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.