Being Pregnant

I have been pregnant for 9 months. Baby girl, please come out and play!
I feel great right now. My feet are looking and feeling normal, and my back does not feel like it'd be better if I broke it in half.
In all honesty, it hadn't been that bad for months! I was just, well, bigger, and trying to keep up with all the supplements, the ounces of water I am supposed to drink (but can never quite finish), and the big no-no rules. But lately it's been uncomfortable and painful-- so I take my good moments and relish them.
Thankfully I've had many good moments. Q and I have been spending a lot of time together. It's really been great, doing so much cooking, shopping, and working on baby projects together. We've also been going out a lot. Even if we just go out to Mass Street to walk around (trying to keep fit) and have some coffee and dessert (okay, maybe not that fit). Being out and about together is just... wonderful. We walk, we talk, we hold hands. We say stupid stuff and laugh like no one's ever thought of this or that pun. We discuss "serious" things, wondering what it'll be like to be parents, trying to figure out problems we don't yet have... lol. We enjoy the weather, the view, the fun and different people walking by us (it was zombies last time we were on Mass St, complete with makeup, calls for "brains," and that weird walk). We clean and disinfect (and yet I wonder if our place is clean enough every day!). We read and read to baby.
Being pregnant has been pretty awesome. I know in twenty years I will think back to these times in my life and wish I could go back. Yes, everything is up in the air. And yes, our finances could be better. But things are so simple and wonderful right now. We are in love, we are happy, we are learning, and experiencing, and growing.
Baby girl, I pray that you will be as lucky as your mom has been. At church during communion the other day, I was asking God to please take care of you, especially when I am no longer there to do it -when you are older and on your own and I have to let you live your life the way you choose. Today I ask Him to give you happiness like mine. I hope you will find someone like your Dad is to me, someone who loves you and takes care of you, and makes life seem like every single little thing in the world is full of beauty and wonder.

I can't believe I'm saying this...

...but I'm hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, it's incredibly cheesy and unrealistic to the point of ...but anyway, it's entertaining. Besides, most of the main characters in the show are incredibly smart. And it keeps me from thinking about the demonization of illegal immigrants in Arizona. *sigh* Now THAT is unrealistic stupidity.

Advent

Q and I have been trying to follow an advent devotional, "The Uncluttered Heart," published by the Upper Room Books company. It has been a while since I last tried to follow a devotionary. It has brought me peace and inspired me to be mindful of the essence of the upcoming holyday.
What would a higher power who has closely and patiently followed humanity and its history, and even interfered every once in a while, think of us Christians, celebrating the birth of His human incarnation the way we do? I have a feeling that He knows we have turned it (maybe without noticing, but still, we've done it) into a celebration of ourselves.
Nothing wrong with celebrating ourselves. He celebrates us too. And those of us who are fortunate to actually enjoy the holidays with our families should be thankful for it. But as for me, as a follower of Christ, I need more than just that. I need the communal celebration that the supernatural was among us. I want to celebrate, yes, the blessings my loved ones and I have enjoyed, but also the triumph of having been so close to the heart of the Almighty that He left his position as a divinity, as a worship-receiver, and became one of us -- a child, a preacher, a human friend to those lucky few. I am very glad and grateful that though He deserves all glory and worship, and even though I have not been the best friend to him, he still decided to befriend me and keep tabs on me. I think it speaks to the kind of God we have.

On a different but also happy note, today is Sarai's (the oldest of my younger sisters) Birthday!! I don't think she reads my blog, but I still want to add a happy birthday wish for her. FELIZ CUMPLE, MIJA! Te kiero mucho, mucho.

Rare Sightings

So Abi was here last week, and she'll be back on Saturday and the part-ee will go on :D
While she was here, we started talking about some of the strange things we have seen this summer. Fond as I am of lists, I decided this one had to go on the blog.

Rare Sightings 2009 :">

1. My "no nonsense" socks. Bought during our honey moon by my husband, they will live on forever in the pages of romantic history. They have the straight forward message sowed into the toe section of each sock. Love them. Why are they a strange sight? It's a sight for the wearer, not the beholder. It's not so much the message as the fact that it's positioned so that the wearer of the socks can read it, unlike the messaged t-shirts (which I nevertheless enjoy a whole lot).

2. The crazy man in L- town. Q says he's been around for a while. I've only seen him twice, both times on our way to the bank. The friendly man, dressed in baggy clothes, with really long curly hair and what seemed to me like a colorful reggae/rasta hat, was happily walking down the main avenue with a careless and light step, waving at strangers as he walked.

3. Rata asquerosa. (Disgusting Rat). I kid you not, it was the size of a cat. Q and I were going back home after a late afternoon walk, and there it was, ahead of us, crossing the street, walking towards the apt complex. It started walking just as the green man lit up too, so it even seemed to me that the darned thing had been waiting for its turn. I protest- there are no rat lights on pedestrian crossings! But yes, it kept on going ahead of us for a little bit, and then crossed the street again and went into the large green lot across the street from the complex. Guacala de pollo!! O de gato, o lo k sea!!

4. A bike-rack on the back of a hearse. (Una bici montada en la parte de atras de un carro funebre) Saw this one in KC while picnic-ing with Q's friend and his gf. Don't see that very often.

5. Shark bike. Yup. A bike all dressed up, with the head, body, and tail of a shark. Saw it during an outing with Abi, at the L Downtown Film Festival.

6. My moving plant. Okay, I don't care what Wikipedia says, Q. It's not a reliable source anyway. NO, ITS NOT NORMAL FOR PLANTS TO MOVE. They grow, they process nutrients, but they do not move like that. My mint plant turns, like a sunflower, to face the sun. Every time. If you move it so that its stem and leaves are turning away from the window, a couple hrs later it will be facing the darned sun. I swear. It freaks me out.

7. Arm incubation. I know this is nasty, but I think a small bug incubated in my left arm. I've had a red bump there for the longest time, and nothing I do to it makes it better. Any ideas? I dont want a little animal creeping out of my skin. *omg*

Can't Sleep

Writing a post for my blog will forever remind me of the first week I spent with my husband to be… back in Dallas, when I would write in the wee hours of the night simply because it was the only time I could do it. And I HAD to do it, of course, because I knew he’d be reading it soon. Just knowing that he would was enough of a booster to keep me up for hours, writing away, making sure to include the most interesting things in my crazy busy life to entertain and impress him.

Well, it’s sort of like that still… except this time around he is somewhere in the US and Im down here in Mexico. It’s past midnight for me, and I haven’t been able to go to sleep yet, because I have way too many things in my head. The anticipation doesn’t let me sleep. Forgive me if for a moment I write like no one else will read this… Q, Ry bear… I miss you.

Home will always be home. There’s the expected and familiar.. and I’m grateful for that. I am grateful to be here. But there are a lot of things I just didn’t expect.. the busy-ness and messiness of it all, for one thing, disorients me once in a while (and don’t get me wrong, it was busy and messy enough with just me, but now it’s 9 of us!) I expected this time to be a bit more laid back.. a time to enjoy my family leisurely. Strange that I expected that, knowing how crazy my parents’ schedule is –and I want to be of as much help as I can be. This is my very last year at home, and at home we all eat from the same pot. All for one, and one for all! I’m learning to re-embrace it.

So I am once again a “teenager,” a Sunday-school teacher, a school secretary, an active member of a youth group.. and of course a sister/daughter, a wedding planner and an ESL teacher, which were the three main goals for the year.

It’s been a busy month for me… emotionally and otherwise. Busy, busy. It’s been a strangely overwhelming AND fun month. Both hectic and exciting, tiring and rewarding….

School is going amazingly well, despite the expected bumpy start. Office paperwork is as complicated as I knew it’d be… and teaching 1^st through 6^th grade ESL is no easy feat, especially while the classroom is under construction and still lacks a blackboard. But I do have plenty of space, seats, and a computer (my laptop) and a projector. And Dad bought me a Disney interactive program, which the kids LOVED. I also have a whole lot of Power Points, flashcards, and other didactic materials. I think the kids and I are all having a lot of fun, and they are learning fairly quickly. In a month (2 classes a week) most of the grades have learned school vocabulary, the pronouns, the verb to be, this/these, that/those, the, my, a… the family, the house, the numbers, the calendar… my goodness.. I’m going fast. But that’s how smart they are. I’m very proud of them.

Hard things? Learning names, keeping the noise level down, and grading so much homework! But I refuse to lower the hw load.. they need it.

Fun things? Games and crafts with the kids. I had the 1^st grade kiddos make cubes with the names of the months, and they loved it. The cubes came out surprisingly well, given the age of the kids. They are all cute and colorful, and I intend on hanging them to the paper tree Im building in one of the corners of the classroom…Getting little notes and drawings is also a lot of fun too :)

So that’s been the start of the year for me.. I love teaching :) The kiddos make me happy .. jejejeje…

Alrights… Im going to sleep now.. Im finally starting to fade.

Ecclesiology and the Anti-Praxis of Liberation Theology

Speaking of post-Enlightenment responses (such as modern cosmopolitanism, liberation theology, and even that new trend that they call reconciliation theology) made me think of Schleiermacher, “the father of modern protestant theology,” whose Ecclesiological a priori principles could be very briefly listed. He strongly advocates a type of Church theory that emphasizes communion to such an extent that some believe him to have been anti-institutional (thus my mental link to liberation theology…):

1. The Church is first and foremost a fellowship or communion with God through Jesus and the Spirit that is shared among Christians.

2. The Church is the corporate life brought about by Jesus; its origins must be grasped historically and dynamically. Its foundation lies in a religious intimacy between Jesus and his followers that grows organically through the spread of like relationships. Schleiermacher identified religious self-consciousness, which is also a consciousness of God, as the basis of religion. This consciousness or piety leads naturally to fellowship or communion which in the case of Christianity is the Church. In On Religion Schleiermacher lingered on the topic of intimacy, discussing how religious consciousness dissolves the artificial boundaries of our personalities and immerses ourselves within the feeling of comradeship. In The Christian Faith he described Christian redemption as arising through fellowship with Jesus, and the emergence of the Church as a necessary extension of such fellowship.

3. The Church is an intrinsic dimension of revelation and not an added extra. Schleiermacher argued that whether in the modern era or in the time of Christ, Christian redemption takes place always and necessarily within the context of a fellowship. It is not enough to say only that individuals first have their own personal transforming experiences and then come together to form a fellowship. Christ's ministry took place within a context in which a collective need for redemption and its expectation already existed. Moreover, each personal Christian experience takes place within and is conditioned by a fellowship that took form with Christ's first public appearance. The resulting organization finds its roots in this initial self-organizing principle.

4. The Lord's Supper is the highest representation of church unity, achieving fellowship with Christ and fellowship among believers. The most apt image for describing the Church is that of the body of Christ. Although he explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic view that stresses transubstantiation, Schleiermacher also rejected views that characterize the Lord's Supper as merely figurative. He saw the Lord's Supper as the primary way of maintaining the living fellowship with Christ, so that all other forms of "enjoyment" of Christ are either an approximation to it or a prolongation of it. I would not necessarily agree with this last point, but I find his acceptance of the Holy Communion as more than simple symbolism refreshing and true.

5. The unity present in Christian fellowship requires certain essential elements. Schleiermacher held that since Christian fellowship must exist alongside the world, it will possess organizational elements such as laws and structures of authority. Most of these elements are historically variable, but there must be certain essential elements that account for continuity in self-identity. Schleiermacher identified these elements as Holy Scripture, ministry of the Word of God, baptism, the Lord's Supper, the power of the keys, and prayer in the name of Jesus. He links these six elements with the threefold ministry of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, and thus considers them to be the continuation of the activities of Christ himself.

6. Historical manifestations of the Church will legitimately be diverse. Church unity is not narrow uniformity but a reality that exists amid the dynamic interplay of many diverse elements; unity and diversity are complementary rather than contradictory. The main purpose of church authority is to counter those who insist on making their own mode of thinking obligatory, as the only expression of the common spirit. Because it exists in the world, the visible Church has many mutable and corruptible elements. It is subject to error and division. Only the invisible Church is infallible and unified. Each part of the visible Church should be aware of its own incompleteness, and open to fellowship with other parts. It could be argued, then that he believed that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism can be viewed as incomplete mediations of Christianity. “Religion is but a human attempt to reach God,” my dad once told me.

7. Church unity requires some normativity in its basic expressions of revelation. Scripture is the most basic norm of revelation; Protestants are bound also by Evangelical confessional documents; dogmas are necessary but provisional. Sources of dogma such as the witness of the patristic writers and the decrees of early church councils can be valuable but are not binding.

8. The Church is trinitarian.

All of this to go back to one main, ever-important argument that Christianity is not an ideology nor a juridical institution, but an event that has individual and communal dimensions and that spreads organically.

I believe it is this basic concept of the organically spiritual structure of the church that I did not have on the surface of my consciousness when I had a troubling discussion with the head of an important alliance that promotes the rights and welfare of immigrants in MA ---a lady whose work I deeply admire, but whose ideology I almost immediately found to be disconcertingly incorrect…

I met her at the Solutions Conference at HDS, where she and a colleague spoke about their work as an umbrella structure for different organizations… I had a word with her about my personal work aspirations, and about my interest in grass-roots activism, a short little spiel which of course she gladly absorbed. It was when I spoke of the possibility of communal work between the churches, of the collaboration between organizations, the government, and the church, that her semblance changed.

“I met a wonderful group of people in Puebla,” she said. (She’s not Mexican, so my mind went directly to the late 1970’s CELAM conference in Puebla, during the height of liberation theology within the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) “That once told me this… La Iglesia y la Politica son tiburones. Con los tiburones, tienes tres opciones: Una, nadar a la par. Dos, nadar contra ellos y atacarlos. Tres, ignorarlos.” She paused for a moment. “Ellos me dieron una gran leccion, la gente de Puebla. Yo estaba intentando nadar en contra de los tiburones. Hay que ignorarlos. Hay que hacer lo que tenemos que hacer, y dar en cuenta que no deben tener el poder que tienen. Si nadamos en contra de ellos, les damos el poder.”

She proceeded to draw a circle and a triangle. “La politica y la iglesia, ambas tienen estructura de piramide” And she went on to explain that what we should structure our society not in a manner that gives the power to one person (the president, the pope) but to all (and she re-traced her circle). It was quite an impressive little homily. The only issue I had was, what do you do about leadership? It will always exist; it will always be needed. That is the problem with liberation theology. They go on and on about the liberation of the poor, and their so called "preferential option for the poor," and they let their socialist tendencies go overboard. This is not a circular, all-encompassing order. As a matter of fact, they do not offer an alternate order. “So if democracy is a pyramid, then what structure can be placed that will resemble the circular graph of power?” I didn’t say it, but God, I was dying to ask, “Socialism? Marxism? Communism??” I did ask, though what she thought would be an alternate way of structuring our society and the Church. No answer. She very gallantly left that up to me to figure out. She advocated the destruction, through the simple “ley del hielo,” as we call the systematic, childish ignoring of people we’re mad at in Northern Mexico, of our present political and religious system. Destruction without any hope for reconstruction.

What I figured out, (lol.. even if entirely too late), is that the Church, as it is structured today, accepts leadership, but is ultimately not a pyramid (nor is it a damned polarized shark), but a communal organization. And perhaps now would my previous statement make more sense: “All of this to go back to one main, ever-important argument that Christianity is not an ideology nor a juridical institution, but an event that has individual and communal dimensions and that spreads organically. I believe it is this basic concept of the organically spiritual structure of the church that I did not have on the surface of my consciousness when I had a troubling discussion with the head of an important alliance that promotes the rights and welfare of immigrants in MA…”

An organic structure. Not a circle, not a pyramid, but a body. A tree. A living organism. A much more realistic, much more complex approach. Christianity as an organic event. Cosmopolitanism, the ideal of global justice according to which, in some fundamental respects, all individual human beings matter, and matter equally. Democracy, which renders power, though not incautiously, to the people, and still allows for the fair structuring of leadership. I cannot believe how much this small triumph excites me. The triumph over the simplistic symbolism behind a circle and a triangle! This lady… she shall remain unnamed, but for all the mental tribulation her simple conversation with me set off, she still needs to take a philosophy course or two. And that, querida familia mia, was my little ideological triumph of the month.

Hierophanies

Went out with the girls tonight. We watched Juno. Good movie.. Fable-like... in my opinion. The movie is about teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, love... a very universal story --simultaneously mundane and spiritual. We took the T to Park Street and walked to the movie theater.. talked about small city mindsets and worldviews in comparison with those the ppl in/from big cities have.. criticized the NY Times cartoonist... talked about maps and borders and transnationalism... about women's liberation.. about hierophanies.. and about taking the last train...
The last time I took the last train, I was in Madrid.. and the whole outing felt so much like my outings with Scott and Peter --well, except of course, I went out with girls this time. I enjoyed it a lot. Ceme's friend is swimming with the polar bear group tomorrow morning. I think it's wonderfully outrageous... and she's been doing it for three years! It's insane, and I haven't done something insane in a long time.
I suppose we all need it once in a while.. the sacred, the mundane, and the hierophanies that bring them together... The chaotic insanity and the clean-cut & rational... the fables that ring painfully true... The outings that remind you that all of this exists, and that you so deeply enjoy the craziness of the world.

big and ugly

Affiliate organizations, general boards, national associations and such…
UGH! I’ve been reading.. or.. well, semi-memorizing the United Methodist Church website for clues of what is out there that I would like to be a part of. I don’t understand why, if I absolutely crave planning and organization, can the mere mention of vaguely political labels and structures give me such an ugly feeling of nausea. Maybe it’s the memory of my heart broken parents leaving the politics of Methodism behind… sort of behind. Or that ugly stomach discomfort I used to get during conferences when we were all waiting to see if it’d be time to pack and say goodbye to everyone again. Maybe I just quite honestly don’t like that tricky, deceptive side that politics will always have –I don’t know if I’m sharp enough to keep up without some disregard of my own personal values. That last sentence alone sounds ugly enough.
Whatever it is, how does one get rid of it? This… thing… that is … so ugly sometimes but also very often necessary, and so useful, and SO beneficial? How can I be a part of that “Church and Society” tab without going crazy (--er)? Will I make a difference in the kind of small organization I prefer? Maybe it is a big fat lie that revolutionary changes can only be made through the masses. Wesley might have disagreed with me, though! Maybe my “preferences” will only get me stuck in an unproductive, mediocre hole of contentment. Or maybe I am altogether too problematical. Maybe I am missing the beauty of the simple life. Of making a true and lasting difference, one life at a time.
Why do I feel like I have to do everything? Sometimes it is so overwhelming that I feel I have done nothing in comparison to that gigantic original goal… If I didn’t think like this, though, what would keep me on check? What is it that drives great leaders, if it isn’t the fear that things could remain the same? If a great leader needs a great label, though, and colossal structures, and ridiculous amounts of attention… then maybe I can remain an ordinary person doing… um.. random acts of crazy greatness.