Bookish

I'm not a great person to invite to parties.

When it comes to interacting with large groups of people I don't know outside of a professional setting, I am one of the shyest people to ever walk the planet. Put me in a professional setting and I can network like a madwoman. I shake hands. Hand out my business card. Remember all the interesting things I've read in the New York Times. I'm charming. Invite me to a dinner party with five people I don't know, and it's as if I've suddenly reverted to a better dressed version of my high-school self. I'm self-conscious. I have sweaty palms. My voice is always a few octaves too high. I'll be creepily silent until my inner monologue, hysterical from trying to remember how one makes conversation, will (apropos of nothing) burst out with "there are ice fountains on Enceladus!" Or "I saw Abraham Linclon's death certificate in a museum!" Or "On an atomic level you're not very different from that dog poop you just stepped in!" I will then laugh a nervous-high-pitched-oh-my-God-I-think-she's-a-serial-killer laugh and abruptly leave the conversation.

On Sunday, attending a barbeque, I had no fewer than three of these moments in a row. Devastated by my inability to simply calm down and interact like a normal human being and by the beer that I had spilled on my new dress, I skulked off to the kitchen. At least there I could do the dishes and have a legitimate reason for avoiding all the new people laughing in the backyard. When the screen door banged shut behind me I heard a familiar hello. Standing at the counter casually fixing a salad and blessedly not surrounded by strangers was an honest-to-goodness friend of mine. Someone who laughs at my jokes, has participated in more than one top 40 dance party, and has shared a beer with me. Someone who I somehow managed to meet without sounding like a psychopath or idiot-savant. At that moment, I was so pleased to see someone I knew I could hold a normal conversation with that I almost kissed him.

We caught up casually as he put together his salad. At one point I asked him if, a few months previous, I had discovered his love for The Great Gatsby, high-fived him, and recited the opening page of the book. I had. Thankfully, he's also a Gatsby lover and we started chatting about the upcoming movie and our disappointment in the way it appeared to be filmed. Before I knew it, the kitchen had a few other people in it, all of whom were enthusing over different aspects of the book and trashing on the film. I was pleased to discover that my voice had remained normal and that I wasn't running in the opposite direction or searching for something to to say. The conversation was effortless, the way it always seems when my slightly-hysterical self is when watching the way other people interact at parties.

***

I've been living in Minnesota for nearly ten years, all of my adult life, actually. I assume that everyone who lives here has read Gatsby at least once, the same way I assume that everyone's heard the Prince song "Raspberry Beret" or gotten over a broken heart by playing "Don't Think Twice" on repeat for two weeks. Reading Fitzgerald in his home state seems like a given, but I've recently discovered a whole host of people who have lived here for their entire lives and have never gotten around to reading it. I am absolutely unable to fathom this, but then again, I spend one Saturday morning every couple months sitting in Fitzgerald's old neighborhood, sipping coffee and pondering his life when he was still living here.

One of the images I've always loved from Gatsby is his vast, beautiful library full of unread books. I love the image because it's so odd and perfect. It's another thing I cannot fathom. I read constantly and more than a little obsessively. There have been more days than I can count where I will curl up in my armchair at 8 am in my PJs with the intention of reading a few chapters only to look up, blinking, at 9:30 pm. I realize that I've finished my book(s) but I've neglected not only to take out go to the grocery store and scrub the floors, but to change, eat, or brush my teeth. 

I would rather read than do any number of other things, which probably accounts for my social-awkwardness. I didn't realize the role it played in my life until my film-loving friends pointed it out. We were discussing the merits of Joss Whedon's Avengers  and he was trying to connect the movie to some other film I had seen.

"So, you've seen Avatar, right?"

"Uh, actually, I missed that one."

"Really? Ok, how about Inception?"

"Nope, missed that one too." 

"Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?"

Long awkward pause.

"Tell me you've seen Drive."

Longer pause.

"BUT YOU LOVE RYAN GOSLING!" 

"I have seen some movies recently!"

It's true. I have seen some movies recently, but they've all be based on books that I've read an loved. And, to be 100% honest, I go for the snarky, superior satisfaction of being able to say "Oh, well, in the book..." and then making some asinine observation on a tiny detail that only an obsessive fangirl would remember from the 3,000th time she's read something. In addition to being a terrible party guest, I'm a pretty shitty person to see movies with as well.

***

I've never thought of my reading habits as something that might need to be corrected, even when my parents used to yell at me for taking books to family parties and hiding in another room to finish them. I thought that I was catching up for lost time. I didn't learn to read until I was seven, and I still remember the exhilaration that came when I finished my first book at the appropriate reading level. When I eventually found my way to sci-fi and fantasy I found that I could inhabit worlds where I could be something extraordinary. They were worlds where a moral question wasn't whether or not I should copy my best friend's history homework when I forgot to do mine, but what to do when given the choice of absolute power and authority or an ordinary life. It's adolescent and escapist, but there's still a part of me that wants those things to be true. It's why I let myself get so wrapped up in these other worlds and forget to do every day things.

Yet at the same time, I want to be the kind of person you can invite to parties. The girl who can converse easily. The one who can strike up a conversation with someone at a bar rather than whipping out her Kindle and updating her Readability downloads. I don't really know if reading is the root cause of my social ineptitude, after all, Gatsby's books were all uncut and he was a solitary figure at his own parties. And I'm not certain if I really want to be the chatty, outgoing girl at parties, how to become her if I do, and if giving up the joy of reading 4,000 pages in a month is worth it.  I do know that when I was talking about all of these concerns with a friend she said "I just read a great book about that."

Neutrinos

Neutrinos


I know so little


about them 
aside from the fact
that they are 


tiny


beyond my ability
to comprehend.
And, that somehow
they make their way 
across


spacetime.


The result, I think,
of a reaction 
inside of the sun.


They are, apparently,
coursing through me
at this very moment.
By the billions
and billions and


billions. 


Stardust mingling with
stardust. 

Kindness

I love when objects have a story to go along with them. I have a friend like this. When you walk into her house, you can point to almost any object in her house and she can tell you the story about it. Some of them, particularly the ones regarding moving heavy pieces of furniture, are ridiculously funny. Others are moving and sad. There have been a few that have left me cocking my head and saying "huh?"

My life is not like that. I've been living a really transient life since I was 18, and have managed to acquire my fair share of stories, but very few of them are attached to objects. The objects that do have stories tend to be highly portable. My copy of The Brothers Karamazov has traveled the world with me. My copy of Extraordinary Chickens was a 25th birthday gift at my favorite birthday party from two people that I adore. My Tiffany necklace was a gift to myself after I finished my M.A. The things in my life that have really good stories connected to them could all fit into a small box. 

***

When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to be a nun. 

It's less surprising than it sounds, actually. I had just gone through a rather intense conversion experience, I was living near a Benedictine monastery and being educated by Benedictine nuns. I was seriously considering spending the rest of my life studying God, and what better place to do it than in community with a bunch of other like-minded women?

I went as far as having a series of conversations with the vocational director. She encouraged me to attend prayer with the sisters, think deeply about my own decisions and what God was leading me to, and to pray on my own.

That summer I was working in an organic garden and living with a few other women, most of whom were fellow theology majors. We were all earnest in our desire to understand and love God, and committed to living lives of justice and peace. Typical undergraduate high-mindedness, but it was one of the best summers of my life. When we were talking about the ethics of food production we were talking about religion, spirituality, or what it meant to be a feminist and a Catholic. Like I said, earnest. When I first started to talk about my desire to become a monastic one of my roommates said "You need to make a promise to yourself and to God that you're going to take this seriously. Even if you don't want to commit to a monastic life, you should take your commitment to theology seriously." 

I was a little bemused, but said, "All right. I promise to take this decision seriously." 

A week or so later she came home and announced that she had something for me. It was a sterling silver ring that I had been eyeing all summer. Justly sourced silver, of course, with a chunk of yellow-green amber in it. It was to be, we decided, an outward symbol of the decision I had committed to making. 

The situation sounds a little strange to me now, but one of the things that has always attracted me to Catholicism is the symbolism behind many of the ritual actions. When the priest dons his vestments each one of them has symbolism and ritual. When babies are baptized the water and oil carry significance. We have all of these outward symbols to remind us of (at least, the way I've always understood it) the many ways in which God's love and grace are part of the world we inhabit. 

Even after I decided against the monastery, I continued wearing the ring. It reminded me, even on my most secular days, that I wanted to understand and love God. 

***

I am not a kind person.

In the past few months I've had a difficult series of conversations with the people with whom I had the biggest, angriest, knock-down, drag-out fights about Christianity and Atheism. The conversations have consisted of my having to say (through various media) "hey, remember how I used to yell at you about how wrong you were? Turns out, I'm closer to your side of things than I thought."

Have I mentioned that I'm not great at apologies?

Thankfully the people receiving these emails or phone calls have all been astonishingly gracious and kind. They have been much kinder than I deserve. They've asked me about my emotional reaction to my change in worldview and have given me space to talk about how painful it has been to give up my faith and how awe-inspiring it is to think about the utter improbability of my own existence. Their responses have made me think of what my own would have been, were our situations flipped.

I was not pleased to discover that I probably would have been jubilant at best and smugly unbearable at worst. The more I reflected on what my own reactions would have been, the more uncomfortable I became. Once that kind of self-reflection started, I began to meditate on the way I treat people--not the people I love and care about, but the people who irritate me. The ones I find challenging. The people who say things opposed to my political/spiritual/social ideologies. I am terribly unkind to these people, in the way that I dismiss what they have to say, in the things I say to them directly, and in the stories I tell about them after I meet them. Of all of the flaws I suspected in myself, unkindness had never been one of them.

***

I still wear the ring my roommate bought me. And when I look at it, I still think about my commitment to find, love, and understand God. But I alternate that ring with another one that I had made recently. It's supposed to represent the Big Bang. The first reminds me of what I wanted to know, the desire that I had to understand my place in the universe. The second, new ring reminds me of who I want to be.

That may sound a bit backwards, but it's the truth. In the conversations I've had lately, in thinking about the importance of a symbol to represent commitment, in deciding that I'm going to dedicate the next-however-many years of my life to studying the universe, I've realized that I have to take responsibility for how I treat people here, now. If I really believe that this life is all there is, I have a responsibility to the universe to understand it as best I can, and I have a responsibility to the people in my life to treat them with more kindness, understanding, and respect. 

The next time I move, these two rings, along with my bible, my copy of Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, The Brothers Karamazov and Tiffany's necklace will all be in the same box. And here's the thing I learned about this box. These things, these highly portable objects are not just a record of who I was, but they are a remind of who I want to be become. The beauty of these objects is that their stories, like that of the cosmos, like the story of the Christian faith are for the most part, still unwritten.

Stardust

Stardust
(for Kerry, with gratitude)


For weeks now, riding the bus,
listening to the radio, chopping vegetables
for dinner, I have paused to wonder
Is this it? I know the answer is probably
yes.

I am made of exploded stars.
Most days, that keeps me
sufficiently in awe
of my own existence.

There are times, though, when
that alone should be enough.
But isn't.

Perhaps, says my friend Kerry,
this is all there is. And perhaps
there will be days when stardust
just doesn't feel like quite enough.

But it's also possible
that this universe
is just one of many
paper lanterns
strung up along
God's back porch.

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.