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. 

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. 

Love, Love, Love

For the majority of my life I thought ee cummings was a hack.

I'm not, you know, proud of it, but I did. I've always belonged to the school of "poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of" and cummings, from the time I first read him as a child (which was probably my first mistake) seemed like someone less interested in telling a story and more interested in being clever.

Until recently.  Until Kerry sent me a reading of May I Feel, Said He.

Woah. Good Poetry.

***

"The issue is the lexical gap." 

In almost any other circumstance I would instantly be embarrassed by the fact that this sentence came tumbling out of my mouth. But it's late, I'm among friends, and we've been up and talking for hours. There's a pause in the conversation and someone interjects:

"Have you thought at all about the Greek?"

There's are a lot of things I love about having friends who are theologians. For the record, there are a lot of things I love about having friends with esoteric interests. But theologians are nice because they have access to Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew.

And because they like to drink scotch and talk into the wee hours of the morning. 

This is one of those conversations. As a former theologian and generally sort of curious person, I can sit up and talk academic theology for hours. As someone who spends a not insignificant part of her life wishing she could believe in God in some capacity, I can sit up all night and talk about the soul's desire for union with the Divine, about the emotional parts of faith, about knowing in your gut that there is a God who loves you.

Anyway, the conversation has been winding on for hours, there's been a fair amount of yelling (me, of course), some pounding on the table to make a point, and at times five-minute long breakdowns into laughter. This is precisely the kind of evening I love, the kind of socializing where I feel most at home and most like myself.

As I'm not writing a dissertation or teaching high school students theology, I don't have much to contribute to those bits of the conversation, but eventually things turn to my life and work. I touch on how fulfilling work has been and how much I like where I'm living. We get into writing for awhile and I confess that I feel stuck. I've been doing a lot of writing about Love, and I feel like I'm starting the repeat myself. The issue is, of course, that the writing I want to do about Love isn't necessarily about ohmygodILOVEYOU love. I mean, yeah, I'm single and really fucking angsty about it, so a fair amount is pretty emo, but there are people and things I love and want to write about, but language is failing me. Hence the lexical gap. And the suggestion to look to the Greek. The conversation doesn't linger here too long, we're almost instantly on C.S. Lewis's book The Four Loves, and then to his friendship with Tolkien and then to books we covet. 

But the thought of the Greek keeps me up even after I've ushered everyone out into the snowy evening and ensured that they have means of getting home. 

Yes. I am exactly the kind of person who is kept up at night by lexical gaps and Ancient Greek.

***

I seem to have accidentally memorized the poem [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)]. 

I have, over the course of a few years, attempted to memorize a few poems. They feel very much like prayers and come to me in much the same fashion. When I'm foundering on at work, the first lines of Sonnet XXIX come to mind. When I'm upset about a relationship, I repeat Mary Oliver's "The Uses of Sorrow" to myself under my breath. When I'm frustrated by how the world is GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL and shouting about how the Boomers have just bitched everything for us, I recall the line "Love someone who does not deserve it" from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front." 

Memorizing this poem by ee cummings came as a surprise. 

Shortly after Kerry sent me "May I Feel, Said He" I was helping some friends choose readings for their wedding. As a former poet and poetry enthusiast, I was pulling up a number of love poems. The poems, however, didn't feel much like the couple, so I bookmarked a few of them to enjoy later. But the cummings, for whatever reason, has stuck in my head like the hook from a great pop song. 

i carry your heart with me. (i carry it in my heart)

Over the past weeks I've wanted to use that line more times than I can count. The problem, of course, is that [i carry your heart (i carry it in)] is a LOVE poem. It's a poem you would read at someone's wedding. It's the kind of poem I can imagine tumbling out of my mouth after a long evening in with someone I'm dating (I'm more fun than this makes me sound, I promise.)

But I can't stop thinking about the poem. And I nearly recite the line over the phone as a good friend tells me about a gut-wrenching breakup. I think about it when someone else tells me about a family member diagnosed with a terminal illness. I actually write it in a card I'm sending to a friend going through a rough spot before thinking it might be a little overblown and rewriting the whole damn thing.  

***

Lexical gaps annoy the hell out of me.

Of course they do. I write for a living. I emote for a hobby. I've been told that I feel things more deeply than most people. So I need to know that there are words to express whatever the hell it is that I'm feeling. 

The lexical gap for love annoys me more than most. I need a word that means "We're related and I care about you, so I will always buy you remote controlled robots for Christmas and if you're ever in jail I'll come bail you out." I need another that means "I will spend an entire Sunday helping you Keratin treatment your hair and watching Game of Thrones (probably giving myself cancer in the process). " I need another one that means "Every time I think about you I want you here, now, so we can [censored] and then spend the rest of the night talking about modern literature and feminism and cracking up over terrible puns." 

But I don't have any of those words. I've got a big, ridiculous lexical gap that I can't fill. And as much as I would like those words, as much as I not-so-secretly want to employ the Ancient Greek, it isn't coming back into vogue any time soon. So instead I find myself repeating the simple truth behind all these kinds of love.

I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart.

Turns out cummings wasn't as much of a hack as I thought. 

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. 

Gifts

Catholicism gave me gifts.

It's an aspect of the religious life I never talked about or even thought about until recently. But that's one of the benefits of being a religious person, is it not? Through prayer you receive a connection with the Almighty. Through Church you participate in a loving, caring, close-knit community.

The biggest gifts the Roman Catholic Church gave me were, in no particular order, the promise of eternal life,  a sense of purpose, and a personal God who could not only number of the stars in the sky but knew me before I had a name.

But, in a way, it was the smaller gifts that meant more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eternal life and happiness. But immediately to hand was a community of close friends who loved and cared about me. There was the intellectual stimulation that came along with a good fight over doctrine. My parents and I shared a relationship that was based in this faith and transcended all of the hurt that we could do to one another.

And there was an outlet for anxiety.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that my compulsions began to become serious and interfere with my life when they did. One of my favorite graduate school professors used to preach that the liturgical action, Mass, kept Chaos at bay. Through our worship we were, in essence, creating a safer, calmer, more just existence. When he said Chaos he meant, if I understood him, Evil. Capital E Evil.

And he was right. I mean, I'm skeptical about the idea of spiritual warfare, but the liturgical actions of Roman Catholicism did a great deal to keep my own anxiety at bay. To this day, I don't know if it was the repetition  that is a part of Catholic Mass, the feeling of having a community who loved and accepted me, or something else about Catholicism  but something about it helped me cope with the anxiety that was becoming exponentially more crushing. Anxiety, depression, everything I was struggling with was Evil. I was certain of it.

But while I was coping with the anxiety, I was refusing to actually address it in a meaningful way. I was pulling the liturgical actions around me, taking comfort in their repetition and the ability to lose myself and forget about my issues in them. It wasn't enough. As my ability to square my intellect with Catholicism faded, my compulsions become more pronounced and less easy to control. As if losing faith in a personal God wasn't devastating enough, I was also slowly going crazy in the process. When, a year ago, I finally said out loud "I'm relatively certain there is no God" I went to pieces. I slept with the fire-extinguisher next to my bed so that when the house accidentally caught fire because I hadn't turned the stove off, I'd be able to put enough of it out to escape the house. Of course the burners weren't on. I had already checked them upwards of ten times. But giving up God meant giving up a purpose, it meant giving up any illusion of order and control in the universe. And I need that, even if it is an illusion. So the logical thing to do was to substitute a new illusion for the old one.

Constant checking behaviors are a pretty shitty substitute for a God who loves you.

***

Meditation has been bringing me gifts. 

I've refused the big ones. Promises of Enlightenment, of ending suffering, of living each moment in the present, these are all gifts it offers me. Granted, there's hard work involved, it makes no promises of these gifts being easy to earn. I'm not tempted by these promises. Rather, I'm tempted by them, certainly, but I'm not willing to accept them yet. For the time being, I'm content with the smaller things it's offering. A slower heart rate. Deeper breaths. Better sleep. 

I'm struggling quite a bit with meditation. It's a hard enough discipline to try to practice. Additionally, there's the guilt that comes with being an ex-Christian who's reading Buddhist scholars and taking introductions to zazen. The greatest struggle is to keep meditation from becoming a place to hide from my own anxiety, my obsessions and compulsions. There's a delicate balance here between learning to recognize anxious thoughts for what they are, addressing them, and moving beyond them and simply burying my mind underneath a mantra and being present to my breathing. 

***

It troubles me now that I thought of anxiety as Evil, if only for a little while. I suppose it explains why I went so long trying to conquer it on my own, or as "Kelly and God" kind of buddy-cop approach to mental health.  How arrogant, how wrong-headed an approach to getting better. Recently I came across the following passages in one of the Buddhist books I've been (a little guiltily) reading.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness  our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion. -The Wisdom of No Escape

In the end, I don't know where meditation and I will end up. It could wind up by the wayside with Catholicism  It may be a place to rest for awhile before moving on to something else. It may be that I accept the gifts meditation is offering me: a slower heart rate, deeper breaths, and better sleep, but also Enlightenment  of a life without suffering, of living in the present. Any of this is possible. But what I'm slowly, painfully learning is that anxiety is not Evil. Illness is not a something to hide from. Religion or spirituality alone are not going to fix me. The hard work of overcoming illness, of fixing myself, is something that I'm going to have to do.

That's a huge responsibility and a terrifying thought. But even if anxiety and OCD are problems for which I have to take responsibility and fix alone, I can do it with the gifts that both Catholicism and meditation have given me. A good night's rest is invaluable to an insomniac. The friends I've made at Catholic college and in graduate school love me in a way I would have never thought possible. The Zen group here in the North Country has provided me with resources I didn't even know existed. These gifts remind me that even though I must do the hard work of putting myself back together myself, I am not alone.

And when you're struggling to pick up the pieces of yourself and somehow put that shattered self-image back together that knowledge, that bit of connection means more than promises of eternal life or Enlightenment ever could.

 

Love, Knowingness, Bliss

In the category of slightly surreal:

I'm stretched out on my bed after a weirdly emotional reaction to a memory of an argument I had with my father. I have a blackout mask over my eyes so the light from my computer monitor won't distract me from my breathing. I'm listening to a well-known self-help-style guru guide me through the Heart Sutra. I'm trying desperately not to feel like some sort of spiritual hack--a horrible cliche of an ex-Catholic, ex-Christian trying to find some solace in Eastern Traditions. Here I am, a former student of theology in a tradition that prizes intellectual inquiry, a lover of science and proponent of the scientific method, engaging the most new-agey, ridiculous "I'm-spiritual-but-not-religious" activity I can imagine. I'm doing a meditation recommended by my therapist, not by my spiritual director. I can practically feel all my graduate school friends twitching in their sleep for reasons unknown to them

In the category of unsurprising:

I am "intensely cognitive, with a disconnect between my mind and my heart." Alternately, "I need to intellectualize everything with my giant fucking brain." I'll let you guess which words are mine. I've been told repeatedly, irritatingly, constantly, that my being intensely cognitive and prone to intellectualizing the shit out of everything is a coping mechanism, the result of dealing with an over-active and apparently out-sized amygdala dealing with a stoic Midwestern society.

"So what?" Has always been my response. Overly cognitive, I ask you. I search for logic flaws in my emotional reaction to things. If that's a coping mechanism (and I'm not entirely convinced it is) who fucking cares? It's not as if I'm taking drug or drinking or engaging in risky behaviors. Hell, I don't even smoke anymore. I'm still a high-functioning member of society even if it takes me two weeks to process an emotion. Big whoop.

This, I am told, is No Way to Live My Life.

In the category of unfamiliar:

The self-helpy meditation works. I mean, it really works. My breathing and pulse slow waaaaaaay down. I stop crying. When outside thoughts intrude on the mantra of "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love" I imagine them as wisps of blue-grey smoke drifting away. At the end of the meditation, I rip off my mask and shut off my computer. I still feel like a religious fraud, but I also drop almost instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep, a new experience for me.

In the morning, I have that gross-morning-after-some-big-mistakes feeling. I'm a little galled by the fact that a SELF-HELP guru's meditation ON SPOTIFY soothe me so completely. Can you get any more prosaic?

In the category of foolishness:

I suspect the universe is laughing at me. I want religion, faith, spiritual attainment to be one way. I want it to be Tenebrae at the Basilica. I want it to be Dante in the original Italian and scored by Mozart. I want it to be meditation in a Tibetan monastery as the sun rises over snow-capped mountains. I want spirituality and fulfillment not to have any relation to my amygdala or pre-frontral cortex or the amount of norepinephrine I produce. That's what I would like. What I suspect, what I know is that faith, for me at least, is not going to be found in front of a German high altar or a Vatican II church. Enlightenment is not going to happen at a Japanese Zen retreat house. Fulfillment will not come by renouncing all that I have and living retired from the hullabaloo of daily life.

Rather, these things are going to come about as the result of getting up every day and forcing myself to eat breakfast. Of going to work and doing my best. Of loving my family and friends and being kind to those around me. And much to my chagrin, what finally integrates my heart and my head, what finally makes me less intensely cognitive, less prone to intellectualizing, will not be dense theological treatises or transcendent moments meditating on the beach. It's quite possible that it will be crawling into bed each night and listening as a self-help-style guru repeats "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . .Love . . ."

Ashes

For Corein, some thoughts on hope, Ash Wednesday, and Lent

***

When I was 18, my AP English teacher--perhaps the adult I admired most--dropped the equivalent of a literary time bomb into my hands.

To this day I remember, with a cinematic amount of clarity, the three most important novels I've ever read. They were all novels he made me read and were novels that he told me would change my life. He was, of course, right. To this day I can remember lying in the grass of my parent's backyard and lazily finishing The Great Gatsby and feeling, for the first time, that I wanted To Be a Writer. I can remember the hum of my old dorm fridge as I curled in my favorite flowered armchair my second year in college and deciding that if I ever had I daughter I would name her Frances after Franny Glass's character. I remember being 18, angsty, looking forward to the conclusion of high school and leaving for college in the fall.

My AP teacher truly had a gift for understanding adolescents. In what I largely consider one of the greatest teaching decisions ever made, he gave a group of affluent suburban kids The Great Gatsby to study. And we talked at length about materialism and longing; greed and spiritual shallowness. As a relatively lower-middle-class kid in a school where 17-year olds drove BWM's and Audi's, Gatsby fascinated and repelled me. Fitzgerald's prose made me realize, finally, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing. Jay Gatsby scared me into discovering that I didn't want only wealth, possessions, notoriety. For four years I had watched the students around me get $400 prom dresses and expensive cars and thought that it was what I wanted. Gatsby forced me to think about wanting something else.

But the brilliance of this particular teaching decision is twofold. First, Gatsby. Second, Larry Darrell.

Larry is the protagonist of a largely under-appreciated novel by W.S. Maugham, The Razor's Edge. Outside of those of us who took AP English, I haven't run across many people who've read the book. I'll spare you an entire synopsis of the plot. Suffice it to say, it is one young man's quest for wisdom and spiritual fulfillment after WWI, costs be damned. It is a very ordinary little novel; certainly, Maugham's prose has nothing of Fitzgerald. But unlike The Great Gatsby it is a novel that haunts me not because of its style but because of its characters. It is earnest in a way that reminds you of every (sober) conversation you ever had after 2:00 AM in someone's dorm room, when questions of morals, ethics, and God all took on a kind of monumental importance. It's that kind of novel. It appealed tremendously to my 18-year old self. I was nothing if not earnest and was, more often than not painfully, sincere in that way you only seem to be during your adolescence.

***

I find myself missing Lent. I woke up yesterday with an inexpressible longing to go to church--to go to Catholic Church, actually and receive my ashes. It went so far that I actually called the local Cathedral and asked about distribution of ashes and mass. Then I saw one of those news stories that reminds me why I gave up Christianity, to say nothing of Roman Catholicism. 

I still miss Lent. 

I always liked Lent. I like any holiday that makes you stop and take stock of where you've been, where you are, where you want to be. I liked that, in a culture of indulgence and instant-gratification, there was still this tiny space where restraint and simplicity were held up as virtues. Where we were asked to take a long, hard look at ourselves and decide what is keeping us from spiritual progression. 

I've particularly always liked Ash Wednesday. As a Christian, I think I was supposed to find Easter the most meaningful. Afterall, what is death with the promise of Resurrection? But the outward symbols of Ash Wednesday, the external reminders of our own impermanence (remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return) and the subsequent examination of what in your brief life is important and what is expendable has always appealed to me. 

This is what I miss when I say that I miss Lent. When I chucked Christ's Resurrection by the wayside, I inadvertently chucked the possibility of my own resurrection--at least, as far as I've always understood it--along with it. And so, on a day where many of my friends are thinking about death and the resurrection I find myself just thinking about death.

It's less gloomy than it sounds, actually. Perhaps "thinking about death" isn't quite the right way to express it. I find myself thinking about impermanence. About what is important in this life. About what I want from life and who I want to be. This year, without the Resurrection to look forward to, without the assured promise of a tomorrow, I find that I am more interested in my actions right now. It's related to what I said two weeks ago in my post about grace and wanting to participate in my own salvation. I want my good deeds to count for something, and I want the life I lead in this world to count for something. Since I've decided to put the Resurrection on the shelf, such as it is, I find myself more preoccupied with figuring out how I want my life to matter here and now.

I feel a little closer to that 18 year old who was so moved by Larry Darrell and his quest for understanding and peace. It's funny. I've spent the past ten years trying to become more educated, cultivated, and worldly. The only thing I've become is less sincere. Somewhere in the process of growing up, I managed to forget that the life I was striving for wasn't exactly what I had set out to achieve. And of course, no one is the person they wanted to be when they were 18. You make choices and they have consequences. You compromise and rethink positions and sometimes you change for the better. And sometimes you look up from your mountain of work and social obligations, tests and oil changes, trips to the grocery store and fights with the guy you're dating and wonder "how in the hell did I get here?"

When I was 18 I marked heavily in my books. In my copy of The Razor's Edge this passage was the most heavily marked. It is one that I find running through my mind, today, when Christians everywhere are called to think of impermanence.

If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

I cannot, nor do I want to be the same person I was at 18. I've changed, and for the most part I am grateful for those changes. But today, thinking about impermanence and yes, about death, I can't help but long for the sincerity, for the earnestness I once had. I can't help but feel like they're here, somewhere, beneath the detritus of work and a life post-graduate school, underneath the piles of decisions and consequences and compromises and that if I am just patient enough, I'll be able to find them again. And that if I do, my own imperfect, impermanent life will be all the richer for having them back.

The Star-Gazer

This essay is, for me at least, the emotional companion to one I wrote a few months ago called “My Heart Don’t Wish to Roam” and posted here. By emotional companion, I mean that when I finished both pieces I cried and felt absolutely empty. I also struggled with posting both of them, because they involve deep feelings for people who are still in my life.

When I posted "My Heart Don't Wish to Roam," I was sick with nervousness. Lauren tried to calm me by saying, “Writing is by nature a pouring out of the heart” and assured me that people would understand my vulnerability in that post.

The nerves involved in posting that essay pale in comparison to anxiety I have surrounding this one. The things that are in this essay have been a part of my private life for such a long time that I am hesitant to make them public. The anger and frustration I talk about here have been an on-going part of my life for the past eighteen months. I cannot remember I time in my life that I wasn’t filled with doubt or skepticism. It’s now, finally, that I can begin to give these things a voice.

***

The Star-Gazer

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved stargazing.

Standing in my childhood backyard, far from any significant light pollution, I could look up and see thousands of stars. An insomniac for most of my life, I would often slip out of the house in the middle of the night to sit in the backyard and look at the sky. I was terrible at identifying or remembering constellations, but something about the night sky moved me beyond words.

Read mystical literature or talk to a person of faith and you’ll almost inevitably hear about a person’s conversion experience—the moment in their lives when they knew¸ definitively, that there was a God and that God loved and cared for them. Conversion, for all people of faith, is supposed to be an ongoing process rather than a specific moment in time. In my experience though, there are moments that stand out for many people. For Paul it was getting knocked off his horse. Augustine heard someone reading from the New Testament. I saw the Perseid meteor shower for the first time.

My best friend’s parents live in an even more remote location than mine. I spent so much time at their house that it became a second home to me. They had this beautiful backyard and a pier that Michelle and I spent a great deal of time on. During the day we would lie out and read and talk about boys and books. After her folks had gone to bed we would grab a blanket and go out and look at the stars and talk about what we wanted from our lives and our partners and our families. Late one August, she called and said, “the Perseid meteor shower peaks around 2:00 AM. Want to come over?”

If you’ve never seen a meteor shower at its peak, there’s nothing I can say to describe it accurately for you. It is, in a very literal way, breath-taking. When you’re in your early 20s, watching a meteor shower peak with your very best friend, it’s the kind of experience that sears itself into your heart. I don’t know if it was the emotional high of being with someone I loved tremendously during this intensely beautiful moment, or if it was actually a moment where God broke through the thin space, so to speak, but for the first time in my adult life I was utterly convinced of God’s presence in my life.

I wasn’t entirely sure what happened that night, but I knew that something inside of me had changed. I was, to use a phrase I hate, “on fire for God.” But easily three-quarters of the priests I knew as a child and young adult were Jesuits, and their personal charisms tended toward the intellectual. Consequently, I grew up with a “There is something here that doesn't make sense… let's go poke it with a stick” approach to Christianity rather than a strictly evangelical or deeply prayerful approach. God was Unknowable, certainly, but that didn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what we could while we were alive. Understanding God intellectually seemed at least as important to me as worshiping God or spreading the Good News. The best approach, then, would be to learn to know God through intellectual inquiry and the rest would follow.

I threw myself into the study of theology with all the zealousness of a first convert. I was lucky enough to attend a college that encouraged questions and wrestling with your faith. Unfortunately for me, an inherent part of those questions and that wrestling was a deep-rooted, nearly unshakable skepticism about everything from the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church to the historical necessity of the Incarnation. It was an exciting, if frustrating time in my life. Every time I began to grasp something intellectually, if felt like that experience with the Persid’s was slipping just a bit further away.

Thankfully, I also attended a college in a place where star-gazing could still very much be a part of my life. I still took quiet, late-night walks and if I couldn’t quite see the same number of stars I could in my backyard in Wisconsin, I could still see enough to remind me of that moment when God was so present to me.

I pursued theology through two Master’s degrees, for a total (including undergrad) of seven years in the same place thinking about God and the Church. I found myself taking fewer and fewer nighttime walks. 

When I did manage to slip out, I was usually accompanied by another student. Instead of looking up, I would argue with them about something from class or an issue raised by a text we had just read. I was still chasing down that feeling I had on the pier, but it seemed to be getting inexplicably further from me with each passing year.

I told myself that the problem was with me. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was clearly faking this whole thing.  I had a passion for the subject, certainly. But it was an intellectual passion more than a spiritual one. I loved arguing with students and professors who were clearly more intelligent than I was and earning their respect. When someone told me that I offered a good point or an excellent critique I felt dizzy. The part of me that was spiritually or emotionally connected to God shrunk every day, but I thought--I was convinced-- that if I could just get to a point where I could understand God and the Church intellectually everything else would fall into place. So I did what I had always done. I argued. I argued for things I was unsure of myself. I argued for the sheer joy of the intellectual challenge. I argued because I was terrified to admit to these people I loved and respected that I wasn’t sure if I believed in any of this. I argued with a vehemence and an unwillingness to bend that shocked me then and embarrasses me now. It was as though if I admitted my own doubts out loud, if I began to give even a little, the whole construction of the past seven years would come tumbling down. If I admitted that I didn’t know if God was Triune or when the human developed a soul, I wouldn’t know where to stop.

During that last year at grad school I was, frankly, a disaster. I was unspeakably angry most of the time. The worst part of it was that I wouldn’t—couldn’t really—talk about what was going on with the other budding theologians. With the other students, God was the first premise. They were all already (seemingly) past that question. Why waste time talking about it when we could talk about Cardinal Ratzinger’s eschatology or our dreams for what the Church could be? I had spent so long trying to convince myself that I believed this by convincing them that I believed it, that I was afraid of what would happen if I started to talk about doubt.

Try as I might to keep it together, I began to slip, bit by bit. The non-academic writing I did exhibited a great deal of my frustration. Any poem I tried to write was about doubt or God’s absence in my life. Prose pieces that I did were a conglomeration of invective against higher education and theology. I opted out of arguments with my atheist friends that I would have welcomed before. My mass attendance slackened and then stopped all together.

And then. Somewhere into this immense swirl of doubt, a friend emailed me a picture. That’s it. Just a photograph with the message: “I remember how much you like meteor showers. Thought you would enjoy this. It’s a meteor in the Mojave desert.”

When I opened it, I cried. Sitting alone in my crappy little grad school apartment in the middle of winter, I cried harder than I had in years. The memory of that night on the pier hit me stronger than it had in a long time and I just lost it.

The essay that I would like to write ends here, with me returning to church and to my studies with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and knowledge of God’s presence in my life.

That is the essay I would like to write.

The truth is that what I felt when I opened that picture was a deep and terrifying sense of loss. The God who was so present to me on that pier in August had now become a series of abstractions—definitive statements I could make in the presence of others without really believing in them myself.

I squeaked out of grad school with very little enthusiasm for my last months and with negligible Church attendance. For a long time, I felt incredibly guilty about this. I would try to go, and would sit in the back of Church feeling like I was radiating anger and hostility that the people around me could feel. I would go and leave early. I would go and wonder if anyone else in the church was feeling the same way. I would go because I was staying with friends and knew it was expected. 

I stopped. I just...stopped. I gave myself permission to stop attending and not feel guilty about it. I  haven’t voluntarily set foot into mass in nine months.

And, strangely enough, I’ve started to feel better. I’m not as angry anymore. I’ve stopped having arguments about women’s ordination or the place of lay theologians in the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve started going out at night to look at the stars again. I missed the Perseid meteor shower but stayed up to see Jupiter next to the moon. I meet with an astronomical society and look at deep-space photographs of far-off nebulae and try to wrap my head around the extent of the universe. I grieve, deeply, for the sense of God’s presence I had.

At the same time, there’s room here that there wasn’t before. There’s a calmness and a quietness that comes when I look up at the Aurora or catch a glimpse of a far off star in a telescope. I hope that, maybe in that place where questions of the Assumption and open communion are dwarfed by the birth of new stars and the limits of how we understand time, that I can start to find my way back.