My Life as Calling

Recently I gave part of a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon. Here is what I wrote.

"I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity.

-Kurt Cobain

I’ve always wanted to be as primarily sincere as Kurt Cobains lyrics, putting myself out there exposed and open for the whole world to see. I wanted my deepest fears and desires on display. I thought that was a desirable and attainable goal. I have always wanted my life’s work to mean something more. Maybe that is just me or maybe it Is part of my generation. My generation is full of daydreamers and creative powerhouses, like all generations. But we are not just sitting around daydreaming while playing video games and roaming the internet, we are doing. It may not be loudly but we are a powerful silent change maker. Instead of protesting everything we are slowly making change, we are using the media to make our voices heard and when we are told no. we will rant, rave and put on guy Fawkes masks and go to the streets to let our views be known.

Like all generations we have an overall calling and I believe ours is “make it work.” Yes Tim Gunn made that phrase popular on the TV show Project Runway but this phrase goes so much deeper that a reality tv show. We are leaving college in an unstable economy and patch working jobs together that are sometimes not even close to what we went to school for to stay above the poverty line, we are making it work. We are feeling voiceless as politics are taking possession of our bodies, sex lives, and who we can legally commit our love and lives too and as damn frustrated as we are we are making it work, We are avoiding calls from collection agencies who need our student loan payments even though sometimes our paycheck wont stretch through the month, we have to make it work. This may sound like I am complaining and making our lives sound like all hardship but I am bringing up realities that are around us.

What I have not mentioned is how incredibly passionate my generation is. I have a friend who is in school for ministry right now who has been arrested while protesting occupy wall street and is so involved with his community he goes to long city meetings staying awake by doing push ups in the back of the room until he can go up and say what he came there to say. I have a friend who is in Paris right now studying foreign policy because she wants to be the change in the world, not just talk or read about it. She talks of how she would love to help change the face of politics and work on human relations and rights one human at a time. I have a brave friend who is going to school full time so she can make dreams for her and her family come true. I am so in awe of all of these people and I feel it is part of my calling to raise them up and support them.

I didn’t always want to be a minister. I had dreams of being a starving actress working two jobs so I could have a bad apartment and eat cup of noodles in New York City racing to get to auditions and rehearsals. I wanted to be a high school music teacher, inspiring kids like my high school teachers did for me, but then I learned I really hated music theory. I knew that my calling was to be present and make a difference in peoples lives.

I was three the first time I was told I would make a great minister one day. I had said something apparently very prophetic for a three year old in church in Connecticut and our minister told me that. The next time would be when I was 19, my childhood minister from Illinois responded to an email I had sent him catching him up on how my life was in Oregon and when I had told him some of the things I had started doing in UUFCO he told me I should think about becoming a minister because it was clearly where my heart was.

Nelson Mandela said “I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.” I knew I wanted to become a minister because of an extraordinary circumstance in my life. That circumstance was coming into this church on an ordinary Sunday. This would be my second time stepping into this church and Cameron Clark made an announcement about how youth group would start that evening. I approached him after the service and explained about my involvement in my UU congregation back in Illinois and was introduced then to Rebecca Fender who invited me that night. Sitting in the cottage as almost a complete stranger watching how warm and welcoming this congregation was and how my age or where I had come from didn’t matter, all that mattered was what I had to say. Working with the youth group and then the children’s RE program that first year made me realize how much I cherished this faith and wanted to make this denomination my life’s work. I don’t know if those two people will ever realize what a profound impact they had on my life by just kindly inviting me to sit in on the youth groups meeting that night.

Calling to ministry I feel was building for me all my life. I was an over involved child in the UU church in Illinois. Helping rewrite our mission statement at 16, being an integral part of the youth service we put on every year and then raising money to go and walk in what was my true first social justice experience in NYC in 2008 on a 20 mile walk for suicide prevention and awareness from dusk to dawn. That experience alone has changed me in ways I am still learning about. But that smack in the face moment about my calling to ministry happened out of the blue. I didn’t expect it but I embraced it with 2 arms wide open and ready for whatever happened next. Once I felt that call I realized a weight had lifted from my shoulders and I stopped laying in bed at night thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

My life goal is to inspire, question, ponder, laugh, and admire through my ministry. I want to stand up and do something when I see injustice and try and make a difference. I want to feel as connected to this faith as much as I did in 2012 when I was standing on the side of love at tent city during a vigil when 2,000 strong inspiring Unitarian Universalists chanted Si Se Puede loud enough for the prisoners could hear us and feel our support. I want to bring change to this world, even if that means I touch one persons life, because that is a beautiful thing I aspire to do every day. I want to be like my father and bring change to the environment, even if that means just composting. I want to be like my mother and be so open and giving, even if that means just being ready for what the world has to offer and having no expectations. I want to be like those young adults in the video, breaking stereotypes for the better. I want to be like all of you, hungry and eager to learn. I think being inspired by people on a daily basis is part of ministry. I need to live my life primal sincere because that is the only way I know and the only way I want to know. Lastly I want you to know that my life calling begins and ends with all of you. I want to be an agent of change to this ever changing world and hopefully make my footprint on the world last a little bit, and have an amazing time doing it. I may not know exactly where my life calling will take me but I do know that I will enjoy doing whatever it is I do."

Orange juice guilt.

So I am sometimes a little overly cautious about where my food is being sourced from. I want a true ethical product for all involved. If you know me you know that I take immigration reform insanely seriously and will not support any company that treats workers poorly. Well most orange farms treat their employees almost like slave laborers and pay them pennies. It is insane to me to be able to drink your orange juice without feeling guilty as to where this came from. I know it is just juice but still, buying and consuming just one product is perpetuation the cycle and making the product in demand. Why is it so hard to have human equity? We have stickers that show products are animal cruelty free, why not human cruelty free?

I am on a soapbox tonight

So I try to keep my social politics to myself for the most part. This is until someone does something so INCREDIBLY DUMB that I need to call them out. That person would be Mr. Lorenzo Garcia at the University of Texas. He is representing the the Young Conservatives of Texas and supporting a 'catch an illegal immigrant day'. Seriously? Really? You think that is appropriate? Walking around campus making students show their id's and then taking them to immigration services and then receiving a $25 gift card. Look, I am not one to judge what you do in your spare time...well that is until you decide you need to take the law into your own hands. Even if that is a non-violent hand. What is that student doing to you? Why do we need multiple Joe Arpio's? One of him is already too many. Let us look back to 1492 when we were 'discovering' land and then immigrated and pillaged here. I am sure the Native Americans would have liked to put up borders and kept us out but we were bigger, stronger, and had more small pox blankets than they did. We have not learned our lessons yet because as a mixing pot country we should be embracing the fact that people want to come here for a better life and not acting like complete assholes and calling them aliens while dehumanizing them and throwing them back to a country they left for reasons, or don't know at all because their family brought them here as infants. I pray that we all get some compassion injections in us soon because we need some compassionate immigration reform. We don't need bigger or larger walls, we need to tear those walls down. We don't need to be afraid of other cultures, we need to embrace them. We don't need to shun anything that is different, we need to welcome change. Seriously America, (wo)man the fuck up.

Home is where my suitcase is.

We have been staying with relatives the whole trip. So much love and family support, it makes not being at home really easy. Today we got to enjoy some of the incredible perks of being in Connecticut and visited the pez factory. We literally felt like kids in a candy store the entire time. I mean if we were to get technical we were kids in a candy store. This whole trip actually feels that way, from pez factories to science museums we have been making my search to find an academic home to pursue my call to ministry. All searches and adventures need to have silly in them. 

The science museum in Boston with jaz and my cousin and her kid.

The pez factory in Connecticut! 

Born to be a free bird.

We have been on our epic crafting across America tour for three days now but it feels so much longer. Over 900 miles, multiple road trip playlists, paper cranes, and tambourine solos its nice to be in a place for more than one night. Tomorrow we head into the beautiful city of Boston to look at a grad school and hopefully help my sister feel the intense and amazing connection to the Unitarian Universalist faith movement on the historic streets of Boston. It is amazing how places can feel right and natural to be in, Massachusetts is one of those places for me. I get an overwhelming calm when I am here and although I am used to the Oregon pace, the east coast pace is refreshingly up and fast. Only time, intuition, and acceptance letters will tell where I go but man, Boston is a hard place to beat.

Reliving Childhood Summers Past

The sounds of lawn mowers, children laughing, and dogs barking remind me of summer. My last few summers have been amazing but full of hot summer days and drunk summer nights. I loved that, but this summer I am back in the town in Illinois I grew up in spending this summer driving with the top down and getting ice cream, blended drinks, making lemonade, and going to the movies. I feel like I am 14 again, I am not thinking about when my rent comes out or when my next meeting is. Dreams of owning food trucks that drive cross country and going to India are talked about on a daily basis and it's wonderful. It feels right to be back. As I grow into the Adult I strive to be I constantly find myself thinking back to my incredible upbringing, from my parents raising me to the community I was raised in. I am lucky and will never forget that. My upbringing was not perfect, there were tears shed, mistakes made, bugs that were accidentally eaten, and bubbles popped. I will say though if I could stay in the constant child like presence I feel when I am back here with my beloved community I will take a bug in the mouth once in a while.

Midwest storms to calm my soul

It has been raining in Illinois every day since I have been here. I call this a sign, one thing I desperately miss about the midwest is the visceral thunderstorms that just don't happen in Oregon. If you have not experienced a midwest storm I say put it on your bucket list because there is something reviving about a storm here. It does not drizzle all day in a grey gloom, you get pouring rain sometimes with some blue sky, loud loud thunder and if you are lucky electric feeling lightning strikes that illuminate a once sunny early afternoon. Those elements dance along the sky and remind you about how large the world we live in really is, and the smell after the rain is a mixture of wet mulch and flowers that oddly work putting a smile on your face and frizz in your hair. I call myself lucky to have heard some of these awesome nature rock concerts the last few days. It has been an adventure though dogsitting two adorable pups who are both not fans of thunder. Mabel due to her giant pony like size is in no way suitable for my lap so just kind of drools, pants, paces, and whimpers before even thinking of sitting down. Bennie on the other hand is the size of Mabels head and can fit perfectly on my lap so will sit there kind of shaking but just happy I am taking control of his teeny tiny furry body. Even for them when the storm calms we all renew, I am grateful for the rain soaked smell and blue sky and they are grateful that the Greek Gods in the sky have stopped bowling for the time being. There is something  comforting about writing and reading with two dogs by your side sleeping and peaceful on a stormy day with a fan on and curled up in a blanket. The small things like this make the days special and the nights magical.

My partners in crime for this stormy week Mabel and Bennie.

The long and windings road.

I love the summer, it brings out sunshine and warmth in the world and revives your soul from the long and cold winter. I am back in my hometown in Illinois right now looking at the house I grew up in through a window. The house that I lost my first tooth in, transitioned from elementary to middle to high school in, laughed, cried, caused trouble, and found my way in. It's odd to think that a structure that holds so many memories and milestones in my life is steps away but unattainable at the same time. I am in a house that has fond memories of thanksgivings, laughter, and childhood mischief in. I am back to start looking at a new chapter in my life, a chapter filled with uncertainty but excitement. I am looking forward to finding a place I can call my home to discover myself as I pursue my calling into ministry. I will be embarking on a once in a lifetime road trip with two people who mean the world to me, a blood sister, and a sister who has ties like blood. I will be posting pictures, thoughts, and stories through this journey and am excited to see what I decided and who I become after this adventure.