Saints and Pancakes

"And I want to learn how to love God, and rest in His goodness."

This was a sentiment I heard often while I was studying theology in college. It has a distinctly hands in the air, Praise Jesus feeling about it does it not? Like you can imagine a generically good-looking, earnest young man saying it into the microphone right before he starts into a God Pop power ballad. Wearing jeans. In a Mega Church.

Believe it or not, I didn't hang out with the God Pop power ballad contingent while studying theology, although they were certainly around. The closest my friends in the department got were a few social justice oriented, wanna-be youth minister types, who would listen to the music because "it connects with the youth." My crowd was the intellectual bunch, shocking, I'm sure. But what I found even more shocking was that the Future-Theologians-of-America crowd also shared this sentiment. They still proclaimed a desire to "rest in God."

As far as I could tell "resting in God" meant learning to be content, working to be fully present to life in the moment.

It was, frankly, a sentiment that puzzled me. Both because it was the one thing that my orthopraxis and orthodoxy friends could agree on and because it was just a sentiment I didn't understand. I was rarely concerned with the Here and Now, preferring to think about the Soon to Be and Already Was. I wasn't sure how resting in God--someone so ethereal and disconnected--could make me more present.

***

One of the very few (very few) good things about living hundreds of miles from your friends is that whenever you're in town, there's an excuse for a get-together. When I'm in the North Country I can spend so much time alone that I forget how much I love and enjoy spending time with friends and a few glasses of wine. There is a certain kind of holiness that comes when you share a meal with people you love dearly. And the amount of laughter that I manage to wring from a few days with good friends is unmatched in the rest of my life. 

We always spend a few moments catching up. Hi, how are you's, how's work or law school or your mortgage or whatever. We spent the first hour of my birthday party talking about or 401(k)s. Retirement accounts at a birthday party, I ask you. Four years ago it would have been tequila shots and bawdy jokes. But after the seriousness, after the quick catch-ups with the details of one another's lives, we settle in to talking about movies or comics or books or politics or sex, as you do with people who know and love you. 

Over the weekend I saw some of these friends. They live on the East Coast now, and if we're lucky we see one another once a year. But they kept me sane through my first year of graduate school and I love and care about them as if we were family. We went to a local restaurant  ate pancakes, drank coffee, and caught up. I told them about what was going on in my life. They told me about their lives on the East Coast. The catching-up took less time than I had supposed. Then we talked politics and religion and laughed. Sweet merciful Jesus, did we laugh. 

The entire time we were together I didn't check my cell phone. I didn't think about the pile of work and equally large pile of dishes waiting for me at home. I sat at a table with my friends. I ate pancakes. I drank coffee. I talked about politics and religion.When I got out of the car for goodbye hugs I realized how rejuvenated I felt.

I struggle every single day with mindfulness, with perspective. More than that, I struggle to remind myself that while I am  not perfect, and that it is dangerous to always strive for perfection, I am still worthy of love, respect, and care from other people. I realized that when I'm with this couple, when I'm with good friends in the Cities or Central Minnesota, all of those doubts take a back seat. To pancakes and coffee. Babies and MPR. Dance parties and conversations about comic books. In those moments I am content to be loved and to love the people that I am with.

And that's the damnedest thing about trying to live an authentic, spiritually fulfilled life. I try so damn hard to rest in God by discovering Her through systematic theology and scriptural analysis, meditation and renunciation of a material life. In my off time, I've been toasting to years past with a tequila shot, making dinners, arguing about postmodernism and secularism, all the while discounting these actions as less-than-spiritual because they were things I enjoyed doing.

Much to my chagrin, I am coming to understand (ten years after the fact) that these relationships I've been building slowly are not what I do in my spare time but are part of my spiritual life in and of themselves. These men and women are not Bodhisattvas or Catholic saints. They are good, loving people who open their homes and their families to me. Through these small actions, these little graces, they teach me again and again that resting in God, or mindfulness, or inner peace, or whatever it is that I'm searching for is called, need not be something ethereal, something preached in a Mega Church by a man in blue jeans. It may be as simple as pouring a second cup of coffee, asking about someone's work or children, and sliding a second stack of pancakes onto their plate.

Gifts

Catholicism gave me gifts.

It's an aspect of the religious life I never talked about or even thought about until recently. But that's one of the benefits of being a religious person, is it not? Through prayer you receive a connection with the Almighty. Through Church you participate in a loving, caring, close-knit community.

The biggest gifts the Roman Catholic Church gave me were, in no particular order, the promise of eternal life,  a sense of purpose, and a personal God who could not only number of the stars in the sky but knew me before I had a name.

But, in a way, it was the smaller gifts that meant more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eternal life and happiness. But immediately to hand was a community of close friends who loved and cared about me. There was the intellectual stimulation that came along with a good fight over doctrine. My parents and I shared a relationship that was based in this faith and transcended all of the hurt that we could do to one another.

And there was an outlet for anxiety.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that my compulsions began to become serious and interfere with my life when they did. One of my favorite graduate school professors used to preach that the liturgical action, Mass, kept Chaos at bay. Through our worship we were, in essence, creating a safer, calmer, more just existence. When he said Chaos he meant, if I understood him, Evil. Capital E Evil.

And he was right. I mean, I'm skeptical about the idea of spiritual warfare, but the liturgical actions of Roman Catholicism did a great deal to keep my own anxiety at bay. To this day, I don't know if it was the repetition  that is a part of Catholic Mass, the feeling of having a community who loved and accepted me, or something else about Catholicism  but something about it helped me cope with the anxiety that was becoming exponentially more crushing. Anxiety, depression, everything I was struggling with was Evil. I was certain of it.

But while I was coping with the anxiety, I was refusing to actually address it in a meaningful way. I was pulling the liturgical actions around me, taking comfort in their repetition and the ability to lose myself and forget about my issues in them. It wasn't enough. As my ability to square my intellect with Catholicism faded, my compulsions become more pronounced and less easy to control. As if losing faith in a personal God wasn't devastating enough, I was also slowly going crazy in the process. When, a year ago, I finally said out loud "I'm relatively certain there is no God" I went to pieces. I slept with the fire-extinguisher next to my bed so that when the house accidentally caught fire because I hadn't turned the stove off, I'd be able to put enough of it out to escape the house. Of course the burners weren't on. I had already checked them upwards of ten times. But giving up God meant giving up a purpose, it meant giving up any illusion of order and control in the universe. And I need that, even if it is an illusion. So the logical thing to do was to substitute a new illusion for the old one.

Constant checking behaviors are a pretty shitty substitute for a God who loves you.

***

Meditation has been bringing me gifts. 

I've refused the big ones. Promises of Enlightenment, of ending suffering, of living each moment in the present, these are all gifts it offers me. Granted, there's hard work involved, it makes no promises of these gifts being easy to earn. I'm not tempted by these promises. Rather, I'm tempted by them, certainly, but I'm not willing to accept them yet. For the time being, I'm content with the smaller things it's offering. A slower heart rate. Deeper breaths. Better sleep. 

I'm struggling quite a bit with meditation. It's a hard enough discipline to try to practice. Additionally, there's the guilt that comes with being an ex-Christian who's reading Buddhist scholars and taking introductions to zazen. The greatest struggle is to keep meditation from becoming a place to hide from my own anxiety, my obsessions and compulsions. There's a delicate balance here between learning to recognize anxious thoughts for what they are, addressing them, and moving beyond them and simply burying my mind underneath a mantra and being present to my breathing. 

***

It troubles me now that I thought of anxiety as Evil, if only for a little while. I suppose it explains why I went so long trying to conquer it on my own, or as "Kelly and God" kind of buddy-cop approach to mental health.  How arrogant, how wrong-headed an approach to getting better. Recently I came across the following passages in one of the Buddhist books I've been (a little guiltily) reading.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness  our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion. -The Wisdom of No Escape

In the end, I don't know where meditation and I will end up. It could wind up by the wayside with Catholicism  It may be a place to rest for awhile before moving on to something else. It may be that I accept the gifts meditation is offering me: a slower heart rate, deeper breaths, and better sleep, but also Enlightenment  of a life without suffering, of living in the present. Any of this is possible. But what I'm slowly, painfully learning is that anxiety is not Evil. Illness is not a something to hide from. Religion or spirituality alone are not going to fix me. The hard work of overcoming illness, of fixing myself, is something that I'm going to have to do.

That's a huge responsibility and a terrifying thought. But even if anxiety and OCD are problems for which I have to take responsibility and fix alone, I can do it with the gifts that both Catholicism and meditation have given me. A good night's rest is invaluable to an insomniac. The friends I've made at Catholic college and in graduate school love me in a way I would have never thought possible. The Zen group here in the North Country has provided me with resources I didn't even know existed. These gifts remind me that even though I must do the hard work of putting myself back together myself, I am not alone.

And when you're struggling to pick up the pieces of yourself and somehow put that shattered self-image back together that knowledge, that bit of connection means more than promises of eternal life or Enlightenment ever could.

 

Tornado

Here's a hard learned lesson. Never ask your friends what they would like to see you blog about.

The answers are either a) smartass or b) so off the wall and unlike anything you'd ever want to write about that you wonder if they've ever actually read anything you've written.

Selah.

What saved me this week was half a day in a car and a Neko Case song I adore.

***

I have waited with a glacier's patience. 

-Neko Case

My best friend is looking forward to a date.

Like me, she's using online dating. Also like me, she has some pretty horrifying stories about online dating. When we're together we privately agree that online dating is a wasteland of human sadness. However, we're both homebodies whose immediate social circles are either primarily gay, partnered, or both. Meeting straight single guys in those circumstances is challenging.

She's telling me about the guy and how excited she is about going to meet him and I can't help it, my inbred cynicism bubbles to the surface.

"He's probably some small town asshole."

She laughs and I tell her, "No, seriously. No one who uses online dating, you excepted, is good looking, charismatic, nice, and totally sane. Period. Even I'm only three fourths of that particular equation."

She doesn't miss a beat. "I assume you're missing totally sane?"

***
Stop it! Stop it! 
Stop it! Stop it! 
Stop this madness.
I want you.
-Neko Case

Dating with an anxiety disorder is awful.

I have sort of your normal woman-in-her-late-20s fears about dating: "How does this dress look? What if we have nothing to talk about? What if he's a Fundamentalist Christian? Who should pick up the check? What if he only listens to metal?" 

Then I have the special fears that only come with living with an anxiety disorder: "What if he's actually an H. H. Holmes style serial killer?" 

Seriously. That is the thought that goes through my head every single time I meet someone new for coffee. 

This is to say nothing of the sheer terror that comes with having to (eventually, I've never actually spilled it) admit that I have OCD and that despite being in treatment, I still struggle with it every day. If I'm not actively trying to suppress one of my compulsions I'm having to snap my fingers in front of my face to stop an obsessive thought train, which can be anything from the number of calories I've had in the course of the week to the fear I am actually allergic to cabbage and am about to go into anaphylaxis.

I wish I could say that I'm being a little flippant here, but these are the things that worry me. These and a host of other things. Living inside my head feels like spinning around inside a tornado of negativity, doubt, and anxiety. I'm still trying to figure out how to stop the negative thoughts from whirling around, sucking up other negative thoughts into a death-spiral of doubt and fear. I can't handle this without professional help, why in the hell would I want to land that tornado in someone else's life? 

***

 I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

how you'd sigh yourself to sleep. 

-Neko Case

I've been in love exactly once in my life. 

I wouldn't have called it love then. I would have said infatuation at the time. I would have said a total fucking mistake when we finally broke up and it stuck. But now, with the clarity that only comes after many glasses of bourbon, crying to Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits, and many more years, I can say that I was in love. 

We weren't right for one another. I knew it even then. I was just starting to realize that there might not be something right about the way my brain works. He was the best candidate for delayed adolescence I've ever met. But he made me laugh, which I needed. He was devastatingly good-looking. So much so that my friends commented on it. He could also keep up with me intellectually, which was a gift. He liked Brahms and bluegrass and art. He edited and encouraged my writing. When we finally did split up, it was like losing one of my best friends. I cried so hard I threw up. I gained five pounds. I didn't leave my house except to go to work for weeks. 

What I loved about him--why I can say now, definitively, that I loved him--wasn't his washboard abs or his killer sense of humor. It was because as this fragile thing that was my mental health was slowly coming undone, I allowed myself to crash into him with the full emotional force of everything that was happening. And he understood. At least, he seemed to. He didn't turn away or try to deflect it. Instead he made me feel like, despite everything that was happening, something in me made me the kind of woman who could be loved by a man like him. 

In the end, he wasn't the Adonis I originally made him out to be. He was, however, a storm shelter for a brief time. 

***

This tornado loves you.

-Neko Case

In the end, my best friend's date didn't turn out. I saw her shortly afterward and she shrugged it off. He was good looking, and may have ended up being charismatic, nice, and totally sane. They just didn't click with one another. I admire both her stamina and her optimism. I find trying to keep those things up on my own end exhausting. 

But then again, the alternative is equally exhausting. Being alone and a mess is no easier than being with someone and a mess. 

In the end I think that's what keeps me dating even despite fears of metalheads and serial killers. It's the hope that there's someone who's not just a storm shelter, but an anti-tornado. And he may not have washboard abs or be charismatic, and he's probably not totally sane, but who is? My only real hope is that if he is a little bit crazy, he's also the kind of guy where when we do collide we can both finally stop spinning. 

Love, Knowingness, Bliss

In the category of slightly surreal:

I'm stretched out on my bed after a weirdly emotional reaction to a memory of an argument I had with my father. I have a blackout mask over my eyes so the light from my computer monitor won't distract me from my breathing. I'm listening to a well-known self-help-style guru guide me through the Heart Sutra. I'm trying desperately not to feel like some sort of spiritual hack--a horrible cliche of an ex-Catholic, ex-Christian trying to find some solace in Eastern Traditions. Here I am, a former student of theology in a tradition that prizes intellectual inquiry, a lover of science and proponent of the scientific method, engaging the most new-agey, ridiculous "I'm-spiritual-but-not-religious" activity I can imagine. I'm doing a meditation recommended by my therapist, not by my spiritual director. I can practically feel all my graduate school friends twitching in their sleep for reasons unknown to them

In the category of unsurprising:

I am "intensely cognitive, with a disconnect between my mind and my heart." Alternately, "I need to intellectualize everything with my giant fucking brain." I'll let you guess which words are mine. I've been told repeatedly, irritatingly, constantly, that my being intensely cognitive and prone to intellectualizing the shit out of everything is a coping mechanism, the result of dealing with an over-active and apparently out-sized amygdala dealing with a stoic Midwestern society.

"So what?" Has always been my response. Overly cognitive, I ask you. I search for logic flaws in my emotional reaction to things. If that's a coping mechanism (and I'm not entirely convinced it is) who fucking cares? It's not as if I'm taking drug or drinking or engaging in risky behaviors. Hell, I don't even smoke anymore. I'm still a high-functioning member of society even if it takes me two weeks to process an emotion. Big whoop.

This, I am told, is No Way to Live My Life.

In the category of unfamiliar:

The self-helpy meditation works. I mean, it really works. My breathing and pulse slow waaaaaaay down. I stop crying. When outside thoughts intrude on the mantra of "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love" I imagine them as wisps of blue-grey smoke drifting away. At the end of the meditation, I rip off my mask and shut off my computer. I still feel like a religious fraud, but I also drop almost instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep, a new experience for me.

In the morning, I have that gross-morning-after-some-big-mistakes feeling. I'm a little galled by the fact that a SELF-HELP guru's meditation ON SPOTIFY soothe me so completely. Can you get any more prosaic?

In the category of foolishness:

I suspect the universe is laughing at me. I want religion, faith, spiritual attainment to be one way. I want it to be Tenebrae at the Basilica. I want it to be Dante in the original Italian and scored by Mozart. I want it to be meditation in a Tibetan monastery as the sun rises over snow-capped mountains. I want spirituality and fulfillment not to have any relation to my amygdala or pre-frontral cortex or the amount of norepinephrine I produce. That's what I would like. What I suspect, what I know is that faith, for me at least, is not going to be found in front of a German high altar or a Vatican II church. Enlightenment is not going to happen at a Japanese Zen retreat house. Fulfillment will not come by renouncing all that I have and living retired from the hullabaloo of daily life.

Rather, these things are going to come about as the result of getting up every day and forcing myself to eat breakfast. Of going to work and doing my best. Of loving my family and friends and being kind to those around me. And much to my chagrin, what finally integrates my heart and my head, what finally makes me less intensely cognitive, less prone to intellectualizing, will not be dense theological treatises or transcendent moments meditating on the beach. It's quite possible that it will be crawling into bed each night and listening as a self-help-style guru repeats "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . .Love . . ."