Ramblings From The Broom Closet

Or, "If It's Dark In Here, Then Maybe I Should Turn On The Light."

In my day-to-day life, I'm "out" as a Christo-Pagan to a few people.  My mother and my brother know, as do my closest friends (largely because with only one exception that I can think of, most of my closest friends are also Pagans of one variety or another).  But there are far more people who I haven't told, like most of my family—I shudder to think what the news would do to my grandmother—and a number of friends who I'm not sure would handle the news very well.  I'm closeted at the school where I do my volunteer work, though that's more of a "closeting by omission" thing, not because I've intentionally hid my spiritual life, but because it hasn't really been necessary to say anything about it.  And anyway, it's not like I know what anyone else there believes.  I mean, for all I know, the principal could be a hardcore Satanist, as out-of-character as that might seem.  And of course, I'm also utterly closeted at my church, unless someone from there has somehow managed to stumble upon this blog and realize that hey, that brunette with the loud voice has a lot in common with this "Zillah" weirdo...

It's been my choice to remain in the proverbial broom closet so long, mostly because I don't feel the need to come out of it unless I'm talking to someone who I'm sure I can trust not to overreact, or to react badly in general, to finding out about one of the lenses through which I view the world.  Sometimes, when I decide that I want to tell someone, it can be a bit of a risk, though it's generally turned out fairly well.  (I suspect that this is because I'm so selective about whom I tell.)  But for the most part, I don't feel particularly inclined to come out as a Christo-Pagan; while my spiritual practices are an important part of my life, they're also personal and private enough that I just don't feel the need to inform absolutely everyone that there is a witch in their midst.*    I'm pleased with my spiritual life; it leads me down avenues of thought that I might not have gone anywhere near if I had remained entirely Christian or entirely Pagan, and because of it, I am a more compassionate and informed person than I might have been otherwise.  I just also don't think that it's something that everyone who knows me absolutely has to know.

Am I hiding behind the Christian privilege that being open about only part of my spiritual life necessarily brings me?  Maybe.  I don't deny that there are some aspects of Christian privilege that do apply to me, though I'm in the fairly unique position in which those aspects of it won't always apply, or in which they can backfire, or be as easily taken away as they were bestowed should the wrong person find out that my spiritual path is not entirely church-based.  Any "protection" that these privileges give me, like the strange idea that Christians are inherently more honest or moral people than non-Christians (and the current candidates for the leadership of the Republican party are all excellent arguments against that ridiculous concept), or my religion not working against me when I need medical or legal help, can vanish as easily as mist on a sunny day in the summertime as soon as the full story comes out.

And then, there are the aspects of Christian privilege which cannot ever apply to me.  Except for blogging under this pseudonym, I can't speak openly about my religious practices unless I'm talking to one or more of the seven people who know I'm a Christo-Pagan, and we're not in a public place or in a group with anyone who I don't trust with the knowledge.  I haven't had the comfort of assuming that religious experience is universal since some time in my childhood (I think I was about ten years old) when I found out that I was actually the product of a "mixed" marriage: remember, my mother's family is Catholic and my father's family is Anglican.  Because of the nature of my spiritual beliefs and practices, I've never actually been in the company of anyone who believes entirely as I do, much less been able to restrict my company only to the people who believe what I do.  And the mass media couldn't possibly represent my religion in any meaningful way; I've seen depictions of Paganism in the media, and I've seen depictions of Christianity, and if you took the mainstream media's view of things, you'd have to assume that the two are so fundamentally incompatible that the attempt to blend them just might form a very tiny black hole that exists just long enough to destroy the person foolish enough to give it a try.

*waits*

So much for that one.  I'm still here. :)

All kidding aside, I do admit to being a little conflicted about being mostly closeted as a Christo-Pagan.  Am I somehow less honest, or am I perhaps buying in to the Pagan persecution complex, because I believe that it's not always wise to be up-front about my spirituality?  I do realize that there are some very practical considerations regarding my decision to keep quiet about roughly half of my spiritual life, and it's not like I'm always trumpeting about the Christian half of it anyway.  But at the same time, I have the option of keeping quiet and not being too upset by most of the assumptions that people make about my spirituality based on what they do know.  That's a huge luxury.  And sometimes I think I'm being too easy on myself for having it.

(For the list of examples of Christian privilege that I referred to in this post, see this post at Godless Girl.)

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*A phrase which just brought to mind the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which Sir Bedevere determines whether a woman accused of witchcraft really is a witch, based on the premise that witches burn because they're made of wood, which floats, just like ducks do, so if she weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood, and therefore she is a witch.

Oddly enough, when I was taking a Philosophy course in university that included certain formulae which would help to determine whether an argument was logical, I decided (just for fun) to check this line of thinking with one of them.  Much to my surprise, it checked out.  Is it factual?  No.  But apparently it's very logical.  Go figure.

Ashes

Back in my high school days, when I sang with my school choir music group for the school's Masses and prayer services, one of my favourite hymns was one called "Ashes."

We rise again from ashes, from the good we've failed to do,
We rise again from ashes to create ourselves anew.
If all our world is ashes, then must our lives be true?
An offering of ashes, an offering to you.

We offer you our failures, we offer you attempts,
The gifts not freely given, the dreams not fully dreamt.
Give our stumblings direction, give our visions wider view;
An offering of ashes, an offering to you.

Then rise again from ashes, let healing come to pain,
Though spring has turned to winter, and sunshine turned to rain.
The rain we'll use for growing and create the world anew,
From an offering of ashes, an offering to you.

Thanks be to the Father, who made us like Himself,
Thanks be to the Son, who saved us by His death;
Thanks be to the Spirit who creates the world anew,
From an offering of ashes, an offering to you.

An offering of ashes, an offering to you.

I've been thinking a lot about this one lately, and not just because today is Ash Wednesday.  There was a period in my life, starting around the time I graduated from teacher's college, when practically everything that was important to me went wrong, and the result was depression—which went un-treated and even ignored, because my mother had also developed depression as a result of conditions at her workplace that had become downright abusive, and she needed my support to get through it.  So my own life was put on hold, which I still don't regret, though I can't help wondering sometimes if I've screwed myself over, and I've been doing my best to re-build my life in the years that have followed, both personally and professionally.  It hasn't been easy, and I sometimes wonder if I'll be able to make things work in such a way that I have much quality of life (two of my biggest fears are failure and homelessness), but I'm still going to try.

Someone who's particularly close to me has told me that he considers people who have had to rebuild their lives more often than the average person to be something of a different species: Homo sapiens invictus, rather than—as I say, especially when I'm feeling a bit cynical about the horrors we humans have caused to each other and our planet—Homo (questionably) sapiens.  Unconquered, not just wise.  It's a nice thought: the idea that there's an evolutionary response of some sort, though not necessarily a genetic one, that's being forced by all this adversity and the stubbornness that leads to the desire to carry on, and not to allow defeat to be a permanent state.  And it even ties in to the mythic pattern of a death and rebirth, whether they're portrayed in the stories as being literal (the Phoenix, Jesus' resurrection from the dead, Gwion Bach being devoured whole by Cerridwen after making the somewhat unwise choice to shape-shift into the form of a grain of corn, and later being reborn as Taliesin) or figurative (Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, Siddartha Gautama becoming the Buddha after an extended period of meditation).

As it says in the song above, we re-create ourselves from the ashes of what we were.  Perhaps that's why "Ashes" has been on my mind so often lately; I feel like I'm in another time of transition, and I'm re-evaluating a lot of things lately.  And, oddly enough, I'm OK with that.

"Love and Freindship"

(The spelling error in today's post title is intentional; it is the name of a short story by Jane Austen, epistolary in form, written when she was about fifteen years old. Despite her youth, she'd already acquired her disdain for conventional romantic sensibilities by the time she wrote "Love and Freindship," and she was already developing the sharp wit for which her work is so well-known.)

In the wake of Valentine's Day, I've been thinking about the way that we privilege certain types of relationships—particularly romantic ones, though to some extent, biological family as well—over other ones, no matter how close we may be to people who are neither part of our direct family tree, nor our romantic partners. And we'd better only have one of those at a time, or we're dirty, rotten cheaters, because apparently healthy polyamorous relationships don't exist. And that means that despite all evidence to the contrary, two of my dearest friends are just figments of my imagination—which would probably come as a bit of a shock to them, and to everyone else who knows them. ;)

Oh, and by the way, what's with all this de-valuing friendship by saying that you're "just friends" with someone when someone else asks (or assumes) that you're involved with them?  At its best, friendship is a wonderful kind of relationship that should not be dismissed like this.  Friends or not, just because you're not bonking someone else (regardless of whether you actually ever do want to have sex with them), it doesn't mean that you don't love them in one way or another.  But no matter how close we are to our friends, no matter how mutually supportive or downright affectionate these relationships are, they're often thought of as less-than.  It's like a relationship doesn't really matter unless you're sleeping together or you have a lot of recent ancestors in common.

And the pressure to really only love one person who will somehow magically be able to perfectly meet all our needs, and whose needs we're expected to be able to perfectly meet, is also frighteningly strong, and getting stronger all the time.  It's as if while Western society in general is slowly becoming more accustomed to the idea of LGBTQI (etc.) people's relationships being as valid as straight people's—though I must stress that I do not in any way mean to imply that relationship equality exists, as I know damn well that it doesn't—there's some kind of push to re-establish monogamous heterosexual relationships between two cisgendered individuals as the standard to which everyone, despite individual preferences and realities, should aspire.  And the pedestal that these relationships are put on is so limiting that, frankly, it's a wonder that any of them lasts, when even a casual friendship with a member of the opposite sex can easily be construed as "cheating" and when, once you're in that marriage with only one cisgendered opposite-sex partner, it's assumed that this partner is the only person with whom you should ever even think of having any sort of relationship that goes deeper than having occasional superficial chats about the weather.  And Heaven forbid that a married person should have a decent conversation with a single person of whatever sex the married person happens to be attracted to, because single people are dangerous, and spousal jealousy seems an inevitable consequence of such interaction.

OK, that may be overstating it a bit...but, all things considered, I'm probably not overstating it by much.

It's very human to crave connections with other people, and a wedding ring, even one that symbolizes a heterosexual marriage that's intended to be completely monogamous, doesn't automatically destroy one's capacity to be attracted (emotionally, sexually, romantically, etc.) to people other than one's own spouse.  Furthermore, even within the context of a monogamous relationship, friendships, even with people who happen to have the same type of genitalia as your partner, do not have to threaten your relationship as a couple.  And denying this, or refusing to admit that for those who are so inclined, polyamory really can work as a relationship model, isn't just harmful in the sense that it stigmatizes this kind of relationship.  It has the potential to hurt almost everybody because suddenly opposite-sex friendships, or same-sex friendships if the couple in question is same-sex, are suddenly considered to have a power to harm the couple's relationship just because at least one half of that couple has the capacity to be sexually attracted to that friend.  And I'm sure that border guard from a few months ago would agree—after all, when I encountered him again early last month, he asked (again, with a sneer) whether I intended to spend the night with my friend.

It's such a terrible, restrictive way of looking at human relationships.  I rejected it a long time ago.  (Just as well, I suppose, for reasons that I'm not quite able to adequately articulate here at the moment, though I've had a relevant post in the works for quite some time now; I just haven't quite managed to get the wording quite right.)  Even so, I find that I tend to avoid getting particularly friendly with most married men.  After all, I'm 29, and though I'm not what most people would consider to be attractive enough to be "dangerous," I'm unmarried and likely to stay that way.  Yet, I have friends of varying sexes, sexual orientations, and marital statuses.  And yes, I love my friends, especially the ones I consider to be my closest friends, very much.  It bothers me very deeply that they're not supposed to mean as much to me as my biological family or the spouse I'm fairly certain is not in my future (not least because, despite a few notable exceptions, I do have trouble letting people truly get close to me).  And yes, it also bothers me that I'm supposed to be somewhat insignificant to my friends who are married.

Most people, it seems, need more than just one strong relationship with other human beings.  So why do we deny it?  And why do we de-value our friendships?

"Just friends," indeed.

Things I See On My Stats Page

As narcissistic as it may be, I have to admit that I do check my statistics page once or twice a week. I'm curious about the people who read this blog, after all; I don't get many comments, so it's nice to be able to get at least some kind of an idea of what sort of people read what I write.

First of all, not a lot of people read this blog. Generally, I only get a couple hundred pageviews per month. I'm not complaining, mind you; when I started this blog in 2009, I never expected that I'd gain a large following, and I never set out to do so. And I know that I don't update nearly often enough for my work to really get noticed. All I wanted to do was write about my experiences with my very decidedly unorthodox spiritual path, hoping that these reflections, meditations, rants, ramblings, and other assorted collections of words would prove to be useful, or at least interesting, to whoever finds them.

But one thing that astounds me is the sheer diversity of the countries where this blog has been viewed. By far, most of my pageviews come from Canada and the U.S., which makes sense both because of where I live and the language in which I write, but I've also gotten lots of pageviews from Germany, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Poland, and the Netherlands. (That last one especially pleases me; I'm about a quarter Dutch.) People from Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, and even Israel have paid me a virtual visit. I've had a few pageviews from Egypt, China, and Latvia, and once even had a visitor from the United Arab Emirates. I've had visitors from many other countries as well (and if you come from one of the ones I haven't mentioned, and you've visited my blog before, I apologize* for having left you out). Unless a lot of my readers are frequent users of Tor or other such privacy-preserving software and services, the possibility of which I am not at all going to discount, that's at least one visit from every continent but Antarctica, which to this Canadian seems pretty cool, to say the least.

I'm not entirely sure how everybody finds this blog, of course, but I also get some fairly interesting search terms. I get a lot of on-topic search terms, of course; most people who come here via search engine (usually some variety of Google, by the way, though a few others are represented fairly well, too) get here by searching for something involving some variation on "Christo-Pagan" (and a fair few have actually gotten here by doing a search for the URL, which I find a bit odd), but I've been keeping track of some of the weirder search terms that have come up, such as:

easy pagan sex: Er, I'm not that type of blogger. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; some of my favourite blogs for occasional reading, none of which are particularly work-safe, include Figleaf's Real Adult Sex, The Pervocracy, and Hey Epiphora.) And although I don't buy in to the "purity myth," I'm not exactly easy, either.

my fat wife: I have no idea how anyone could possibly have found my blog with this search term.

crochet pagan blog homestead: This one almost makes sense, since I've mentioned my fondness for this particular textile art a few times, but I don't think I've ever actually written the word "homestead" on this blog before today. If this was a search for another site featuring Pagan-themed crochet projects, though, I would absolutely love to have the link!

conniving sly cunning women get their men: Did this come from the sarcastic responses to dating rules post? Because if it didn't, there's no logical reason why my blog should've popped up in response to this one, either.

meditations for people that hate oa: What the heck is an "OA"?

christopagan spells to keep bad neighbors away: I don't share spells. Well, unless they're silly spells, anyway. I just don't normally do anything that could even remotely resemble spells. Well, except for Reiki. And cooking. (My potion for the relief of an empty stomach, better known as beef vegetable soup, is particularly delicious, I'm pleased to say.) And the occasional gaze into my crystal ball. And a ritual now and then. :)

shipwreckcentral offline: By the time the search results page would get to me, I think it's safe to say that any useful information about the regrettable demise of such a fantastic website would have been long since exhausted.

w. w. j. d. bracelets: Probably the result of having written a shorter-than-usual rant a few months ago about why WWJD bracelets bother me. But again, I'm surprised that someone spent so much time paging through so many search results that they ended up taking a look at what I had to say on the matter. :)

So, there you are: a quick look at what I've been seeing when I look at my blog stats. Even if it's not particularly interesting to you, I'm rather amused by some of it. :)

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*It occurs to me that I've just done something that's quintessentially Canadian. Here in Canada, it could be said that we have two national pastimes: hockey and apologizing (probably as a result of our frequently stereotypical emphasis on the necessity of being polite). I'm an absolute klutz on skates, so perhaps it's just as well that I chose the other one. ;)

"Let the music heal your soul..."

(Today's post title taken from a song by the "Bravo Allstars," a pop supergroup composed of acts like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and The Moffats.)

I've been thinking lately of the role that music played in my gradual adoption of a Christo-Pagan spirituality.

When I was a child, the thing I loved best about all those mandatory school Masses was all the singing we got to do. If I had to, I could still sing the tunes, at least, of the hymns that came up most often. "Peace is Flowing Like a River." "Though the Mountains May Fall." "Like a Shepherd." "Companions on the Journey." (We sang this one so often that even now, nearly sixteen years after I graduated from elementary school, I can still sing it perfectly.) "Abba, Father." "Sing to the Mountains." "Service." "Hail Mary/Gentle Woman." "Bloom Where You're Planted." "I Believe in the Sun." "My Shepherd is the Lord."

And so on.

When I got to high school, I joined the school choir. (Actually, that's not entirely accurate; there were usually so few regular singers that we called ourselves a "music group" rather than a choir most of the time.)  Most of what we did was sing the hymns and service music for the school Masses.  Even though I probably shouldn't have, I stayed on with them even after I decided that Christianity wasn't working out very well for me.  What mattered most to me at the time was that I got to sing—it rankled, of course, that the songs I was singing were all religious in nature, but then, I went to a Catholic school, so that sort of thing obviously went with the territory.  And even as I went through my "Pagan persecution complex" phase, I gradually found that singing, even singing songs of a religion I no longer really felt connected to, was becoming a deeply spiritual experience for me.  It was at about that time, I think, when I started making that distinction between religion and spirituality that still persists in my mind: the idea that religion is one way of experiencing the spiritual, but that it is by no means the only one.  Around that time, I realized that (for me, anyway) spiritual experiences don't have to be religious in nature, and that religious experiences aren't always spiritual in nature.

Part of the way through my high school years, I joined a community choir.  Our repertoire, even back then, was a bit of a mixed bag; we had show tunes mixed in with jazz standards, folk songs, one very strange medley of tunes called "Much Ado About Nothings" (I remember the words for the first one particularly well: "I love the evening, I adore the night, but most of all, but most of all, I think I'm allergic to morning!"), and, of course, a hefty dose of liturgical music.  Again, the fact that I had to sing Christian music did rankle a little, but at least in this case, I had a choice: I didn't have to keep going to rehearsal.  I was there entirely of my own volition.

Eventually, we planned a couple of trips to England to sing Evensong in a couple of cathedrals there: Winchester in 2002, and Lincoln in 2005.  I had a few personal reservations about making the trips, but I didn't want to miss out, either, and in retrospect, I'm very glad that I went.  We went to Winchester when I was nineteen years old; I'd been out of the Catholic school system for a year by then, and forced involvement in Christian religious celebrations had come to an end.  In preparation for the trip, we'd done a few Evensongs at the church where I now sing every week, but again, I didn't mind the religious service because I was there by choice, because Evensong is significantly different from anything I'd experienced as a Catholic, and because there was a minimum of preaching.  (Very little during Evensong is actually spoken.  There are a few scripture readings and a few prayers, but most of what happens is actually sung.  It occurred to me in Edinburgh back in August that, from a certain perspective, the liturgy could be seen as simply an excuse to have the music.)  The simplicity of the service, when mixed with the music we sang and the sheer presence of Winchester Cathedral, showed me that I actually could feel connected to Christian worship after all.

Actually, one of my favourite memories is of singing something while at Winchester Cathedral.  It was the Thursday evening that we were there; the sky was clear and there was sunlight filtering in through the Cathedral's windows.  Our choir's director had told us not to slip back into our street clothes immediately after the service was done; after the final procession, he led us to the retrochoir, where St. Swithun's tomb is marked.  We gathered around the place where the tomb is marked and he told us to take out the music for that ubiquitous piece of Anglican church music, Tallis' "If Ye Love Me" (which I'd absolutely fallen in love with the first time we practiced it), and there, in the sunlight in the retrochoir, we sang it.  And as we sang, I felt a feeling of peace and contentment that I hadn't known for a long time.  It was a thoroughly beautiful way to end our choral duties for the day.

After the trip, I continued with my personal religious and spiritual practices as I had been doing, but gradually other things, like adapting some prayers so that I could say the rosary again (something that I always found would clear my head in my Catholic days), began to creep in.  By the time I was twenty-five, I'd done another week of Evensongs in Lincoln, and I'd decided that although I couldn't give up the Pagan part of my spirituality—by that time, it was too deeply ingrained, and it inspired me to be a better person in ways that Christianity had never done, especially in regards to environmentalism and feminism—I should probably admit, if only to myself, that I couldn't entirely ignore the religion of my childhood.  Like it or not, it was part of me, and if I continued to ignore that, I would be doing myself a disservice.  Even if I couldn't go back to Catholicism, and even now I don't think I ever will, at least I had to acknowledge to myself that I had in fact become a Christo-Pagan.

And music had been a big part of that.

Even so, it was a bit of a strange decision for me to join my church choir back in 2008.  I had a number of reservations about the idea, actually, especially considering that my personal beliefs and practices are not entirely Christian.  (That's the same reason why I feel a bit conflicted about receiving communion as I do every week.)  But in the end, I decided I'd give it a try, and now, just over three years later, I don't regret it.

Before It's Too Late...

I'm a small-time blogger from Canada, but I get enough pageviews from the USA that I believe that it's worth saying something about two dangerous and unnecessary pieces of legislation in the USA that can, and will, affect more than just citizens the United States should they pass.  Because I'm not a U.S. citizen, and I don't live within the borders of the USA even if I'm a very near neighbour, I can't really do much about them, but if you're American, you have a voice in this matter and you can do something to stop these bills before they become law.

I'm referring, of course, to the misleadingly-named Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Opposing these proposed laws doesn't mean that you're a pirate, or even that you sympathize with them.  Under U.S. copyright law, corporations already have a number of different ways in which they can fight piracy (which, by the way, doesn't lead to nearly as much lost income as the MPAA and RIAA would like us to believe).

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has already been used and abused many times to censor opinions and remove legitimate usage of copyrighted content (Fair Use) from sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  It's even been used to silence criticism of doctors whose patients have had bad experiences with them.  The powers that would be granted by SOPA and PIPA go far beyond the very considerable ones that already exist under the DMCA; among other things, corporations like Universal (which, um, already has a pretty bad track record of abusing the DMCA, even using it to block videos that don't actually contain any content that Universal owns) the power to have any website on the internet blocked or taken down even just for containing a link to copyrighted content that wasn't posted by the site's owners.  Imagine the impact that this would have on the internet, not just in the USA, but for the world.  If SOPA and PIPA had existed years ago, there would be no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.  News reporting would look very different.  I doubt that even blogging would be the same; who would, who could, say anything when even the slightest hint of the use of someone else's intellectual property could get their blog, or their whole website, censored?

Intellectual property is already very well-protected, even at the cost of free speech, as it is.  Piracy is a minimal threat to profits.  These pieces of legislation are unnecessary and hand over far too much control of the internet to media companies who feel that they have a vested interest in breaking the internet because they think they can make more money that way.


PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Stop SOPA and PIPA...before it's too late.

Some Year-End Thoughts

By some measures, this has been a significantly more interesting year than I'd expected it to be.  In the past year, I've made some headway in conquering my depression and my eating-disordered behaviour, mustered the courage to let several new people into my life, become friends with most of them, started working (if only on a volunteer basis) in my chosen field, come to a slightly better understanding of my sexuality and sexual orientation, travelled to Scotland and Ireland, bought a guitar, read a lot of great books, learned how to make bannock, finished my first major crochet project, did some of my best writing so far, both here and under my other internet pseudonym as a fanfic writer, and found myself with something approaching a love life that confuses me a little, partly because of the nature of it and partly because (as I've said before) for a very long time, my love life has consisted of little but a series of rejections and other emotional disasters.

(I also, at this point in time, have thirty-five posts that are only in draft form at the moment; most of them were started this year, though there are also a few from 2009 and 2010.  Perhaps I'll be a bit better at finishing what I've started in 2012.)

So, whatever else I might say about 2011, one thing I doubt I'll ever call it is boring.

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On a not-so-personal note, this was also the year in which Stephen Harper unfortunately got that majority government he'd been salivating over since he first became our Prime Minister, the NDP became the Opposition party in a rather surprising twist of political history, Troy Davis was executed in Georgia even though seven of nine witnesses recanted or significantly changed their testimony against him and there was never any actual evidence that linked him to the scene of the murder he was convicted of committing, Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement grabbed headlines and met with unreasonable obstruction and aggression on the part of law enforcement, and a lot of white feminists did a lot of offensive and embarrassing things.  It's been a difficult year, but (as cynical as I can get sometimes) I do hold some hope that it's at least laid some groundwork for better things in the future.  A lot of people who needed to learn some hard lessons learned them, and a lot of other people were inspired to act, and to speak up, in ways that they might not have otherwise done.  And perhaps we'll eventually get the chance to build a better world because of it.

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A few days ago, a friend of mine wrote about a few things about the Western celebration of Christmas that bother him.  Among other things, he said that he wished that we wouldn't give so much money to stores that sell goods that were produced in third-world sweatshops, and that we'd give more generously to charitable organizations that help those in need, or actually reach out ourselves and give our time and energy to more good causes.

Which made me think of something that bothered me quite a bit while I was travelling, actually.

When I was in Scotland and Ireland with my church choir this summer, I was struck by the sheer amount of poverty I saw in both places.  So many people begging on the streets in Edinburgh and in Dublin, obviously needing help...and every time I didn't have a pound or a Euro to spare (I never carry much cash, just as much as I think I'm going to need, especially when I'm in a foreign country), my conscience picked at me.  How could I possibly think of myself as a decent person when I'd just refused help to someone who was obviously in need?  And inevitably, this quote from the Bible, which I've quoted here before, would come to mind:

How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?  Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
—1 John 3: 17-18

Obviously, I failed the test.

It's too easy to say that a single coin couldn't possibly have helped that much.  It's too easy to say that I was just being smart, avoiding being pickpocketed in a foreign country while distracted by the opportunity to do good.  It's certainly being too easy on myself to say that I was just being careful with my money, as I only brought with me what I thought I'd need.  The fact is, I saw people who needed help, and I didn't give it, even though I was only able to make the trip in the first place because I'd had help.  It didn't matter that the little that I could give would hardly lift them out of poverty, or even feed them for a night.  I know damn well that when you're in desperate circumstances, every little bit does help.

And yet, I know very well that kicking myself for it will do absolutely nothing to put things right.  I can only resolve to do better next time, and then actually do it.

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In some ways, I can hardly believe that we've made it to the year 2012 already.  When I was a child, even the year 2000 seemed like a far-away futuristic time, even when I knew objectively that it was actually not that far ahead of us.  2012 sounded positively magical, especially since at around the time we got our first dial-up internet connection, around 1997 or so, I started hearing about the Mayans' so-called dire prediction about the end of the world.  Never one to just sit back and accept the doom and gloom, I did a little research (it helped that I'd already started to develop an interest in Mayan culture and civilization), and soon realized that it wasn't so much that they'd decided the world would end in December 2012, as their calendar was set to enter a new cycle then.

But there are some people who just aren't capable of letting the facts get in the way of a good panic-inducing scenario, I suppose.

In any case, I shrugged it off.  I haven't changed my mind, but I do get the feeling that we're in for an interesting year on a lot of fronts.

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One last thought, and then I'll conclude this slightly disjointed ramble.  Of all the things I learned this year, there are two that I think are the most valuable: first, don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.  Even if it doesn't go well, the experience will be worth having anyway.  And second, it's OK to ask for help if and when you need it.

So that's it.  Whoever you are, wherever you are, I wish you a wonderful and blessed new year.

A Slight Clarification

It occurs to me that there's something else that I should've made a bit clearer in my previous post: I don't just consider myself pro-choice because I believe that the option of abortion should be available if it is necessary, for whatever reason a pregnant person might want or need it.

I am also pro-choice because I believe that it should be easier for those who want to continue the pregnancy, and to give birth, to do so.  I believe that parental leave should be longer, and that there should be a system in place that will help people to raise their children: better and more accessible daycare, for example, and easier access to services and assistive devices for children (and adults, for that matter) who are physically, mentally, or emotionally disabled, and a health care system that doesn't treat pregnancy like a disease unless there's actually a real complication and not just "oh, you might get this because you're not a Hypothetical Perfect Patient."  And I believe that children should not be punished if their parents are poor; poor children often get the worst of everything, including food, health care, and education.  Those who are pro-life might want to consider fighting for the rights of those children who have actually been born and who are vulnerable to the intrinsic unfairness of a world in which there are haves and have-nots.  Unless you care, not just with your emotions but also with your actions, for the children who have been born into less-than-wonderful circumstances, I would argue that you're not really pro-life, just pro-birth.

In Reply to a Pro-Life Comment

(The following post started out as a response to a comment on my post Why I Am Pro-Choice.  However, my usual verbosity got the better of me, and I decided that it would be better in the end if I made an actual post of it.)

Hello Anonymous,

I wish I could be sure that you would see my reply to your comment, because just as you felt called to comment, I feel called to respond.  You say that you believe that every person, even an unborn child, has a right to life, and on that point, we actually agree; although I am pro-choice, I am not necessarily pro-abortion.  I simply acknowledge that there are times when people who are pregnant may wish to have an abortion, for reasons that are extremely important to them.  I would never condone the use of abortion as birth control (which happens far less frequently than you may have been led to believe).  And I would never insist that any woman experiencing an unplanned and/or unwanted pregnancy absolutely had to go through an abortion.  But I would never want to remove the option, either, from any person who wanted to exercise it.

The thing is, sometimes pregnancies go wrong.  Sometimes the pregnancy is ectopic—that is, implantation takes place somewhere other than in the uterus itself—and this puts the life of the pregnant person in danger.  A ruptured fallopian tube is a very painful way to die.  Sometimes the fetus has developmental defects that are incompatible with the ability to sustain life, such as severely underdeveloped lungs or missing internal organs, and it would be by far more compassionate not to force the eventual child to suffer the death to which these defects would inevitably lead.  Sometimes the woman has medical problems of her own that make pregnancy and childbirth a particularly life-threatening prospect, and even if you take the callous route here and say that she should've used birth control of some kind, I must remind you that sometimes birth control of any type fails, no matter how careful people are about using it.  And suggesting that such women should avoid having sex at all is just plain cruel.  Physical intimacy may not be as basic a need as food, water, air, or shelter, but many people find that it is necessary nonetheless.

And there are other considerations.  Although it's rare, sometimes pregnancy is the result of rape, and it is manifestly unjust to re-victimize a victim of rape by forcing her to bear her rapist's child if she doesn't want to.  Sometimes women literally cannot afford to be pregnant, whether or not they want to have children; even if someone would be willing to adopt the baby immediately, during the pregnancy there would still be necessary doctor's appointments, sometimes medications which insurance (even here in Canada) may or may not cover, and usually maternity leave, which women (especially single women working low-paying jobs) may not be able to afford to take.  If she can't afford to actually take maternity leave, then that would be an additional layer of hardship for a pregnant woman, even if she was going to immediately give the child up for adoption after it was born.  And pregnancy and childbirth are not things that a woman should be forced to go through if she doesn't want to.  They take a serious toll on women's bodies, and even when they go well, recuperation can be difficult afterward.  C-sections, episiotomies, and even the wear and tear of a totally natural birth, can all be very hard to heal from.

In a perfect world, abortion would never be necessary or desirable.  But we do not live in a perfect world.  We live in a messy world where things go wrong and the right choice will not necessarily be the same thing for everyone.  And while you believe that God doesn't make mistakes, your belief does not, and should not, trump any person's right to determine what happens to their body.

So I stand firmly on the side of the person who is pregnant.  The person who already exists, who lives in the world, who loves people and who has people who love her, and who should not have to go through pregnancy and childbirth unless she actually wants to.  And if she doesn't want to, for whatever reason she has, you, and people like you, should not be able to have veto power over what she does in response to what is happening to her own body.

Although I don't know if you'll ever see this, or if you'll listen to me if you do see this, I would like very much if you would visit the following web pages.  I don't expect any of them to change your mind; I simply hope that reading these things will help you to understand why I, with my deep belief in the necessity of love, compassion, and respect for life, support the right to choose.

Pregnant 10-Year-Old Refused Abortion By Mexican State: Pregnancy can be dangerous for full-grown women, but even more so for children who have been raped and who have become pregnant as a result.  Children under 14 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than adult women.

A Heartbreaking choice: The stories of women who didn't want to have abortions, but who found them necessary anyway.

Every Saturday Morning: A blog written by escorts at a clinic which provides abortions in Louisville, Kentucky.

Abortions just as common in countries that ban it as in ones that don't: study: Whether or not it's legal, women who want abortions will find ways to have them...even at the risk of their own lives.

Abortion in America: A three-minute video by the Guttmacher Institute about women who have abortions, and the reasons why they have them.

As I said, I do not seek to change your mind.  If your mind changes at all, you're the one who has to change it.  But I do hope that you are willing to at least look at these resources and do your best to understand why I, and why others like me, believe in the necessity of choice, even if you don't believe in it yourself.

Regards,
Zillah