blogging

Losing my religion, finding my faith

It is my distinct honor to welcome Kristen from Motherese to this space today. Kristen’s blog is one of those I admire most, for her lucid and intelligent probing of questions so relevant to me I often feel she dug them out of my brain. Kristen is dear to me, too, for leaving me one of the comments here that has meant the most to me. It turns out we have a personal connection that neither of us knew, and I love that we found each other through the ether first.

Kristen writes beautifully about questions of identity, politics, parenting, and living in this world.  Her posts are shot through with personal reflection and every single day she makes me think.  Her essay here talks about something that is much on my mind of late: faith.  I am certainly grappling with some big questions of belief in my life: I feel often as though I’m groping around in the dark, occasionally grabbing something solid or feeling a truth, as gentle as a moth’s wing, brush against my cheek.  As I grope, I feel lost but am propelled forward by a distinct, unavoidable longing for something.

I’m delighted and blessed to have her words here today.  Please go check out Motherese.  You won’t regret it

Losing my Religion, Finding my Faith

We worry. We wonder. Anxiety steals our sleep.

I worry, too. I worry all the time.

I worry about forgetting lines to plays that I am not in. I worry about forgetting to mail a mortgage payment. I worry about passing a fifteen-year-old calculus exam. I worry about my dad embarrassing me with an uncouth comment.

I worry that Big Boy will have another meltdown at tumbling class. I worry about what the other mothers will think of me when he does. I worry about why my son would behave that way. I worry about how I will handle it.

These are the shades of my worry.

But there are other shades, too, shades that don’t cast an inky penumbra over my mind.

I don’t worry about dying young. I don’t worry that the world will end before my kids grow up. Even in the face of graphic evidence of the possibility of calamity, I don’t worry about catastrophe – natural, economic, interpersonal.

I have always thought of myself as a neurotic person, as a woman whose days are sketched in anxiety and colored in worry. But recently it occurred to me: I do worry, but I worry about the small things. I do not worry about the big ones. I worry about my performance, about how it will be evaluated. But about the most important things? The life-altering, life-threatening, life-crushing things? I don’t worry.

Instead, I practice random acts of blindness, never allowing these deeper, soul-shaking worries to penetrate my bedrock of faith.

And this is a strange revelation for me. After all, I am an agnostic. I am not a religious person anymore. But I still have a sense of subconscious serenity honed, I think, through an early commitment to religious practice. I grew up with a traditional religious education: I went to Catholic school for nine years and went to church every Sunday, loving the rituals and the singing, the candles and the community. I was never sold on the dogma – on transubstantiation, the ascension, the Holy Trinity. But I believed. I believed in the benevolent, white-haired gentleman. And I prayed to him every night before bed. I confessed my white lies and my gray doubts. I asked him to protect me, to look after my family. And – it seemed – he did.

My family faced its share of health problems. People we loved died. But my own life – and my own experience of it – seemed to take place in its own sort of numinous space.

In my adult life, some bad things have happened to me. I have faced illness, high-risk pregnancies, and physical violence. But I have never doubted my fundamental security.

I don’t spend time these days talking to that white-haired man. I don’t ask for intercession or for forgiveness. Now I am more a veteran of religious practice, with a medal of faith pinned to my chest, a talisman against the deepest doubts.

I am the seasoned traveler in Christina Rossetti’s “Up-Hill”:

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

In this life – this entropic life – I feel safe.

But now a new worry sprouts: how will my sons, children of an agnostic mother and an atheistic father, unschooled in religion, never steeped in belief, find their safety? Without faith, will the monsters of worry call to them from under their beds and from behind their closet doors?

Do you worry about the small things or the big things? What role does faith play in shielding you from worry?

The Help Haiti Blog Challenge

My dearly beloved Kelly Diels twittered me last night and asked me to participate in her Help Haiti Blog Challenge.  She asks that we all think about how we can contribute, whether it is a service or a good or our time.  And yes, yes, yes I say.

Last night Matt informed me that he had been online giving a family donation to his firm’s fund for Haiti (which they match!  Yay!) and Grace asked him what he was doing.  He explained to her what happened and she apparently turned and ran downstairs in silence.  She returned holding a crumpled dollar bill and gave it to him, saying she wanted to give her own money too.  This story, told to me when I got home, made me cry.  I am so fiercely proud of this behavior.  Grace has exactly $11 to her name ($10 now) and each dollar has been earned the hard way (usually by losing teeth).  I find the fact that, without hesitation, she wanted to share some of her treasured piggy bank store, overwhelmingly poignant.  I’m actually not sure I’ve ever been so proud.

I am going to follow in the footsteps of my friend Aidan on this one.  Pursuing an idea she and I have talked about in other ways, I will donate $2 for every comment left on this blog between now and Monday morning, January 18th. Please come comment.  Please.  I will donate to Partners in Health, whose story so moved me in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains.

My favorite line from that book seems an apt way to close this plea:

The idea that some lives matter less than others is at the root of all that is wrong with the world.

They don’t.  Those people are our people.  As Gracie told me this morning, chin trembling, she could imagine being hurt or without a house or without her mother.  And she wanted to help the children who wake up that way this morning.  And so do I.  Please help.

Best of 2009: Gwen Bell blog challenge

Yesterday: Challenge: Something that really made you grow this year. That made you go to your edge and then some. What made it the best challenge of the year for you?

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, marinading in the question and wondering how to express the challenges of this year. I don’t think there was a specific new challenge this year. Instead, I’d say a lifelong challenge has made itself newly urgent. I’ve been dogged for years with a nagging anxiety about my inability to really live in the moments of my life. This is surely both a symptom of and partially caused by my extreme multi-tasking. I rarely do one thing at a time. Almost never. I write in my head while I listen to songs while I run. I play tetris and read google reader while on conference calls. I pack lunches and empty the dishwasher and feed my children breakfast and mentally organize my day.

In the last few years this multi-tasking has started to fall apart in some small but inescapable ways. I’ll check my voicemail, remember that I had five messages, and hang up the phone with no idea what two of them were. I’ll walk into a room and not recall why I’m there. I’ll pour the wrong kind of milk in the wrong kid’s cereal. Etc. It’s made me wonder what I’m trying to escape by always doing several things at once. What am I afraid of? What am I hurrying from, and to?

But far more important than my lack of focus collapsing is my intense and growing awareness of what I’m missing. I’ve written before of my children that “their very bodies trace the inexorable forward motion of time.” For some reason, in the last year, the bittersweetness of this forward motion has become almost unbearable for me. Regrets have piled up in every corner: regrets about the things that I wasn’t really there for. And the sad part? I’m almost always physically there. Even though I work, it’s part-time and I am around my kids a lot. It’s the emotional and mental presence that I lack. Be Here Now? I can’t. I want to, desperately, but oh WOW is it hard for me.

I started thinking about this in a focused way over the summer, and these thoughts coalesced into an interview series I am doing on this blog called Present Tense. I’m talking to women I admire, women who I know juggle multiple identities and manifold demands, women who I know fret about and aim to be more conscious and present. I’m learning a lot from their answers, finding my reactions to and reflections on their words telling and instructive. I hope my readers are too. In truth, though, this is as much for me as for anyone. I am trying, I really am – trying to crank back the gears in my own head and heart by sheer force of will. I hope that the words and the thinking are a means to meaningful change in behavior and perspective, instead of (as my fearful heart sometimes whispers) a way of actually avoiding concrete shifts.

So this 2009’s challenge, and, I’m sure, that for 2010 as well. And beyond. I imagine this is a lifetime effort. Perhaps 2009 brought the awareness that I really want to live in the minutes of my life. After all, I know now that the meaning is in the minutes. One thing Present Tense has helped me see, though, is that it’s impossible (for me) to be present, fully engaged and aware, all the time. That is like staring into the sun. The emotional vulnerability of being fully present, fear of which no doubt contributes to my challenge in doing so, is such that I cannot do it all the time. I would burn my retinas, and my heart might explode.

Still, at least some of the time, I want to let go, turn off my brain, and fall backwards like in the Trust Fall at my camp years ago, believing that the net of my life will catch me.

Turning 35, realizing my children are growing out of their smallness, pouring whole milk onto my dairy-hating daughter’s Cheerios: these and many other wake-up calls have joined into a single, screaming message whose insistency I cannot ignore. Now. Now. Now. Like a drumbeat or a pulse, I cannot hear anything else. Now. Now. Now.

Sugar Doll: Drama for Mama

Kristen delighted me the other day when she honored me with the Sugar Doll Award. Kristen has been one of my most favorite discoveries in the blogging community I feel tremendously fortunate to have stumbled upon. I found her – I think! – though a comment on my blog and immediately fell head over heels for her frank, intellectual, incisive take on issues big and small. I love her voice: she pushes my thinking on a daily basis but does so in a warm way, with great empathy and compassion. She is brutally honest, impressively well-read and clearly brilliant, and furthermore she is a dear friend of one of my all-time favorite people (which I did not know when I stumbled upon her blog – oh small world in the massive wilderness of the internet).

I am utterly undeserving of her praise and find myself wondering daily how someone so thoughtful and wise can find any meaning in my rambling writing here. But she says she does, and that goes a long way to propping up my fragile self confidence. Thank you, Kristen! Please, go read Motherese: you won’t be disappointed.

And now it is my honor to pass on the Sugar Doll to another relatively new and absolutely wonderful blog discovery: Drama for Mama. Meet Becca. She writes with vivid detail and a great sense of humor about her life mothering two small children. She writes about her daughter’s obsession with car brands and what that means, about how her son is still a mystery to her while she sees strands of herself and her husband in her daughter, about hthe fear that she may have permanently lost some brain cells along the way somewhere, and about her long-ago restaurant Thanksgiving and what that made her realize about what the holiday means.

I laugh at almost every one of Becca’s posts. What I think is most notable is her ability to describe concrete details of life with small children and to see the enormous life lessons in the everyday. Yes. Amidst the red pepper slices and the visible thongs and the initiation into the American Girl Way there is also conversation about what it means to be really happy and the nature of friendship and belonging. This combination of mundane and meaningful echoes precisely the unruly bunch of thoughts that make up my days, and that is probably why I feel so drawn in and welcomed by Becca’s writing.

To be flanked in this metaphorical way by Kristen and Becca is my privilege indeed. Please go read their words – I promise you will laugh, you might cry, and your world might well shift. All three of those things happened to me from finding them. Thank you both.

Now I will start thinking about my Ten Things You Don’t Know About Me. And you too, Becca! I can’t wait to read them.