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. 

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. 

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. 

Raw

"You are out of your goddamn head."

"No, you're too close to it to read it as a final product."

About twenty minutes into the argument, I realize the absurdity of what we're disagreeing about, and acknowledge (to myself) that I am complete shit at taking compliments. Truthfully?

It takes me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I'm not being teased.

He continues, despite my protests.

"Specifically, you should be writing plays."

"You're sweet, but I'm never going to do that."

"Why not? What you're writing is essentially the same as opening up the fridge and thinking 'Huh. I have all the ingredients to make an excellent Pate de Carnard en Croute.' Not doing something with it is the same as not making the damn duck."

"Yes, well, the difference is that when making a Pate de Carnard en Croute, you're serving up the duck, not your own heart."

***

This was my weekend.

The good part of it anyway.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved comic books. When I was young, I would read X-Men and Captain America when I could get my hands on them. As an adult, it's been Sandman, Watchmen, pretty much anything Brian K. Vaughn has ever written.

I love comics.

I find them soothing, even when they're horrifying.

I have a lot of grown-up reasons for loving comics. I think that because of the interplay between the drawings and the dialogue the storytelling both requires more skill and manages to take you deeper. Comics are allowed to explore darkness in a way that is compelling and evocative. Sometimes (as, in Saga, which every single one of you should read at least the first issue of) they can be, quite simply, stunning.

Frankly, though, the escapism also appeals to me. I like the idea that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, that your life can change dramatically in a flat second, and that you can be different without being wrong. 

So when I came home on Saturday night with my feathers ruffled and pretty close to tears, I pulled a stack of Preacher trade paperbacks out of my backpack, made a pot of tea (despite the humidity), curled up in my red armchair, and read myself to sleep.

***

"Can we hit the reset button on this whole conversation?"

"Um, okay."

"What I should have said was: 'Thank you, I'm flattered.' So if we could just erase my little tirade about Writing and Writers from both of our minds I'd be obliged." 

"Consider it said and unsaid."

"Thanks."

"I still think you need to do it."

"I'm going away now."

***

I am not at all completely embarrassed to admit that The Avengers is one of my favorite movies.

I watch it when I'm home with the flu. I watch it when I'm sad. I watch it and squee. I watch it when I'm at the cabin and it's raining and I want to talk with my younger brother about how much we love Captain America. I watch it the night before major work presentations while I'm painting my nails, and when I can't sleep. 

It may, in fact, be on in the background while I'm writing this entry.  

I love The Avengers. 

The Hulk has never been one of my favorite superheros, and isn't within a stone's throw of my favorite Avenger (Jean Grey and Captain America, for those of you wondering), but I gotta admit that Bruce Banner has my favorite line in the whole movie. In response to Tony Stark's prediction that Banner would be joining the rest of the Avengers, he responds

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

Oh, Dr. Banner. You speak to my heart. 

***

"Your writing utterly smacks of a one woman show. Insight, humor, intimacy, titillation, shock. It'd be great." 

"Not happening." 

"Your definition of a play, as I well know, includes one and maybe two intermissions, multiple acts, even more scenes, and likely includes iambic pentameter. Writing doesn't have to be Shakespeare to be good." 

"It's. Not. Happening."

"It's okay to be scared."

***

I hate feeling exposed. 

It's a strange confession, I suppose, for someone who spends her free time as a memoirist, but it's the truth. It's also the reason that I keep my writing almost exclusively to trivia and write for the same thirty people (all of whom are related to me by blood or might as well be) every week. 

Put another way, I feel the same way about writing as Bruce Banner feels about transforming into the Hulk. 

The people who read my writing, the people with whom I share it, regularly, are ones who have slipped in under my guard. They're the ones who understand that when I'm crawling between the covers of a comic, it's not because I'm trying to avoid them, but because my social tank is already overflowing, and I need to justohmygodbealone.

Extroversion, being outgoing, having a drink with a stranger at a bar, just being able to put myself out there, these things I've never been good at. For goodness sake, I have to actively make a decision whether or not a friend is ragging on me when he suggests that I become a playwright, I'm not going to be the person who writes a one-woman show about her life. The ability to be that exposed an vulnerable, it's just not on my utility belt. 

Except. Well, that's the damndest thing about eating and breathing comics. 

Bane breaks your back. You fall in love. You fuse with a half-angel, half-demon. 

You find something in your utility belt that wasn't there before. 

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.

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 #4

This is one of the few pictures taken of me that I, without any reservations, love.

It's me, crossing the Headwaters of the Mississippi up at Itasca for the first time. 

I was an invited third wheel into a nascent relationship. Things were a little awkward (I was along for a weekend trip I didn't know was a weekend trip until much later) until I mentioned that I had never seen the Headwaters of the Mississippi River. The couple took me to the Headwaters and I nearly lost my mind for joy.

I've had a lifelong love affair with the Mississippi River. Whether it was because I read Mark Twain early on or the fact that it links my early years in Wisconsin and my later years in Minnesota. That river has wound its way throughout my entire life and crossing its Headwaters for the first time was one of the most profoundly spiritual moments of my life.

When I wrote in the first post that I fear a sort of Loss of the Creature moments with these entries, this was the one I was thinking about. Unless you've stood at the Headwaters or seen the Mississippi where it empties into the Gulf, it's difficult to describe the beauty and fragility of the river. It's a force onto itself. 

I return the Headwaters once every few years and take off my shoes (always in the fall. I've got to go sometime when the weather is warm) and wade around. I like knowing that however polluted and full of Asian Carp the river is even a hundred miles downstream that this place exists. That there is this one moment in space and time where the Mighty Mississippi is just a stream that you can walk across. 

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

Amen. Alleluia.

My apartment smells like homemade funfetti cake. It's clean, at least, as long as you don't open the closets. Miles Davis is playing ballads on the radio. 

"Oh my God!" One of two favorite former roommates walks into my apartment. She and her husband are not normally this effusive but within fifteen seconds of them entering I'm introduced to their daughter, hugged, and told "Your apartment is so cute! It smells so good in here! You look incredible." I warm up, almost instantly. I've been simultaneously excited for and dreading the evening all week. My phone rings and I run downstairs to bring up another guest. 

It's November 7th, the date of my annual birthday party for Lise Meitner and Marie Curie. 

I have, as I've noted in the past, keep some strange holidays. I can generally be relied on to read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July and recount the Haymarket Square riots on Labor Day, sure. I think anyone who has known me for awhile knows that I have a minor Lincoln obsession and will celebrate his birthday with a Mary Todd Lincoln almond cake every February (this is the holiday I celebrate instead of Valentine's Day). These are the somewhat normal holidays I repurpose every year. 

The odder ones are, in no particular order: the day Teddy Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee and continued reading the speech he had started before accepting treatment, the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the publication dates of The Great Gatsby and The Lord of the Rings and the birthdays of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Meitner, Curie, and Jane Austen.

Of those holidays, November 7th is the most important. It's my secular Christmas. It's a mash-up of all the things I love. History, science, feminism, excellent writing, discovery. Every year I celebrate with a birthday cake and when possible, friends over for tea and birthday cake and conversation about women in science or books or writing or that article in The New York Review of Books that's been irritating me all week. 

It's one of my favorite parties. 

This year I almost canceled. 

***

I am, as I wrote previously, having some issues with OCD and anxiety again. And while they're no where near as bad as what I experienced while living in the North Country, they're bad enough that other people have noticed and insisted that I return to treatment. The amount of frustration, anger, and disappointment I feel over being unwell is indescribable. I suppose I always knew that I would live with anxiety and OCD for my entire life, but there was a not insignificant part of me who hoped that it was really a function of loneliness and the place where I was living, that once I moved back to a city I love and was surrounded by people who love me, all of my mental health issues would vanish. 

I have a slight giant tendency to be extremely hard on myself. I'm also stubborn, proud, and am used to fixing things on my own. It is, of course, what kept me from getting treated for so long (which, of course, ultimately meant that I had a bigger hole to clamber out of when I finally did). Becoming a sane, stable individual is, for some of us at least, an entire life's work. 

There's still a version of myself who is constantly telling me "It doesn't matter. If you can't make yourself happy here, you won't be happy anywhere. You're a drag on all your friends, no one is ever going to love you, and you might as well accept that you'll die old, alone, and crazy." 

That Kelly is such a bitch. She's also unbelievably loud. And convincing. 

***

The Benedictines really did a number on me. 

After seven years of schooling with them it was, I suppose, somewhat inevitable. But they didn't make me want to become a nun, and they certainly didn't keep me a Catholic. What they did pound into my head were those damn Benedictine Values: Community Living, Taking Counsel, Listening, the Dignity of Work, Hospitality, Stewardship and the rest of them that have essentially told me for my entire adult life "A job that pays you piles of money, a big house, all of the trappings of the successful adult world are not the way to live." 

The Benedictines would ask "Are you doing God's work in the world?" and despite the fact that I'm an atheist, it's still a question I ask myself, on average, three hundred times a week, even if it comes out a little differently:

"Are you living a life of deep meaning? Is this the life you want to live, because your existence is so improbable and you only get one shot at this. It better be."

That's the damndest part of dealing with mental health issues. I feel like those Benedictine nuns are looking over my shoulder tsking at how because of anxiety and depression I'm not able to be my best self. I can't be the Kelly I'm supposed to be because when I come home these days I go right to bed or sit down in front of the television so I don't have to think. They serve as a constant reminder that this is not the way you're supposed to live, Kelly. 

***

Six people drop in for the Curie/Meitner party, which is the perfect amount for my tiny apartment. We end up talking as much about books and family law as we do about women and science, but we drink six pots of mint tea and eat all of the funfetti cake (homemade funfetti, who knew?). It's a fun, quiet party, full of the kind of conversation I love most. 

Despite the week I've had and the depression I'm struggling with, despite the fact that we used literally every single plate I own, despite the headache throbbing behind my eyeballs, I'm really happy. Happier than I expected to be. 

Those nuns, I realize as I stack plates in the sink and check the oven for what feels like the seven-hundredth time, aren't tsking over my shoulder. If anything, they'd be offering me a cup of tea and asking in that wonderful women-religious way how are you doing? 

I finally give in and take something for my head, switch out the lamps, and crawl into bed.  The bitchy, anxious side of my brain immediately starts up These aren't tension headaches, it's a tumor and you're going to die in your sleep. Your cake was terrible, people just ate it because they feel sorry for you. You are never, ever going to be well. 

I think of the people who have just spent the evening with me, the conversation we had, the list of books I have to read, the suggestions for therapists I've procured. I consider the holidays I celebrate, and the fact that despite being a bit odd they hold deep meaning for me and that the friends I've made are willing to celebrate them with me. I remember my favorite bit of Marie Curie's writing:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this something must be attained. 

Anxiety, depression, and OCD are, truthfully, going to make my life extremely difficult for at least the foreseeable future. I will struggle with them to varying degrees for my entire life. While that's a pretty grim reality, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be able to live the life I want to live, the life the Benedictines taught me was important. And as the medication I've taken for my head gently tugs me towards sleep, I murmur two words that haven't slipped out of my mouth in a long time.

Amen. Alleluia.  

Rock Me

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

Every sweet song that comes on the radio is about me. Rather than walk through my neighborhood in the gathering dusk, I dance. I skip. I sing. Twice in the past week you could have driven down Marshall at around 7:40 and seen me pirouetting, for Christ's sake. I'm so frustratingly gooey and ridiculous that there are soberer, quiet moments where I think:

Oh my god. I hate myself.  

I can't help it. I haven't felt like this in ages.

***

I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I'm cuddled up on the couch, wrapped in a cottony, fluffy blanket. There's a woodstove at my feet and the sound of rain on the roof. The entire room is lit by twinkly white lights and candles. I am warm. I am happy. I am loved. 

I've woken up to the sound of a cello, a guitar, and a three part harmony on one of my favorite songs. I sing along (quietly enough that I don't disturb the delicate balance of the other voices) and smile to myself. 

Wagon Wheel was my introduction to bluegrass. It's the song that inevitably is played whenever my musical friends get together. It's a song I can remember hearing for the first time with the kind of crystalline clarity that makes me suspect it's actually a false memory. It's a song that I have to hear to the end whenever it's started. It's the song I sing in the shower and we sang on my 25th birthday sitting on the floor of my shitty, mouse-infested graduate school apartment. 

Yikes. I suddenly realize how gross that floor was and by extension, how  gross sitting on it was. 

When I was attending a Benedictine college I heard a lot of chatter about the values of hospitality and community. I did not realize how deeply those values would impact my life until full of risotto and wine and conversation, I would stay up late having marathon conversations about God and Love and Truth and Children. Conversations where things that had influenced my life abstractly as a theologian (Faith, Love, Charity) were brought to bear on the life I was living and the decisions I was making about community, kindness, and sustainability. 

Somehow everything was always proceeded or followed by music. Huge, angry intellectual sparring matches devolved into harmonies and melodies. Hurt feelings were soothed away by familiar choruses and even if we didn't all believe in an afterlife, we sure as hell loved to sing about it.

And always (usually at my request) came Wagon Wheel. It's been such a part of my life that I can remember each of the specific instances in which we sang it as a group and why those days were important and what they meant in my developing adulthood. I smile when I think about the future times we'll sing it and wonder what those occasions will mean and how they will shape me the way all those past late nights have. I can't help but feel like the song has wormed its way into my DNA. That, should I ever actually have kids, loving it will be passed down through the generations until a 100 years from now some descendant of mine will be around a campfire asking "Hey, does anyone know that old song . . ."

***

The past ten years of my adult life have been a series of experiments on how to (and please forgive the douchiness of what I'm about to say) live authentically. I've learned how community grows organically and what I can do to help that community thrive (Pro tip: live nearby). I've failed in building that community and authenticity in some places (the North Country) but have laid down deep roots in others (who knew that Stearns, Hennepin, and Ramsey counties could all occupy the same space in my heart? Jesus, who knew that I would fall in love with Stearns County?). Growing up has been a process of deciding that I want to live a life where community, charity, patience, and kindness are not just things I think about on holidays or when someone shows me some small example of them, but are things that I want to influence my daily life and work. 

And before I sound too ohmygodi'mtotallyselfactualized here, I need to say that these things are really difficult for me. They're well, virtues I guess, that I don't have. At all. Anyone who has had the misfortune to drive with me through a traffic jam or catch me when I'm late can attest to how quickly I lose my cool. I'm not particularly good at being attentive to the present, when I'm tired or hungry I have a razor-sharp tongue, and nine times out of ten I would love to tell community to just sod off already. 

***

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

I'm so in love that it makes me giddy.

Have I mentioned that I'm so in love that it makes me completely fucking annoying? 

God help the entire world when I actually fall in love with someone rather than something.

For the time being, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that what I'm in love with is the life that I am slowly, agonizingly building for myself. A life where special occasions are where frustration and kindness, community and solitude, silence and harmonies all co-exist.

So rock me, momma like a wagon wheel. 

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. 

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.