on being a ninja AND a sinner

I had two things I wanted to write about tonight, so I went the classy route and divided them with asterisks.  You're welcome.

The past couple of months have been difficult for me.  Once it was too cold and dark for us to go on walks as a family when Andrew gets home in the evening, I found myself basically without regular exercise.  We have this double stroller, a very walkable and friendly and safe neighborhood with lots of regular pedestrians all day long.  I kept thinking, I should put the children in the stroller and go for a walk.  That would be so lovely and nice.  Except I couldn't.  Even writing about it raises my heartrate.  Going on the street with the children by myself seems terrifying right now.  I am afraid of cars, dogs, spiders, who knows what.  I can't stand the thought of putting the children at risk.*  On the few occasions I thought I might try it, I got very scared and had a bout of adrenaline (my flight or fight is fight), which made me a little cranky for about twenty minutes.

Finally, I just decided to drop the subject for awhile.  Apparently my body's way of dealing with my Dad's failing health is to become irrationally anxious.  Like, I see that this fear does not make sense in any way, but my physical self disagrees.  I know I'm just dealing or healing.  But for now, I need to find a way to exercise that doesn't involve me having to go into public alone with the children in a situation in which I feel out of control (the grocery store is fine, as is church [where lots of people know the children, so I don't feel alone]).  Thus, after discussion with Andrew, I joined our local gym this week.

I plan to go most nights for a good fat burning cardio workout, moving on to interval and strength training once my weight loss has made movement safer.  Pemberley has not weaned yet.  I have been able to lose ten to twelve pounds, only to have my metabolism adjust to make dietary changes ineffective after that point.  My medical providers told me that about half of women cannot seem to keep weight on while nursing, and the other half seem not to be able to lose it.  I guess my hormones put me in the latter camp.  I am not willing to wean Pem right now, since nursing seems to be very important to her.  I stopped taking galactagogues for the most part, which is how I lost the tens pounds.  But dieting is not really interesting to me, nor do I particularly need to reduce my average calorie intake.  I want to be strong and healthy.  Strength requires exercise.

My first workout at the gym was a real eye opener for me.  I thought that I might feel frustrated with my body after being out of shape for so long.  But I found that I connected to myself instead.  That disciplined, strong part of me that gave birth to two children and carries them and a bag or two and excess weight with little effort, the part of me for whom two gallons of milk per hand is a comfortable trip up the stairs, was there on the elliptical.  I checked my heart rate and was surprised at how hard I had to work to get it up.  I was surprised as the workout went on at how aware I was of changes in my heart rate.  (For fat burn, there's a specific 5 bpm range that is optimal for each person.)  I would just know that I was getting a little high, and I would check.  Then, keeping up the work, I would breathe deeply and think my heartrate down, watching it fall back into the prime range for me.  My target was 135 bpm, and the average at the end, according to the machine, was 135bpm.

I am very grateful to have a good gym close by.  I'm excited about making progress over time.  They have Zumba classes (!) that I want to try soon.  Besides my optimism, though, the thing that really strikes me about working out is that I can control my heartrate.  Yep, that means I'm kind of a ninja.

*Please under no circumstances try to comfort me by listing statistics of all the other more risky stuff.  This anxiety is just a sort of post traumatic thing as my body processes my grief over a person who contributed to a lot of the trauma.  I do not need to hear anything bad or scary!  I have had enough actual experience of bad and scary things already.

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I noticed tonight on the way to Target to buy some workout pants (my old ones are all holey) that we usually hear "sinner" in our culture in a judgmental way.  People talk about how they came to realize themselves as sinners from the perspective of deserving a punishing judgment of God. In this context, God's mercy is simply not meting out just rewards, and also opening up privileges for the unworthy.  But I have come to experience myself as sinner in the context of God's mercy.  The fear of the Lord is not a fear of punishment, but of the justice and mercy marked by impartiality.  It is because God's mercy is so thorough that I see that I am a sinner.  I hate the man who abused me, and I know myself a sinner - not because the abuse marked me as bad or for any fallout sins I committed in my confusion following such a thorough betrayal of boundaries , but - because I hate a creature whom God has called good.  How can I not love what God loves and calls lovely?  Yet, here I am, a sinner, hating a pedophile.  Even when I know God totally agrees that hurting children that way is despicable, one of the vilest of vile sins, I am not justified in hating my pedophile uncle.  God loves him, and until I love what God loves, I am a sinner.  I am truly sorry and sad that I hate my uncle.  I do not want to hate him.  I do not like wishing death on another human being.  My mistakes are many, and I have several flawed habits.  But my sin, as seen through the eyes of mercy, is my failure of mercy.  Forgive me, Lord.

One of the reasons I have never warmed to the Western church's style of confession is because the focus is on listing sins forensically. There is a sort of clinical feel to the forgiveness offered, the sins laid out.  Like coming in to take vitamins or to get a salve for a rash.  Perhaps I have read the wrong things.  I don't see confession in this style as worthless. It's just not what my soul craves.  I don't think most priests of my acquaintance would take well to, or understand, if I came to confession and asked to be guided and forgiven for hating my pedophile uncle.  If I came in and said that the place where I know myself a sinner is where I have failed in mercy to this person, and then did not list other sins, I think they would find it odd.  They would also probably go through the routine, the words spoken, as though they were really healing my soul.  But I have a sense that if I really forgave, the wounds would heal.  The uncle would be changed.  Some sort of grace would be unleashed on the world such as I cannot describe.  

It is the same with the passion of anger.  See, what I would like to confess is the misdirection of passions, not just a check list of when I said a cuss word or when I laughed at a bawdy joke or envied my neighbor's pearls and chrysanthemums.  I want to be able to go to a priest and say, look, it has recently occurred to me, I think by God's Spirit, that the horses of thumos should not be hitched to just any wagon.  I sense that the anger that sometimes flares up is due to indiscipline of the irascible faculty of the soul, but I do not know its proper direction.  I feel my need of guidance and my guilt in letting it run amok for so long.  And I want that priest to totally know what I'm talking about, and actually know what to do about it, to give spiritual guidance based on the teachings of the ancient church and the liturgy through the ages.  So, maybe what I want is an Orthodox priest.  

Maybe I'm totally off in my suspicions.  I have actually never talked to an Orthodox priest about confession.  I don't know the rite or how it's done.  But I suspect I won't be required to list out every time I muttered, "shit!" under my breath when I spilled hot tea on my leg or to follow a format without respect to my soul's desire for healing and direction by the Holy Spirit.  

Next week, we're going to visit with the priest of the remaining Orthodox parish in our area, to talk about visiting and to inquire about how we might learn more about Orthodoxy, even though we still feel called to be in our Episcopal parish right now.  We have visited an OCA parish and a Greek Orthodox parish, and this last one is Antiochene.  I plan to ask about confession.  

Oh, and I have suspicions about that saint who was praying for us to come to Holy Orthodoxy.   I think he called for backup.