i need to preface this by saying that i absolutely love my church. and i mean that. i go to a great, progressive, interesting lutheran church in northwest washington d.c. that is filled with all kinds of wonderful, supportive people who have made my time here much less lonely.
i also happen to love liturgy. of the high church variety. incense, pipe organ, chanting the psalms…i can’t get enough of it. i love the structure and the order. i love that when i stand in the chancel with the augustana lutheran church choir and sing “a mighty fortress is our god” my parents and my brother are halfway across the country doing the same thing. i love that if i could look back to a sunday morning seventy years ago, my great grandpa draeger would be preaching a sermon in his little lutheran church in brownton, minnesota. and that if i looked back one hundred years before that, my ancestors would be sitting in a lutheran church somewhere in northern germany singing the same hymn, listening to the same stories, believing in the same god. so when people talk about “finding jesus” i feel a little confused, because in my family…we never lost him. my christian faith is a faith that goes back generations, it is communal, and i stand in my faith knowing that it is not entirely my own. it has been bequeathed to me by generations of faithful men and women. by a church that, although imperfect, still reflects the movement of a living god, here and now. in this place. in these times.
with all that being said, i move to the humorous part of the entry. this weekend at church the smoke alarm went off. right at the beginning of the service. this is largely because augustana has what i like to delicately refer to as “an incense problem”. we love the stuff. seriously. we use it as often as possible. and since we are still celebrating the easter season, we’re rocking it every week. along with “he is risen, he is risen indeed!”
it has recently warmed up in d.c. that lovely point where neither air conditioning nor heat is immediately necessary. so the church (full of stingy lutherans, god bless them), had neither on this past sunday morning. my guess is that this decreased the air flow through the sanctuary and the billowing smoke from the incense burner made its way to the ceiling and hung out there long enough for the smoke alarm to go off. right in the middle of “this is the feast”. but my favorite part about all of this is that nobody moved. no one said anything. sure there were smiles, perhaps even a few giggles (i plead the fifth on this one), but the service went on.
and when we started chanting psalm 68 (may god arise, may his enemies be scattered;may his foes flee before him. as smoke is blown away by the wind, may you blow them away)…no seriously, the service still went on. the ritual continued. as i sat there trying not to laugh i realized that this anecdote could be used in two very distinct ways as a metaphor for faith. either (1) you need to persevere in spite of interruption or (2) an emphasis on ritual can blind people to what is really happening around them. perhaps needless to say, i choose the former rather than the latter.
the thing of it is, god interrupts our lives all the time. in fact, there are times when i feel like my entire path in life has consisted of interruptions. there have been multiple times in my life when i thought things were going on swimmingly, when in fact there was a major detour coming my way. there are those of you out there who might call this fate, or karma, or perhaps even bad luck…but what i’m reflecting on this morning (and have been over the course of this project) is that the most complicated times in my life are often the most interesting. the interruptions in the path i’ve created for myself are where the real divinity in my life seems to sneak in. just like some of the most complicated women i know, the katie girls, are the most beautiful. they radiate the knowledge that life rarely turns out the way you have it planned…but somehow god, or luck, or buddha, or the universe…pulls a fast one on you and you end up in a better place than where you started.
when i was going through a “dark night of faith” a couple years ago, i had the following quote on my mirror from renowned christian author c.s. lewis:
“god whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain. it his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”
what i believe, and what the smoke alarm reminded me of this weekend, is that the painful parts of life are often an awakening to something greater. put another way by john lennon:
“life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”
and finally, from the gurus we all hold so near and dear, the sex and the city gals:
“maybe mistakes are what make our fate… without them what would shape our lives? maybe if we had never veered off course we wouldn’t fall in love, have babies, or be who we are. after all, things change, so do cities, people come into your life and they go. but it’s comforting to know that the ones you love are always in your heart… and if you’re very lucky, a plane ride away.”
more katie girl stories tomorrow, until then happy monday.
In first grade I shoved a rock up my nose. It got stuck. In fourth grade every girl in Grandview, Missouri, got the bright idea to shave only the back of their heads. It was some kind of rebellious fashion statement, and one I rarely admit to doing. In sixth grade I started my period and insisted that it wasn’t normal. I was so persistent that my mother had to take me to the doctor. I refused to believe that my mother, a nurse, knew what she was talking about. In seventh grade I received my first kiss. Ken Willert was the one to give it to me. My friends and I were at Mitch Karsten’s birthday party, girls on one side of the room and boys on the other. The kiss was strategically planned, not romantic or spontaneous in any way, and I refused to kiss him until I found my Dr. Pepper Chap Stick. I had to make sure my lips were soft after all. Two years ago I dated a guy named Ben. I was bored, and he was cute, until he turned in to a stalker. I had mentioned that I liked Batman, and one day I came home to find him in my apartment in nothing but a child sized Batman cape. I sent him home. Three weeks ago,I accidentally found out that the father of my son is having a baby. This was quite a shock to me because he had been trying to get back together with me for months. He would tell me how sorry he was for things that happened in the past, tell me he loves me, and wants nothing more than to have his family back. I knew that even though there were still feelings on both people’s parts, I couldn’t ever go back to that relationship. I didn’t want to be with the father of my child, but he should damn well be miserable and pine over me. I figured that he deserved it after everything that he had done. I spent the rest of the night throwing myself a pity party and avoiding his text messages and calls. Unfortunately when I was ready to talk the only thing that could come out of my mouth, after some alcoholic beverages, was, “I hope your baby has five legs.”
I thought about how immature that phrase was for about a week, and then I realized something. It is ok to do things I regret. I’m not saying I should go out and purposely do things that are stupid, but all of my experiences have taught me something. For example, I now know that rocks do not belong in body cavities, that being a woman is a normal biological thing, and I have learned that clippers should only be used on members of the male species. Spontaneous kisses that hold feeling and meaning are the best, and I no longer worry about having Chap Stick. I figure I am a little old for Dr. Pepper flavor and so have now matured to Tropical Punch Kool-Aid. Dating someone because I am bored never goes anywhere and is a waste of time. Maturing enough to consider someone else’s feelings is something that I am glad to have learned. I can now just tell someone that it isn’t working out rather than hoping that he gets my subtle cues and disappears. Even though I still do not like the idea of my son’s father having another child, a baby with five legs just wouldn’t be a good thing.
Learning to let things go is not an easy task, and I have not mastered it by any means. I am positive that I will have more moments that I am not proud of, and I welcome them. I figure it is how I handle myself during and after them that shapes who I am. I can only hope that as I age and mature that I live a life without regret and have many stories to tell.
i’d like to thank this week’s contributer for such an incredible essay! for more information on the katie girl project or how to submit a piece, click here.
here is my essay on why i’m a katie girl
(for an explanation of the whole project, see the entry directly below this):
i am a katie girl because i have big hair. anyone that knows me, knows this. when i was born i had chestnut brown ringlets covering my entire head and the nurses tied in three pink bows. i am a katie girl because the feminist in me questions this sometimes. that i had a socially constructed gender identity at less than an hour old.
but back to my hair.
when i was two or three it started growing in blond. my mom has a lock of my hair that is half blond and half brown. it also straightened out. but it was still big and thick, and when i was in kindergarten my mom used to crimp it and put it in a side ponytail. i was frequently referred to as “lioness” and “large marge” as a child because of it. it became part of my identity.
in high school it was popular to straighten your hair. thin, straight hair was all the rage and my katie girl hair didn’t fit. adolescence had turned it curly and wild again. in the summer it frizzed out and at some point in junior high i had dyed it a bizarre shade of yellow-blond. it didn’t fit in and so neither did i. i used to straighten it everyday, layer by layer, inch by inch, until it was unrecognizable. one day i overslept and when i walked into class one of the guys i went to school with laughed out loud at my katie girl hair. i’ll never forget standing in our physics classroom, humiliated.
when i went to college i started noticing girls on campus who were unapologetic about their katie girl hair. some had dreads and afros, others had pin tight ringlets, and still others rocked amazing pixie cuts. to a vulnerable eighteen year old this bordered on miraculous. at the end of the year, my best friend and i realized that we had the same katie girl hair. at the end of high school, she had cut hers short, much like i had straightened mine. by the end of our freshman year we were embracing our crazy waves (which aren’t exactly curls) and wearing our hair huge. and gorgeous.
i used to hate it when people touched my hair. they were usually commenting on it or trying to smooth it down and it made me feel like i was being violated. i needed people to leave my katie girl hair alone, to just let it be.
i still straighten my hair sometimes. for job interviews and important meetings. it is still patted down by well meaning middle aged women on occasion. i still wear it short because long my katie girl hair is too much. now my friends call it my “sex hair.” i’m okay with this. i also apologize for it frequently. when people say my katie girl hair looks nice i tell them i overslept and didn’t have time to straighten it.
i’m a katie girl because i still don’t feel like i fit. because i think my hair defines me sometimes. because the complicated relationship i have with the way i look is a battle i am still fighting. i don’t look in magazines and see myself, i have to look in the mirror for that. and the person i see there is a katie girl. complicated, happy, judgmental, passionate, driven. and more than a little bit self-conscious about the skin she’s in.
as promised, here is my attempt at explaining what i am now referring to as “the katie girl project.”
i majored in women’s studies in college, and one of my enduring passions over those four years was reading the stories of women’s lives. eleanor roosevelt, adrienne rich, gail griffin, katharine hepburn, toni morrison, willa cather, the list goes on and on…these are the women i learned about, the lives i read about and wanted to make my own. as we grow and move through this world we collect bits and pieces of these wild, courageous women, and incorporate them into our own lives. we make mistakes (lots of them) on the path to self-actualization and understanding. as my favorite college professor once said, “we come to knowledge through a lived life”. this idea is the inspiration for the katie girl project.
the name of the project comes from one of my favorite episodes of sex and the city where carrie, miranda, samantha and charlotte are sitting around having drinks and talking about the movie “the way we were.” big has just gotten engaged to natasha, breaking carrie’s heart and she has spent the episode looking for an answer to why he didn’t choose her to marry.
as the girls carouse in the bar they start talking about the barbara streisand movie “the way we were,” where streisand (the lovely, passionate activist) falls in love with robert redford (the dashing and talented, but conventional, writer). at first it seems an unlikely match (the gifted golden boy meets slightly awkward, over opinionated mensch) but eventually a role reversal transpires, as streisand comes of age and stays true to her passions while redford sells his talent short as a television writer. the two part ways and streisand moves on with her life. when they meet by chance in front of the plaza hotel some years later (in one of the most famous final scenes in hollywood history) where it becomes apparent that streisand has come into her own, stuck to her passions and displayed courage and clout while redford has merely settled. streisand tells redford’s character: “your girl is lovely, hubbell” in the heartbreaking final moments where the audience understands that sometimes love doesn’t conquer all.
the recollection inspires carrie’s epiphany that there are two types of girls. the simple girls, and the katie girls. “i’m a katie girl!” she shouts. after the women leave the restaurant she encounters big after his engagement brunch and says one of my favorite lines from all of sex and the city: “maybe some women aren’t meant to be tamed. maybe they need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with.”
so this is the inspiration for the katie girl project as it currently stands. your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send me an e-mail (ellen.draeger@gmail.com) that explains why you are a katie girl. it can be a picture, a short essay, a work of art, a quote, or anything else you can think of that helps express an important part of your “lived life” to the world.
i plan on featuring a different “katie girl” story on my blog every week. as i continue to collect stories, ideas, art, etc. i hope that i eventually have enough to do something really big with the project. so if you have any ideas on that…feel free to include those as well (!) also, please pass on this information to any fun, fearless female that you know who would be a great candidate for the project.
above all, the katie girl project is about celebrating the unique role women play as teachers in one another’s lives. we have all learned some major lessons about life, love and following your passions…we celebrate together, cry together, learn together and build our lives together. the more connected we are the stronger we become.
xoxo.
ellie
p.s. remember to e-mail me with your stories (leave a comment here with your e-mail address and i’ll get back to you). all submissions will be posted anonymously (unless you request otherwise), but for my records include your name, age and e-mail address.
