Manifesto: The Mad Preacher's Call for Community

In the summer of 2006 I was 21 years old and standing on the edge of a field where the Community Supported Agriculture program I worked for grew our organic vegetables. Our farm manager, an eager and earnest young woman not much older than I, read Manifesto: A Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front to us before we started our work for the day. She wanted us, summer workers who just wanted a decent job, to feel a deep connection to the food we were growing, the land around us, and the crusty old republican farmers we sold next to at the St. Joseph Farmers Market. I loved the poem, instantly, and because this was a time before I even had a computer, to say nothing of a smartphone, after work I bicycled to the library, copied it out, and hung it on the refrigerator in my apartment. 

It has hung on many refrigerators in many apartments since then. I have carried the phrase “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.” in my heart for nearly 20 years. 

The poem hits differently now at 40 than it did at 21. Quick profits, annual raises, and vacations with pay sometimes seem desperately out of reach for my working class husband and me. If there is a window in my head, people probably see my wishing for a vast inheritance from some long estranged family member I have never heard of. Working class folks  work very hard to simply maintain a standard of living that my parents–also working class people–endured for a few years in their early 20s.

For my fellow working class folks and Millennials, our lives and the cards in their heads are probably very similar. We’ve been offered a raw economic deal, social support systems that are, frankly, laughable, and wave after wave of seemingly unprecedented world events. Much of Berry’s advice: to invest in the millennium, praise the slow growth of things, and take time to breathe in the holiness of the world around us  are trampled under the day to day grind of student debt, stagnant wages, inflation, and a dying planet. 

So why do I continue to hang this poem on my refrigerator? Better yet, why do I continue to carry it in my heart? 

I have worked for almost twenty years in community nonprofits and I spend a lot of time listening to stories of women who have endured horrific violence, children in poverty, and folks struggling with addiction. I have, on occasion, hidden in an office supply closet to cry. The longer I have spent in nonprofit the less time I have spent crying in the supply closets because of the stories themselves. I spend more time crying over the cruelty of generals and politicos Berry talks about and wealthy tax dodgers who are unnamed and the middle class folks who simply do not care because they have achieved a comfortable job and a single family home. It is heartrending and exhausting. 

I get told often that my response to things is always overblown. My tears are the reaction of ADHD overwhelm or life as an empath or the kind of personality that leads one to become a chaplain, but I think that when we say those things to ourselves and one another  we are simply falling into the very thing that Berry is cautioning us against–we have become predictable, ready to die for profit, ready to accept suffering. We have forgotten to “do something that won’t compute.” When we fall into the trap of never having enough spoons, or being too busy running the kids to soccer practice, or needing to veg out in front of whatever bingable show we’re currently watching we are hiding behind things to keep from engaging with our emotions,  our friends,  and our families. 

What profits can we expect from that sort of a life? Are they worth prophesying? 

Beloveds, I am not asking us to run ourselves ragged or become burned out trying to fix this bloody and broken world. Our economic system is slowly grinding us all to dust and yes, occasionally we do need to just get the kids where they’re going and have a few quiet moments before bed. But this is not always the case.* 

In fact I think it rarely is. Sometimes we are simply stuck in our own inertia. And I am there too. I understand the lure of scrolling tiktok and half watching a tv show, but let us consider–could we not use that time to do something that won’t compute? 

You’ve heard me preach before on the corporal works of mercy, but today I am not even asking us to take on anything that big. I am asking you to ask a trusted friend to watch your kids for a few hours while you go on a date with a spouse. To say to a family member “I am really overwhelmed this week, could you bring by dinner and I’ll bring you something next week?” 

And for those of us whose lives are not currently on fire or even currently very hectic to say yes to those requests–or to do something that will not compute. Walk the picket line with the currently striking City Park Workers, take some mail to the post office for your elderly neighbor, do a very un-Minnesotan thing and invite someone from church you do not know very well to your house for coffee. Yes, to your house, not the neighborhood coffee shop. 

Perhaps I am pushing us a bit with that last one, but beloveds, I am asking you to do these things because what else can we do in this broken world? Some of us are activists and organizers and I applaud you for that work, but we are not all cut out for it. To borrow a concept from Christianity there are many gifts but the same spirit. There are many ways to live a life that will not compute. 

And when we find those ways and break free from bingable shows and snackable media, when we begin to live lives that do not compute, something powerful happens. We can be joy despite knowing  all the facts about our economy, our political system, and our world. Joy is a powerful thing–when was the last time you felt joyful? Really, think about it. I don’t know when the last time was for me. 

My husband has teasingly called me a bit of an egghead. I spend a lot of time thinking about joy and suffering and what they mean theologically and socially. I spend a lot of time thinking about the implications of joy–that it is transformative, leads to public action, and is a radical middle finger to a world that is trying to return us to dust. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about joy and living a life that will not compute, and less time actually doing those things. When I’m not watching The Sopranos for the fourth time and  mindlessly opening and closing apps on my phone, I spend a lot of time pushing joy away from me because there is still so much to do. There is always another grant to be written, another dish to be washed, another reminder of a world coming apart at its seams. I will be joyful later, when I have fully lived a life that invests in millennium and takes care of others and only eat organic produce raised within a hundred mile radius of where I live. 

Beloveds, I have been very inattentive. 

In an attempt to live a life in line with my ethics, to love people who do not deserve it, and serve a God  whose existence I am frankly very iffy about, I have forgotten to reap the fruits of such a life. I have forgotten that this is my one chance–to live in this world and love it and its people and the God who maybe created it all. I have forgotten the pleasure of standing on the edge of a field and listening to a poem, and feeling it overwhelm me with emotion. 

I do not know what awaits us when we leave this world. What I do know is that this is our one chance to experience joy as ourselves, in this beautiful and broken world and not in an eternity we cannot even begin to fathom. We must take this opportunity. Our lives depend on it. Our community depends on it. Perhaps, even the world depends on it. 

Beloveds, may we live lives that will not compute and may we experience the joy that those lives bring us. 

Let it be so, and amen.  

Good News

The Good News

Thich Nhat Hahn

The good news

they do not print.

The good news

we do print.

We have a special edition every moment

that we need you to read.

The good news is that you are alive

and the linden tree is still there

standing firm in the harsh winter.

The good news is that you have wonderful eyes

to touch the blue sky.

The good news is that

your child is there before you,

and your arms are available.

Hugging is possible.

They print only what is wrong.

Look at each of our special editions.

We always offer the things that are not wrong.

We want you to benefit from them

and help protect them.

The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,

smiling its wondrous smile,

singing the song of eternity.

Lo! You have ears capable of hearing it.

Bow your head.

Listen to her.

Leave behind your world of sorrow

and preoccupation

and get free.

The latest good news

is that you can do it.

* * *

During the summer of 2020 I was one of many people walking laps around our city neighborhood. My husband, a city bus driver, had just gone back to work. I was frantically worried about our health, his lack of insurance, and catching COVID-19, I needed to burn off the extra anxiety.

The Good News was that I had space to do it. 

On the way back from one such walk, I noticed a dandelion growing from the brick retaining wall. I looked at it for a long time, snapped a picture, and sent it to my husband. “If this isn’t,” I said, “an admonition to thrive wherever we are planted, I do not know what is.” 

Little did I know it, but I was hearing that dandelion’s song of eternity at that moment. 

Dandelions are a remarkable plant that seems unremarkable. For example, one thing that we all know about dandelions is their ability to thrive where they are planted. We see them in pavement cracks and brick walls. We pull them from our gardens’ deep soil. They are very common and they bloom where they are planted. 

Where have we been planted? 

Beloveds, right now I feel very much like the dandelion growing out of a sidewalk or brick wall, trying to sing the song of eternity into a world filled with sirens. But while the soil here may not be deep, it is rich. The good news is that it is enriched by this spiritual community, by my friends and family, by my volunteer work and by daily my spiritual practices. 

What enriches your dirt? 

The other interesting thing about dandelions is that they are edible–flowers, greens, and roots. It’s funny to think of this ubiquitous (and for some, irritating) sign of summer, as a nutritional powerhouse, but it is high in vitamins and calcium. They’re also delicious.  

Let’s pause and consider this briefly. What we roundly consider a nuisance flower or a pest is food not only for our beloved pollinators but for us as well. 

Consider too one of the most frustrating parts of our lives today–the knowledge that we are each one person standing against a tide of special interests and a broken political system that will sell us and our children, and our children’s children down the river for a quarter of a percent increase in profits or votes. In the face of this power we, like the dandelions, are common and perhaps a little unremarkable. 

The good news is that you too can feed a community. In my Catholic childhood we called these acts of spiritual and physical feeding the corporal works of mercy. Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick & the imprisoned, and bury the dead. We know how to do these things. We can recognize them even in their less obvious forms in our community and each of these acts is a  note in the song of eternity. 

The final thing I want to say about dandelions is that they spread prolifically. Each head contains hundreds–did you know that–hundreds of seeds. Every time we make a wish on these little weeds, we ensure that they will continue to grow into the next season. 

Here we are, rooted in this church, with the ability to feed those around us, and the good news–the best news–is that these actions plant seeds of hope, love, and grace in the community around us. They ensure that our notes in this song of eternity are heard, and lead us to the next movement. 

Beloveds, may our lives be representations of the good news. May we grow here, in this soil in which we planted, provide food to others, and let our deeds carry forth into eternity. 

May it be so, and amen. 

Share Your Love with Me

 The Queen of Soul is belting it out in the apartment tonight. 

I can't decide on a specific album so I cue up the first one I ever bought: Aretha Franklin's 30 Greatest Hits. It's been a rough day at the office, so I really wanted to hear "Respect," and I'll see how I feel as the album winds on. 

I go on cooking and tidying things up until a song comes on that brings back my first marriage so vividly that I have to stop and remind myself to breathe. 

Oh how lonesome (oh how lonesome)

You must be (you must be)

It's a shame (shame, shame)

If you don't share your love with me. 

I listened to this song on an endless loop while the ex and I were breaking up. I was so lonely and I kept thinking that he must be lonely, too. 

* * *

"I think that this is what people meant by "adulting.""

I'm on a videocall with one of my dearest friends. I've been telling her about how everyone I know really seems to be going through it lately. Divorce, unemployment, issues with their health, issues with their parents health, discipline problems with their kids, it's just everything all at once. And it's hard to know when someone has enough space to hear the minor tragedies that are going on in your life. 

Community has been a buzzword for so long now that I think it has lost all of its meaning. We say that we know it is life-affirming and life-changing, but I haven't been able to build an actual community since the first few years after college. We got wrapped up in our jobs and lives and went our separate ways. I understand that life is like that. We love people for a season or a lifetime and whichever it is, it was worth loving them.

But I long for real community. 

* * *

I was laid off in December. 

It was awful. I was called into the office one day and told that the organization was 3.1M dollars in debt and that there was no way out. We were being laid off because they weren't sure they would be able to meet payroll for another week. We were laid off because of incomprehensible financial mismanagement. The people responsible for that mismanagement still had their six figure salaries and probably had a very merry Christmas watching The Christmas Carol. 

I digress. 

Getting laid off is one of those things that you can't really conceptualize until it happens. I killed it at that job. I raised our entire fundraising goal for the year in six months. I loved my boss. I loved my work. I thought that I landed at the organization where I was going to stay until I at least finished school. Having that yanked out from me was so disorienting that I took three weeks just to process it. I could not fathom going from having a good job where things were going really well to having no job, and not because of anything I had done wrong. There were very few people I could talk to about it. David bore most of the burden then and now, because my emotions have become even more volatile than normal. When I do see people I love there so much pressure to be positive about my job search, because no one wants to hear you rant about how middle management creates jobs for themselves by making the job search worse for applicants. 

Or whatever tear I'm on that week. 

* * * 

My longing for community is wrapped up with a concept I fucking despise. 

"Having enough spoons." 

I understand that sometimes we're carrying so much in our private lives that we can't carry any more. But I am also in the process of becoming an interreligious chaplain who wants to do hospice work. I know firsthand that grief and stress shared are grief and stress lightened. My favorite minister once said that "Asking for help is self care and giving help is community care."

I have never forgotten that sermon. 

I don't know if this is a me thing. Do you all feel disconnected and vaguely unhappy? Am I just unlikable and can't form the community I want? Is the community that I long for just non-existent anymore?

That's not to say that we should all be willing to take on everyone's everything all the time. Of course not. Boundaries are important. But if we can't put a card in the mail, show up unannounced with a hotdish, or offer to take someone's kids for two hours so they can go on a date, what's the point? 

* * *

I've been relistening to a lot of music I haven't heard in awhile. 

It's been a lot of what Spotify has dubbed "Millennial Post Rock." I've listened to The Crane Wife album on repeat while writing papers. I play The Postal Service and make baked ziti for David's lunch. I just sit and listen to For Emma, Forever Ago. 

This is completely embarrassing, but the reason I am revisiting all these albums is because I feel like I did in my 20s. Everything is too uncertain, all of these life experiences are new and overwhelming, and IamjusthavingtoomanyfeelingsandIcannotdeal. 

Christ, I turn 40 next year. 

In the midst of this review of the tail end of my emo years, I let David have a turn at the radio. Somewhere in his mix a cover of "Share Your Love with Me" comes up. 

I'm drawn back to those months before my divorce, but only for a moment. I keep thinking about the line "Oh how lonesome you must be." Every time I have told someone "I don't have the spoons" or had someone cry when I drop off tater tot lentil hotdish or allthefuckingfeelings of worthless and despair I have felt during unemployment come over me. 

It's a lot. It's almost too much. 

But I realize again that a lot and almost too much are exactly what I want. I want to listen to you complain about your horrible Boomer boss or the price of houses or your dog chewing up your $3,000 dental guard. I want drawings from your kids and to bring you cookies when didn't get the job you wanted. I want to be in this horrible phase of "adulting" with you. I want to share our love and grief and joy with one another. 

Maybe we can all feel a little bit less lonesome. 

Ruth

 I've been thinking a lot about the Book of Ruth lately. 

Part of it is that we sing a version of Ruth's words to Naomi at church most weekends (and let me tell you, for a hymn it's an earworm). Part of it is that I remind myself of Ruth's words to Naomi when I think about David. There are probably a lot more "part of its" that I'm not ready to talk about.

But almost daily I find myself musing over Ruth's words. "Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God" 

* * *

I am spiritually exhausted, y'all. 

I don't know how else to talk about it. I am convinced that the world is going straight down the toilet. I expect the world to devolve into a Parable-of-the-Sower-dying-gasps-of-Capitalism hellscape in the next ten years. I know that aforementioned capitalism is grinding us all into pulp and that we cannot bring ourselves to imagine that there might be something else so there won't be. Inflation is making our already tight budget even tighter. I worry about climate change Every Single Day. I spend my life talking about how to provide healthcare to the homeless, jobs to the jobless, and basic human dignity to everyone and nothing has gotten any better and in many cases things have gotten worse. 

I was talking to my beloved last week about some of my more extreme end-times views a few weeks ago. How I'm teaching myself to identify medicinal and edible plants. My desire to learn to use a firearm. My almost fanatical obsession with water conservation that I can't impact (I'm looking at you, Western United States).

"I know, babe. I feel the same way."

"I am so tired," is all I can reply. 

* * *

I'm on the Amtrak back to Milwaukee. 

It's about a week before Christmas and I'm going to spend some time with my family. But I'm feeling a little . . . I'm not sure. I've left my beloved back at our apartment (he can't get the time off work) and the holidays don't feel like the holidays without him. 

So I've tuned into the livestream of the Unitarian Universalist church we've been attending for the last month. 

I love UU Church. 

I'm a little embarrassed by how much I love UU Church. I'm embarrassed by how quickly this community has found its way into my heart. I'm embarrassed by how much I look forward to services. I'm embarrassed by how much I need this place. 

This week, it's the sermon that gets me. My favorite minister is preaching and his words have managed to grab me more than once. Today he tells us "Everyone needs more than anyone has to give right now, but also, no one can fill those of your needs that you won't let show. I believe that asking each other for help is self love and answering honestly is self love and giving what we can is community love."

I embarrass myself by crying on the train. 

* * *

I want to have a heart like Ruth's. 

I don't want to feel like I have it alone.

Let me explain.

I am tired of being spiritually exhausted. All of the problems that exhaust me are too big for me to handle on my own. Truly, they are too big for even a dedicated community to have much of an impact on. But I don't have the money to run away from climate change and crime and desperation and even if I did I do not know that I would. Community love is the only way I can see out. 

Everyone needs more than anyone has to give right now. 

I am trying to have a heart like Ruth's. 

Instead of telling people that I don't have the spoons or the time or the interest, I am going to start asking how I can help them carry what they have to carry. I am going to remind myself that time alone in the woods is a spiritual practice and so is running an errand for our elderly neighbor and so is speaking truth to friends (and power). I am going to try to draw our family circle so wide that no one feels left out. 

I am going to have a heart like Ruth's. 

In the words of that favorite pastor: let it be so, and amen. 

Grief

 I have a print hanging in my bathroom that's held an outsized significance in my life for awhile. 

It's a quote from a Louise Erdrich book that I love. 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will break you with its yearning. You have to love. you have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to be swallowed up. 

Mostly it just sits there on the wall, placed inconveniently for anyone to really notice while they're peeing or washing their hands, but I know it's there. And occasionally I stop and read it and think of when I bought it and how my life has changed. Or I'll read it mindlessly while I brush my teeth. 

Sometimes, though, I read it and my heart breaks open. 

* * *

David and I have started going to church.

I can't remember how it happened. I know that we were both yearning for something. Community was a part of it. A lot of my friendships have changed dramatically during COVID and before COVID. But it was more than just looking for a beloved community for me. "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord" says Mary in one of my favorite bible passages. "My spirit rejoices in God, my savior."

God and I have not been on speaking terms since 2012, but my soul has been proclaiming something recently. 

So David and I have started going to church. We attend a Universalist Church not far from where we live. 

In graduate school, Unitarians were easy targets for derision because "They don't believe in anything." I made this argument as much as any of my peers, and what an arrogant, judgmental little shit I was. I didn't realize how badly people who didn't have my confidence in the One True Church still needed a place for spirituality, hope, and love. Now I find myself regularly attending Unitarian services. 

Who says the universe doesn't have a sense of humor?

Yesterday we had a Service of Remembrance. It was the first in-person one this community has had in over two years (everyone is asked to be vaccinated and masked for the entirety of the service, and we were in N95s, so don't get sassy). The service had some aspects that felt odd to a recovering Catholic (speaking your losses to a stone and dropping it in a bowl of water, profligately having conversations with your neighbors about loss mid-service) but weren't any odder than almost any Catholic ritual I could name. Near the end of the service there was a litany of the people we have lost in the past year, and the congregation lit a candle in remembrance of every person. 

I have never grieved communally. My beloved grandmother died in May of 2020 and I was stone faced throughout her entire service. When I came back to Minnesota I screamed with grief. I cried and retreated from David and held on to my grief like a weight. The worst of it passed. 

It always does. 

So when I found myself in the midst of a bunch of very earnest people speaking about loss so openly, I was terribly intimidated. Afterall, the only thing I'd lost was a beloved pet. Listening to people speak the names of their loved ones who had died made anything I've experienced in the past two year seem mild. 

At the end of the service, a little embarrassed, I went up the altar and lit a candle for my beloved kitty. And in the act of lighting and thinking her name, something odd happened. 

My heart broke open. 

* * *

We've lost so much in the past two years. 

Families and friendships. Pets. A civic society. Live theater and music. Jobs we loved. Time. Illusions. That teacher we really wanted our kid to experience. A sense of normalcy. Hugs and shared laughter and warmth. Maybe our conceptions of ourselves. 

I've lost a a grandmother I adored, a pet who got me through difficult times, getting to watch my adopted nieces and nephews grow, the choice about whether or not I'll be a parent, my sense of smell and taste, months to long COVID, a little bit of my sanity, the joy I used to take in my work, more things than I can name. 

And in the act of lighting that small taper candle for a cat who died in November, my heart breaks. 

It breaks and it breaks and it breaks. 

And then it's all there. All the complicated, overwhelming, messy feelings that I've been carrying with me for two long years now. 

Probably for longer than that, if I'm being honest.

Somehow, it's easier in this place. Perhaps it's the message of the day. That the kindness we hold for one another is the only thing that is left after grief. It might be that quote from my bathroom, rattling around in my head and reminding me that these complicated feelings are the reason I'm here. It could just be that it was a cathartic experience and my brain is hit with a wave of feel-good chemicals. 

What I think it is--no, what I believe it is--is that doing this together has somehow made things easier. That speaking our losses, whether to a stone or a neighbor, and lighting our candles for a person or a pet has made this act of grieving lighter. Grieving communally has created a place of compassion, empathy, and love that is so necessary and so lacking right now. 

As we leave I take David's hand and smile. "I'm glad we did that."

"Yeah, me too."

And my heart begins to mend. 

Daddy

"Are you still writing?"

It's a question from my father, at the end of a long weekend. 

I'm startled. I never knew that he read my writing, much less cared if I was still doing it. He's always been a fairly practical man, so I tell him about how much money I'm making, what's in my IRA, and how I'm hoping to buy a house in the next year. 

"Um, no. I don't really have time for it with the new-ish job and the commute, you know?"

He nods, and goes back to watching television. 

* * *

I barely cry at my grandmother's funeral. 

It was last weekend, right in the midst of of COVID-19 insanity, and for good or ill I go back to Wisconsin for her funeral. 

I guess I won't know if it was the right decision until fourteen days from now, when I find out if any of us contracted COVID. I'm not going to justify going aside from saying that she was a towering figure in my life, a surrogate parent when mine couldn't be there, and that I was as responsible as I could be. 

Anyway, I barely cry. As the designated Emotional One in the family, I'm a little shocked by my own stoniness. My cousins cry. My brothers cry. Even my father cries. 

I get the church giggles. 

* * *

"My psychologist thinks I have PTSD."

I'm out for dinner with my then-boyfriend. Things have been bad for awhile now, but I'm about to make them a lot worse. 

"Oh really?"

"Yeah."

When I try to change the topic by saying something I don't know, neutral, he ignores it and stares pensively into his sushi. 

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Well, she thinks I have PTSD."

It takes me a minute to process this. I've spent years working in domestic and sexual violence, lived through a sexual assault, and have sat with people dear to me while they relive their own trauma. I don't want to be insensitive, but his life has been deeply, profoundly normal. I hold my breath, tense and worried about what he's going to tell me.  

He sighs.

"The trauma of never living up to my father's expectations of me."

"PTSD because you don't live up to your father's expectations of you?"

"Yeah."

"Isn't that just the human condition?"

"Well, I also told her I wanted access to medical grade marijuana for recreation." 

We break up a few weeks later. 

* * *

I have a complicated relationship with my father. 

I mean, everyone does, and many of us in the same way, right? Daddy (and you could do a whole psychoanalysis on my calling him "Daddy" at 35, but I don't fucking care or have the energy for it).

Sorry, let me recalibrate. 

Daddy taught me a lot. How to hit a baseball and dribble a basketball (neither well, but not because of him). He taught me how to fish and the importance of a good work ethic. He taught me to give back to my community and a lot about generosity. 

I love him so much it hurts. 

My father has also hurt me deeply over the years. I can't (won't?) come out to my immediate family because he's said awful things about gay people during my life. He believes that financial success is a matter of work ethic and can be deeply dismissive about my personal experiences. 

I still love him so much it hurts.

* * *

I have never lived up to my father's expectations of me. 

I think about it a lot. When I'm flirting with a pretty girl. When I'm voting for a Socialist. When I take the attitude of "I'd rather pay someone to repair it." 

It's what I think about when I make it through my grandmother's funeral dry-eyed.  

It's only later, after a small breakdown in the car on the way to Minnesota that I start to see thing a little differently. My dry eyes during the funeral weren't a shortcoming, but a bit of his Stoicism that I managed to hold on to. His tears were, perhaps, the tiniest expression of a same emotions that I often feel every fucking day. 

I think a lot about that, and a lot about the question he asked me about writing. And perhaps this whole post is just one more attempt to have him be proud of me, even though he'll never read it. I honestly don't know. 

But I hope he is. 

Grace 2.0

The theological gears in my brain have started spinning again.

It was sort of inevitable after the weekend. We went to go see a play called The Whale on Friday night. I spent most of the week looking forward to it. The boyfriend told me that it was a beautiful show, and he hadn't missed with a recommendation.

Most of the time I know what (and how to avoid) things that I find profoundly upsetting. I flatly refuse to see shows or movies with sexual violence. Ditto domestic violence. Actually, I consume very little violent media, at all. My favorite video games are puzzle based games rather than first-person shooters.

Aside from violence, I tend to do pretty well.

The Whale, though.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I spent most of the play crying. Or that it impacted my mood through much of the weekend. I went to bed sad on Friday, teared up a few times thinking about it Saturday, and spent a solid chunk of today writing and thinking about it.

One of the most interesting parts of the show completely opposite ways the boyfriend and I saw it. For me, it was a show about watching someone commit suicide by tiny increments. For the boyfriend it was a show about redemption and the ability to see grace and kindness in other people, even when they are verifiably rotten.

Either way, the show was a lot to process.

In theology, when we talk about grace, we talk about God breaking into the course of human events. For Christians, the major example would be the Incarnation, but also through sacraments and the liturgy.

One of the things I loved best about my theological education (especially graduate school) was the idea that moments of grace would break into our daily lives, without the sacraments, without liturgy, we could find these little moments of God's love in the everydayness. But more than the in-breaking-of-the-Divine-into-the-world, what appealed to me most was the idea that everyday grace could be transformative. 

The accessibility of God in those moments, or the idea of it, always appealed to me. 

It's been . . . awhile since I've thought about anything even tangentially related to theology. But our differing reactions to a play that was about depression, loss, and redemption, has me thinking about grace throughout the weekend. 

Relationships are such grace-filled things. 

Not in the big born-of-a-virgin or the slightly-less-big-consecration-of-the-Eucharist kind of way, but in the everyday way that has always meant more to me. The chance to see yourself in a different way is no small thing. Particularly when seeing yourself in that different way makes you want, quite simply, to be a better version of yourself. More than that, it's the other person's ability to look past who you are in your worst moments and say "I believe in the person you want to be and want to help you get there." 

That kind of unflappable belief in another person and the transformative power of grace is, I think, what The Whale was about. And it's something I would have missed, had I not had someone there to help me see something that wasn't colored by my own experience. 

Like I said, perhaps not the Incarnation, but in my worst moments, it doesn't feel any less miraculous. 

Repressed

My family is full of Repressed Irish Catholics.

When I was 14 my mother gave me The Talk. It consisted of the following:

"Kel, do you know how to keep from having a baby if you don't want one?"

As a good little Catholic girl, I quickly responded, "Abstinence!"

She nodded and said "Do you know the other ways?"

Uh, yes, theoretically? I was terrified to admit it that I even knew they existed. I whispered my answer. "Birth control?"

She nodded. "I think we're done here," and walked out of the room.

***

At 18 I was a precocious little shit.

The precociousness wouldn't have been as much of a problem if it was accompanied by some self-reflection. But I was my Tea-Party father's nightmare--the kind of kid who was ready to be molded and influenced by whatever I read and any adult who took an interest in me. So when I went to a college that encouraged us to read Millet, Dworkin, and Daly I soaked up their ideas without much reflection. Their opinions and theses became things that I would expound on a great length during dinner parties and classes. I did this not just as a first-year student, but all the way through my academic career.

My senior year in college I was in a Women's Lit class. It was taught by one of my favorite professors and I was confident enough to speak up in class.

By speak up in class, I mean intellectually eviscerate people who disagreed with me.

When the single guy taking the class dropped it because "There are too many man-haters in the room" I didn't take it as an opportunity to reexamine some of my more barbed remarks. I scoffed: "Typical guy."

***

I was 17 when I had my first boyfriend.

I don't doubt that we were really cute. A couple of nerds (Him: Math, music. Me: Sci-Fi, Fantasy. Both of us: LAN parties) who were ohmygodsoawkward together. My father, more accustomed to boys who played sports and were interested in cars wasn't quite sure what I saw in him. My mother kept trying to feed him.

I also don't doubt that we were completely revolting in that way that only sexually unsatisfied teenagers can be. We made out constantly, publicly, and really handsily. And not very well (So much tongue. Jesus). But I  still remember it with the kind of rosy-tinged fondness that accompanies your first love. Probably because it was the first time I realized "Oh. That's what that feels like."

There's one moment in particular that I remember with frightening clarity. Michelle and I had lifted weights after school and there was no part of my body that did not hurt. I went going to his house, ostensibly to watch an anime that he loved. He teased me the whole way downstairs because I had a hard time walking.

Once he got to the couch I, being a real empowered 17 year old, jumped him.

When we surfaced for air 90 minutes later he asked "What the hell was that about?"

I wasn't sure.

***

"What do you think left you more fucked up, Catholicism or radical feminism?"

I'm having a late-night Skype freakout to my old college roommate. The only good thing about her living in Thailand is that we're twelve hours apart and when I'm panicking at, say, 12:36am on a Saturday, she's awake and able to take a phone call.

We've been talking about sex and relationships for a few hours, in the open way you do with a very old friend. The bit of the conversation that leads to the question is about how, in our youngest days as feminists, if a partner asked us to do something (a bit of grooming, perhaps, or the dishes) our response, invariably, was "Fuck off." Do you know why?

Because our partner asked for it.

Trust me, the cuntiness of that mindset is not lost on me as an adult.

But for whatever reason, during my early 20s I thought that someone expressing a sexual or social desire was automatically stepping on my Rights as a Woman. How dare you ask me to shave! Women are supposed to have hair, that's why we haven't evolved to be hairless! (I know.) No I won't do the dishes because women to the lion's share of housework and I don't care that you made dinner! (I know.) You want me to put what, where? Noooooooooope. That's demeaning to the Sisterhood! (Trust me, I know.) I had some intense ideas about sex, relationships, and desire.

It's galling to think of the way I treated the men I met during that period of my life.

(It's also amazing to think that I managed to lose my virginity.)

And yeah, the feminism I was reading certainly outlined (or outright argued) some of those ideas. As intellectual exercises, they were interesting and led me to a lot of fascinating conversations. They're also part of the reason I work so damn hard in women's issues. I am indebted to a lot of those writers.

At the same time, they made me into a bit of a prude.

They wouldn't have done so if I wasn't also another Repressed Irish Catholic in a long line of Repressed Irish Catholics. Given little information on the particulars, sex (theoretically) was mystifying and a little bit scary. As a result of 18 years of Repressed Irish Catholic-ness, there was a right way to have sex (after marriage, on your back, with an openness to children). The little bit I knew about my own sexuality, the bits I knew about desire and what I found desirable, ran counter to that in startling ways that I didn't have the ability to articulate, but ways that I knew were bad, wrong, distasteful.

Mix up all that fear and guilt with a precocious shit of a young woman reading feminist theory by Andrea Dworkin and it's no wonder I had such messed up ideas about the way relationships were supposed to work, or that I was so blisteringly bitchy to men that they remained obsequious and zipped up around me.

It's taken six years to dig out of the hole created by that mindfuck of a cocktail, but if the recent uptick in my late-night dopamine production is any indication, it's been time well-spent. I still have my books of feminist theory. They're on the shelf next to a couple books by Dan Savage and a comic book called Sex Criminals.

I'm much less of a prude than I used to be.

Grown Ups Doing Emotions

"So then you're sad for awhile."

There's a certain "Duh, honey" tone to Michelle's voice.

We've taken the paddle boat to the other, less populated end of the lake. When we're out of earshot of the cabin we take off our sundresses and stop paddling and spend the next two hours lounging in the sun in our bathing suits (Seriously, 85 degrees in the Upper Midwest over Memorial Day?) talking obsessively about everything from our favorite Game of Thrones characters (Littlefinger, of course) to our love lives (despite being non-existent, mine still requires thorough dissection). It's a long, lovely morning and the start to a long, lovely weekend that I need badly.

As the emotional equivalent to a supernova (or a black hole, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) it's helpful to me to have people in my life who are more, um, regulated. Who don't have huge responses to things. People who don't cry when a book by their favorite author arrives on their doorstep or forget to breathe while watching Hamlet. It's good for me to be around people who are a little less emotionally strung out.

After we discuss the finer points of Littlefinger's endgame, she starts in on a few things I said the night before, drunk on sleep deprivation and meteor showers, but didn't elaborate on. They're the kinds of things I don't want to talk about, but should. Those revelations you have about yourself that hit with tremendous force and leave you stunned an thoroughly disgusted. Those moments when you realize that you don't actually love your partner anymore and are with them because it's easier than being alone or that you're keeping someone around as your fall-back plan or for your next orgasm or emotional whipping boy. Or whatever your particular emotional pitfall is.

Mine has me so ashamed of myself that I don't want to tell Michelle a thing and when the words come out they're halting and physically painful to stay aloud. When I finally get them out, I follow up with the extenuating circumstances, the Things That Made Me Act This Way. They're bullshit, of course, I know what I'm doing and who it may hurt, but I'm doing it regardless, because it Makes Me Feel Better and it Keeps Me From Being Sad. I'm trying to use depression as an excuse for (knowingly!) behaving badly and she's one of the few people who can call me out on it.

She does.

***

Of all things, I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians. 

It's the passage that follows the passage everyone knows from every Catholic wedding ever (Love is patient, love is kind . . .). Shortly after that there's a part of Paul's letter that is slightly less well-known and has been running through my head all weekend: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." 

Oddly, the reason that it's on my mind has nothing to do with scripture or theology, but because over the weekend I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. 

Called "Harry Potter for grown-ups" (a label that seems to be stuck on every fantasy novel that had the misfortune to be published after Harry Potter) it's an interesting, if slightly maddening book. The plot is a little wonky here and there (I get fussy about the rules of fantasy universes being established early in the book and followed throughout it) and there are moments where the editor should have excised whole paragraphs, but it's a book that triumphed despite itself. 

The reason I liked it so much was because it dealt with the idea of getting your childhood fantasy fulfilled as an adult. Stop for a moment and think about what that would mean. Always wanted to go to Narnia? Poof. There. Been waiting for your telekinetic powers to manifest themselves? Bang. Wake up one morning and turn on the shower with your brain. You get bitten by a radioactive spider, find yourself smack in the middle of Diagon Alley, wake up with a harp in your hands in Rivendale. 

The question the book raises is whether or not it's good for us to want those things as adults, if it's not better to exist in the mundane world and struggle through the small trials and tribulations we have here. Sure, we'll never save Middle Earth from immanent peril, but if we continue to pursue childish fantasies as adults, we'll undoubtedly meet a messy, unfortunate end. Maybe.

That question, so central to the book, is the reason why I managed to overlook its structural failings. I mean, let's get real. I still read comic books and YA lit. I've been known to quote the phrase "We're grown-ups now, we get to decide what that means!" I've built forts alone in my apartment and spent the afternoon reading in them. For all of my cultivated adultness (high heels, jazz, scotch) and I can still summon the enthusiasm of an eight year old. 

I'm starting to wonder if it's healthy. 

***

I'm childish when it comes to big emotions. 

I'm not talking the sugar-coated "childlike wonder" at things that we're not supposed to lose. I'm talking temper tantrums and meltdowns. While I don't actually throw temper tantrums when things aren't going my way and tend to keep my meltdowns private (bourbon, gummi bears) emotionally I don't think I'm far off of those little kids who make you roll your eyes in grocery stores. I justify selfish motives with Adult Logic (I'm susceptible to depression and need to be happy and distracted, we both knew what we were getting into, I didn't make any promises) and call it good, even as I know I'm being selfish. When relationships, regardless of whether or not they're platonic or otherwise, start to have actual issues I cut and run. I pull the fade away or say that I'm opting out of the relationship because I really need to do what's best for me, and for now that's not having any contact with you. It's like when an eight year old gives you the silent treatment, pathetic, childish, and irresponsible coming from an adult woman. 

I act this way in an attempt to keep myself from having to feel any big emotions: shame, regret, anger, sadness, anything that isn't the sheer, manic joy that keeps me buoyed up most days. They're the actions and emotions Michelle calls me out on while we're drifting quietly across the lake. And while I recognize that what I'm doing is harmful not only to me but to my relationships in the long run, I don't think I want to stop doing it. It's time to grow up, and like every other overtired child, I'm stomping my foot and pouting. 

But I don't want to. 

Lord Have Mercy

When the alarm rings at 2:00am, I stumble out of bed towards the clothes I've left draped across the wingback chair. I'm sleepy, less than half-awake, and still recovering from string of late nights I've had recently. I can't stop shivering, which is the number one indicator that I've been up too late and have had too little sleep. I stretch and yawn and look back at my bed. It would be easy enough to take off all these clothes, turn up the heating pad, and slide back underneath the quilt.

I check my pocket to ensure that I have my keys and mobile, and step out into the freezing air, hurrying toward the Mississippi.

Getting up to see an astronomical event is, well, lonely. I'll admit that while I didn't invite anyone to stay up with me to watch tonight's eclipse (mainly because after years of asking I've discovered most people aren't interested) I thought I might run into at least one other person awake, particularly because astronomical events that you can actually see in the city are unusual.

But 2:10am finds me standing alone on a bridge over the Mississippi, looking up at the Blood Moon, feeling like the only person awake in the world.

Despite the loneliness, the eclipse is something I revel in.

***

Somewhere along the way I confused "reflecting on your sins for the sake of atoning for them" and "relishing your sins."

I'm definitely relishing.

I can't help it. I'm at the Easter Vigil with my folks and it's close to a three hour service. Three hours. Three hours of church for an atheist. On a Saturday night.

I go because it's my atonement for moving so far away and coming home so infrequently. I know that it means something to my parents to have me there with them, and I am almost never home over Easter, so I might as well do this for them. But as everyone who has ever attended a Catholic wedding knows, just because you're there doesn't mean you're paying attention. We're wrapping up Lent so there's a lot of talk about sinfulness and Christ's triumph over Original Sin and I can't help it (not that I really want to), I can't stop thinking about the past year. Oddly enough, despite twenty-six years of Catholic indoctrination, it's not the big sins that are getting to me (not to say that I'm not thinking of them. More on that in a minute). It's the little failings from the past year, times when I could have been kinder, less dismissive, worked harder, loved with fewer conditions that I'm atoning for at the moment.

The big ones though, the ones that would come off that list of seven.

Those are are things I would not repent if Jesus Christ were standing in front of me personally offering me a place in heaven.

I suspect everyone has sins like that. Mine tend to fall along the same lines, regardless of how old I get. Long boozy dinners with heaps of inappropriate jokes that leave my sides aching and head splitting the next day. Arguments where, just briefly, I let my temper get the better of me. After hours that leave me trembling and breathless and thinking I forgot it could be like that.

Like I said, things I wouldn't atone for if my (after)life depended on it.

***

When I get back into the house I am freezing. It's the kind of cold I know I won't be able to shake and that will keep me up for awhile, so I make a cup of herbal tea and wrap myself around my heating pad. Getting up this late, especially after so little sleep, was a silly idea. I'm going to be exhausted and not worth much for in the morning and I'm reasonably certain I'll be paying for this for the rest of the week. 

I don't care.

It's unusual for me to feel that way surrounding sleep (lifetime insomnia has made me hyper-aware of the beauty of a full eight hours), but when it comes to staying up late to see something incredible (especially related to space) I feel like I have to do it.  I go out in the early morning and stay up as late as a possibly can on the off chance of seeing the Aurora or the Perseids because it's my way of saying thank you to the universe. Our lives are such brief, unlikely things that I feel like I owe it to the universe to experience as much as I can.

It's a thought that will follow me to two-and-half hours into the Easter Vigil, when I'll guiltily snap back into the present. Our lives our so brief, and yeah, some things are worth atoning for, some things are worth skipping. 

And some things are meant simply to be relished. 

Beauty #1

When I was getting a degree in Jesus, I chose the most esoteric branch of theology I could uncover.

I went into graduate school knowing that I had one intense theological question. I wanted to understand grace, how we were redeemed, why it had to happen through the crucifixion of a Palestinian Jew.

I also knew that I wanted to be a poet (rereading some of those old poems is embarrassing. Roundly I think switching to narcissistic, unproductive self-probing was a better move). I knew that while I loved (and continue to love) encountering new ideas, using bits of my brain that hadn't had a workout in awhile, I also loved simply being moved by the beauty of something.

During my first Theological Aesthetics class the professor started the course by playing Mary Oliver reading Mary Oliver. He followed it when some of Glen Goldberg's performance of The Goldberg Variations.

I was smitten.

One of the underlying tenets of Theological Aesthetics is that we come from Beauty. We talked extensively about what it meant when we said that God was Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. How Beauty and beauty interact in the world. The role that grace plays in our lives. We also listened to a lot of incredible music (I heard Faure's Requiem mass there for the first time) read some astounding poetry, and looked at heart-meltingly good art.

I loved that class. If I could have simply done a degree in Aesthetics and ignored the whole "I'm not terribly sure about this Jesus-died-for-my-sins" thing I would probably still be a Catholic. They're discussions I miss having, little bits of Roman Catholicism that still catch my eye heart now and again.

One of the times I miss Theological Aesthetics the most is during Lent. It sounds crazy, I know, but have you ever been to a really good service on a Catholic High Holy Day? Ash Wednesday, Tenebrae services, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday are all magnificent when they're done well. So today when I was scrolling through a social media feed and I saw a fellow theologian's comment that every day during Lent he was going to try to post something beautiful (because we come from Beauty), I sat back and my chair and thought "Huh. That's an idea worth stealing."

Because regardless of my feelings about J.C. specifically or God generally, I do believe that we come from Beauty. We live in a universe that is improbable, complex, and stunningly, breath-takingly beautiful. I don't know about everyone else, but I have a tendency to get a little caught up in thebusislatei'vegottagogroceryshoppingwherearethetpsreports that I can forget about it. So (hopefully) once a day during Lent (I can't help it. I feel an upwelling of religiosity this time of year) I'm going to be posting something I find beautiful.

I admit some trepidation in doing this. First because the things I'm sharing are, well, it's hard to explain. The best I can do is that they're not things that are close to my heart. They are my heart. Opening up is always a scary, free-fall-y thing for me. This time it feels particularly intense.

There's also the worry that you'll have a Loss of the Creature experience and won't get what I'm saying. I suppose that's okay. The goal is not to convert everyone to the Cult of Heart-Exploding Reactions to Things but merely to say "these are some things I find beautiful."

I hope you do too.

***

My love for Ryan Adams knows no bounds. 

I debated for awhile about how I should start this series off. I have well documented love affairs with all sorts of things: poetry, space, particle physics, the outdoors.

In the end, music won out. Of course it did. Music and fiction/poetry are the art I consume most often. Of those, music is the one that can impact my mood quickly and profoundly. The wrong song at the start of the day and I'm in a rotten mood for the duration. I'm unable to shake off the feelings it gives me like I can shake off a poem that reminds me of my ex or a book that kept me up the night before. 

So, Ryan Adams. 

Admittedly, part of me loves him because he has such a ridiculous Rock n' Roll past. He's what I think of when I think of a rockstar. He writes these songs with lyrics that just destroy me. He has an album for whatever mood I'm in. 

Usually when songs hit me in the guts, when they become songs that I know I'll listen to endlessly on repeat it's because of the lyrics (I can't help it. I always wanted to be a poet). I like well-arranged songs, and I like interesting melodies, and I'm a total sucker for complex harmonies, but it's the lyrics that usually rope me in. 

That didn't happen with this one. 

The first time I heard "New York, New York" it was the version off of the Gold album, which is very different from this version. It's a rock song, and a damn good one. I liked it instantly, but was completely enamored with the rest of the album, so I let it pass. 

Then I heard this version. 

And it just . . . hit me. The combination of the piano and Ryan's voice and the obvious emotion he feels singing it blew me out of the water. When he sings the lyric "I'm still amazed I didn't lose it/on the roof of the place/when I was drunk and I was thinking of you" I feel like he's writing about every breakup/unrequited crush I've ever had. I loved this version from the opening bars of the song.

Music is funny like that.

Ryan Adams is funny like that.

This song is funny like that. 

Note: Start the video at 1:34

Pontificate

A few months ago, driving on glare ice in St. Paul, I was rear-ended.

Being the kind of person I am, I took my car in for an estimate on repairs today. 

The guy who gave me the estimate was nice enough. He took a bunch of pictures, he told me about the process, and we went back inside. When he opened up his computer, I immediately saw that his desktop was a giant image of a Cross interposed across some lyrics from a God Rock song.

I excused myself to use the restroom. 

While I was washing my hands at the sink, I happened to look into the mirror. Hanging on the back of the door was another poster, emblazoned with a neon cross and I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me. 

When I got back into the office, I accepted the estimate, smiling through gritted teeth and silently vowing to take my business elsewhere.

***

I am an angry, bitter ex-Catholic. 

I am not a sad or nostalgic ex-Catholic. Yes, there are times when I long for the community being a theologian and a member of the church provided me. But for the most part I am a furious ex-Catholic. 

I didn't realize how angry I am until quite recently. I know how that reads and I'm positive most people knew how angry I am, but I didn't realize it. The truth is, my life as an ex-Catholic and my real life, the life I live on a day to day basis, intersect very little. When a sanctimonious, celibate old man in New York essentially calls me a whore because I choose to use birth control, I have a slight flare-up, but for the most part, I keep those parts of my life pretty separate. It helps that I live in a relatively liberal city and that I have very few friends who could even remotely be called devout. Since graduate school I've been spending more time with those friends for whom religion plays no part in their lives. 

There are a lot of reasons I spend more time with them. One is because they're objectively wonderful people I lost track of for a little while. Another is, selfishly, that it's just easier not to have to resist shouting "hocus-pocus!" at someone when they're telling you that you'll never not be Catholic because the sacrament of baptism left an indelible mark on your soul, so you might as well stop bitching at get back to church. 

So, what with not going to Catholic Churches and having very few Catholic friends, I find that most weeks I can get along ignoring the Catholic Church's existence rather well. 

Until recently. 

Until Benedict XVI stepped down. Until the cardinals elected Francis. Until even my reliably agnostic and atheist friends exclaimed habemus papam and waited breathlessly for the announcement from Rome. 

That's when I realized that I'm not just an ex-Catholic, but that I am a furious, will-never-even-contemplate-returning-to-the-Catholic-Church ex-Catholic. Because every time I saw someone, Catholic or no, losing their shit over the fact that a pope washed the feet of a woman on Holy Thursday or that a pope returned to his hotel room to pay his bill, I was so angry I couldn't speak. I felt like screaming "Have the previous pontiffs been so bad that when this one, I don't know, acts in the same fashion Christ may have you don't say "about time" and instead waste pages of your newspapers praising him? Have you completely lost your minds and religious imaginations?" 

It was the kind of anger that you feel in your guts. The kind that makes your jaw tighten and your blood pressure spike. It was the kind of anger that made me realize "Oh. This isn't about this pope or these people, but about me." 

Rather, it's about me and this Church. It's about 28 years of hearing that women who used contraceptives were subverting God's will. It's about theologians I love--men and women who are prophets in every sense of the word--being sanctioned and excommunicated for daring to write and speak theology they felt to be the Truth. It was about hearing you are a child of God, but will never be a leader of this church because you are a woman for my entire life. It's about having Catholics tell me that I need to just get over the fact that priests sexually abused children and bishops and archbishops conspired to cover it up. It's about the message that God loves you but the men who run this church never will. 

It's about how all of this anger and resentment slowly built up on top of a foundation that was becoming increasingly wobbly. How I could never convince myself entirely about Jesus Christ as savior. How I was meeting, for the first time really, smart people who poked holes in my already insecure faith and made me ask questions it couldn't answer. And how it felt when things came tumbling down. 

It's about me and this Church. 

***

When I marched out of the auto repair shop today, I realized my indignation wasn't directed at the nice guy with the unfortunate desktop who had done my repair estimate. When I'm honest with myself, I know it isn't even directed at my friends who are continually trying to convince me that I'm still Catholic, or even at this new pope. It's about me and this Church and 28 years of disappointment, anger, resentment, and doubt. And my devout friends and the guy are the auto shop are on the receiving end of rage they did little to deserve.

In the end, though, I don't think I'll take my car back to there for repairs the same way I don't foresee a whole hell of a lot of theological arguments in my near future. Not because I'm still furious with the guy at the shop or my Christian friends, but because I am happier and more at peace in the world I inhabit now. The world were I can go to the loo or out for a drink without having someone try to tell me the Good News.

And I hate neon.  

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. 

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.