On Wednesday night I went to the weekly Lent meditation
series at Judson Church. This is week
two. I find it really hard to tell
friends etc. that I can’t do things on Wednesdays because I’m “going to church.” But I walked in this week and there it was,
all warm and candle lit again. The same
guy was playing piano.
So, I sit down and start reading the back of the program and
it says:
"The "W", or the Gospel of "W", is a living document a
compilation by Judson of stories, quotes, and testimonies of bodies, many times
"W"omen's bodies, for whom sacrifice and crucifixion are daily
realities. We play on the idea of the “Q” (short for the Germen Quelle, or “Source”),
which is a hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus, assumed to be one of
the two written sources behind the gospels of Matthew and Luke. This Lenten season, we use as “text” for
reflection the bodies in our midst for whom sacrifice and crucifixion are not
just a 40-day religious tradition, but rather they sacrifice and are crucified
on a regular basis”
After reading that, I knew I was a goner. Any pretense I had
of having my “shit” together was gone. I’m
like a blubbering idiot. I don’t even
know that it has anything to do with God or religion. It might be the space? I have no idea. But the combination of all of that and the
fact that we’re going to talk about womens’ bodies had me in tears before they
really got into anything.
We talked about sacrifice.
Not the, I’m sacrificing sugar as a way to fast for 40 days kind of
sacrifice, but the “what are you consistently sacrificing.” I even had to write down on a piece of paper
the “sacrifice [I] all too often make.
As an artist this question is HUGE! Some days I feel like I’ve given up any semblance
of a normal life. Many things ran
through my head. Like the times I have
to temp to pay my bills and that sometimes I spend hours upon hours of my life
working for companies doing work I would much rather spend my life fighting. In some ways sacrificing my morals in order
to be an artist to not be an artist.
That was a huge one. It’s not
what I wrote down, but it was huge.
But I did think, now we’re getting down to business, this is
what church should be like. It felt
personal. It felt intimate. It felt like something that really truly
mattered deep down inside. So of course
I go and lay my little slip in the bucket and then we stand and pray. The ritual laying down of this
sacrifice. So I’m a blubbering mess and
the minister is standing next to me and I don’t want anyone to see me
crying. She did politely seem to
overlook that though she did introduce herself to me. And look me very straight in the eye. Some people just do that, and that also makes
me want to cry.
I think about being a woman a lot. I think about being a woman in theatre a
lot. I think about what the effect of my
career is on my love life and if I’ll have children. I have no idea how someone lives my life and
has children. I’m not even 100% certain
I want them, but if I did meet someone I wanted to have them with, how do you
do that? And since we’re talking about
sacrifice, it’s pretty emotional to suddenly think of being a woman and having
your period, and all of that as sacrifice, as crucifixion. But it’s also really hard to think about that
and think about sacrificing that for art.
So I duck out pretty quickly after the service because I’m a
little embarrassed by the deluge of tears.
On my way down the street I text Emily and said something about “you’ll
never believe what they talked about in this service – womens bodies in
relation to sacrifice and crucifixion.”
No more than two minutes later I walk on to the platform at West Fourth
street deep in thought and a man rushes past/toward me and before I know it, he
has elbowed me in the face, right on the edge of my eyebrow. I cried out in pain as I doubled over
grabbing my rapidly swelling brow. I was only barely aware enough to notice
that he didn’t stop to see what happened.
A very kind woman sort of stood me up and made sure I wasn’t bleeding,
and a couple guys on the platform said “Shit man, he didn’t even stop to say he
was sorry.” How one manages to
accidentally elbow someone in the face like that remains to be seen, but I was
pretty shaken up. I was also flabbergast
as the words sacrifice and crucifixion floated through my half functioning brain.
My entire evening was derailed, it’s pretty hard to think
about much else when there is a searing pain in your head, and when your body
feels like it’s been beaten.
There was more metaphor in that combination of events than I
knew what to do with. As a woman, as an
artist, a lot of life is getting beat up by people who may or may not notice
the blow they’ve dealt you. There’s a
lot of getting up day after day even when you’re black and blue and your brow
is swollen, and just going for it over and over again. That night my reality
really was that I got decked in the face and it hurt like a (insert explitives
here). I didn’t choose that. There are a
lot of sacrifices and crucifixions I don’t choose. But there are some that as they said I “sacrifice
all too often.” It’s important to know
that, you can’t always stand up straight after a blow to the head. It’s important to honor that, to give
yourself time and space to heal. It’s
also important to take the time to see where I’m in control of the sacrifice,
and how I can go about laying it down.
I think part of why I don’t always want people to know that
I’m religious or at least on some sort of spiritual journey is that I am afraid
that they will associate that with my not being able to think for myself. But on Wednesday, I really did need to think
about what I sacrifice. In fact, I go to
church so I CAN think. It is a space
where I find amazing clarity and where I can think about the world from a
totally different angle. Obviously if it’s
making me cry every week something is working.
God is a huge concept. As is Jesus.
I’m struggling with that. But one
of the amazing things about Judson is that they talk about the principles of
Christianity using things like the “the bodies in our midst” as text. I feel like even if I decided I didn’t
believe in God at all that I would be comfortable there. I really like going to Church actually. Go figure.
So what about you?
What sacrifice do you all too often make?
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