Making banana "pancakes"

Sorry. It's another food post...

Just kidding. I'm not sorry.

Yesterday, in a very successful attempt to procrastinate, I did my grocery shopping. It was another weird week - not a bad one, just a weird one - and with the exception of once a month outdoor market, the grocery store is my favorite wandering/decompressing space. Some people like clothes shopping. I like food shopping. 

It was perfect: crazy cheap red lentils, spinach and tomatoes on sale, and a package of 6 pitas for 22 pence (about 35 cents). I also bought bananas, which is something I haven't done since mid-February. Because they serve as the base of almost every vegan milkshake, smoothie, and frozen dessert, and because they're delicious, bananas were a staple in my diet last year. Here though, I had a weird reaction to raw grocery store bananas. I don't have a blender here, so I just stopped buying them. 

Until I found a sugar and grain-free pancake recipe. 

Yep. You read that correctly. Here's the recipe:

1 banana 

1 egg

Mash them together. Cook like a regular pancake.

The end. 

Do those even qualify as pancakes? I don't know. But calling it a 'sugar and grain-free pancake' sounds way tastier than 'banana/egg patty.' Are they as good as regular pancakes? Ehh. Probably not. But I filled mine with Nutella (happy Saturday to me!), and that makes almost anything taste good. 

Nothing else to report here from the "sunniest city in Scotland" except that it hailed, rained, and sleeted yesterday. If it's sunny tomorrow, I'll take some pictures of the botanical garden's flower labyrinth that's sprouted in the last few weeks!

On Dresses and Dancing

At the St. John's UMW retreat last fall, we were asked to reflect on a time we experienced "a new normal" in our lives. "New normals" tend to sneak up on me, and even with lots of time for reflection this semester, there were a few that have slipped in almost unnoticed. 

I’ve had a lot of I don’t ______’s.

I don’t dance.

I don’t twirl.

I don’t giggle.

I don’t wear dresses.

I don’t play games.

You get the idea. Living with abandon is not something I do well, or, if I’m being honest, at all. I am typically extremely calculated. I even try to calculate my moments of abandon…see my former post on control (that paper turned out well – I worried about it without reason, as usual).

Dresses are my new normal. After two months of walking everywhere, eating well, and not being obscenely stressed, none of the pants I brought with me fit. Because the weather has been nice (comparatively), and because pants sizing is confusing here, I've been wearing dresses and cardigans every day to class. I've suddenly become fashionable. Or something closer to fashionable than I have been in years past.

Taking a day off each week to do anything - from nothing at all, to wandering around Aberdeen, to (like today) reading up on research sources - is another new normal. Not eating meat is another. I think I just stopped buying it and didn't notice.

The strangest one yet though, came today. Today is Wednesday, which means that I have no class. It's a weird scheduling thing here - class on Wednesday mornings is rare, and class on Wednesday afternoon does not exist on the timetables. Having made it through the chaos of last week, trudging through a truly awful tutorial last night, and celebrating it with a new friend and ice cream, I was in a particularly good mood today. I spent the day organizing research files, reading through a couple articles on theodicy and trauma, and then eventually, got hungry. I went to the kitchen, turned on some music, and started hacking a sweet potato into cubes.

On my day off, with Macklemore blasting in the kitchen, sweet potatoes cooking in a bath of thai curry paste and coconut milk, and naan warming in the oven, I started to dance. Not a lot. Just a little. Just enough. I danced, and it took me until I was folding spinach into the curry to notice. 

Whoa. When did I start doing that? The question was certainly aimed at the present dancing, but I was also searching my recent memory for when dancing in my kitchen (or at all) had become part of my life.

Cooking Indian food on a tiny stove while dancing to hip-hop/rap, is not my norm, but even as I'm surprised at myself, I am secretly loving this new kitchen dancing reality. 

The curry, by the way, was delicious. 

Under a Chicken's Wing

I'm in the midst of trying to articulate my Christology.

It is, without a doubt, one of my least favorite questions. I always feel ill-equipped to answer and afraid that I am transgressing some boundary of orthodoxy.

Unfortunately, Christology is a pretty foundational issue in conversations around ministry. When we're talking about working in churches, belief about the person of Jesus is, to understate it, important.

And so when the email came through this past week to please articulate my Christology, the memory of my former failed attempts to answer actually caused me to groan out loud. I've been asked the question three other times, each during significant periods of spiritual growth in my life, and, though I couldn't see my face, every single time, I felt it flash a "deer in the headlights" expression. The first two times I was asked, I made something up or recited part of a creed. The third time, I actually just admitted that I had no idea. I was sitting in a room full of wonderful people, one of whom knows me better than almost anyone in the world. And yet, having just finally started to creep out of my feminist shell in the three months before, I wasn't ready to articulate what I was thinking to the room.

This time around, I can't say, "I don't know." But this time around, I've had a year of reading, writing, teaching and processing to move into my new theological home.

In the midst of the mess and tragedy that was this past week, in light of my year of learning to stand more firmly in chaotic theology, and because I finally, finally, have something that resembles an answer, here is where my Christology sits for now. (For those of you who think it's incomplete, I know. This is just a piece.)

I affirm that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, that his finite body held the infinitude of God. I also affirm that Christ is one of three equal persons of the Trinity, and that, in the form of Sophia/Word, Christ was present in the Trinity at creation and is still present now.

More than orthodox affirmations of creed though, I think story and imagery may better communicate “Who is Jesus” for me. One of my favorite images of who Christ was and is can be found in Matthew 23:37-39 and Luke 13:34-35. I love it because typically, should we call on imagery of birds or wings in reference to God, we go very quickly to “wings like eagles.” We gravitate toward pictures of power, of agility, victory, and force. We want God to be our triumphant protector, an impenetrable wall, a fourth quarter hero.

We may call out to God our Impenetrable Wall, but Christ names himself as something different. I love the image of Christ as a hen gathering her chicks for many reasons, the foremost being its ability to disrupt the desire to build a Christology that makes Jesus seem to be made of steel, impassable, and transcendent to the point of being distant. Hens are hardly eagles, but I do think it reveals a subtlety of who Jesus knew himself to be. He was not distant, but close enough to swoop those he loved under his wing. Just his physical presence was renewing and redemptive. He was a fierce protector, but not an impenetrable one. He was fierce in his love for his children, not in battle. He was Sophia, the Divine Word incarnate, but he was also human, and therefore, vulnerable.

I often hear people remembering “The Lord is my Shepherd.” In the same way, I love to name that “The Lord is my Chicken.” While it certainly doesn’t have the same poetic beauty as Adonai Roi (Hebrew for "the Lord is my Shepherd), it does challenge me and ask me to remember who Christ saw himself to be – a mother, protector, shield and lover.

And so, in light of the tragedy of this past week in Boston, in light of the stories of the countless women who have inspired me to research the intersection of theology and trauma, my answer to the question, "Where does your Christology sit?"is

Under a Chicken's wing.

On Control

I have a problem with control.

I'm aware of it, and sometimes I attempt to intentionally move into discomfort...i.e., moving to a different country for 6 months.

Most of the time though, I don't. When I started cooking more, I was initially proud of myself for experimenting with new recipes and foods. Then I realized that even the cooking was an attempt to further control what went into my body.

Other shining examples: I bought a bus pass today, purely because being in control of when I can leave my apartment makes me feel better, somehow, less trapped in my room. I hate, hate, hate taking medicine for anything because it acts in my body in ways I can't control. It took me a month to travel anywhere outside of Aberdeen because I didn't know how to navigate the rail system here - the newness put me out of a position of control.

And right now, I am having a serious control problem with a paper that's due tomorrow. I'm supposed to turn in a 2500 word paper on a prompt that's...well, it's not making me want to get a graduate degree in biblical studies. It's outlined, all of the quotes I need are organized into sections, the headings and bibliography are done, and I even have little sections of it written. But every time I sit down to write a big chunk of it, I freeze.

At Rhodes, I know exactly what I need to do to get a good grade on a paper, and with multiple paper opportunities for each class, I can turn out a rockstar final essay by the end of the semester. Here, there is one paper for the whole semester. One. You get one shot, and then you take an exam - an exam that isn't even graded by your faculty member.

The grading scale is 1-20, split into six sections. The percentages don't help to translate - no joke, a 47% is considered a pass here.

So I'm writing blind here, with no clue what it takes to write for an upper-level seminar class at this school, trying, so far abysmally, to let go of control.

London: Face-sized Meringues and Huge Clocks

Here are some pictures from the London trip (there are more on Facebook)!

Big Ben - seriously, it's huge

From the London Eye

Her Majesty's Theatre for Phantom of the Opera

St. Paul's Cathedral

Golden St. Paul on a pole

Borough Market

Between St. Paul's and the Tate Modern 

King's Cross Station

It was a wonderful and very full trip - Westminster, St. Paul's, Tate Modern, National Gallery, the Theatre, a trip to Harrods, an afternoon shopping on Oxford Street...

The highlight of the trip was Borough Market - it was so wonderful on Wednesday that we went back on Friday for the full market. After choosing between flavorless Scottish food or curries for two and a half months, a whole market dedicated to organic, fresh food was incredible.

On Friday, I had a sandwich on fresh ciabatta bread, made with sliced tomatoes, greens and goat cheese. Earlier in the week, we'd bought empanadas straight out of the oven from an Argentinian food cart, ate fruit and pomegranate juice from other stands, and found a baker who was making meringues as big as your face with leftover brownie or cookie crumbs sprinkled on the top.

And, having established some trust with the food vendors in the city, I ate my first British fish and chips!

London, well done. You could make food that's just "okay," and still have better food than the rest of the UK. But you make food that puts everyone else to shame. I am seriously considering going back just to go to Borough Market again.

I'm back in Aberdeen, writing papers, doing laundry, making curry (I'm getting better!), and looking at ticket prices for short trips to...somewhere it's not snowing. Because, no joke, it's still snowing here.

Untellable

At 21, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is still one of my favorite books. Read it if you haven't. At one point in the story, the characters encounter a people without sight. I found a quote from one of those characters to be extremely helpful in processing the last week:

“We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing."

One of the theologians I've been reading this year spent some time unpacking the difficulty of telling stories of trauma. She asserts that there are things that are so terrible that our vocabulary has no way of fully communicating them. They become "untellable" stories.  And as I've sat with friends, mentors, even strangers, holding their frustration, I know there is truth in what she says.

It wasn't until this week though, that I found her words to be true of something beautiful. Holy Week at Iona, the teaching, the people, relationships, the hours spent wandering along the Sound, the late night services in the cold, drafty Abbey, will live in my very bones for years to come.

And even as I acknowledge the profound mark the last week has had on me, I have to also admit that it's difficult to share, not because I don't want to, but because my vocabulary cannot move into moments of sweet community, theology that made me want to weep with joy, and meals so perfect that I was never hungry.

I can tell you what I saw. I can tell you of a quiet winding road, of sheep guarding newborn lambs, of water so clear it reflected the clouds as they passed and so blue it might take your breath away, of buildings that echo with ancient stories of monastic rhythms and whisper a new story of community and justice, of the smiles and the tears of the four young children whose presence grounded the sea of adults gathered for the week, and of fresh baked scones at tea time every morning at 11.

Beyond sight though and beyond words, there was something pulsing underneath, something that caught me in the stillness of the island, something untellable, risky, incredible, and beautiful. 

I've made it to Glasgow for the day, and tonight I'll be in London! I took nearly 300 photos last week. Even as sight is limiting, I am grateful for the photo memories as the already untellable beauty of the week slips further out of reach in the noise of city life. 

Here are just a few pictures of the trip -