tend to not show any emotional expression with their bodies. I prefer not to move in large ways, not to lift my hands and be exposed and vulnerable with a crowd of strangers around me, not to share my emotions with people I do not know well. God knows what is in my heart, and it is that which I offer to Him – He will not judge me for not moving my body in a way that aligns with neurotypical standards for deep emotional responses. He will not make me feel ashamed because my anxiety and sensory overload cause me to respond in a less than perfect way.

If the church wants to be truly inclusive, truly open and welcoming to those of us who feel and respond and behave differently, then the least it can do is acknowledge our presence. Acknowledge that some people cannot physically respond with lifting of hands or kneeling because of chronic pain or age or muscular dystrophy or any other disability. Acknowledge that for some people a verbal response is the most genuine and whole-hearted response they can offer in worship, because their authentic physical responses are buried under years of practice at masking to fit in with a neurotypical society. Stress the importance of the heart centered on God, and acknowledge the reality that the outward response can look radically different because disability and neurodivergence are real things that affect real people present in the body of Christ.

links, musings

janus (looking forward, looking back)

Posted on 2020-01-012019-12-31 by kristinabean

British Library digitised image from page 384 of "Man, embracing his origin, ... civilization, ... mental and moral faculties. ... Illustrated" — Picture of the two-headed Roman god Janus, from the British Library Flickr

I’m not really that great at looking back or looking forward. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis in my formative years, and I still have his words echoing in the back of my head: Screwtape teaching Wormwood how to enslave men to either the past or future and thus distance them from the present which alone intersects with eternity; the unfallen Queen on Perelandra describing time and circumstance as the waves of the sea into which we plunge as we swim, taking what comes and letting go of what has come before.

Aubade standing in the waves rolling ashore, feet in the water, arms spread wide in the air, with her back to the camera and the sunset before her.

However, it can be helpful to look back and see the path I’ve taken – to see evidence of God’s grace, of answered prayer, of comfort in hardship, of blessing and providence in good times – and be reminded of God’s faithfulness. It can be encouraging to see progress made, or convicting to see unhealthy patterns deepening. Similarly, it can be good to look forward, to make goals and resolutions, so that I can prepare well for the future I hope to build.

This year especially is a bit of a landmark, as not only the old year but the old decade comes to a close. Ten years ago – 2010 – I was single, graduated college, moved out, bought my first car, and began working at the university where I am still employed now – so really, the whole of my adult life so far has taken place in the now-past decade, and even the highlights would take far longer than this post to describe.

One of the major highlights of 2019, however, was finally getting diagnosed with autism and having a reason for all the times I’d felt out of place and two steps behind despite hearing from everyone how smart I was, for all the moments I’d been so overwhelmed by a sound or touch that I couldn’t process anything, for all the weird behaviors (now I know they’re called stims) I’d accumulated over my life, and more. This was reflected on the blog – 4 of my top 5 most popular posts this year were from my Autism Acceptance series in April:

That third post in the list above touches on one of the things I’m most proud about this year, actually: the way I was able to identify the onset of seasonal depression and take steps to counteract it. This is the first Christmas in several years that I have only had minor situational anxiety instead of moderate overarching depression, and I think being prepared made a huge difference. It wasn’t the type of preparation that gets me all anxious about making lists and potentially forgetting things; just a conscious choice to let go, to dig deep, to roll the thoughts away, to take things one step at a time, and to center my life on meditative prayer.

What also helped was a chance, at the beginning of December, to bike significantly more frequently. I started biking in to work 1-2 days a week in November, but in December my hours increased (from 8 to 20 per week!) and I needed to commute 4 days a week. That regular time outside exercising is amazing for mental regulation and emotional health, at least for me! And the reason for the change is also something I’m excited about, both for 2019 and going into 2020: I have the chance to learn bioinformatics and transition over the next 6 months from the genomics wet lab team to the bioinformatics team, which gives me a chance to learn something I’ve been interested in for years and develop skills which will be even more valuable for my career.

Outside of work, I’m looking forward to an opportunity to help develop neurodiverse community and support at my church. The woman who’s been running the special needs children’s ministry wants to reshape it to better reflect acceptance and neurodiversity, multiple people have anonymously asked the pastors about ministries specifically for neurodiverse adults, several pastors across our web of churches are working on formulating a theology of disability, and I’m apparently one of the adults they know of who is neurodiverse. Hopefully they will not ask only me, since neurodiversity is by definition diverse 🙂 But I really appreciate that they care deeply about the whole spectrum of the children of God, that they don’t want to make it something that neurotypical people are doing to or for us without our input or leadership, and that I have a chance to be involved!

With all of that said, I have just a few resolutions for the new year.

First, I resolve to pray every day. Things are just better when this happens, like marriage is better when I actually spend time talking with Paul 😛

Second, I resolve to write on this blog more frequently. My goal is approximately every 3 days – so, 122 posts for the year. I have lots of ideas but often don’t post for reasons that don’t make sense outside of my head, so I’m going to try to let go of my perfectionism and just share my thoughts.

Third, I resolve to read a variety of good books and keep a book log again! That was such a good experience in the past and I really need to get out of my fan fiction rut anyway. (I already have two books on my list and I can’t wait to write about them!)

How about you, readers? Any highlights from the year (or decade)? Anything you’re resolving for the New Year or especially looking forward to? Or conversely, any challenges from the past or apprehension about the future? I always love to read your thoughts.

“This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, hum-drum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalist, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom – that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

orthodoxy

Quote• Posted on 2019-05-15 by kristinabean

autism acceptance month, sqt

autism and faith

Posted on 2019-04-252019-04-25 by kristinabean

This post is part of my april autism series for autism acceptance month. Visit the first post here for links to the rest of the series!

Because autism is a neurological difference that impacts the way a person perceives and makes sense of the world around them, it affects every part of an autistic person’s lived experience: from school and work, through friendships and marriage and parenting, to religion or lack thereof. For the seven quick takes linkup this week, I’ll be sharing seven thoughts connected to the autistic experience of faith: one study, three aspects of religion that may make faith more or less difficult for autistic individuals, and three essays from other autistic writers (two Christian, one not religious).

Don’t forget to visit Kelly at This Ain’t the Lyceum for the rest of the linkup!

According to a study from Boston University, autistic individuals are more likely to be atheist or agnostic and less likely to belong to an organized religion. While a statistical study of this type cannot explore (and categorize, and analyze) all the various reasons that lead individuals to religious decisions, this particular study also coded several forums for various thinking traits and noted where they differed significantly between autistic and neurotypical populations. Perhaps not surprisingly, areas of difference included emphasis on rationality, social discomfort, and social disinterest. Let’s run with those areas of difference for a while.
In modern Western culture, rationality, logic, and clear, critical thinking is most often associated with atheism or at least agnosticism. Autistic individuals are not exempt from the pull of those cultural associations – and it doesn’t help the cause of religion when it is publicly tied to pointless traditions and illogical, superstitious thinking. As a scientist, I see God’s glory shining brilliantly in the intricacies of biology (from the ecosystem level down to the molecular, everything so tightly bound together in ever-widening webs). I see it in the laws of logic and math that provide a pathway for understanding and explaining reality and truth. But if someone grew up being told that burying a statue in your backyard would help you sell your house faster, or that the whole Bible was intended to be read literally despite clear indications of allegory and myth (in the Lewisian version of the word), or that mental illness was a result of a lack of faith – that person would have a much harder time reconciling the beautiful logic of science with God. Since autistic individuals are on average significantly more likely to emphasize rationality in their thought processes, that difficulty would be compounded for an autistic person and be much more likely to end in a rejection of faith.
Social discomfort is an aspect of the autistic lived experience of religion that might be missed from a neurotypical perspective – but it is certainly significant. There are weeks where simply staying in service on Sunday is a struggle for me, because of the anxiety surrounding the social environment. Even on a good week I typically avoid talking to anyone during the official greeting time, and an unwanted intrusion (read: friendly tactile greeting from happy neurotypical to poor sad girl sitting with her head down who must be lonely) can make the rest of the service almost unbearable. For someone entering a religious service from a different background, the discomfort, uncertainty, and anxiety can be even worse.
Social disinterest is a related but distinct phenomenon. Many neurotypicals keep going to church because of the community they find there: the friends they make, the chance to catch up on what everyone is doing, the networking and small talk and friendly interactions. This is unlikely to be the case for an autistic individual (or at least it will be less of a factor). I go to church because it forces me to focus on worship and the Bible, and because I know intellectually (and believe from what the Bible says) that the community of faith is important in a spiritual and eternal sense. But I don’t draw energy or encouragement from any of the trivial small-talk that surrounds it. If an autistic person does choose to be part of an organized religion, it is very likely that they actually believe it to be true, and are pursuing it despite the discomfort and disinterest of the social experience of it instead of using it as simply a source of friendship and community. I suppose that is a positive, actually. Believing in something really seems like the only rational reason to go through the actions religion necessitates.
“Because that was always something that bothered me before university: I knew so many Christians who firmly believed that God’s works were the result of some kind of magic rather than science. It felt like intellectual dishonesty to agree with them, but I didn’t have the breadth of experience to know that I could disagree with other Christians and still be a ‘valid’ Christian myself.
You see, I have always believed that science was God’s ‘computer’, or at least his OS. Just the same as how nobody designs a game without a playable set of rules, you wouldn’t create a universe without a decent set of physical laws, and a few handy mathematical constants.
Honestly, the deeper I looked into mathematics and its uncompromising logic, the more I appreciated how beautifully God crafted the universe. Religion encourages us to find God’s amazing works in the mountains and rivers and sunsets, but if you have a mindset like mine and want to witness God’s glory, take a look at his OS.” – Chris Bonnello, Asperger Syndrome and Religion: Reconciling Logic with Faith
Please read this whole article! It is a great outline of one autistic person’s reasons for faith and lived experience with religion, and hits on a lot of points that I’ve heard from other autistic people.
This article by Brett Hanson touches less on the reasons to have faith and more on the religious experience of autistic individuals. Like Hanson, I find myself distracted from the overall point (and emotion) of a sermon or worship song because of an error in one small detail in that sermon or song. I realized in junior high that while I found it easy to meditate on and praise the life that we have in God, and the light that comes from God, it was harder for me to understand the love of God and feel it in an emotional way (looking back, I see that I didn’t feel or express things the same way my peers did, and so thought I must be missing something). It can make “fitting in” more difficult – but that attention to detail can push someone to deepen and broaden their theological knowledge, and that resistance to emotional sway can help someone ask hard questions and push for the truth when it might otherwise be obscured.
Finally, this article by John Elder Robison is an excellent examination of historical reasons why autistic individuals may have poured themselves into the church, although the author is not himself religious. He sees in the texts of early church leaders the systematizing, logical thought processes of the autistic mind. In the great cathedrals, temples, and pyramids he sees evidence of autistic skills at work, intuitively grasping concepts that modern mathematics and engineering are still uncovering. As he writes, “[…] the church was as a bastion of structure, logic, and reason for its era. In those years, the church and the military were two places a young man could go to find order and rationality. If you were a thinking sort of person, the church offered the kind of home some of us seek in universities and laboratories today.”

My final thought would be that, ideally, the church would still be “a bastion of structure, logic, and reason.” God is equally the great engineer and scientist as He is the great artist and poet, is He not? So too church can be the pillar of logic, the laboratory of theological and philosophical inquiry, just as much as it can be the neighborhood block party or the safe space for sharing emotions and struggles.

musings

meditation on lenten fasting

Posted on 2019-03-112019-03-11 by kristinabean

Not quite a week into Lent, I’ve already had many opportunities to think about the nature and experience of fasting. It is a constant running up into a wall that isn’t normally present, a rebuttal of habit and comfortable patterns, a never-ending awareness of hungering desire countered by a never-ending “no.” No matter how insignificant my fast is compared to many others throughout history and tradition, it is still satisfying to reach the end of another day without breaking it, without crossing those invisible boundaries – and the crossing, the satiation of that gnawing desire, when it does happen, doesn’t feel nearly so good as it promised.

It’s an interesting demonstration of the power of our internal rules for life: of the strength that our decisions and convictions hold over us, even when we aren’t very good at holding true to them. That internal satisfaction is a deep motivation, regardless of whether anybody else knows of our success in following the path we have chosen or staying within the lines we have drawn. So Lenten fasting is an exercise in strengthening our will by holding ourselves forcibly to the (arbitrary-seeming) rules we have designated for the season; in the end, ideally, our will is then better-equipped to hold fast to the laws of God and the way of faith.

For that, ultimately, is the most important thing about Lenten fasting. It’s not primarily about the surface things we give up – alcohol or chocolate or frivolous Internet browsing, or more traditional limitations on consumption – but is rather about training our minds and emotions and wills to forego pleasure for a greater end, about focusing our pursuit of God. If I give up a certain activity, it is so that in the empty spaces it leaves I can devote more time to prayer or edifying reading. If I choose to eat less, it is so that through the physical emptiness inside I can remember in my prayers and actions those for whom hunger is not a choice; or so that I can be reminded of the spiritual emptiness I can become so deadened to, that results when I fail to feast on the Bread of Life.

Up against the wall I will come every day, for these forty days, and sometimes I will fail, and sometimes I will succeed, and in the end I will come to the cross of Christ and know that those failures will make me more glad of His grace, and that those successes will strengthen my ability to love and emulate Him more fully. In the end, having walked through the desert of self-denial, I will come to the spring of the water of life, bursting forth in the Resurrection for my refreshment and renewal, and it will taste the sweeter for the burning sands and parched lips of the journey.

musings

because it is good to belong somewhere

Posted on 2018-12-132018-12-13 by kristinabean

One of my favorite things about our church is the group of people I’ve gotten to know through the special needs branch of the kids ministry (called Equipped, for future more succinct reference). I’m not one who ever really feels that I belong in any particular group, but it comes close here – at the least, I feel like here are people who desire to understand and support our whole family, and who have a solid foundation and similar experiences on which to build that understanding and support.

To provide a concrete example of what I mean, I skipped our small group’s Christmas get-together (familiar people, familiar place, convenient time of day) because I was worried about the social expectations involved; but I jumped at the chance to go to the Equipped Christmas party (only some familiar people, unfamiliar place, inconvenient time of day) because I knew that whatever behavioral issues came up we would be unconditionally loved and accepted, and because I knew there would be other people there like us potentially dealing with the exact same behaviors and struggles. To be not alone, and for one’s difficulties to be understood and normalized, is an incredible gift.

I think it is for this reason that minorities and people with other differences often find themselves isolated from what could be called the mainstream culture (it may only be mainstream relative to a certain location or culture subset, of course). It is just so much more comfortable for any human being to be around people who are similar to them, with whom they can connect across some significant differentiating and identifying characteristic – and for people who are typically outnumbered or alone in those key characteristics in everyday life, a chance to not be the odd one out is like a breath of fresh air.

It is of course good and important to know how to live in mainstream culture, and it is at least as good and important to understand minority cultures of which one is not a part (I am always thankful for every person who tries to understand autism instead of judging or ignoring it, who isn’t offended by my refusal to participate in Sunday morning “greet your neighbor” moments for instance!), but it is also good to find a place where you can be yourself – and as a parent, to connect with a community where your child can be themselves around other children like them, so they too can have a place and time to no longer feel different and alone. And that is the gift that my church is striving to give to her children with differences and disabilities, all these neurotypical parents seeking to understand and support their children instead of forcing them to hide their true selves and appear “normal”, and it is (even incomplete and imperfect) a beautiful thing.

musings

making accommodations for myself

Posted on 2018-09-262018-09-26 by kristinabean

Every fall and spring the women’s ministry at our church creates a Bible study and hosts a few events for all the women at the church (in addition to the regularly-meeting discipleship small groups). I’ve never attended any of the events before, or been part of the study groups, just because life has been busy, but I have been feeling the need for more structure in my spiritual life to give me direction and motivation, so I went to the first meeting of the year a few weeks ago (leaving Paul to do bedtime with all three kids 😉 )

Large group events like this can be challenging for me for a number of reasons. The first is simply the uncertainty: I had no way of knowing the schedule or plan for the event, nor did I know if anyone I knew well would be attending. The second is the number of people and the accompanying audio and visual (and potentially olfactory) stimulation. I often have significant anxiety or discomfort in church every Sunday because of this factor, and there was no reason to expect it to be different at this event. A third reason is my desire to appear normal and fit in; I really don’t like attention and so I somehow needed to find a way to handle any stress without looking like I was stressed (this is called masking).

Fortunately, as a 29 year-old, I’ve developed a few strategies for coping with these challenges.

To deal with my uncertainty, I thought back to other group events I’ve been to in the past and created a potential outline for the night: mingling, some talking from the front, maybe some music, probably some discussion questions. Other than knowing that mingling always comes first, I figured the schedule would be some modular arrangement of those four activity types, and I would just need to be prepared for all of them. I put my smile on, focused on looking at least near people’s faces when conversing, and thought of some basic questions to bring up that no one would be offended by (like asking about their previous experiences with the women’s ministry at our church – a particularly good icebreaker for the kickoff event for a new semester).

For coping with sensory overload (during both mingling and music) and for staying focused during the presentations from the front, I brought my fidget cube and a pen and paper. I am not really a note-taker, but writing is a fairly effective stim when listening to a speaker; the fidget cube is perfect during discussion and small talk as it is small and discreet, and can even be used during music. My goal for the night was not to pick my skin at all, and thanks to near-constant use of my alternate stims I mostly succeeded! I definitely flapped a lot in the car on my way home to shake off the tense/overloaded feeling though 🙂

[Flapping connects back to the masking issue: hand-flapping has never been a major stim for me because it is just such a big obvious motion and I feel extremely anxious and self-conscious if I do it anywhere anyone can see me. Skin-picking is more typically more subtle (unless I start bleeding…), as is rubbing my fingers together back and forth, and the fidget cube and writing are almost normal. But as I’ve been learning more about the purpose of stimming, which is to help the body cope with sensory processing difficulties, I’ve been trying to give my body opportunities to stim naturally without instantly shutting it down because of my social anxiety. Right now that looks like stepping out of an overwhelming environment and letting my body work through the overload before going back or moving on to something else, and finding a more private space where I can relax in the way that works most efficiently for me. Bluntly, I’ll leave church a few minutes early (like I always have, to pick up the kids), and instead of just walking to their classrooms I’ll let myself flap on the way; it only takes a minute or so and it decreases my inner tension so much.

Also I dislike the word “flap” but that’s what the action is usually called so it’s not really up to me to rename it…]

Anyway, the event was overall a success! Was it exhausting? Yes, of course – but it was also spiritually encouraging. I got to be with other women who love God, talking about Him, reading His word, singing songs of praise and worship to Him, and I even got to have a long-ish chat (far away from the realm of small talk) at the end of the night with an incredible woman who I deeply respect for a number of reasons, leaving me better equipped to pray for her and for family.

While my definition of a challenge may be very different than yours, I think it is true for everyone that it is sometimes very worthwhile to attempt challenging things – and that it is always worthwhile to give yourself the compassion, understanding, and acceptance needed to adequately prepare for and evaluate yourself during those challenging things. These were some of the ways I accepted and made accommodations for my own struggles (instead of telling myself I should just fight through them and be normal) – what are some of your strategies for doing so?

musings

pastor barbara and the out-of-sync girl

Posted on 2018-05-022018-05-01 by kristinabean

Once upon a time there was a church which had a female pastor. Now, this pastor wasn’t the lead pastor, or even the primary teaching pastor; she led the family and children’s ministries, actually, and spent most of her ministry time with women and youth. But she had the title of pastor – Pastor Barbara.

She was beautiful. She had long, curly brown hair and a nose with that perfect spark of defiance bringing its straight lines singing up from her face. She had a gentle way of moving – never too fast or too sudden – and a gentle way of speaking – never too loud or too harsh. And when she saw the children she loved and taught and prayed for, her whole body would glow with that love and light, like an emanation of the Holy Spirit through her presence.

There was a small girl at this church who adored Pastor Barbara wholeheartedly and unstintingly, although mostly from a distance as she was a quiet child. She enjoyed above all the new songs that Pastor Barbara would sing with them! For her, songs were a release from the uncertainty of social interactions, because the songs (at least the children’s songs that she knew) would specify how you were supposed to act. Take for example “Father Abraham:” no one would ever move that way in everyday life, but the song says to do it so everyone does it and no one has to worry about being out of sync.

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