(Un)Mute Yourself, Day 11

Malachi 2:10b — Why do we turn covenant of our ancestors into a dumpster fire by being unfaithful to one another?

Today’s featured contributor is Dr. Vivia Kay Kieswetter. She is an evangelist of glitter, radical hope, and the power of burning it all down to find the beauty in the ashes. She’s disabled, queer, re-connecting with her father’s Indigenous heritage, and usually more joyful than angry. In her twisty path, she has: mucked out stables, tended bar and waitressed in dives and five-star restaurants, served as an event coordinator, a project manager, started social enterprises, conducted choirs and small ensembles, been a professional jazz, reggae, and opera singer, holds two Bachelor’s degrees, two Master’s degrees, a Ph.D., and two professional certificates.

Currently, she works primarily as a children’s minister and studies as a seminarian at Toronto’s Trinity College to pursue her first calling which is to love Jesus and people as hard as she can. She enjoys long meandering walks, deep conversations with her two ginger cats, connecting with her partner, and is working hard at getting better at vegan cooking.

I am luxuriating in a dumpster

The dumpster that is 2020 like the swampy trash panda I was raised to be

“I know that my creator lives” or better still as Jesus-creator-sets-free because this is the year that we all went into exile or at least we should have

but we didn’t all go into exile some of us went into degrees of denial and those of us that went into denial whether quiet or loud

set about gaslighting those of us in exile

Me, I went allllll the way into exile. I was ready for it. Like an olympian who had trained my lifelong days for the moment. I became a crouched scavenger. A night creature. 2020 was a dumpster fire. And I was a fireproof raccoon.

I crouched into my little dumpster hair buzzed off at three in the morning shrieking with my new possum and rat friends and anyone who came nearby

“ this isn’t normal”
“ this isn’t normal”
we whispered
or sometimes shrieked to each other.

We feasted on leftover Cheetos and half-eaten Chinese takeout and built shelters out of discarded Amazon packaging and whispered among ourselves as the world went about shopping and hurrying still
while we hid inside our safe little home.

The “as if normals” the in-degrees-of-denial business-at-all-costs-as usual folk came by now and again, opening our lid just a crack but they wouldn’t listen, they just dropped in their wasteful garbage and ran off quickly as we tried to tell them.

“This isn’t normal.”

We said. We prayed and we wondered what offerings we could make to the Creator and we spoke to the ancestors up in the heavens when the stars came out at night and one piece of prophetic wisdom kept coming down again and again.

This isn’t normal.

Our weird disabled bodies had been at the margins for a long time. We’d rehearsed for this — staying home when the lymph nodes swelled, washing our hands a bit more than the average, always worried when “that cold was going around” but now when our moment to shine was really here we didn’t feel shiny.

We felt sullen and tired more sullen and tired than ever before. We felt so tired.

Like Jeremiah in his hole, stuck down in the mud, my little weird trash panda body stuck in the dumpster with my new possum and rat friends — I tried to remember the last day I took a shower and tried to remember the coordinates for yet another zoom meeting where I had to appear to act as if I was a human for 45 minutes until I could retreat back to my new nature. Scurry back into the safety of my new covenant of NOT NORMAL while everyone else strode back into the behaving as if

This behaving as if: a profane covenant of faithlessness — an unkind say-nothing and behave in a corporately friendly (but not corporally friendly) way.

But we were down in the dumpster with the new knowledge, the deep knowledge, of not normal. Gazing up at the stars with the ancestors in them. Thinking of Jeremiah gazing up at the stars with the ancestors in them. We wondered if Jeremiah ever thought about going back home from exile?

The strange fire of 2020 is a realisation of the excess of our humanity. So many, too many, far too many frail precious magnificent fleshy fragile creatures gone in a flash of God’s time.
Loved infinitely and unimaginably.
It’s never been normal.
It will never be normal.
It’s not normal.
The love, the death, the exile.

As infinite and untouchable as the stars.

Check back here throughout the season of Advent for featured contributors offering their reflections. While it may not be daily (#thanks2020), there will be content featured here.

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The prompts for the entire season of Advent are as follows: