Kindness

I love when objects have a story to go along with them. I have a friend like this. When you walk into her house, you can point to almost any object in her house and she can tell you the story about it. Some of them, particularly the ones regarding moving heavy pieces of furniture, are ridiculously funny. Others are moving and sad. There have been a few that have left me cocking my head and saying "huh?"

My life is not like that. I've been living a really transient life since I was 18, and have managed to acquire my fair share of stories, but very few of them are attached to objects. The objects that do have stories tend to be highly portable. My copy of The Brothers Karamazov has traveled the world with me. My copy of Extraordinary Chickens was a 25th birthday gift at my favorite birthday party from two people that I adore. My Tiffany necklace was a gift to myself after I finished my M.A. The things in my life that have really good stories connected to them could all fit into a small box. 

***

When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to be a nun. 

It's less surprising than it sounds, actually. I had just gone through a rather intense conversion experience, I was living near a Benedictine monastery and being educated by Benedictine nuns. I was seriously considering spending the rest of my life studying God, and what better place to do it than in community with a bunch of other like-minded women?

I went as far as having a series of conversations with the vocational director. She encouraged me to attend prayer with the sisters, think deeply about my own decisions and what God was leading me to, and to pray on my own.

That summer I was working in an organic garden and living with a few other women, most of whom were fellow theology majors. We were all earnest in our desire to understand and love God, and committed to living lives of justice and peace. Typical undergraduate high-mindedness, but it was one of the best summers of my life. When we were talking about the ethics of food production we were talking about religion, spirituality, or what it meant to be a feminist and a Catholic. Like I said, earnest. When I first started to talk about my desire to become a monastic one of my roommates said "You need to make a promise to yourself and to God that you're going to take this seriously. Even if you don't want to commit to a monastic life, you should take your commitment to theology seriously." 

I was a little bemused, but said, "All right. I promise to take this decision seriously." 

A week or so later she came home and announced that she had something for me. It was a sterling silver ring that I had been eyeing all summer. Justly sourced silver, of course, with a chunk of yellow-green amber in it. It was to be, we decided, an outward symbol of the decision I had committed to making. 

The situation sounds a little strange to me now, but one of the things that has always attracted me to Catholicism is the symbolism behind many of the ritual actions. When the priest dons his vestments each one of them has symbolism and ritual. When babies are baptized the water and oil carry significance. We have all of these outward symbols to remind us of (at least, the way I've always understood it) the many ways in which God's love and grace are part of the world we inhabit. 

Even after I decided against the monastery, I continued wearing the ring. It reminded me, even on my most secular days, that I wanted to understand and love God. 

***

I am not a kind person.

In the past few months I've had a difficult series of conversations with the people with whom I had the biggest, angriest, knock-down, drag-out fights about Christianity and Atheism. The conversations have consisted of my having to say (through various media) "hey, remember how I used to yell at you about how wrong you were? Turns out, I'm closer to your side of things than I thought."

Have I mentioned that I'm not great at apologies?

Thankfully the people receiving these emails or phone calls have all been astonishingly gracious and kind. They have been much kinder than I deserve. They've asked me about my emotional reaction to my change in worldview and have given me space to talk about how painful it has been to give up my faith and how awe-inspiring it is to think about the utter improbability of my own existence. Their responses have made me think of what my own would have been, were our situations flipped.

I was not pleased to discover that I probably would have been jubilant at best and smugly unbearable at worst. The more I reflected on what my own reactions would have been, the more uncomfortable I became. Once that kind of self-reflection started, I began to meditate on the way I treat people--not the people I love and care about, but the people who irritate me. The ones I find challenging. The people who say things opposed to my political/spiritual/social ideologies. I am terribly unkind to these people, in the way that I dismiss what they have to say, in the things I say to them directly, and in the stories I tell about them after I meet them. Of all of the flaws I suspected in myself, unkindness had never been one of them.

***

I still wear the ring my roommate bought me. And when I look at it, I still think about my commitment to find, love, and understand God. But I alternate that ring with another one that I had made recently. It's supposed to represent the Big Bang. The first reminds me of what I wanted to know, the desire that I had to understand my place in the universe. The second, new ring reminds me of who I want to be.

That may sound a bit backwards, but it's the truth. In the conversations I've had lately, in thinking about the importance of a symbol to represent commitment, in deciding that I'm going to dedicate the next-however-many years of my life to studying the universe, I've realized that I have to take responsibility for how I treat people here, now. If I really believe that this life is all there is, I have a responsibility to the universe to understand it as best I can, and I have a responsibility to the people in my life to treat them with more kindness, understanding, and respect. 

The next time I move, these two rings, along with my bible, my copy of Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, The Brothers Karamazov and Tiffany's necklace will all be in the same box. And here's the thing I learned about this box. These things, these highly portable objects are not just a record of who I was, but they are a remind of who I want to be become. The beauty of these objects is that their stories, like that of the cosmos, like the story of the Christian faith are for the most part, still unwritten.