burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

In a (locked) post on a community today, someone talked about considering joining her faith community in a more formal capacity and spoke of her resistance to joining things, to putting her name on membership lists, and solicited thoughts on formal and informal membership.

Having put together my reply, I thought it might be of interest to regular readers of this journal as well.

my autobiography is probably not a helpful comment (but here it is)

I grew up with Honesty and Intentionality and Consistency being hugely valued, so I often have a really difficult time labeling myself as a member of a group.  (See also the fact that I tend to feel sympathy/connection to a variety of, if not mutually exclusive then at least not wholly overlapping groups, so I feel not only more at home on the borderlands but also feel that is a truer statement of my identity.)

I grew up in a nondenominational Protestant church, and at some point during my teen years the pastor asked me if I wanted to get confirmed.  I said no, because I didn't know what I believed, nor did I know what I was supposed to believe in order to become a member of this church.  (My mother brought me and my brother to church every Sunday of our childhood, and I continued to attend until I left town for college -- but the pastor's sermons put me to sleep, so I usually helped with childcare rather than staying through the service; I never felt like I wasn't a part of that church family, though.)

The church I attended almost every Sunday my sophomore through senior years of college (two hours away from the town I grew up in) I was never invited to officially join as a member, and I would have said no if asked.

The year after college I lived with my parents and church-hopped some (though I spent most of my Sundays at the Congregational church), knowing I would be leaving town soon, so I saw it as more denomination-shopping than congregation-shopping.

Some months after I moved out of my parents' house (and moved a half hour closer in to Boston) I started church-hopping again and began accumulating church communities.  Two and a half years later, it's almost a stubborn point of pride that I attend regularly (read: weekly) at a number of different churches (two Sunday worship services, one Wednesday night worship service, one Sunday discussion group) but am not officially a member of any church.

I've been referring to Cambridge Welcoming Ministries as my "primary" or home" church for probably close to a year now and Tiffany (the pastor) sometimes invites me to officially join the church (this year I'm on Finance Committee, so I'm not uninvolved), but that means claiming not only CWM but also the United Methodist Church.  In looking at lay speaker certification recently I actually felt a willingness to officially join the church/Church -- though I'm still not ready to do it (yet).

In writing this up, it also occurs to me that because I'm involved in so many church communities, to claim one "official" membership feels problematically exclusive -- even though in some ways it shouldn't since I'm very clear that CWM is the church I feel most at home in, the church that most teaches me how to be church, the church that best embodies how I think church should be, the church that most nurtures my gifts and graces and challenges me (in a growing way rather than a frustrating way -- it does the latter, too, but less so than some of my other church communities), the church I prioritize and privilege over all others.

In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives! -- Parker J Palmer, 1977, Quaker Faith & Practice, 10.19

The Parker Palmer quote [from the OP] definitely resonates with me as often my resistance to claiming a group identity label is very much connected to my resistance to being officially linked with certain other members of that group (political affiliation, church denomination, etc.).

( gym )

CNN's This American Morning had John Avlon (Independent Nation) and Patricia Murphy (CitizenJanePolitics.com) on via satellite. The former commented that undecided/swing voters are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I was like, "Repruhsent!"

InstaPundit:

STEVE CHAPMAN LOOKS AT THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN CONVENTIONS, and doesn't like what he sees. "You will scour the presidential nominees' acceptance speeches in vain for any hint that your life is rightfully your own, to be lived in accordance with your beliefs and desires and no one else's." They're giving people what they want.

Reading the article, I felt kind of like, "Okay, I am kind of a socialist," but by the end I was like, "Oh yeah, still a libertarian."

Relatedly, I finally got around to doing my voter registration (since I moved towns).

***

At CWM last night, Tallessyn lifted up as a prayer concern the "misconception" that Sarah Palin is a feminist. I winced. We had joked last week about feminism being "my way or the highway," and she explicitly said when lifting up the prayer concern that she wasn't saying that Palin herself was bad, just that it was a dangerous misconception. But still... I didn't approach her afterward, in part because I didn't know how to begin articulating what I saw as the (broader, more inclusive) definition of "feminism," but in reflecting later I kept coming back to: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." [Goggling to confirm gives me: Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings. --Cheris Kramerae, author of A Feminist Dictionary, 1996]

This morning, InstaPundit linked to:
* "A feminist's argument for McCain's VP" by Tammy Bruce
* "Sarah Palin Feminism" (WSJ) -- which discusses popular mis(?)perception of evangelicals vis a vis women having careers and families, etc.

***

Orin Kerr:

There are many acceptable criteria for evaluating candidates and no real agreement as to which criteria are more important than the others. As a result, it's easy for commentary to focus on what many will perceive as minor points while ignoring what many perceive as bigger ones, and it's easy for commentary to speak to a very small slice of the ideological pie while ignoring or even alienating the rest. The result is that a lot of blogging about candidates ends up just running in circles.

( ... )

Is there a way out of this dynamic? Maybe, maybe not. But I tend to think that it would improve the level of commentary for bloggers and commenters to explicitly acknowledge how limited their claims really are. Given how many criteria exist, narrow commentary about just one criteria is necessarily only a very small piece of the puzzle about the merits of voting for a particular candidate. I think it would help us if we all acknowledged that, and didn't pretend that any one point was determinative. Perhaps it won't make any difference. But possibly, just possibly, it will be a fairer way of discussing the candidates and won't send us running in circles quite as much.

So everyone’s back at Smith now, right? Though almost everyone I care about had already returned -- or wouldn't be returning this year (e.g. Liz-in-Germany, Class of '05, etc.). (Come to think of it, anyone know if Lez is back this semester?)

I miss Smith people. And they miss me, which is something I’m still getting used to.

Late-night AIM conversations are bad ‘cause I have to get up at 6:20am. (Yeah, beat that, bitches.) I think I might actually crash tonight, which will hopefully get my body back into a normal sleep cycle. The problem is that I like the people whom I actually like, and realtime conversation is nice, so unless I’m seriously tired I’m probably not gonna cut latenight IMs short.

Paige mentioned my big crossover fic and damn, the dark and the allusion-making!River... I hadn’t realized how similar this is to the darkfic I just wrote -- probably ‘cause I wrote the crossover back in March.

We talked about Sessions (duh, I hadn’t realized the first and final released sessions were halves of the same session). I need to watch them in numbered order now instead of release order. And I’d forgotten what it would be like to watch them not knowing the canon, to not know the extent of what they do to her.

wisdomeagle wrote Dawn/Tara and reading the comments has been funny ‘cause so many are surpriseish and (a) Dawn and Tara are the biggest sluts on my recs page (with Lilah possibly tying -- oh, it occurs to me that I should figure out a way to include poly and crossover stories on the character pages) and I primarily femslash both of them (though my Tara -- and Dawn -- is BI!), (b) I read Dawn/Tara as practically canon at least in so far as Dawn has a crush on Tara and they have a very close, tender relationship, (c) I will never forgive Willow for S6, so breaking up Willow/Tara is totally not a problem for me, because after probably “Tabula Rasa” I thought Tara was too good for Willow and actively did not want them together (unless Willow reformed, which she didn’t, and now I don’t want them together period). I’m actually trying really hard not to character assassinate Willow in the fic I’m currently working on, particularly because I recently read Teach Me to Hear the Mermaids Singing and felt like the author too easily turned Anya into a nasty character to get her out of the way of the romantic pairing the author wanted.

My parents finished watching Firefly on Monday. I came in for bits and pieces of “Heart of Gold” and sat the whole of “Objects in Space” and then we watched the special features, most of which I hadn’t myself seen before.

My dad asked if the deleted scenes were considered canon. *hearts my geek family*

Joss said that knowing you could be canceled at any moment is good -- not good for your digestion or good for your marriage, but it forces you to focus on the stories you most wanna tell. He called the show a “jewel” and I wondered, If not for that pressure, would we have had the intensely brilliant show we had? Would the quality have been as solid as it was?

Dude, Angie Hart [whose song “Blue” opened the BtVS ep “Conversations With Dead People”] played one of the religious whores in “Heart of Gold.” The blonde one who sings at the end.

And speaking of the end: ( spoilers for The Message and Heart of Gold )

I’ve mostly just been coming in and out while my parents watched my DVDs, but this time ‘round I noticed even more than I had when I marathoned with Rachel and Jonah that I actually like Jayne. For the longest time he was the one character that I really had no love for. Sure he provided comic relief, but he was brainless and brutish and yeah, ways to totally not win me at all. But I liked Jayne full-stop this time. I think because I read him as human, and seeing him as complex and vulnerable and all that makes me actually like him. Oh, and after having seen The Dive from Clausen’s Pier I am far more susceptible to the hotness of Sean Maher (to whom I had been previously indifferent).

Okay, that picture I was wondering about? Gotta be the same artist who did the Australian Serenity poster.

*loves*

mosca on the icon pairing meme:
      2. Ani Difranco/Anya
      Not only could it happen, but there are several albums that it might explain.

Beautiful icons with Leonard Cohen lyrics.

Ann Althouse quotes a NYT article on the winner of China’s version of American Idol ("Super Girl"):

[Li Yuchun], 21, is almost the antithesis of the assembly-line beauties regularly offered up on the government's China Central Television, or CCTV. Tall and gangly, with a thatch of frizzy hair, the adjectives most used to describe her in the media were "boyish" or "androgynous." Some commentators speculated that her fan base consisted of young girls who considered her to be their "boyfriend" because of her appearance.

The first commenter says, "a butch woman is seen as a romantic interest by enough young girls that that was the reason she won a popularity contest? Assuming the commentators weren't total idiots (though they probably are), it would suggest China won't have an overpopulation problem in a generation or so."

Ann replies: "Maybe androgyny is becoming popular because young men are trying to find a way to have sexual relationships. Li really is a woman but she looks boyish. That may help a young heterosexual man find a way to see other men as suitable sexual partners."

---

So, um doyle_sb4 linked to a SomethingAwful.net thread called "Things You've Learned About Your Fandom Thanks to Badfic" and I got sucked in. It’s almost entirely about anime, which meant I could skip over most of it, which was probably a blessing.

Snippets I particularly enjoyed:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
* There was no book. There was no original movie. There is only Johnny Depp.
(posted by Baelish)

ST Voyager:
B'Elanna would love to wear lacy dresses. Tom would, too.
Harry thinks about wearing lacy dresses, but is too scared to try one on.
Tuvok exists whenever he's in Ponn Farr and needs to bonk immediately or die, which happens about every few weeks dues to a recurring spatial anomaly.
(posted by Dama47)

Newsies:
2. Just because you're selling newspapers in 1899 New York doesn't mean you can't be an American high-schooler a hundred or more years later.
(posted by Cecilia86)

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So, Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died on Saturday and Bush quickly nominated John Roberts as his replacement. This is the same Roberts who’s been up for Sandra Day O’Connor’s spot, so I’m confused by people who are all, “Who is this guy and where can I find info on him?” (From a Yahoo article: "For the past two months members of the United States Senate and the American people have learned about the career and character of Judge Roberts," Bush said. "They like what they see." Whether you agree with Bush’s assessment or not, the media has in fact been discussing Roberts for quite some time now.)

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Ann Althouse on why New Orleans is under sea level to begin with

commodorified talks about how relief organizations work and how to make your donation most effective, and damned_colonial talks more about specifying where your donation goes.

versailles_rose has a list of some NOLA landmarks and how they fared, via the Associated Press. And a couple days later: "Katrina doesn't cancel Southern Decadence parade"

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OkCupid told me:
     You are a Social Liberal (75% permissive)
      and an... Economic Liberal (36% permissive)
     You are best described as a: Democrat
      You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.
*cries*