There are a Million Things I’d Rather Be Than a Catholic Feminist

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

Cross-posted at Xavier University’s Dorothy Day Center for Faith and Justice Blog

There are a million things I’d rather be than a Catholic Feminist.

It was a gnawing and haunting restlessness that pursued my conscience like a ravenous lioness.  It was relentless.  And once I acknowledged it, it was like pressing UNMUTE on the button of life.  I could not deny the pattern that was emerging from my life experiences, reflections, and work.  Personal, professional, familial, academic, spiritual – the thread punctured all layers of my conscience.

The something was the ungodly needle of gender oppression.  It began quietly, observing theory and famous authors with a gender issues bent, like studying Wollstonecraft at Xavier.  And then it became visceral holding the hands of sexual assault survivors while doctors performed a rape kit on them at 3am in an emergency room during my Jesuit Volunteer Corp experience.  While studying trauma and pathology in graduate school, I took a feminist theology class at Harvard that ripped down every door that I thought was securely nailed to the hinge. Then I found myself listening to stories of female college students selling their bodies to pay for tuition.  Then I found myself hotly negotiating paid time off, benefits, and maternity leave in preparation to give birth to my son.  With each passing year of my adult life, I saw that the world more clearly.  And I saw that it spun on an axis that disproportionately distributed violence, poverty, and disadvantage to women and girls, especially women and girls of color.

It was right around the time when in the morning I was trying to convince a suicidal grandmother to report her two person sexual assault and later that same afternoon was dodging spitballs from high school boys sneering at my lectures about power and sexuality that I realized for the umpteenth time that the world was deeply problematic. But that deeply problematic realization quickly morphed into a deeply inconvenient epiphany when it hit me that I was partitioning my faith from the rest of the world instead of using it as a tool to help heal it.

The separation of faith and feminism was a futile, self-serving, psycho-segregation act. How does one reconcile feminism – distraughtly misunderstood movements with a history of both progress and digression – with Catholicism – a distraughtly misunderstood institution that has danced on both floors of social justice and injustice?  I know how labels work.  In today’s water cooler conversations, use the descriptor “modern Catholic” or “contemporary feminist” and see how long it takes before someone utters a negative stereotype about feminists (male-bashing, abortion loving radicals) or Catholics (gay-hating, scandal cover-up hypocrites).  Watch how quickly and thoroughly ignorance washes their thoughts, as quickly as the water they drink.  Watch how quickly the opportunity to engage disappears because of preconceived notions with their cultural attributes rather than remaining open to the person holding them.

In these early days of March, Women’s Herstory Month, it is easy to be caught up in media headlines and sound bytes which profile fantastic activists of the past, scholars and philosophers with visionary quotes about equality and human rights.  I celebrate this as well, but I also want more.  I want liberation.

Engaging and critiquing both the women’s rights movements and the Catholic Church has birthed a perspective to view the chaotic world; a way to organize thoughts, probe issues, and build a more critical and relevant conscience for the 21st century.

It is only through profound empathy and solidarity with the least in society that Catholic feminism resonates.  It is a holy call to education; to unravel racism, transform violence, and challenge systematic oppression.  Understanding the role of gender in the assignment of privilege, punishment, and power in the world is one of the most urgent and rudimentary calls of Catholics today.  Our faith is bolstered, not weakened by feminist praxis, and feminist methodologies must more deeply embrace the spiritual gifts of their activists, not shun them in fear of conservative religious propaganda.  And though some might argue there are fundamental differences between the two that prohibit peaceful co-habitation, I would kindly offer this experiment:

Find five active Catholics and five active feminists.  Put them in a room for one hour and ask them one by one to articulate their vision of liberation, of radical love in the world.  I believe they would have much more in common than one might guess.  Their rhetoric and politics may seem incongruent, but is the point of progression to achieve same opinion or a better outcome than the present?

2013 Seventh Annual State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa Category: State of the Self Address

Every year I write a reflection about the past year of my life and deliver it on my birthday.  This year, the address will be given twice.  Once to my husband Nick, who is in Rhode Island, using FaceTime at midnight.  The second time address goes to a dear group of friends, my dinner guests, to help celebrate 34 big ones.

I could eat 34 avocados over the next year.

I could throw a quarter, a nickel, and four pennies into a fountain with a hefty wish.

I could donate $340 to my favorite charity. I could run for 34 minutes.

I could write a 34 word haiku, or even write a 34 word haiku everyday for the next 34 days.

It seems that that’s what birthdays have come to mean to a lot of people, doing something to commemorate the number of years they’ve survived lived.

I’m not doing any of those things.  Instead, I sit down and give myself the curse gift of an honest reflection.  Once a year, I become a coroner over the body of a life I lived for the past year, investigating the scars, the stretches, the entry and exit wounds of the bullets of life.  All the evidence is gathered to be delivered in a report I call The State of the Self.  And it’s not just the wounds that are noted, but the signs of growth, ghost trails of joy, mapping personal achievement and meaning over the past year.  This is the seventh year I’ve done this and still, like every year before, I struggle to convey what a year of life, my life, can mean in words.

It was the year of breaks and break-throughs.  Friends and neighbors died.  Break.  Nick finished his MBA program.  Breakthrough.  My book was picked up by a publisher.  Breakthrough.  The publication journey began. Break.  Praise finds me, blithe criticism follows.

The year went on like that.  Life goes on like that.

In my Catholic peer circles, when they found out I was 33, would often remark, “Oh hey!  It’s your Jesus year!”  To which I thought, “Oh, awesome!  That’s the year he was betrayed by his closest friends, tortured, arrested, wrongly convicted and crucified.  Excellent.”

No, 33 took a different route than crucifixion.  It was the year that I radically accepted the mysterious paradox of making life choices.  I relinquished Robert Frost’s most beloved image – the diverge in the wood and the less traveled by road making all the difference –  in favor of Sylvia Plath’s terrifying image of a fig tree as my touchstone:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

My figs are beautiful and plump, and represent different parts of me.  Upon intense scrutiny, they all seemed to have my initials imprinted on them.  One fig was a tireless journalist.  Another was an artistic photographer.  One fig is a respected novelist.  Another fig was a psychotherapist working with survivors of violence and trauma.  Yet another fig was a gender and women studies professor.  Another fig was a zumba instructor.  Another fig was a mother of four.  Another fig was a nomadic missionary.  A priestess fig.  A globe-trotting human rights lawyer fig.  A smashing activist fig.

The fear of failure, of things and life ending, the fear of publicly stumbling, the fear of turning around and finding oneself alone in a crusade, the fear of being wrong impedes the fig-selection process.  Fear is a contagious mental illness, the mouth that never stops whispering. Despite those devilish whispers, we must choose.

I’m tempted to write an ending that describes the fig I chose, but the significance isn’t which fig I chose, it’s the fact that I actually and tentatively chose one.  For now.  Unlike Sylvia’s figs, which wrinkled, darkened, and fell to the ground, mine did not follow suit. Sylvia watched her figs die and I refuse to sit as she did and starve into the bend of a tree.  Off the page and in real life, Sylvia Plath took her own life, the violent refusal to choose any fig at all.

My figs are still glowing, but the real milestone of 33 was not the choosing.  It is the knowledge that even if I did watch some figs die, I know that I am not. I look back at 33 and see a woman of choice, deliberation, and active honesty, sometimes painfully so. Yes I am afraid, but I am not paralyzed.  I know my figs won’t last forever, but they’re here now and so am I.

The coroner’s report read three simple words: She chose well.

The Bokeh Effect: Why One Billion Rising Isn’t Enough for Me

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

For the last twelve years, I walked around with an idea about helping survivors of rape and sexual violence.  For the past three years, I’ve been working intently on finishing and publishing a collection of letters, essays, and prose written by survivors for other survivors exploring issues of justice and healing.  Each time I’ve arrived at my screen to work on it, it’s been an uphill battle.  Though I am comforted by the contract that it will be published, I still sit with the same heavy question as I did twelve years ago: What will it take to end rape and violence against women?

In my experience working with survivors in the context of mental health, advocacy, and now publishing,  I’ve articulated some cornerstones/reminders/mental sticky notes that keep me grounded in this labor.

1. Power exists. Most folks know this, but don’t KNOW THIS.  The majority of folks still need mentorship and education on its dynamics; what it is, how to use it, and its impact in daily action and relationship.

2. Gender…Essentialism. Stereotype. Discrimination.  Whatever label is assigned.  Gender_____ must be addressed. Ongoing.  Never ending.  There’s nothing more loaded or consuming than a dialogue unfolding the layers of the invisible gender laws of US society.

3. Discerning leadership. Every campaign, movement, or rally must acutely examine its use and spaces of power, privilege, and cultural differences.

4. A global dance, not choreographed. Each community must take the primary role and responsibility of creating and implementing its own actions toward ending violence against women.  (Yes, United States of America, this means you. Stop trying to diva your way into lands and peoples trying to save them.  They’re quite capable of their own liberation.)

And finally…

5. Be mindful of the bokeh effect.  Bokeh is a photography term.  It’s the blur of a camera lens, throwing something in the background out of focus for an aesthetic quality.  I fear this is the case for many movements to end violence against women.  It throws so many out of focus.  The reality is that men are not an accessory to ending rape, they are the primary target and tool to the fruition of this reality.  We need everyone.  Men. Children. Gender non conforming people. Transwomen.  Transmen.  Houseless folks. Mentally ill folks.  Physically disabled folks. Todos/ALL.  Everyone must be included in building a transformed world.  Women cannot be the disproportionate population surviving rape and then be the ones who take majority over the work in ending it.  How does that make any sense?  The work must be shouldered and inclusive.

As Vday 2013 comes to its final hours in the United States, I sit watching the sky darken and wonder…

What happens on February 15, 2013?  What happens when the 1 Billion Rising are risen?  What happens when the music stops, everyone gathers their things, and heads home?  Before I throw support behind a cause, I ask a question:  Does this effort dismantle rape culture action or transform it?   If it dismantled, it’s focused on awareness. (Keeps the issue bobbing like a buoy.  It’s important and sustains it on media’s radar.)  If it transforms, it digs deep, trying to get rid of the bokeh. (Works at a deeper level of change, goes to the root of the issue utilizing timeless questions about sustainability, liberation, and vision.)

I’d never say 1 Billion Rising is a bad thing.  It’s a great thing.  But the music will stop (if it hasn’t already).  And the wonderful movement that uplifted the Rising will carry them home while those who did not dance may or may not catch a faceful of the stirring breeze the Rising created.  That’s it.  From what I gather, there is no clear follow-up for organization or education.

I ask my question: Did it dismantle or transform rape culture?   I think it’s clear that 1 Billion Rising is about dismantling, not transforming rape culture. That’s not a bad thing!  Every project fills some kind of void gathering forces to make a statement has a role in ending rape.  I’d never discourage anyone from participating in action that brings energy and inspiration, but it’s also helpful to keep in mind how many more consciousness-raising campaigns we promote in the name of ending violence against women when we know full well that as long as we keep using bokeh – keeping one billion in focus and blurring the other six billion – we are not advancing forward.  We are not ending violence against women, we’re just delaying it by a day.

I want more than One Billion Rising. I want Seven Billion Transforming.

We’re Divided by Power, not Gay Marriage: What Firing Mike Moroski Says About Catholic Church Leadership

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

Crossposted at The Catholic Feminist Reader and The Counterpunch

The termination of Mike Moroski as Dean and Vice Principal at Purcell Marion High School in Cincinnati, Ohio is reaching a national audience. Recently, Moroski offered these questions as prompts for deeper analysis:

WHEN do institutions go too far in trying to quiet their members?

HOW do you reconcile your faith and your own personal beliefs that are the direct result of that very same faith?

WHY are some people seemingly so afraid of differing opinions?

WHAT is the REAL issue in all of this confusion?

The impact of this situation has always been much larger than Moroski’s unjust punishment or standing up for gay marriage.  In my opinion, if you take a closer look at the fallout, you’ll see a prime example of what is eating the Catholic Church from the inside: a hierarchal leadership removed from the needs of the people.

When my partner, Nick, was an employee at Moeller high school at the same time when Moroski was teaching English, Nick often commented about a gift that Moroski possessed.  It was an undeniable and rare ability to connect, truly connect, with teenagers. “God love him” was my reply because if you work with teens, observe youth groups, or sit in on high school theology classes, you know that anyone capable of entering the often ear-budded tunnel leading to a 16 year old mind can only be described as a miracle worker.

How we educate the Catholic youth is, in my opinion, one of the most pressing crises of the US Catholic church.  It’s not just the statistics of school closings.  (In the 2011-2012 school year, 34 Catholic schools opened while 167 were consolidated or closed.  And we know that this pattern will only continue.)  What makes Catholic education so dismal is the manner in which Catholic adults, notoriously, mark their faith formation beginning and ending with Sunday school programs, sacramental preparation classes, or formal Catholic education.  Once a diploma is in hand, or high school youth group is over, the faith formation often ends as well.  Catholics often regard faith formation like algebra class: learn what you need to get through it and survive.  I imagine that Mike Moroski’s approach to education and faith formation somehow penetrated that superficial layer.  From the outpouring of student support, the emotional upheaval is clear: the students listen(ed) to him and they loved him.  The archdiocese removing that kind of educator from Purcell’s environment not only devastates the community, but models an abuse of power that not only insults and damages the students who stand to lose the most, but it insults and damages us all.

My generation finds itself repeating history, we are once again living in a time when the combined use of our vocal chords and critical thinking skills is a threatening action deemed punishable by church leadership. When we put our conscience into action, when we speak from the multi-lingual living God who. dwells. in. each. of. us., we are not met with open curiosity or inquisitive invitation.  Those of us who publicly and openly claim our identity and embrace our “divergent” beliefs are met judgement, with condescending suggestion to study Scripture more closely, we are advised to find the REAL truth of our lives by prioritizing someone else’s reasoning over our own.  It’s as if there is a myopic, linear way to God.  It’s as if our human history hasn’t already spoken volumes about the evil we are capable of when we misuse systematic power and control in the name of God and orderliness.

It is most certainly not a modern trend to be an outspoken Catholic, to be in the fray.  It was the searing call of the earliest Christians.  Our history books reveal multiple instances of church leadership changing their tune, ideas and decisions (slavery, capital punishment, the priesthood to name a few).  Does that mean there is no merit to having leadership or believing its teachings?  No, of course not.  Quite the opposite.  The church leadership should stand with us in dialogue, not above us.  Why is that such a threatening position, to stand shoulder to shoulder?  Could it be that we’re equal (no master is greater than the servant) and that equality doesn’t neutralize power, but rather perfects it?  This collective massaging of truth does not make it inauthentic or morally relativistic nor is it about making it convenient for everyone to lead comfortable lives.  Quite the opposite!  HIERARCHY is the easy way out.  The social and religious construct we currently practice IS the convenient way.  We may have moments like this when many are in uproar and as tragic and outrageous as this situation is for Mike and Katie Moroski, it’s also a lot easier to deal with this than it would be to engage each and every student, educator, catholic, priest, lay person, minister, child, friend.  Operating as a love-centered, God-revealing community would mean that we actually and actively reflect upon our lives as we strive to understand the mystery of grace.  Hierarchy is the convenient way to run companies, organizations, and institutions.  Yes, it limits creativity and spirituality,  but it does remove our sole responsibility to own our lives of faith.  Hierarchy.  It’s instructional and thereby the very definition of convenient.  We Catholics pay lip service to “The Process” or “Discernment” or “The Journey” of faith.  Yet, in my lifetime, my own personal discernment of love, sexuality, identity, human rights, reproductive health, and power is commendable only if I arrive at the same answer as church leadership.  If and when I arrive elsewhere, I’m labeled a liberal, a moral relativist, or a rebel, a heathen, ignorant, uneducated, lazy, unsaved.  I reject these labels.  I reject the idea that unless I completely embrace all the teachings of the Magisterium that it disqualifies me from asserting a valid, thoughtful, sacred insight of my own, born out of the fire of my own God-given existence.

I believe church leadership is capable of rich goodness and wisdom.  I believe that its guidance and prudence has a place in our church community, but its patterns of behavior, its unapologetic bullying and abuse of power – the very model of leadership that Jesus overthrew – is not only spiritually killing its faithful, but viciously destroying our ability to pass on the faith to the next generation.

Moroski says that for him the issue has always been about the acceptance of diverse opinion.  For me, the issue is much uglier than that.   We all know that Catholics possess different and opposing opinion, but how it is publicly handled is the problem.  This is not about accepting diversity, it is the prioritization of details over children, of dogma over community, of uniformity over reality.  It is about how we are treated by our brothers in leadership positions of the highest levels of church.  It is about being callously thrown around like dispensable objects instead of sacred vessels.  It is about church leaders being so removed from the people that they do not see they are persecuting their own sisters and brothers in the name of church doctrine.  It is the lack of relationship with community that these situations arise.  Or, perhaps, it is the utter lack of faith (or is it fear?) that God is speaking through others that paves the way to Calvary.

Today, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, Catholics receive a marking upon our foreheads and souls reminding us we are entering a season of change.  I reflect upon “change” and conjure up some of my favorite images of Christ which pertain to the restoration of the senses.  The blind see, the deaf hear, the diseased walk, the dead rise, the mute speak.  If one of the messages of the new covenant was absolute clearing and openness, why do we expend so much energy on the opposite? Why does church leadership spend so much time and resources trying to mute those who are speaking?

May this season of reflection bring inner transformation for us all.

Why This Isn’t About Gay Marriage: Mike Moroski and Modern Day Catholicism

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

One of the most challenging calls of being a modern day Catholic is to openly and publicly be yourself.

For years, the combination of working for the church and writing progressively on issues relating to feminism, gender, and reproductive health made me feel like I was living a double life.  I would turn down writing opportunities that would let my writing career flourish or deepen because I didn’t want the inevitable questions to arrive: how can you believe ______ when the Catholic Church says ______this instead?  (insert a variety of issues pertaining to women, sexuality, gender, liberation)  It’s a difficult thing to balance: your call to write your vision of the world knowing its very core lies in conflict with the walls of the Catholic Church where you’ve been educated and formed.  After years of working at an adult education center that eventually was investigated by the Vatican because of reiki and yoga sessions I helped program, after attending retreats by excommunicated priests whose message was identical to that of Sunday homilies, after being raked and silenced by the archdiocese for participating in social justice organizing with interfaith communities, after turning down yet another assignment because I didn’t want to publicly deal with the inevitable outrage, after self-editing my own soul,  after reflecting for the umpteenth time upon how my now partner had to choose between living out a vocation either as a priest or married person, after meditating on the sexual abuse scandal while simultaneously editing an anthology about sexual violence, I left my position working for the church.  Willfully.  Quietly.  I work now on a project-by-project “consulting” basis because I didn’t want to arrive at the day or situation that Mike Moroski has now found himself in.

Mike Moroski is many things in my life.  He’s a good friend.  He’s a human anchor for Cincinnati, Ohio and, truthfully, for all who know him.  Nick and I just attended his and Katie Moroski’s wedding back in the fall.  They are the kind of people who remind you why you’re alive.  They embody not just a Catholic spirit, but a human spirituality.  A fleshy, tangible joy that celebrates good music, the miraculous nooks of our planet, food, love, justice, and community; all the best things in life.  Whenever I see one or the other, or better when they’re together, I am flooded by emotional memos to enjoy more, live deeper, and cultivate my being.

No, I’m not exaggerating.  They’re that kind of good.

Which is why, unfortunately, I was not surprised that Mike was given an ultimatum to either be terminated from his position as Dean from Purcell Marion High School in Cincinnati, Ohio or take down his words on his own website and blog voicing his support of gay marriage. It was heart-wrenchingly predictable to read this news.  And it was my own reaction that was the most depressing to absorb, my non-shocked state.  Everything about that choice – be silenced or lose your livelihood – sums up the prison/call of being a modern day Catholic.  Most Catholics I know profoundly disagree with at least one component of church doctrine or dogma and for those of us who have professionally chosen to wade even deeper in the Catholic ocean by working for it, being aligned with it, and getting paid by it, we know that the risks and punishments are severe.  The punishments always seem to lie with being silenced one way or another.  You’re ostracized, excommunicated, fired, cornered, bullied, or trampled on by the powers that be because of the very existence of the diversity of belief, the diversity of faith.  Catholics who believe in equality, in social progress, those of us who want to see more peace in the world – and care a little less about who marries whom or who loves whom – are cast out of Catholic institutions because the sign of conflict is perceived as disorderly, not as unity.

So many people over the years have said the obvious, “Just leave the church.”  I chose one year to discern that.  For one year, I thought intensely and darkly about leaving the Catholic church and weighed it all: family, culture, choice, spirituality, power, oppression.  I came to the decision to stay when I was singing at mass one ordinary Sunday.  I was looking around my worship community  who come in every shade and size and background and ability, all of us fumbling, all of us so heartwarmingly hapless, trying to love and forgive in this world, and the song – lyrics and rhythms I’ve known since I was a young child – overpowered me with simplicity.  The choice wasn’t about staying or leaving, it was about growing.  Deciding WHERE and how to grow was the question, how to position myself to best hear the Inner Voice, how to stay close to my Conscience.  It came down to this: where does God speak to me?   At the time, I told folks it was to focus my energy on writing and give myself to freedom to openly write my positions.  Inside, I was screaming for air.  I no longer wanted to be questioned or defend my beliefs which I thought to be as basic as breathing.  The first thing I decided was to give myself my own breath back. I chose to stay Catholic, but leave my position of leadership.

Mike Moroski and Katie Moroski came to a decision because of an illusion of a choice the archdiocese gave them.  The media will report that the choice is either to take down a blog post or resign from your job.  That’s not a choice, that’s a silencing.  Either way, there’s an attempt to silence him.  Mike, typically, finds his way to rise and says he’ll take the consequences that come with voicing his opinion.  In this unsurprising dilemma, Mike will join a very long line of Catholics who have dealt with the illusion of choice by the church (abortion: mother or child; vocation: marriage or holy orders; sex: abstain or count fertile days; gay issues: deny yourself  or deny yourself) and I hope he knows that regardless of the outcome, he is not alone in this turmoil.  Mike, you are not alone.

My prayer is not for Mike.  I know him and have every confidence in the physical and spiritual world that this will only strengthen his resolve and core to continue to be the anchor he already is to his communities.  My prayer is for all of the modern day Catholics, especially young folks, who think this is about gay marriage.  It isn’t.  It’s about the future of the church, who we want our leaders to be,  and how to teach ourselves and the next generation how to fully respond as the person God has called you to be in voice, in action, and in uncertainty.

Be, write, love, live who are you called to be.  Answer only to your own conscience, the place where you and God converse.  This is the signature commandment and challenge enscripted for our generation.  On this wall, I gladly sign my name, too.

Lisa Factora-Borchers

Me, You, and Everything In the Soul: 2012 New Year’s Eve Reflection

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

2000 Boom

2001 Onward and Upward

2002 Shift

2003 Health in All Forms

2004 Phenomenal

2005 Authenticity

2006 Courage

2007 Spectacular, Spectacular

2008 Faithful

2009 My Time

2010 Believe In Goodness

2011 This Was the Year that I…

2012 Simplify

2013 Relationships

Twelve years ago, I stopped making specific resolutions.  They felt too breakable, too fragile to withstand an entire year.  Instead, I began making thematic resolutions in hopes of slower, more broad, more impactful change in my life.  Instead of “more gym time,” “publish first book,” “lose more weight” I started choosing themes that would remind me of the greater picture of life.  I’d choose words or phrases that evoked an area of my life that needed cultivation, attention, love.  As I look researched what past themes have been, I see there are two things that I’ve improved in the past twelve years: reflection and writing.  I’d like to think that will continue for the rest of my life and at a crotchety old age of 89, I’m going to be a masterful zen of all things spiritual and spit out pearls of wisdom with my fake teeth and mismatched outfits, and a magenta toned walker.

2012 was the most impressive year I’ve ever lived.  In some ways, I fear I may not be able to top it, but that silly thought is cast aside by the very principle that led me to make 2012 the beast of a year that it was: confidence. The year was “Simplify” — I was to do nothing but work on two parts of my life: writing and my health.  Both were measurable in clear ways and my achievement defined itself with two markers.  I had a year-long commitment to work out at least five times a week.  Save a few weeks of sickness and travel (and most recently, holiday gluttony and laziness), I did it.  And not one week went by where I didn’t work out at least twice.  Healthy and whole cooking took on immense importance this year with a focus on dramatically decreasing alcohol and caffeine.  I took to veggies and fruits for snacks, and  instead of forcing myself to run, I allowed myself to breathe (literally) in activities I looked forward to engaging: lifting, stretching, dancing, kickboxing, walking, playing.  Not using self-torture was critical to my falling in love with health, with my own body.  As a result?  A slow, sometimes painfully slow decline in weight.  Almost 20lbs.  More importantly, though, now my body not only expects but needs activity to maintain balance, sanity, and keeping anxiety at bay.

Mental and physical health are not two peas in a pod, they are the same pod.  2012 revealed a relationship so delicate and obvious that it seems almost silly not to have understood it before.  Sanity is available when the body works out its stored aggressions and sadness, disappointments and hang-ups, fears and bitterness, confusions and mistakes.  Not only do I feel physically better after activity, but my mental state is on another level afterward.  Miracles happen when the body moves.  Sometimes the anger is dispelled, sure, but more incredibly epiphanies arrive in movement.  There is not a void after a workout or a hard dancing hour, there is a simple line of reason, a bottom line, if you will, that served as a life line.  An inarguable peace that emanated courage to talk to Nick about what upset me, perseverance to push forward with my anthology, resilience to get back up off the floor, hope to repair a frayed relationship.

It had been a long time since I dared to believe I was capable to be astounded by life.  There were no surprises in store for me, I surmised a few years ago, and I could feel the enemy – complacency – creeping toward my mental horizon.  In 2012, I blew it out of the water.  I am in the best physical shape of my life, and as a sweet result, grew an unexpected fortitude that gave spring water to the soils of spirituality and motherhood.

In some respects, 2012 was the year that I was waiting for since I was a little girl.  It was the year, at age 33, my first book was picked up to be published.  It is an anthology, a multi-authored work by survivors of sexual violence for other survivors.  First books – first anythings, really – reveal much about where you are in life, I think.  And my first book, I am so proud to say, is a book of love.  It is for others.  It is for the world.  It is my offering to come always and only in peace to disrupt the silence and culture of acceptance for survivors of rape.  The anthology is my monument to stand as a gathering place for survivors of sexual violence to project their voices, share their stories, and show their communities what radical healing looks like. 2012 was the first year of my life that I finished something grand, that I saw the fruits of my labor.  Fruits that I have been praying for and honestly didn’t believe I would ever get to enjoy.

For years, I had been babying the seeds, even whispering pleas into the flower beds that something would come up out of the dirt.  For years all I saw was soil, and the tiniest hint of green or growth would turn out to be a weed.  Or it would wilt after a few weeks and whither away.  But not this year.   In 2012, the flowers and fruit came.  The work paid off.  The symphony began.  And it was glorious.  The anthology was about an organic vision of seeing a need in the world and working on patching that hole with nothing but mud and spit to hold it in place.   2012 delivered a confirmation I didn’t know that i needed: trusting my own visions.  To have an external party validate your vision is a gift that I wish on every soul that walks the planet.  Not a publisher, per se, but the metaphorical publisher – another entity in the world saying to you: YES. WE SEE THE SAME NEED THAT YOU DO. LET’S WORK TOGETHER TO FIX THAT. It makes you trust your eyes more.  It makes you believe in the good of people again.  It makes you want to work more, give more, love more, love better, find healing, bridge gaps, and yes, even walk out on the plank once more ready to jump into an ocean full of rejection and pain because sometimes, just sometimes, there is a buoy to hold onto, there to keep your bobbing head above water.

I simplified my life and chased my dreams.  The chase ended and they came true.  Not magically or easily, but they came true.  I reached the top of my mountain this year and the view was not only majestic, but showed me a horizon full of other mountains to climb.  And the difference between last year and now is that t I am not afraid of the climb, of the arduous journey. Not only am I excited for it, I believe that I can do it.  I believe that I will do it.

2013 Relationships

In a Los Angeles coffee shop, on a warm summer night, I sat across a table from my dear friend Jess Hoffman, who in the middle of updating me on her life, offered a hastily remarked but profound statement, “If you’re not working on relationships, I don’t know what you’re doing.”  We were talking about communities, families, friends, life…and holding it all in balance when cancer comes unexpectedly, when circumstances create needs must too large to independently navigate, when you realize in this really dramatic way that the things that matter most in life are people and relationships.

If you’re not working on relationships, I don’t know what you’re doing.

For me, the self-examination began, How strong are my branches?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a relationships guru.  Even in my childhood years,  I’d be the one dispensing advice on dating your crush, resolving fights with your parents, keeping peace with your roommate, creating community, buffering the safe zone in hostile work environments. Relationships are, like, my THING.  Or so I thought and yet when Jess said that sentence, a deep anchor of doubt hit the sediment of my soul. How much of my time do I spend growing my relationships?  Is that really the center of my life?

Yes and no.

Instead of divulging my half thoughts, I made it my 2013 theme.  It will be a year where I examine my relationships to God, Self, Family, Others, Community, Strangers, World, Technology, Writing, Food, Church, Things. Clarifying relationships is one of the most radical things I can do to deepen my existence in the world.

One of the specific goals I made is around organization.  When I examine my relationship to technology, I see that I spend an inordinate amount of time either 1. searching for something that in my computer or 2. avoiding something because I don’t want to spend time searching for it.  I see patterns of my life reflected in my relationship to technology.  My inability to delete ANYTHING has affronted me now with a surplus of digital photos, emails, buried requests, and unanswered correspondence.  It’s overwhelming and quite literally out of control.  So one of the things I am doing to improve my relationship and overcome this particular form of procrastination manifested out of my inability to let go delete things is to take the year to organize four email accounts and countless photo libraries.  Tens of thousands of files need to be collapsed or simplified.  It’s a daunting task.  But, it indicates something about my relationship that I want to address.

Another specific goal is to truly define what friendship means to me.  Living in the digital era has put me in a boundless limbo of “friends” and “connection.”  What does it mean to be truly friends with someone?  Is shared history enough to carry forward relationships into the future?  What is the line between building trying to build relationship across difference and ripping open old wounds that probably will never heal?  How much of myself do I truly share with others and the world?  Who do I want to let into my world?  More people?  Or less people to more deeply become connected?

And what about my relationship to my aging parents?  My busy siblings?  My emotionally precocious toddler?

If you are not working on relationships, what are you doing?

The question, for me, then becomes: How do I strengthen my branches?

This detail may sound small, but I believe it critical to 2013: listening.  Taking the time to listen, truly listening is a skill that I need to polish.  Like so many, I love fast paced productivity.  Action, movement.  But multitasking doesn’t work with listening, not the kind of listening I want to do anyway.  To listen, means to go out of my way to NOT be preoccupied with my own life and agenda.  It means focus.  Eye contact.  An extra moment.  Waiting. Not prompting. Not interjecting. Not interrupting.  It means letting others ask their questions first.  It means observation and patience.  Working on relationships means taking the initiative to communicate.  Returning a phone call.  Texting a thought.  Realizing a text is only a thought.  It means face time. Not Facebook.

Relationship building is not just about doing, but being.  Then the question morphs again into: How do I root myself even deeper to the earth?  A tree cannot flourish with full glorious branches without a sturdy trunk and thick, chunky roots.  Knowing my own limits and challenges is key to strengthening my branches. Relationships is intentionally slowing down to evaluate who and what I am today and how that is different from yesterday.  Relationships is also about applying the reflective process to others, realizing that they have also transitioned and changed somehow from how I last knew them and to provide space for all that change.  Relationships means trusting that relationships are not purchased items with clear instructions on maximizing its usage and expiration dates.  Everyone and everything has a different formula.  But one thing is consistent:  the key for building relationships in a healthy, sustaining manner is radical self-awareness.  Without that steadiness, the rest is windfall.

If you are not working on relationships, what are you doing?

I am working on my relationships this year.  I don’t know of a more demanding or necessary task that I could assign myself.

Reflecting on a Year of Travels: Six Lessons in Relationships, Politics, and Health

Published on by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

I think we can find ourselves in our travels.  The best and worst things come out when we remove ourselves from our familiar environments.  Here’s what I learned from 2012 thus far.

1. We romanticize and demonize other parts of the country.

It’s true and you know it.  How else would the red state/blue state map thrive if we didn’t believe that Kentucky was a bunch of cousin-marrying racists?  Or that Northern Cal isn’t a bunch of self-inflated activists pressing liberals far left?  As I made my way to different parts of the country this year (Biloxi, NOLA, Knoxville, New York, New Jersey, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Flagstaff) I realized that the issues I find in Ohio are the issues everywhere else, it just tastes a little different.

I’ve both demonized and romanticized Ohio.  I’m a thinking independent Catholic writer, I tend to see both the good and bad in things.  It struck me, though, how political Ohio truly is and what makes it a battleground state in this presidential election when my CA born and raised cousin asked me, “Why is Ohio always in the news?  I feel like every time I turn on the news, there’s story going on in Ohio.  Always something.”  Out of nowhere, my mouth decides to regurgitate this reasoning I swallowed a few years ago which I recalled in that moment, “Ohio is known as the mirror that most accurately reflects the country.  It has its mix of both agricultural communities and city life.  While our cities are not as imposing as NYC, LA, Atlanta, or Chicago, they are mid-sized cities that reflect the same dynamics.  This mix balances the state as a whole and I think that most people can find a bit of themselves in Ohio whether they like it or not.  There are conservatives, there are liberals.  There are rich people, there are poor people.  There’s urban and rural, educated and illiterate.  Ohio is covered in the news because the story is likely to resonate with somebody watching.”

And when another cousin chimed in, “I’d love to see the political ads.  There are none here.”  I looked at him like he suggested he’d love to try a sampler platter of cow manure.  WHO WANTS TO READ POLITICAL ADS?  Apparently those who don’t hear every five minutes, “I’m Mitt Romney/Barack Obama and I approve this message.”  We romanticize what we don’t have.

I thought I would love to slip into liberal LA LA land and have heavy discussions with strangers that included phrases like Right On, Man. Right on.  And Preach, Sistah! Preach!  Yeah, that didn’t happen.  What did happen was relationship building with my politically-obsessed cousin who loves to discuss it as much as I do.  We watched the DNC together and sat on the edge of our chairs, yelling our support or suggestions for better speech writing (“That Jon Favreau!”)  I found that in the outside world in LA, there were no strange political signs (As spotted last night on 480 W “Obama supports abortion and gay marriage. DO YOU?!”) or coverage on the latest Chick-Fil-A scandal.  It was then I realized, “Ohio’s really political.  At least, since we’re inundated with messages, we’re forced to talk about it more.”

When surrounded by a like minded population, at large, perhaps you aren’t baited for dialogue as much, I surmised.  Ohio’s not as lame as I thought.  It keeps me fired up.

2. Our country is a geographical wonder.

I’m just not sure people can see it.  For example, the first day I was at the Grand Canyon, it was a mystical overcast day.  The tour guides were consoling the wanderers saying, “I know it’s not what you thought it’d be but this is exciting to us who see it everyday!  It never looks like this.”

“THIS” was a Grand Canyon spectacular vista, with clouds as accents and sharpening the hues and shadows.  The natural filter put an almost surreal feel to the already mind-blowing geographical miracle.

As my eyes and camera focused on one particular angle, I overheard two women talking.  One was more distressed and resigned who complained to her friend, “There’s nothing worth seeing here.  I’m not even going to take any pictures.  Let’s just go.”

I did a double take and resisted the urge to scream in her face, asking her if we were looking at the same thing.  Her comments made me feel as though I were on drugs, seeing things no one else was seeing.  The way the light pierced through some clouds and not others.  The different patches of white smattered against the red and brown canyon, the deep gorges of rock softened by the foggy cotton.

How often in life do we do that?  Stand before something absolutely stunning, but fail to actually experience it because we are too caught up in the fact that it doesn’t look the way we thought it would?

3. I am a creature of habit. And control.

As much as I love traveling, I found that having my own space, time, food, freedom is essential to relaxing and enjoyment.  This includes deciding if and where I will worship on Sundays, having time to think and be in quiet, breathing fresh air without car or noise pollution, using my legs as transportation, and cooking with fresh garlic and cilantro.  After a few days, I found myself craving space.  Craving solitude.  Craving meditation.  How does that mix with community?  Family?  How does the absence of quiet affect our mental, emotional, psychological, and therefore physical health?

I realized how much I have worked to truly put a healthy balance into my life of social and solitude, sound and quiet, talking and listening, community and self, writing and reading, expressing and reflecting.  When I have more of one , the ground suddenly feels like ice.

Mental health is critical and the pressures of travels puts acute pressure on our senses.  When I travel my home base is my travel mates.  I must always travel with understanding and compassionate companions who understand my “random and picky” exterior actually has reasoning behind it.

4. Someone needs to study the traffic and psychology.  And more people should be employed to fix public transportation.

My brother commented that I was unusually tense on the road.  Never mind the moment that muttered an eff bomb as the sun peaked out from behind a mountain as I drove on the Pacific Coast Highway, blinded me and I hit the median polls with the driver’s side mirror.  Never mind the parking ticket I received for $63.  I’m not even going to go into detail about how I believe the 405 in California was constructed by Xanax who are reaping the benefits of the public feeling like ants marching to nowhere.

Everyone told me just to incorporate the traffic into daily life, but it was more than traffic.  It was the basic truth of a need not being met.  There are X number of people on the road and there need to be X number of ways to accommodate those folks to get to where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time.  Nothing about freeway driving in southern California was reasonable.  I wasn’t perturbed by the traffic, but by the lack of resources or ideas people offered when I asked what was being done to relieve the pressure of so many people traveling at once.  Someone offered, “The government should forget about the borders around Mexico and put it on California.  We can’t handle any more drivers.”

5. Most people in the United States are friendly to a traveler.

In the grocer. At a gas station.  On a sidewalk.  Guests at a party.  Introduce yourself as an out of towner and there is an immediate and magnetic aura that attracts advice, alternate and faster driving routes, wider smiles and longer attention spans.  Based on my travels this year, I believe that most people want to be good to others.  Even that teen boy with a backwards hat and sour expression on his face who I asked if he knew where St. Francis de Sales Church was located, he shook his head and shrugged but after two seconds turned around and said, “I did see something over there to the right that looked like a church.  That might be it.”

It was.

Or the cashier in Flagstaff who wouldn’t stop complimenting me on Cedar Point.  Like I personally constructed the record holding amusement park myself and ended the chatter with a swift, wide smile, “Welcome to ‘Staff!”

Or the number of people who smiled at me and let their gaze slowly wander to Isaiah and throw stranger love rays to him.  Or the friendly wait-staff in restaurants.  Or fellow hikers.

People are mostly good people.

Gotta try and remember that.

6. Be in relationship. Stay connected.  Get to know your family again.

Social media drives a well-oiled machine that wants you to *think* you are connected when, in reality, you are not.  Connection is different than knowing someone had a baby or moved to another city.  Relationship is not a status update or determined by the number of likes on a post.  How much time you spend in person – not real time – breathing the same air is what build connection and sustains relationship.

One of the most dangerous aspects of social media is the illusion that those who live far away are connected by photos and texts.  The reality is the relationships require more work, and perhaps we intentionally use social media to pacify ourselves and relationships to keep up the pretense that we are in relationship but in reality we actually just don’t want to invest in that relationship – which is actually fine – so long as we don’t kid ourselves into thinking that viewing photo albums is the same as sitting on a couch and actually getting to know your cousin’s children.  When siblings move away, there’s only so much that childhood can anchor you to your knowledge of who they are.  Development never stops and as sweet or nostalgic or horrifying as childhood may have been, adulthood – the present – is infinitely more complex.  That’s when change occurs.  That’s when you need to remember that your sibling, cousin, best friend is likely very different from the way you imagined that person in your head.  It’s called growing up.

Traveling is expensive.  And more importantly is costs time.  It causes discomfort and requires some level of surrender to be surrounded by things out of routine.  Time zones, foods, beds and expectations.  Awkward moments are countless.  Everything is different.  But when done in the name of relationship building, those hard edges round out with time and the memories made, the connection thickened, the laughter deeper – travels become a natural part of our requirement to sustain our presence to those who we most love.