Somewhere in my boxes of old yearbooks, soccer trophies, scrapbooks and running spikes is a drivers license. On this drivers license is a picture of me, long hair, looking somewhat surprised, and smiling and showing a full row of braces. I really wasn’t supposed to get my drivers license on that day. I was nowhere near ready to be given the keys and sit behind the wheel of a one and a half ton clump of metal that could go over seventy miles an hour and have full reign over the radio dial. But after I barely passed the drivers test, they ushered me over to the red curtain, told me to smile if I wanted to, and then wait ten minutes. Thirty-six dollars later, I was the proud owner of an Indiana Drivers License, and on that license was all of my important information that made me me: brown hair, brown eyes, birthdate, no corrective lenses (at least, not yet), and most importantly, my height and weight measurements. On this state issued, official documentation and summary of who I am, on this piece of evidence that supports my citizenship, my voting rights, my ability to enter a bar (or not), it said Jennifer Ellen Frayer, height: four foot eleven inches, weight: eighty-five pounds. By today’s standards, according to my height and weight, I would have barely graduated from riding in a car seat in the second row, when they said, sure, go ahead, take her for a spin. In all seriousness, I probably should have had a couple of phone books under me so I could see over the steering wheel, but instead, I lied and said I could see just fine.
See, I was always the tiny kid. I was always on top of the pyramids, always standing in the front row for the class pictures, always asking for help to get the markers off of the top shelf. I was thrown around on the playground, carried via piggy back during recess, and chosen first for “red rover red rover send Jennifer right over,” which was really just a way for the big kids to clothesline me right in the neck as I tried to break their grip. It's a gruesome game. I shopped in the kids section long after everyone else had outgrown the character t-shirts and footie pajamas and moved on to cooler things like hyper color t-shirts, stone washed Levi’s and this strange store called “Victoria’s Secret.” Sometimes it was really frustrating. I just wanted to be able to be like all the other kids, but I was always told I had to sit in the middle seat, I was always given the smallest piece of pizza, and always carded at the movies. Being so much smaller than everyone else made me different, made me odd, and made the teachers have to make adjustments to my desk height, bring in special sized chairs, and worst of all, make me stand on the stool at the lectern when it was my turn to read the gospel reading for Wednesday morning mass. It was what I was “known” for both in and out of the doctor’s office; I was the kid who could barely make it on to the growth chart, was always chosen first for the trust falls and even made the parents on the sidelines chuckle when I came to the line and prepped for my underhanded free throw.
But eventually, it sort of became my signature. I was the tiny one. I was the one who could squeeze through tight spaces to get the wallet dropped underneath the bleachers. I was the one who was enticed to join the cheerleading squad even though I hated bows and memorizing and coordinated dance routines. I started running cross country, and being small meant that I could be fast. Being small meant I could spend less on clothes, get out of riding those terrifying roller coasters, and eat all the pie I wanted and never gain a single pound. I was the last in the line of nesting dolls, the one safely nestled by all the others, the one who only had to stand out on account of her smallness and nothing else. I didn’t take up space. I didn’t occupy a place where I didn’t belong. And if somehow, if I accidentally did trespass somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, I could quickly sneak out the back door, and no one would be the wiser. Not taking up space became my identity - a sort of non-identity. I was always asking myself, “How can I confine myself, limit myself, compact myself into something smaller, something less burdensome, something easier to carry?”
This translated itself into every aspect of my life. Work harder, so that my manager at the pizza joint wouldn’t have to complain. Stop asking questions, so my youth group leader wouldn’t sigh with the interruptions. Get good grades, so my teachers wouldn’t be disappointed. Run faster so that my short legs could no longer be an excuse. Keep quieter, so I don’t end up saying something embarrassing. Stay little, stay tiny, get smaller, get quieter, quit taking up so much space. Stop taking the risk of being seen. The tinier self, the tinier the mistakes.
And then, of course, college came, and I was a late bloomer, and I promise you that my drivers license no longer says that I am four eleven and eighty-five pounds. But that fear of taking up too much space was still there - just translated into places like the classroom and the dining hall and the Bible studies. Stay small. Keep quiet. Look down. Be agreeable. Don’t ask hard questions. Shut down those desires. Stop being hungry. Draw attention to yourself only by being minuscule, by being perfect, by knowing the right answers even before the question is asked.
But today, we have this passage of nesting dolls. My sister used to collect them. You know those wooden doll shaped containers, that first one painted with gold filigree in amazing detail, right down to the eyelashes and tiny flowers on her scarf, and you’d open that one and there’d be another one inside of it, and you’d open that, and there’s another one, and on and on with less and less painted details until you got to the tiniest little doll, smaller than your fingertip, with just a few strokes of the tiniest brush to indicate eyes, nose, mouth, maybe her hands clasped together in front of her plain red dress. The tiniest ones were the ones that always got lost because we’d separate them and line them up and watch them get smaller and smaller down the line.
Like nesting dolls, Jesus tells us that the Father holds the Son and the Son holds us, that we abide in the Son just as the Son abides in the Father, concentric circles of holding, of embracing, smaller and smaller as we go from the grandiosity of the ever expanding multiverse, to our own universe, to our solar system, our earth, our country, our town, our church, our families, our bodies, our cells, and smaller and smaller down, all abiding in the One who made us all. One doll, snug inside the other.
But I think, my whole life, I’ve been trying to be the tiniest nesting doll, to take up the least amount of space, to wear the plainest dress so that when we’re all separated from each other, when we’re all lined up in a row, I can’t be accused of offending or demanding or taking more than my share, and when we’re all lined up in a row, I won’t have to hold anyone else, and when we’re all lined up in a row, it’s no big deal if I get lost or cracked or if my paint starts to flake off. And when we’re all combined together, I get to hide behind all the others. Not much is demanded of the tiniest doll. Her mistakes are hidden behind all those petticoats. Her missteps are made with tiny footprints. Her whispered truths are hidden behind layers and layers of gold filigree. The littlest one doesn’t have to step out into the unknown; she just gets to be carried by all the others.
The hard part, though, as all of us who have tried to fit back into our wedding dresses can attest, is staying tiny. If we get any bigger, we might not fit in with our other nesting doll families. If we get bigger, we might not be hidden inside and behind all those others who seem to look as if they have their lives figured out. If we get bigger, if we start to grow, if we start taking up some space, we might find that we have outgrown the creeds or the belief systems or the traditions or the right answers that have defined us all this time. "Just abide in God," they said, which meant, abide in Christ, which meant abide in the church, which meant in tradition and in belief systems and creeds and how things have always been done and in expectations that our values should be their values and in arguments over the color of the sanctuary carpet. Stay safe in the sheep pen. Don’t wander away. You might never be found. You might escape the yearly shearing and grow too much wool, enough for forty men’s suits.
I think this is where the nesting doll metaphor breaks down, and I think this is where the church has always broken down. In our attempts to belong, in our attempts to “fit in” we have made our spaces smaller and smaller, we’ve clotheslined those growing in their faith because they tried to break through all the spoken and unspoken boundaries that we have built in order to keep ourselves safe from all that big, grand, outside, ever expanding, unknown.
See, at first, I read this passage as the tiniest doll in the series of ever expanding nesting dolls. Stay small. Stay in the middle. Stay where you belong. Fit in. Don’t push against the boundaries of the defined walls we have built to keep us safe and secure and relatively risk free. You are the numbers on your spiritual identification card. You are four eleven and eighty five pounds. Stick to that. Stay there. It’ll get you in. Nice and safe in this pen we have built for you.
I’d come to God like that, especially in prayer. Ready to receive whatever God had to give me, as long as it fit in my confined spaces of logic and reason and tradition and creed. I’d pray for God to come as long as God was willing to fit somewhere inside of my tiny definitions and expectations and in the tiny space I had set aside somewhere inside of myself for God to occupy. But taking up spiritual space, letting my spiritual world and spiritual self get bigger, means that I can be surprised, I can be amazed, I can have wonder and play and an ever expanding experience of who God really is. Taking up spiritual space means that I’m leaving room for God to be inside of me, just as I am inside of God.
I don’t think it’s as simple opening up the Father, and finding the Son, and then opening up the Son and inside we’ll find us, card carrying, certified, Jesus-approved. Because the Father is ever expanding. God is not limited to the confines of the biggest nesting doll in our curio cabinet. And that means the Son is ever expanding, too. And so that means we get to stretch out, as well. We get to take up some space. We don’t have to be the size written on our first drivers license. We don’t have to confine ourselves to a building or Sunday mornings, or hide our questions, or crawl to God like an unseen street urchin asking for just a little more bread. We are no longer servants, but friends. We get to ask God for anything in Christ’s name, and God will give it to us. We get to be big, bold, loud, laughing. We don’t have to keep spiritually dieting, restricting ourselves of the fruits of God’s goodness so that we can fit in to the same spiritual dress we wore when we were fourteen. We don’t have to stay small.
God wants us to expand, to grow, to change in our faith. And we do that by asking questions. We do that by bringing in more people and more ideas and more confusion and more diversity and more perspectives. We do that by dismantling the separations between the dolls. We do that by enduring and surrounding and holding each other. In other words, we do that by loving each other. Loving each other means we’re laying down our lives for each other, we’re giving our lives to each other, which, I think, is just a way of saying that we break out of our own boundaries and our own defined rules and our own classified ciphers and secret handshakes in order to connect, to build bridges with each other. The boundaries are disappearing. There is fluidity between me and you and God. What affects me affects you. What hurts you hurts me. My life is no longer my own; it’s yours too. My life spreads out and is morphed into yours. The lines that separate what is “me” and what is you start to weaken, because we’re all a part of Christ, who is a part of the Father, who is in and around and breaking through every single boundary we set up for ourselves.
We don’t have to limit ourselves, and we don’t have to limit each other. We don’t have to get smaller so that God can get bigger. It’s not pie. Or if it is pie, it’s this ever expanding, ever growing, ever changing pie with a perfect flakey crust. Preferably cherry, but you can have whatever you want and as much as you want. God is in through and around it all, breaking down all the barriers we try to set up for ourselves in order to make this life make sense. I can take up spiritual space. You can take up spiritual space. There is room in the womb of God for us all.
Thanks be to God.
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