The Star-Gazer

This essay is, for me at least, the emotional companion to one I wrote a few months ago called “My Heart Don’t Wish to Roam” and posted here. By emotional companion, I mean that when I finished both pieces I cried and felt absolutely empty. I also struggled with posting both of them, because they involve deep feelings for people who are still in my life.

When I posted "My Heart Don't Wish to Roam," I was sick with nervousness. Lauren tried to calm me by saying, “Writing is by nature a pouring out of the heart” and assured me that people would understand my vulnerability in that post.

The nerves involved in posting that essay pale in comparison to anxiety I have surrounding this one. The things that are in this essay have been a part of my private life for such a long time that I am hesitant to make them public. The anger and frustration I talk about here have been an on-going part of my life for the past eighteen months. I cannot remember I time in my life that I wasn’t filled with doubt or skepticism. It’s now, finally, that I can begin to give these things a voice.

***

The Star-Gazer

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved stargazing.

Standing in my childhood backyard, far from any significant light pollution, I could look up and see thousands of stars. An insomniac for most of my life, I would often slip out of the house in the middle of the night to sit in the backyard and look at the sky. I was terrible at identifying or remembering constellations, but something about the night sky moved me beyond words.

Read mystical literature or talk to a person of faith and you’ll almost inevitably hear about a person’s conversion experience—the moment in their lives when they knew¸ definitively, that there was a God and that God loved and cared for them. Conversion, for all people of faith, is supposed to be an ongoing process rather than a specific moment in time. In my experience though, there are moments that stand out for many people. For Paul it was getting knocked off his horse. Augustine heard someone reading from the New Testament. I saw the Perseid meteor shower for the first time.

My best friend’s parents live in an even more remote location than mine. I spent so much time at their house that it became a second home to me. They had this beautiful backyard and a pier that Michelle and I spent a great deal of time on. During the day we would lie out and read and talk about boys and books. After her folks had gone to bed we would grab a blanket and go out and look at the stars and talk about what we wanted from our lives and our partners and our families. Late one August, she called and said, “the Perseid meteor shower peaks around 2:00 AM. Want to come over?”

If you’ve never seen a meteor shower at its peak, there’s nothing I can say to describe it accurately for you. It is, in a very literal way, breath-taking. When you’re in your early 20s, watching a meteor shower peak with your very best friend, it’s the kind of experience that sears itself into your heart. I don’t know if it was the emotional high of being with someone I loved tremendously during this intensely beautiful moment, or if it was actually a moment where God broke through the thin space, so to speak, but for the first time in my adult life I was utterly convinced of God’s presence in my life.

I wasn’t entirely sure what happened that night, but I knew that something inside of me had changed. I was, to use a phrase I hate, “on fire for God.” But easily three-quarters of the priests I knew as a child and young adult were Jesuits, and their personal charisms tended toward the intellectual. Consequently, I grew up with a “There is something here that doesn't make sense… let's go poke it with a stick” approach to Christianity rather than a strictly evangelical or deeply prayerful approach. God was Unknowable, certainly, but that didn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what we could while we were alive. Understanding God intellectually seemed at least as important to me as worshiping God or spreading the Good News. The best approach, then, would be to learn to know God through intellectual inquiry and the rest would follow.

I threw myself into the study of theology with all the zealousness of a first convert. I was lucky enough to attend a college that encouraged questions and wrestling with your faith. Unfortunately for me, an inherent part of those questions and that wrestling was a deep-rooted, nearly unshakable skepticism about everything from the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church to the historical necessity of the Incarnation. It was an exciting, if frustrating time in my life. Every time I began to grasp something intellectually, if felt like that experience with the Persid’s was slipping just a bit further away.

Thankfully, I also attended a college in a place where star-gazing could still very much be a part of my life. I still took quiet, late-night walks and if I couldn’t quite see the same number of stars I could in my backyard in Wisconsin, I could still see enough to remind me of that moment when God was so present to me.

I pursued theology through two Master’s degrees, for a total (including undergrad) of seven years in the same place thinking about God and the Church. I found myself taking fewer and fewer nighttime walks. 

When I did manage to slip out, I was usually accompanied by another student. Instead of looking up, I would argue with them about something from class or an issue raised by a text we had just read. I was still chasing down that feeling I had on the pier, but it seemed to be getting inexplicably further from me with each passing year.

I told myself that the problem was with me. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was clearly faking this whole thing.  I had a passion for the subject, certainly. But it was an intellectual passion more than a spiritual one. I loved arguing with students and professors who were clearly more intelligent than I was and earning their respect. When someone told me that I offered a good point or an excellent critique I felt dizzy. The part of me that was spiritually or emotionally connected to God shrunk every day, but I thought--I was convinced-- that if I could just get to a point where I could understand God and the Church intellectually everything else would fall into place. So I did what I had always done. I argued. I argued for things I was unsure of myself. I argued for the sheer joy of the intellectual challenge. I argued because I was terrified to admit to these people I loved and respected that I wasn’t sure if I believed in any of this. I argued with a vehemence and an unwillingness to bend that shocked me then and embarrasses me now. It was as though if I admitted my own doubts out loud, if I began to give even a little, the whole construction of the past seven years would come tumbling down. If I admitted that I didn’t know if God was Triune or when the human developed a soul, I wouldn’t know where to stop.

During that last year at grad school I was, frankly, a disaster. I was unspeakably angry most of the time. The worst part of it was that I wouldn’t—couldn’t really—talk about what was going on with the other budding theologians. With the other students, God was the first premise. They were all already (seemingly) past that question. Why waste time talking about it when we could talk about Cardinal Ratzinger’s eschatology or our dreams for what the Church could be? I had spent so long trying to convince myself that I believed this by convincing them that I believed it, that I was afraid of what would happen if I started to talk about doubt.

Try as I might to keep it together, I began to slip, bit by bit. The non-academic writing I did exhibited a great deal of my frustration. Any poem I tried to write was about doubt or God’s absence in my life. Prose pieces that I did were a conglomeration of invective against higher education and theology. I opted out of arguments with my atheist friends that I would have welcomed before. My mass attendance slackened and then stopped all together.

And then. Somewhere into this immense swirl of doubt, a friend emailed me a picture. That’s it. Just a photograph with the message: “I remember how much you like meteor showers. Thought you would enjoy this. It’s a meteor in the Mojave desert.”

When I opened it, I cried. Sitting alone in my crappy little grad school apartment in the middle of winter, I cried harder than I had in years. The memory of that night on the pier hit me stronger than it had in a long time and I just lost it.

The essay that I would like to write ends here, with me returning to church and to my studies with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and knowledge of God’s presence in my life.

That is the essay I would like to write.

The truth is that what I felt when I opened that picture was a deep and terrifying sense of loss. The God who was so present to me on that pier in August had now become a series of abstractions—definitive statements I could make in the presence of others without really believing in them myself.

I squeaked out of grad school with very little enthusiasm for my last months and with negligible Church attendance. For a long time, I felt incredibly guilty about this. I would try to go, and would sit in the back of Church feeling like I was radiating anger and hostility that the people around me could feel. I would go and leave early. I would go and wonder if anyone else in the church was feeling the same way. I would go because I was staying with friends and knew it was expected. 

I stopped. I just...stopped. I gave myself permission to stop attending and not feel guilty about it. I  haven’t voluntarily set foot into mass in nine months.

And, strangely enough, I’ve started to feel better. I’m not as angry anymore. I’ve stopped having arguments about women’s ordination or the place of lay theologians in the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve started going out at night to look at the stars again. I missed the Perseid meteor shower but stayed up to see Jupiter next to the moon. I meet with an astronomical society and look at deep-space photographs of far-off nebulae and try to wrap my head around the extent of the universe. I grieve, deeply, for the sense of God’s presence I had.

At the same time, there’s room here that there wasn’t before. There’s a calmness and a quietness that comes when I look up at the Aurora or catch a glimpse of a far off star in a telescope. I hope that, maybe in that place where questions of the Assumption and open communion are dwarfed by the birth of new stars and the limits of how we understand time, that I can start to find my way back.