Struggling for the Words – by Katie Mulligan

Cynthia asked me to write last spring, and I didn’t give it much thought when I said yes. I probably should have thought some more, because although I make my living partly through writing, I have struggled over the last couple of years to get words onto paper (or screen). I suppose it is perfect that the writing prompt is, “What are you struggling with lately?”

Six years ago I entered Princeton Theological Seminary with the hope of finding a language for the faith I had found while working with youth in a church. I hoped at the time to find the right words to articulate a deep movement of the Spirit and from there to settle into a church where I might stay a while as pastor with my family.

At the opening communion service at the seminary in September, 2006, Dr. Sang Hyun Lee preached about liminality: “Liminal space is an in-between space, a “social limbo” created by a person’s leaving his or her social structure and not yet having returned to that structure; or to a new one.”[1] He invited us to frame our seminary experience as liminal space, a place and time in which we might leave behind who and what we had known and remain open to the unknown. He suggested at the heart of liminality one might find God’s abiding presence in the midst of creativity and wilderness.

So I stepped off the cliff and let myself be open. Perhaps Dr. Lee might have offered more caution had he seen ahead these six years in my life. Or perhaps he might have just nodded and said, “Yes, that’s how it goes.” These last six years have been a time of change and tumult in my life. I have moved five times. I divorced. I came out as queer. My children have changed schools more than once. We have different cats now—God alone knows how many fish we have gone through. I transferred presbyteries for practical and theological reasons, and so I also left my home church and joined a new home church. I finished my MDiv and started a PhD program.  I withdrew from the PhD program. I left my home church to pastor a tiny church in south Jersey. I left the tiny church in south Jersey. I bought a new bedspread. My family and the people who once held my stories are so very far away. Six years later, they are also so very far away in time as well. And I am not returning to the place I came from.

Life has been in a constant state of flux, and I find myself rootless beyond my wildest imaginings back in California. And I have…I have lost my words along the way. I sometimes think I have lost my voice, but my voice rings loud through my spirit; I just can’t find the words.

Rosa Linda Fregoso writes beautifully of borderland identities in her book meXicana encounters. I am white, but lived most of my life in Southern California where identity is complicated along lines of color, ethnicity, religion, geography, citizenship (and therefore documents or no), money, class, and sexuality. And of course it is like that everywhere, but along aggressively drawn borders one finds complicated and blurred identities that challenge those borders, slipping unauthorized through walls and fences. Of the potential of this border space, Fregoso writes:

Not recognizably Chicana or Mexicana, “yet geographically and historically localized” –echoing the lyrics of Chavela Vargas’ song, “Ni de aquí ni de allá” (Neither from her nor from there)—meXicana is a metaphor for cultural and national mobility. And even though the term is an amalgamation of “Mexicana” and “Chicana,” it does not signal an erasure of difference, but rather calls attention to the intersections among the muiltiple narratives of race, gender, sexuality that inform nation building.[2]

As I’ve become more aware of my own complex identity these last few years, I’ve been stripped of surety. With the loss of surety my words have escaped. It is a slow process finding them. It is a slow process finding replacements for the words that will not return.

I write extensively for sermons and blogposts—twitter  even, if you count that. These are free flowing spaces where I can assume my identity and voice without explanation—they are my spaces, in a very material way. But when asked to clarify, to contain, to identify myself, I struggle. I often fall silent; no words volunteer.

Marilyn Frye wrote a magnificent essay, “Lesbian ‘Sex,’” in which she challenged a study that found lesbian couples had “less sex” than their heterosexual and gay counterparts. Digging into the questions asked by the study, she wondered how one counts a “time” of sex, and suggested that lesbian couples might “count” times of sex in differently. Reflecting on this linguistic ambiguity she wrote:

Lesbian ‘sex’ as I have known it most of the time I have known it is utterly inarticulate. Most of my lifetime, most of my experience in the realms commonly designated as ‘sexual’ has been pre-linguistic, non-cognitive. I have, in effect, no linguistic community, no language, and therefore in one important sense, no knowledge.[3]

In some important way, I relate to this in the spiritual/theological realm. After years of seminary and pastoring churches, I have not yet found the words to express the movement of the Spirit in the depths of my being. I am certain that the liminal space Dr. Lee invited me into has taken hold and stubbornly clings, even as I seek to settle roots in this fifth home since 2006.

The struggle is not at all uncertainty as to identity or lack of theological conviction. What I am struggling with lately is the suspicion that my greatest certainty is uncertainty, and that words remain insufficient for the task.

Rev. Katie Mulligan is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and youth pastor for four churches in and around Trenton, NJ (Ewing, Covenant, West Trenton and Lawrence Road Presbyterian Churches). She is also a chaplain at Rider University. Katie is the parent of two boys and four cats, and blogs at http://insideouted.blogspot.com.

[2] Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xiv

[3] Marilyn Frye, “Lesbian ‘Sex’” in Willful Virigin: Essays in Feminism 1976-1992 (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1992), 115.