Clawfoot

Clawfoot

Tonight in the bath with a glass of scotch
some bubbles and soft music
and a book on quantum mechanics
I began to think of my old clawfoot tub
And all of the Friday night soaks
we used to take when my roommates were gone.

How we drank cold Riesling when it was hot
and splashed in cool water until it warmed.
And drank hot, spiced wine when the windows
frosted over and we shivered when we got out
and raced to the bed where the heating pad
was warming the space between the sheets.
As if we needed it.

About the time I fell asleep against your chest
and you gently shook me awake and we went to bed.
How the water ran hot enough to turn our skin pink.
I remembered the rubber duck we named Alfred
(you took him along when you left)

That time when, after changing the razor's blade,
your hand slipped and we both watched shimmering droplets
of blood mixing with the bubbles before either of us
thought to reach over the side for a towel.
How, afterward, you murmured "I love you"
into my ear and I sat up so quickly water
sloshed over the edge of the tub.

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.

Lead Me Home

On New Year's Eve I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car, sniffling with my fourth cold of the year and listening to my chauffeur for the evening talk about how she missed religious Sundays. This woman is one of my oldest and dearest friends and quit Roman Catholicism while I was still trying to find a way that combined "radical feminist and egalitarian" with "a hierarchy that uses flawed theology to mask its fear and mistrust of women." Needless to say, I've stopped making the attempt to reconcile the two.

The conversation was a soothing one. We both confessed that our Secular Sundays lacked a sense of community and a sense of purpose and belonging that our weeks had when we were both practicing Christians. It may be the result of years of indoctrination in a particular faith, but we both agreed that our Sundays were lacking depth. However, we both also agreed that returning to Christian churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, was an impossibility. That ground has been pretty well razed and salted. We eventually arrived at our destination and put an end to the conversation.

She's departed to finish an internship abroad and I'm left muddling through my own Sundays as best as I know how. Sundays generally include the Sunday New York Times, copious amounts of coffee, baking, cooking, and fiction reading. They're quiet and peaceful and have settled into a routine I truly enjoy. Lately, in addition to all of these things, my Sundays have included a playlist titled "Better than Church."

You see, despite giving up Roman Catholicism, Jesus, and feeling well on my way to giving up the idea of a personal God, I cannot drop Gospel music. I was never one for the organ-based hymns played at the church where I attended graduate school (this particular community could make "How Can I Keep from Singing" sound like a dirge) and I equally loathed anything that sounded like Christ-pop, but Gospel music has long been a part of my life.

As a theology student, I was passionately interested in grace, in the efficacy of the sacraments, and the mechanics of salvation. I thought of salvation as a kind of equation, something like: SALVATION=human sinfulness-Christ's sacrifice +the sacraments+(good deeds+living the faith(?)) I was told many times that salvation was a mystery explained (somehow) by Christ's willingness to be tortured to death, but I was always a little confused by the argument. I arrogantly wanted to be a part of my own redemption, and not just because I participated in the sacraments or professed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I wanted the life I was trying to lead count for something--anything in that equation--regardless of whether or not I was a Christian. Even then I doubted my own sincerity when participating in the sacraments and wanted redemption, somehow, to not be wrapped up in my identity as a Christian.

Gospel music has always brought these questions of grace and redemption forward for me in a way that other religious music can't. I may be moved by the beauty of Mozart's Requiem Mass or repulsed by any religious music played on an electric guitar, but they never make me pause to consider my salvation. But even on my most secular mornings, hearing Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash sing "On the Far Side Banks of the Jordan" makes me long for some kind of certainty about my after life.

***

Driving home today Elvis's cover of Amazing Grace came on my radio. It's a fraught song for me and one that's part of my DNA, so to speak. I remember my maternal grandmother helping me to pick out the first notes of the song on her old piano. When she passed, I inherited both her piano and the songbook with the sheet music and the lyrics. I learned the words and the melody to the song long before I ever learned what they meant. It is a song that I can rarely hear without crying, partially because of family history and partially because the lyrics to the song are so powerful and something that I want to believe with every bit of me, but can't.  

I'd spent the weekend with graduate school friends, something that I always enjoy, but inevitably leads to some intense conversations about faith and how I've been doing. I wasn't particularly in a mood to think about redemption and I certainly was not in the mood to cry while driving down the highway. But ultimately, it was this particular version of the song that kept my hand from the seek button. It's a magnificent rendition of the song, and it had been awhile since I had heard it. 

Something happened this time. Instead of listening and hearing a message of love and redemption that felt like something I was excluded from, I listened with a strange kind of calmness. I didn't think about Church or salvation or heaven and how in the hell I'm going to get there as a skeptic. I thought about the generosity and love in the people I had just left. I thought about my grandmother and the fact that I can't sit down at my piano without remembering her fondly. I thought about my family and my best friend and the gift of a place that is finally beginning to feel like home.

When the song ended I realized that I am not comfortable calling these things grace. That word is still a complicated one for me, still wrapped up in a conception of redemption and salvation that require an equation to be explained. But despite not knowing what to call these things, on this particular Sunday, they managed to balance the equation and give a little more weight to the day.

For the time being, that may be grace enough.

Omnia mutantur Nihil interit

From the moment I first saw Never-Ending Story until my late adolescence, I knew that there was something special about me.

Like the well-written heroine of any fantasy world, I was never entirely sure what was special about me. Some days whatever it was felt like a curse more than a blessing. I felt distinctly uneasy throughout many of my formative years. There was something slightly off with the world I inhabited. The fact that I couldn’t understand what it was upset me deeply.

When I was very young, my older brother told me I was adopted (an absurdity if you’ve ever seen me next to my mother.) It was typical older brother teasing, but I took him seriously. In his defense, I said the same thing to my younger brother when he was small.

Secretly, I hoped that I was adopted. It wasn’t that I was unhappy as a child—on the contrary. There are times when my childhood seems to picturesque that I have to wonder if it really happened the way I remember it. By all accounts I was a joyful, if quiet, kid with a loving and supportive family (run-of-the-mill sibling teasing and squabbles aside.) I loved my parents, my brothers, our home, my summers on the lake, but I still wanted to be special. I was absurdly preoccupied with being different.

When I listen to friends now talking about how they're keeping their girls away from Disney princesses or their boys away from violent toys, I wonder if perhaps they're missing something. My childhood was full of Disney princesses and video games, and neither of which seem to have had much an impact on me.  No, those things may be (and might have been) harmful, but there’s no possible way they can equate to handing a quiet, smart, shy kid a book of fantasy. Add to the mix a middle-child already convinced that she's magical, special, different, and you have the beginnings of a life-long obsession.

By the time I was thirteen, I could name the Elven rings of power, explain the significance of making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, and eagerly anticipated the release of each new Harry Potter book. These were the outward manifestations of my inner nerd, and even when I tried to clamp down on them, I couldn’t bring my nerdy tendencies under control. It wasn’t a question of the things you would normally think of when raising a nerdy child—I was a horrible procrastinator when it came to school and if the homework wasn’t reading fiction or poetry I had no interest in doing it. I didn't want to learn to build a robot or write a computer program or draw a comic book.  I had excellent friends throughout my childhood and adolescence, went out on the weekends and socialized. I have never played World of Warcraft.

No, I didn't do any of those things, but I did read extensively, obsessively. Books and fantasy stories were about the narrative I had already begun to construct for myself. I had convinced myself that I was special—there was something new and different and important about me. I was going to change the world in an astounding, dramatic, superhero sort of a way. I was just waiting for my mutation to manifest itself (C’mon, Jean Gray-esque powers!) or my family to reveal that we had descended from a long line of female demon-slayers. Something had to be different about me.

It goes without saying that none of those things happened. I’m not a caped and masked avenger, a protector of the weak, or a preserver of innocence. I’ve never been able to manipulate the space-time continuum, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to building a robot that will lead to A.I.’s eventual takeover was a (largely unsuccessful) trebuchet I built in graduate school.

Even if I gave up the desire to be a superhero or a wizard, I never lost the desire to stand out, to be something apart from my peers. But the avenues for distinguishing yourself as a responsible adult are far fewer and far less dramatic than being a Time Lord or the Sandman. I knew for certain that I was too dreamy and too disorganized to distinguish myself in the corporate world. I have zero artistic talent and my basic grammar skills are appalling, so life as a painter or a writer was certainly out. In light of these things, I decided that the best way to set myself apart would be as an academic.

As I’ve said before, I went into graduate school with a mixed bag of intentions. Some were religious, others academic, and some were merely me trying to play to my strengths. The way to become extraordinary was to work my hardest academically and eventually come to some astoundingly original, beautiful insight that would not only change the way I thought about God personally, but how the world thought about God. Humble? Not in the slightest. But it was certainly a step down from spending all of my time wishing that I could save the world.

I was not a great graduate student. According to my grades, I was certainly bright enough. But I was unable to really turn myself over to my work. I could never lose myself in theology the way my peers seemed to do with such ease. Thankfully, the Ph.D. programs to which I applied seemed able to suss that out from my applications. I was turned down from academia with a speed that astonished and appalled me.

One of the central part of any fantasy novel is watching the hero or heroine get beat down relentlessly. However, you push through the obligatory narrative kick-in-the-shins because you know that somewhere down the road there’s redemption. The heroine will pick herself up and dust herself up and be the stronger for what she just endured. That seemed to be where I was in my personal fantasy narrative.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t pick myself up and try again. I didn’t attempt to do anything of the kind. I accepted that I was bested and moved on. I did what superheros and fantasy heroines never do. I gave up. 

One of the reasons I took a job in a city apart from my friends and family was because I felt like I needed to start over. I needed a new narrative for my life. At twenty-six, I had to come to grips with a realization that most people make before the end of their adolescence. 

I am ordinary. 

As I said, it's unlikely that I'm secretly the protagonist in an epic fight against evil and haven't realized it yet. But more than that, I've realized that I'm not going to be an academic, looked up to my scads of adoring students and changing the hearts and minds of my peers. I'm unlikely to write a best-selling novel or win a MacArthur Genius Fellowship or the Nobel Prize. It's been a sad realization. And a difficult one. 

Another of the biggest tropes in fantasy writing is the change that a heroine goes through during the course of her journey. She's not the same woman who began the quest. Sometimes the change is dramatic (death, becoming an angel because the writers for your show are idiots, waking up in a not-so-distant future with thirty-some-odd personalities in your head) and sometimes it's just that the heroine learned to how to live in a new world with a different sense of rules. 

I've written a lot lately about the gifts that a life of nerdiness has given me. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the knowledge that a person changes, sometimes profoundly, throughout the course of any narrative. They're different at the end of the story, but something of the person they were persists. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Something of the girl-who-wanted-to-be different persists in the heroine of my own YA fantasy novel, my desire to save the world has led to a commitment to girls and young women in my professional life. Something persists. I may not be a superhero, I may not even be extraordinary, but for the first time in my life, it seems as though being ordinary is finally, totally, enough.

 

Books, Resolutions, and the New Year

I am terrible at New Year’s resolutions. I can’t remember what my resolution was for 2011, or even if I had one. Typically my New Year’s Eve’s tend to involve something like half a bottle of Chilean wine and some horribly depressing movie (No Country for Old Men or The Company of Men were two memorable ones.)

However, in the past few weeks as I’ve been working on wearing out my library card, I hit upon a resolution that feels like a good fit. As I’ve been crossing books off of my reading list, I realized that I couldn’t remember all the books I’ve read in the past year. Tragic, I know. After digging through Amazon receipts, library records, and facebook photos (I knew that taking pictures of the books I’m reading would pay off sometime!) I managed to construct a pretty complete list of books I read in 2010. It hit me that it’s about time I started actually keeping track of what I read and what I thought of it, something I’m also hoping will keep me writing on a more consistent basis. I write so much for work that by the time I get home I’m unexcited about writing. Hopefully reading will inspire some writing.

That said, I think I might as well make some reading resolutions. Apparently in the past year I managed about 35 books, not counting rereading (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, The Great Gatsby were all reread in 2011) or school reading. I think 35-ish is all right for having been in graduate school for four of the past twelve months, finding a new job, and relocating. Next year I intend to go for 47 (an extra book a month) and hereby resolve to try to read more nonfiction. It’s not a guarantee, but I managed to find a few bits of nonfiction that really appealed to me in the past year (David Grann’s writing in particular.) I’m also going to attempt to read some huge books in the next year, including Life and Fate and some Chekov. I’ve also decided (God help me) to tackle Moby Dick if I get a Kindle for Christmas.

All of that said, I should probably say a bit of something about what I read.

Sandman was my absolute favorite. I fell in love with Neil Gaiman after the first 25 pages of American Gods (which was also wonderful), but Sandman hit me so hard and so fast that before I knew it, I was reading The Wake and crying my eyes out. It was unexpected, amazingly written, and breathtakingly illustrated. It is, hands down, the one comic book I would give to anyone who disses comics as low-brow (or who loves comics and hasn’t read it.) It is, quite simply, one of the most imaginative, provocative, and moving stories I've ever read in my life. 

As an aspiring young adult fantasy author, The Hunger Games trilogy was amazing. Hell, as a reader in general, The Hunger Games trilogy was amazing. When it comes YA fantasy fiction, girls get the shaft. There are way, way fewer smart, resourceful, kick-ass heroines than there are heroes. Katinss Everdeen is the kind of girl I’ve wanted to be for my entire life. Eventually I'm planning an extended entry on Sandman and why it's so wonderful, but I need some more time to think on it before I sit down to that piece. 

On the non-fiction front, Tina Fey made me laugh so hard I nearly peed my pants. David Grann’s writing is full of twists and incredible investigative reporting. Capote scared the crap out of me with In Cold Blood.

Now, without further ado, the somewhat-complete-list of reading I did in 2011.

American Gods (Gaiman)

In Cold Blood (Capote)

Anansi Boys (Gaiman)

Dune (Herbert)

2010 Nebula Awards Showcase

Dune Messiah (Herbert)

The Wandering Fire (Gavriel Kay

The Summer Tree (Gavriel Kay)

Bossypants (Fey)

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz)

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (Sedaris)

Kill Shakespeare (McCreery, Del Col)

Hunter’s Run (Martin)

Sandman (Gaiman)

The Archer’s Tale (Cornwell)

Angelology (Trussoni)

The Sparrow (Russell)

If You Have to Cry, Go Outside (Cutrone)

Woman in the Dark (Hammett)

Generation Kill (Wright)

Coraline (Gaiman)

The Hunger Games (Collins)

Catching Fire (Collins)

The Mockingjay (Collins)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson)

The Girl Who Played with Fire (Larsson)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Larsson)

A Visit From the Goon Squad (Egan)

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (Grann)

The Lost City of Z (Grann)

The Commitment (Savage)

Stardust (Gaiman)

How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (Yu)

The Pirate King (King)

Fables (Willingham)

1

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.

Geek Trends 1.0

In a recent email, Lauren told me that she can't wait to find out what the new geek trend is. We had been discussing (via email. And text. And Facebook.) my utter infatuation with the radio dramas on BBC Radio 4 and how angry I am that I can't access the BBC the way someone in Britain can.

When I become a fan of something I become an excessively dorky fan. Whether it's a new author, a podcast, or a television show, when I get excited about something I get a little obsessive about it. I imagine that it's either excruciating or charming to go out for a drink with me, depending on how much you like me and/or how much you like the current topic with which I am enamored.

So, here's what's on my plate this week. What I would be talking about relentlessly over drinks, if I lived close enough to have a drink with you. That would be nice, wouldn't it?

5. Longform.org. Remember when reading an article used to require a physical magazine or a newspaper? Longform.org rounds up new and classic non-fiction that’s “too long or too interesting to be read on a web browser.”

4. Dessa’s “Palace”: I love Dessa. Anyone who can spit “Chicago Manual of Style” in a song that also includes Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allen Poe ranks pretty high in my book. Her new album drops on October 4^th and I’m so excited for it I can barely keep it together. Palace is a great first single off the album. Bonus: Check out “Dutch,” the song that made me fall for Dessa hard.

3. Apod.nasa.gov: Really. With photos like this one of September’s aurora, and my love of space, this isn’t even that big of a question.

2. BBC’s Hawking: My deepest apologies to The United States, but the BBC totally won me over this week. The short film Hawking made me cry at eight distinct points during a ninety-minute movie, a feat that has only been matched by "The Journey’s End" episode of Doctor Who. It’s an introduction to Hawking’s early years at Cambridge as well as the onset of Lou Gerhig’s disease. It’s brilliant and beautifully acted and available on youtube.

1. BBC Radio 4’s dramatization of Life & Fate: If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook or if you have the fortune (good or ill) to be a close friend of mine, you’ve been inundated since Monday with posts/tweets/ texts about this dramatization. In case you’ve somehow managed to miss all of the above let me be absolutely clear. This is the best thing I’ve heard on the radio in years. It is by turns horrifying, moving, profoundly disturbing, and is always beautifully acted. I haven’t made it through an episode without holding my breath or crying—most of the time I do both. The series is supposed to be listened to in order, but some of the episodes work as stand alone episodes. If you really refuse to do the right thing and give this the listen it deserves, listen to the episodes: “Anna’s Letter,”  “Journey,” and “A Hero of the Soviet Union.”

Still not convinced? The novel was considered so subversive that it was confiscated by the KGB—they even confiscated the typewriter ribbons from Grossman’s typewriter. It was finally smuggled out via microfilm in 1974 and started appearing in the West in the 1980s.

If you listen to anything  in the next year, make sure it’s Life and Fate.