All the Redemption I Can Offer

My soul is lost, my friend.
Now tell me how I begin again?
-Bruce Springsteen, My City of Ruins

I'm driving too fast for the conditions in the North Country. 

It's that weather that we have here from October until December. When the precipitation is not really rain or even freezing rain and it's not really snow either. It's just a cold, heavy, wet mess. 

Anyway, I'm driving too fast for whatever this weather is. I've gotten into the car when I'm upset, something my daddy told me never to do. I've been listening to Springsteen's My City of Ruins on repeat for the past ten minutes. Driving too fast. In bad weather. Down twisty hilly roads. While I'm upset. 

Before I got into the car my father called me. My grandmother's best friend, a woman I've known for literally my entire life, passed away. Gram, he tells me, is upset but this was not entirely unexpected. 

Death is sneaky. 

Death is particularly sneaky when you're used to squishing down your emotions, used to avoiding them until they come out in OCD symptoms or insomnia or sleepwalking. When we get off the phone, I tell myself I'm alright. That while I have known this person for many years, while she was  like a second grandmother to me, that I'm not sad. We haven't seen one another in a long, long time. I'll be fine.

I keep repeating this mantra to myself while I get into the car and go see friends. While I'm waiting to check out at the grocery store, I realize that I may have left the stove on. That my house may be burning down as I'm standing there. 

You know the rest. I have a slightly delayed anxiety response to negative stimulus. This is what I tell myself as I walk through the weather and get into my car. It's just an anxiety response. Everything is fine. I do some deep breathing and calm down. 

I have, for whatever reason, a deep desire to listen to My City of Ruins, so I pull it up on my phone and pull out of the parking lot. And as I'm driving down the twisty, dark roads through the weather, the bottom falls out. 

It falls out in a weird way. Or maybe, not so weird. I start thinking about raspberries. This woman, my surrogate grandmother, had an amazing raspberry patch. Every summer for years I went into that patch and ate as many raspberries as I could. It was something she always remembered, and she always brought them out to the cabin when we were there. She always brought them for me, the same way she always made me this special Czech cookie I loved. And I realized that not only did I love this woman, but she loved me back. And I'm never going to hear her funny laugh, or have her beat me at Scrabble, or get a birthday card in the mail or a bookmark that she's made by hand again. 

I'm never going to eat raspberries out of her raspberry patch again. 

I start crying right as the road gets particularly dark and twisty. I make it, somehow, to my destination without incident and manage to pull myself together in the car before I head into the house. I make it through the evening, laugh a little bit, watch election results come in, am overjoyed when we defeat the constitutional amendments and reelect President Obama. I say goodnight and go back out to my car and immediately feel guilty for feeling joyful when this person I love has died. I let myself forget for a little while that she's gone and that I'll never see her again.

Death is sneaky.

***
You can hide 'neath your covers
and study your pain.
Make crosses for your lovers
throw roses in the rain. 
Waste your summer prayin' in vain
for a savior to rise from these streets.
-Bruce Springsteen "Thunder Road."

I'm standing in the nosebleeds of the Xcel Center in Minneapolis. I'm a little sweaty from dancing, my eyes are on the massive, hi-def monitor hanging from the ceiling, my hands are in the air, and I'm swaying from side to side. I'm sure from the back I look like a worshiper in a Mega Church. 

I'm in the Xcel Center but I'm also waxing the top of my father's Bronco. I'm back at the cabin running around in the sunshine. I'm helping my father haul wood in the backyard of my childhood home, or lugging tiles down to the basement of my grandmother's old house, or I'm in the kitchen at the cabin, and all the people I love are still gathered around the table playing Scrabble and there's a bowl of raspberries just for me on the hutch.

Don't worry. I haven't gone all new agey on you, and the Xcel Center is not playing host to Mega Church services on Sunday mornings. I'm attending a Springsteen concert, my first, and I'm hearing my favorite song of his live for the very first time.

It's like a religious experience.

Springsteen is in my earliest memories. My father has listened to and loved him since the 70s. My mother loves him as well. My younger brother and I regularly argue about his best songs. My cousins have seen him live. His Greatest Hits albums is the one that I always put on the radio when I'm spending time with my father and our conversation begins to fade. When I hear say, The River, I inadvertently hold my breath. I silence everyone else in the room or the car. I have to hear the song all the way through to the end or I feel like I'm missing something. Springsteen is in my heart and he's in our familial DNA. Even for the members of the family who don't like him, he's a shared part of our life together.

Listening to Springsteen reminds me of my family in the most visceral way possible. It reminds me of all the times Daddy came to pick me up in Central Minnesota and we listened to him on the trip home. His music reminds me of summers at the cabin, when all the people I loved in the world were still alive. His music reminds me of the time my parents called me at 2:00 am after one of his concerts elated by what they had experienced.

But the memories aren't all good ones. I can't listen to Springsteen without thinking about driving to Minneapolis with a good friend after a soul-crushing breakup. I can't hear him without thinking of all the times I've let my parents down, all the casual hurts my family has inflicted on one another throughout our lives together.

It's this whole mess of memories that comes flooding over me when I hear the opening bars of my favorite Springsteen song, Thunder Road. It's this song that gets me acting like I'm a worshiper in a Mega Church, and before I realize it, I'm crying. Like an idiot. I'm standing in front of literally hundreds of other people swaying to a song, singing along, and crying so hard I'm afraid I'm going to give myself the hiccups.

Listening to that song, hearing it live, makes me miss my parents and my brothers and wish that they were with me. It makes me so utterly, pathetically, absurdly, profoundly grateful for the opportunity to be alive and in this place at this moment. It makes me think about all of the people I have loved and who have passed throughout my life. It makes me think of how all the people I love will die someday. How I'll die someday.

And I feel everything. Happiness, gratitude, anger, loneliness, sadness, joy, I feel everything.

And it's wonderful. And horrible. It feels like walking around with my insides turned out, or with a bad burn that hurts to touch. Somewhere in the middle of all of this feeling, I hear the line that makes me love Thunder Road, the line that makes me love Springsteen, really:

Well, I'm no hero, that's understood. 

All the redemption, I can offer, girl,

is beneath this dirty hood.   

In the moment, the line takes on a kind of spiritual significance. This is it, all of these emotions, all of this feeling, this is redemption. Or at least, it's all the redemption that I can count on here, now. I will never eat raspberries with my grandmother's best friend again, just like I will never hear my maternal grandmother play the piano or listen to my grandfather tell my father he should vote Democrat. But I'll continue to go to the cabin and see my family. We'll continue to hurt and love and support one another. All of this feeling, all of these emotions are with me now. And I'm not losing them again.

It's all complicated and painful and joyous in a way I had never anticipated. In this moment, I am confident that no redemption ever promised to me by a confident priest would be any better than this, now.

The concert closes with my younger brother's favorite song and I'm tempted to call him or pay my parents back for their 2:00 am phone call so many years ago. Instead I pull on my winter jacket and wait on the corner, eagerly anticipating my best friend's arrival. When she does pull up, I get into the car equally pleased to see her, riding high off of the evening, and feeling anxious about the snow. After awhile I pause and think about my gram's best friend again. About raspberries. This time though, instead of feeling guilty about getting caught up in my own thoughts and emotions, I smile.

Life, it seems, is rather sneaky too.

Feast

It was a sunny, late August Sunday morning. I sat outside at a cafe in Minneapolis with friends drank coffee and ate brunch. We skipped lightly over subjects after spending the weekend in one another's company. Eventually we settled on what we did on our Sundays when we were growing up. There were a few church-going families in the group, a few families who always cleaned on Sunday mornings, football seemed to play a big role, as did Sunday dinners.

As a child I spent most of my Sunday mornings in church. As a young adult, I spent most of my Sunday mornings trying to avoid church. Sunday Mass was an important part of life in my house, and my parents very rarely missed it. And after Mass we all rested. My folks would watch football, take a nap, putter around the house.

There was always something sacred about Sundays.

I brought up this sense of sacred Sundays with the brunch group. It's hard, I said, to think of ways to instill that sense of sacredness in the family I hope one day to have without church attendance. We kicked around a few ideas, museums, concerts, cultural events. Meals with family whether that's actual blood relations or people like the ones sitting around the table who are as close as family.

I felt better after the conversation. At least, I felt a little better. But I know the gifts that religion gave me, a sense of awe and wonder, a feeling of being loved, and role models. It gave me early lessons in what to value and how to make sense of the world around me. It gave my life meaning, depth, and purpose. That's not to say religion was all rosy. Catholicism also gave me an unrelenting, crippling guilt complex, fear of a punitive God, and tried to impose upon me a sense of values which ran counter to what I observed about the world.

I want all of those good things for my children without the guilt and terror that came along with it.

***

I love Catholic feast days.

There are of course, the big ones, Christmas, Holy Thursday-Easter Sunday, the Marian feast days, the Epiphany. But the ones that I like are the smaller ones, the ones my graduate school friends celebrated because something about that saint's life or death had touched them. It made them think of something they wanted to strive for in their spiritual lives.

My friends tended toward the (relatively) obscure when it came to these saints. I had one friend who loved Saint Maximus the Confessor and (the fake) Saint Urho. Another, a feminist and later ordained female priest, Joan of Arc. Another, Kateri Tekawitha. They also had feast days they hated. One woman in particular would routinely remind us every August 15th about how much she thought the Feast of the Assumption was a "ridiculous feast day" because (as one of her friends put it) "Where does Mary go? I mean, does she just get sucked up into heaven like one of those tubes at drive-thrus at the bank?"

To digress, The Assumption was always one of my favorite feast days until I heard this description. Then it was impossible to attend church with the, shall we say, gravitas demanded of such a high holy day.

Anyway, I could continue. Everyone seemed to have their favorite saint and their favorite story about that saint or least favorite saint and least favorite feast day. Some of those stories and saints were uplifting, others horrifying, others just plain strange.

My friends would celebrate these feast days quietly for the most part. They would read from the works of the man or woman, ask for their intercessions, think about their spiritual lives and development, walk out to see a statue or contemplate an icon. Of course, there were a few feast days that we celebrated boisterously, with big meals and wine or whiskey and raucous stories, but for the most part, these were private devotions.

***

I keep some strange holidays.

Of course I celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family, those aren't the holidays I'm talking about, although God knows those celebrations are strange enough. I'm talking about the ones that I schedule into my calender throughout the year that hold no national or religious celebrations, the ones for which I practice my own traditions. On Lincoln's birthday I make Mary Todd Lincoln's almond cake and reread Lincoln's second inaugural address. On the Fourth of July I reread the Declaration of Independence and The American Crisis. Starting next year, I'll also spend the 4th of July celebrating, somehow, CERN's announcement that they found the Higgs Boson. On the spacecraft Cassini's 15th anniversary of launch, I insisted that everyone I spoke to watch a video of the most moving images from that mission. 

It wasn't until this week, when I was trying to figure out how best represent Radium on a birthday cake for Marie Curie that I realized that I'm keeping feast days. The small things that I do on these days represent my devotion to these people, certainly, but to what they represent in my mind. When I eat almond cake and reread Lincoln's second inaugural address, I think of how I want to emulate his writing and his passion to preserving a strong federal government. When I read those early American documents I admire the courage of the men and women who fought and those who continue to fight for democracy. When I think of the best way to represent radioactivity on a cake, I think of Marie Curie's unwavering dedication to scientific inquiry and the sexism and xenophobia against which she struggled every day. These men and women represent who and what I want to become during my life, the same way Catholic saints inspire my friends in their spiritual lives. 

It may be that when I'm speculating about how to give my children the positive things that religion gave me without giving them all the hang-ups I have, what I'm really saying is that I want to find some way to give my own life meaning, depth, and purpose now that I've chucked Christianity. As I build my calender of secular feast days, I begin to see patterns in the things I celebrate: creativity, curiosity, drive, ambition, and an unrelenting passion to do what's right. These in and of themselves are not unchristian sentiments. Indeed, they are some of the very things that made me celebrate the Catholic feast days I did. 

It could, of course, be that I'm over-compensating. I could be once again intellectualizing the emotions of loss and abandonment I feel at no longer being a practicing Catholic, a member of the Christian community. That could be true. Although, all things considered, eating Mary Todd Lincoln's cake and pondering democracy sure beats sitting in Church wondering if Mary was sucked into heaven just like one of those tubes at the drive-thrus at the bank.