Work

I do not know how Krista and I became friends.

I write that sentence with a great deal of trepidation  because I cannot imagine life without this hilarious, level-headed, supportive woman. But I cannot understand how we came to be friends. I can't remember meeting her for the first time, and most of our early friendship (actually, everything right up until we became roommates) only stands out in my memory as distinct moments. Driving home from dogsledding in Ely. Some night I passed in her room when she was a resident assistant. Having her in a few theology classes.

When Krista and I met one another she was, well, a Christian. A listen to Jars of Clay, go to lots of hands-in-the-air-Jesus retreats, want to be a youth minister Christian. She was also effortlessly outgoing, funny, and very, very kind. I was a bookish academic. A radical feminist with a Dorothy Day streak and a desire to upend patriarchy and hierarchy, get ordained as a female priest, be a nun, and live out my days on a Catholic Worker farm, writing and praying and loving the Lord while simultaneously racing to get excommunicated for my "radical" approach to egalitarianism in the Church.

Over Christmas, when Krista and Carliene were here, we had a good, long laugh about the women we used to be. Not a mocking look-at-how-dumb-we-were laugh, but an oh-my-God-look-at-how-far-we've-come laugh. Krista told us that when people in Boston ask her what she was like in high school and she says she was way into Jesus they all look at her a little sideways and ask the same question. "What happened?"

She laughs and gives the same answer every time. "I met my friend Kelly."

It's a funny thing, knowing that you were apparently the first tug at the secure knot of someone's faith life and ultimately led to its undoing.

I don't regret it. Not for a second.

The Krista I know now, the woman who has lived among refugees in Kenya, who has helped victims of torture find healthcare and solace and a future in the United States, who has personally gotten me through some of the hardest times in my life, is so much more interesting and loving and compassionate than the women who could quote the Catechism to me.

***

I can't stop thinking about grace. 

This is both an usual and unusual state of affairs for me. As a theology student, I was obsessed with the concepts of grace and redemption. All of my independent papers were on it in some capacity or another. I could twist any conversation around to Karl Rahner. I spent hours ruminating on Romans Chapter 3. I loved talking about grace. What it was, how we receive it, how it changes us. 

I have not, however, spent a whole hell of a lot of time since I chucked God by the wayside thinking about grace. It was too painful, too sad, too much to think that the moments in my life that I always though of as imbued with God's grace were, really, just coincidence. I stopped thinking about grace like I stopped thinking about prayer and justification and works vs. faith. 

Then over the past few weeks a few things happened that have made me pause, have made me think about grace again. I have, rather unexpectedly, made a new friend (given my shyness and general status as a curmudgeon  this in and of itself is a goddamn miracle) who is smarter than I am and pushes me to think harder, be more precise in my language and arguments. Some writers I admire started talking about grace in the way that always hit home with me. Grace that fills and fuels our daily lives, that bubbles up and gives us the strength and courage to keep on. 

***

A few weeks ago a friend in the corporate world asked my why I continue to work in nonprofit. 

I inadvertently led him into asking the question. I had mentioned an article that I read saying how most nonprofit workers who hold my job leave their nonprofit, if not the field, after eighteen months. They leave for a variety of reasons, mainly dissatisfaction with their organizations, their pay, their executive directors, etc. I mentioned that if I ever do decide to leave the world of nonprofit, it's unlikely to be any of these things. 

"What'll it be?" 

"Exhaustion." 

He then remarks that he doesn't know why I stay in the nonprofit world, particularly when my ambition and (let's face it) competitiveness would make me a natural fit for the corporate world. 

The work I do, not my job, but the real work I do on my own time is no easy thing. Working for women's access to healthcare, for reproductive rights, for justice for women and children who experience domestic abuse and sexual violence, is exhausting. It's crushing to realize that because of where I live and the profession I've chosen from myself, I still only make .76 to every dollar a man makes (even after adjustments accounting for education, experience, etc.) 

So this man's comment has stayed with me long after that conversation. It has been especially resonant this past week, during the 40th anniversary of Roe and as I'm reading statistics on child prostitution and rape and domestic violence, as I'm really fucking angry that we still haven't managed to renew VAWA. And as I've started to think to myself I can't do this anymore. I can't care this much, keep this level of passion going. I can't be this angry all the time. I can't keep fighting. After ten years, I don't know if I have it in me anymore. 

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I thought about the women Krista and I used to be. How blithely certain we both were of our faith, our work, and our place in the world. How much we've both grown and changed in knowing one another. And I thought quite a bit about my life as a Catholic, as a theologian, as a feminist. About grace and how maybe it isn't only the province of theologians and people of faith. 

I realized that this work I do, all of these causes that make me mad as hell, frustrated, crazy, all of the hours I spend researching depressing statistics, writing grants and appeals and letters to the editor, all of my downtime that I spend trying to educate people about contraceptives and wage gaps and the number of times a woman will return to an abusive relationship and why, all of this work is my love letter to a God in whom I do not, and cannot believe. 

(For the record, I recognize the cognitive dissonance that comes with an atheist ex-Catholic feminist saying her work for reproductive rights is a love letter to God.)

I am not a person of faith. At this point, it would literally take divine intervention to make me Christian again. But not being a Christian does not mean that I've stopped yearning for and and being tormented by the desire for faith. In the absence of that faith, the best I seem able to offer is the work that I'm doing here and now.  It's rather like saying "Hello, God, I know you're not there. But I love the idea of you so much that I'm going to devote my life to trying to make this hopelessly fucked up world a better, more just, sustainable place." 

Martin Luther must be rolling over in his grave.