Shame Vulnerability Courage Fertilizer

WARNING: this post involves flagrant, shameless, outspoken, unabashed mention of NATURAL LIQUID FERTILIZER. If you think there is a pretty good chance that more detail than that is going to make you run away screaming, please save yourself the screaming and run away NOW!

If you can hang in there, there will be very tender tidings of a recent memorial in RantWoman's life though not in her Meeting, only one of several moments from recent life that RantWoman fears will be a little too much for the average superficial committee members' checkin, but that is another problem.

Quality of Worship evaluation: RantWoman's phone queue and personal conversations are currently full of chatter about a recent Meeting for Worship. RantWoman seems to have high tolerance for different flavors of "I wouldn't want a steady diet of that, but..." worship experiences. In one conversation, RantWoman went so far as to say the Holy Spirit showed up and slapped things around a little. RantWoman said that, and RantWoman did not even get anywhere near the message she herself had been seasoning.

Breme Brown's piece on shame again appeared as vocal ministry and RantWoman recalled another one of hers about Courage that YOutube serves up too.

RantWoman does not really recall how the thread got from Shame and Connections to the state of the World but Inveterate Gardener Friend made the trip seem effortless. Well, it seemed effortless to RantWoman, but, Bang Crash clatter rumble grumble. Eye roller Friend seemed not even to register the shame and connections thread, but interrupted the state of the world several times. RantWoman thought of standing and telling Eye Roller Friend that others want to hear Inveterate Gardener Friend's message. RantWoman thought of this but was stayed. Inveterate Gardener friend herself held steady and shortly there was silence to proceed. Inveterate Gardener Friend is a generous seasoned presence who nearly always manages to stay centered. Afterward, when asked, she said she thought intervention had not been necessary.

As an aside, one of the callers in RantWoman's phone queue disagrees: "Are you guys (meaining a certain committee) gonna do something? When someone is moved to speak they are speaking from the Light and you should listen." RantWoman thinks it's Meeting for Worship under the care of the Holy Spirit, at times an act of faith for all involved.

RantWoman in moments such as Eye Roller' Friend's eruptions, rather more frequently than she prefers finds her soul gifted with a quote from Goethe that forms the epigraph for Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which may arrive straight from German to English in slightly different words, "I am a part of the force that eternally desires evil and eternally does good." In other words, no shame and vulnerability as a path to connection, but other archetypes and dynamics, along with RantWoman thinking of some nonviolent activist surround Eye Roller Friend with love (and discipline) effort.

Back to Worship. RantWoman briefly considered a Bulgakov excursion but her heart was full with memorial thoughts of a Beloved Colleague in the world of accessibility matters. Beloved Colleague passed away unexpectedly and has lately been memorialized at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing with much affection but not as much God as her caregiver would have preferred.

http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2011/05/lara-harding-1974-2011.html

For those of RantWoman's readers who consider RantWoman impossible, overbearing, visionary, and frequently insufferable, Beloved Colleague was RantWoman on steroids with a motorized wheelchair, less vision, and a hearing loss. Beloved Colleague had multiple ways to break almost any effort RantWoman could make to achieve a completely accessible event. Luckily or unluckily, Beloved Colleague was frequently fearless about participating anyway. The memorial featured warm testimonials from students and collaborators attesting to her vast capacity to connect, humor and affection about the upside, for Beloved Colleague at least, of frequently having to get carried around by hunky firemen.

Unfortunately, what kept coming to RantWoman during Meeting for Worship, punctuated by a modest number of others' thoughtful manageable messages, was all about Beloved Colleague's catheter bag, a topic RantWoman definitely would not mind not knowing so much about. Beloved Colleague actually found having a catheter bag a great relief and made NO effort to disguise or hide this big yellow bag of urine hanging off her wheelchair between her legs. On the contrary, the catheter bag kept showing up in meditations about shame and courage and connection for one funny, flamboyant protest reason and one much more delicate one.

The delicate reason: having a catheter bag means one's life is subject to the cost-cutting efforts of state bean counters; for awhile the ravages of state bean counters meant that Beloved Colleague had to contend with a supply of completely inadequate catheter bags: the bags leaked. It absolutely was not Beloved Colleague's fault, and RantWoman had to coax her a little insistently just to let someone at the Friendly Neighborhood Center... know if she realized it was happening and the problem could be cleaned up. In other words, Beloved Colleague was terribly ashamed over something that was not her fault at all.

On the other hand, RantWoman just about boiled Beloved Colleague one day. The Friendly Neighborhood Center had just signed a contract with the city about a new program and there was particular need to set good examples for impressionable youth. Beloved Colleague's command of school realities was nearly always impeccable. Luckily that day there were not school bureaucrats around: RantWoman took a break from poking around electronically among some paperwork to go out for a breath of fresh air. RantWoman got outside just in time to see Beloved Colleague out in the parking lot emptying her catheter bag into the storm drain in full view of God and the neighborhood and everyone!

RantWoman of course HAD to yell. Beloved Colleague in reply complained about "pretentious hoity-toity bitches" and RantWoman took some time to listen to another round of Beloved Colleague's endless struggles, this time from her college days. By the time the conversation ended, RantWoman had made Beloved Colleague PROMISE to empty her catheter bag more discretely , preferably in a bathroom. Both sides were laughing, though RantWoman was still in Sensible Auntie, MUST object to bad behavior even really funny flamboyant protest bad behavior mode.

Back again to Meeting for Worship. RantWoman spent most of Meeting for Worship meditating about Courage and integrity and vulnerability and catheter bags; probably other worshippers consider it a blessing that the catheter bags never showed up in a message in Meeting for Worship. Sure, let Eye Roller Friend take all the heat for disturbances in the spiritual equilibrium....