where do daisies grow?

as the fall draws to a close, i am always overwhelmed by what i've learned - over the course of a semester, a year or several, in a single day, a season, a collection of moments and sayings and kisses, actual and imaginary. i'm sure i learned many things this year worth remembering, but one refrain is stuck in my head, a call and response - 'where do daisies grow?' 'in the end zone.' [knowing that i am new to football, some of you may laugh to know that i wrote 'in-zone' here, thought it looked fishy and looked it up online; good thing i did because 'end' is so much more interesting from a theological perspective] so what does this refrain mean? in the grand narrative of football, i think it's pretty clear, but i wonder why it has tangled up my consciousness like a knot in wet hair.

several weeks ago, i was at a gathering at a colleague's home. i was chattering away about lesbian football to anyone who would listen. one of my dear friends said playfully, 'but j, what about church?' [this is probably funnier to us because we are theologians; church would seem like a required activity for sunday morning] knowing he was teasing, but always taking an opportunity to get serious [this is my way], i started gushing again about true, true community and exclaimed that daisy football was more like church for me a this moment than the sacramental table, where the food has been spoiled by centuries of patriarchy, violence, corruption, apathy and complacency, not to mention the fact that my invitation has been [officially] suspended on account of my sexuality. i was then struck by the audacity and absurdity of calling football church, especially since i grew up in a culture where sports, and especially football was religion, a religion i did not subscribe to. however, i think the difference between the diesel daisies and the throngs that gather in massive NFL and college stadiums, is analogous to the difference between the mega-churches popping up all over the US, with their own private starbucks, and the intentional eucharistic communities emerging on the margins and in the spaces in between.

The simplest and clearest notion of ecclesia given in Xian scripture is Jesus' statement that whenever two or more of you are gathered, i will be there. [ekklesia in ancient Greece referred to the democratic governing assembly, an assembly of equals; the early Xian writers adapted the word to refer to the early community, the church, also individual congregations; now, 'ecclesiastical', 'ecclesiological' and/or 'ecclesiological' refers to theories of what it means to be and what constitutes 'Church/church'] more and more i contemplate this idea of two or more, and at this juncture, i am more concerned with two or more queers than with two or more confessing Xians. i am also interested in the notion that two or more of the marginalized is better attuned to political and social liberation as the principle of the gospel and Jesus' preferential option for the oppressed. so where is it that i find ecclesia most authentically incarnated? it is among those whom the world has rejected.

another theological concept that occurs to me as i think about queer church is 'eschatology.' this term refers to Xian focus on the 'end time,' both the realized future of salvation and the not yet. for me, the 'end zone' could be symbolic of the desires and commitments that surface within this community of women called the diesel daisies. 'daisy love' represents the mutuality, respect, care and unconditional support we offer one another in play and in life. this love manifests in sexual and non-sexual relationships, in friendships and mentorships and families. it is inter-generational, inter-racial, inter-classed, inter-gendered love. as a community of queer and/or lesbian women we live and love OUT the future we crave, the future that is now. we love out our liberation.

i am not attempting to make a church or a religion out of daisy football. this, i think would be dangerous and inappropriate for many of our community. i am trying to honor this experience and the women who have made it possible through the language i know best. as a Xian [because i am one], i am also trying to learn what Xian identity should be/mean in the contemporary world, and i think daisy love as much to teach. i write also to challenge my Xian friends, particularly in the advent of another liturgical year - do you take seriously the fact that Jesus was born in a stable with shit and hay clinging to his skin and swaddling clothes [thank you Marcella Althaus-Reid], that he was born to an enslaved people? my question is, where are you worshiping this advent? is it in the palace of transnational corporate frenzy, the pew of a church where eschatological vision has lost its social and political dimensions [either theoretically, practically or both], the comfortable living room with heat and coffee and cookies, or will you worship in the stable, in the cold and lonely streets, in the company of an odd congregation?

this advent, i am a daisy, and i am growing in the end zone. sunday was the day after my colleague's party. i remember sitting on the sideline watching the yellow leaves swirl down from a tree on the edge of the far end zone, like a sheet blowing on a clothes line. i remember the exhilaration of the moment before the pitch, of running as fast as i can, the thrust of bodies colliding, the weight of being rolled over on the cold ground. I remember breaking bread together, sharing stories, toasts, and plays drawn on napkins. I remember the crushing intensity of my love for these women and how different attractions over and again affirm my queerness and instill joy in being a woman loving woman.

something ordinary

a couple of weeks ago, i was preparing to give a paper at a conference. i was working on chicana feminist writer, Gloria Anzaldúa, exploring the potential for her work to offer a queer symbolic language. it was getting down to the wire, and i was feeling that core-tingling anxiety begin to get denser, like a balloon full of gravel and lava in my chest, bumping into my bones, threatening to burst at any moment. and desperation was the weight tethering it to the inside of my secret part. just begin, whispers the little girl who sits with me sometimes and keeps my loneliness company. just begin.

i opened the library book that has been on my shelf for nine months, an index card fell out, presumably a page marker. rather than look at the page it was holding (opening the book is a beginning; let's not get ahead of ourselves), i was drawn to what was written on the card - a shopping list. i read the list.

can a grocery list be a poem, a prayer even? it seemed so beautiful to me. as i read i tasted and smelled and imagined the labor, the tools, discerning what these ingredients would come together to be - lemon pound cake, tortellini salad, guacamole. yes, a prayer i think, preparations. but what for? a dinner party i think. i tried to think of when i had made lemon pound cake. and i remembered who it was for, the evening shared with friends, opening our home, the moist, soft heat of pound cake on my tongue, mingled with the cold wetness of ice cream and the throbbing sensations of joy and love and energy in sugar and conversation. two things spring to mind when i remember this meal and this moment when i needed to be reminded - eucharist and, well, perhaps you can decipher the other.

Gloria Anzaldúa describes dormancy and emergence as an important process for the human being, the writer, the queer woman, la mestiza. she describes this as the Coatlicue [Coat-li-qwe] state. this is an internal, psychic struggle to reconcile (but not resolve) contradictions. for Anzaldúa, this is characterized by a visit from Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of birth and death. 'serpent skirt' represents for Anzaldúa the fusion of opposites that plague the psyche. she appears at the crossroads of life and plunges the soul into darkness and stasis, the space of germination, where death and new life meet, the threshold of transformation. interestingly, Anzaldúa describes the emergence from this state or the crossing as a claiming of her sexual agency. It is orgasmic. she writes, “And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents – over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weaknesses and strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’ – just ours, mine.”

doing and writing theology are erotic acts, just as making a pound cake or preparing and receiving communion can be. all of these acts also require a claiming of self and desires to give and receive love. they require imagination and creativity, which requires action. this shopping list was a love note from God, a reminder of my hybrid identity as committed to both theory and practice. i am not just an academic. i am a partner, a friend, a sister, a daughter. i was able to see the other commitments in my life, the other things i do. and i was able to move beyond the thinking and the worrying and the fear that academics and writers, really all human beings struggle with constantly, and see the task before me as another labor of love, another instantiation of eucharist. i was, once again, as i always am, able to embrace my insatiable lust for language and ideas. i popped the balloon in my chest and let the grit and heat drip down to the tips of my toes, and i feasted on the entrails of the serpent.