disenchanted april

Oh dear, it has been such a terribly long time since I’ve posted. I do mean to pick up more frequently once the semester is over. I have a lot I’m thinking about, feeling, toying with on a personal level that I really want to write about, but the personal level of my life is just not enough to score a Ph.D. with, so it is getting pushed to the end of the priority list these days.

This last part of my last semester of classes is killing me, actually. I feel like a runner at the end of a marathon (even though it’s really just the end of the first part of the marathon) and I need people at the sidelines cheering me on. I just want to throw in the towel. That being said, there has been good news on all fronts: I got a teaching fellowship for next year, and will be teaching World Religions not only at my school but also where I went to seminary, over the summer. The fellowship is particularly good as it means salary. Not a big salary, not even a half-time salary really, but enough, certainly, to revolutionize our finances. Man, it was such a relief to get that acceptance letter.

Several situations have been touching my heart recently: a neighbor’s mom who will be dying very soon at an extremely young age and leaving behind, among other things, her 3-yr-old granddaughter, a difficult situation in my family which caused me great pain (and derailed my diet – stupid emotions), and, of course, the continuing and developing relationship with our housemates. In a nutshell, I’m reflecting on the following things, all of which will get their own blog posts come May 3 (sacred holy day of my last day of coursework)

- feeling called to pray  – and starting to make sense of that

- the danger with saying that darkness can be a gift – and wondering if its ever safe to say it

- my increasing feeling of “rightness” with liturgical ministry – but nothing else remotely pastoral

- the (slight) softening of my own resistance to afterlife

I hope some of you will hang in with me until I get to write about these things. I think one other thing I’m wrestling with on the sidelines of my soul is writing. I feel more and more that academic writing is not my strength – not because I’m bad at it (I’m okay at it) but because I feel like I might be more of a self-expresser than a persuasive arguer. When I was in seminary, actually, a professor wrote to me: “You have a gift of self-expression. Water it, honor it, honor God with it!” I remember when I read that feeling really ticked off, because as a pastor and aspiring academic, self-expressive was not exactly what I was aiming for. I think I was trying to get away from that whole part of who I am. Now I have no desire to get away from any part of who I am, I think, so I’m trying to ascertain if doing some kind of self-expressive writing (besides begging friends to read a private blog) is in my future. SO – thanks for reading, anyone who is.

I’m at my parents house, alone at the dining room table, listening to “kothbiro” by Ayub Ogada on repeat on my ipod. I’m too emotionally distracted to do my research, which is why I’m here to begin with.

I just sold my beautiful blue harp. Funny how we get attached to these things. There is something different about selling an instrument. It’s like selling a pet, a friend – some part of oneself.

The research I’m not doing right now involves, for lack a better term, the hermeneutics of music. Actually, that’s a terrible term. It’s very difficult reading, and hard to sum up – but what has been the most edifying of this project is the articulation of music as something that forms and creates communities and values, rather than reflecting them. The author is writing about how “high” music (“classical”) and “low” (pop/folk) are not any different in how people talk about them and use them – but makes the distinction that since the 19th century, the classical music culture has been concerned with objectifying music and removing it from it’s social context. This is a simplification of the article that borders on complete misinterpretation (I think – I mean, I’m not totally sure what it’s saying, to be honest) but it is making my musical life make so much more sense to me.

My parents are both classically trained musicians who would be scandalized by the notion that, with certain students, depending on their dispositions, I actually don’t stress reading written notation. They were certainly scandalized when I sold my first concert harp and bought an electric lever harp with part of the proceeds. This isn’t to say they don’t enjoy popular music (from their era, anyway) or respect the music that comes from different cultures, and it’s not to say that they aren’t emotionally moved by music when they listen. My dad is a composer, for pete’s sake. But they understand music other than classical to be lower, not as important, functional, utilitarian… exactly, pretty much, as this article describes the general self-understanding of the classical music genre.

My parents are also scandalized, I think, that I sold this blue harp (from their very living room) in order to help a friend pay for court costs to keep her grandson in her life. My parents are not the type to say what they think about what I do unless they particularly like it (and sometimes not even then,) so I’m inferring this from their complete silence on the issue. My parents were the type who, when I wore offensive t-shirts in high school, just made the shirt “disappear” without ever talking about it, leaving me to wonder, several weeks later, where that shirt got to. They don’t like confrontation. I am tempted, in my more uncharitable moments, to say that they don’t like communication. But all of this has led to a very peaceful relationship with them in my 30s, which is nice to have when there’s a grandson in the picture.

Selling the harp was hard for me. Putting it up for sale wasn’t hard, but counting the money was hard. Something feels yucky about it in the moment, counting money given in exchange for an old friend, a blue friend. Even though I’m deliriously happy that a little boy gets to stay with his family, in part, because of this harp that was really only taken out of its case a few times a year.

Last weekend we started giving Lukas his allowance. 8 quarters every Saturday (unless he loses some of that through bad behavior during the week). Four go to him, four go to “poor people.” We started this because last Sunday was the first time he expressed interest in buying something with his own money. So he bought a donut on the way to church and insisted that he share it with me. Then, spontaneously, he announced that he wanted to give the rest of the money to the church. Because I wanted to emphasize that the best place to give money is to poor people and not to a church (I know, cyncial), I told him that the money we give to the church goes to poor people (not a complete lie. Some does, I think.) He was very taken by this notion. I was so proud of him for wanting to give money away of his own volition.

My parents, upon hearing this story this weekend, were not very impressed, and it surprised me. After Lukas left the table, they began to talk about how they stopped giving to such and such when they found out how much the CEO made, how they don’t like to give to charities who have slick advertising, etc. All very reasonable concerns for sure, and, as I told them, that’s why I prefer to give money to people I know personally who are working directly with people who need it.  There’s more that happened in this conversation, but I won’t go into it.

I’ve been mulling over this not because I’m judging my parents harshly. I know they are generous people in many regards. They are people who, like most people I believe, cannot turn away need when it is facing them. They’ve let family crash here at times, they’ve gone out of their way to help various neighbors and friends who need it. But it is striking me now how different, in some ways, my value system is from theirs. They embrace the musical culture that I have, in many ways, abandoned, for the very reason I left it – it’s a system that values music outside a social context (which is impossible of course, but I do think it is an underlying value.) They look at Lukas with concern when he appears excited to give his money away; I look at him proudly and share the story with close friends.

Maybe they were more like me when they were younger. But I don’t think so. My brother and his wife are more like my parents, as well. Somewhere, along the path of my development, I took a different way. I’m the person that only learned how to be kind to her family in her 30s, but loved outsiders from practically the beginning. My parents and brother are the kind who knew how to love family unconditionally from day 1, but don’t have that much concern for outsiders.

I don’t know why I bothered to write this all out. Just to get it off my mind, I suppose – to clear my head so I can get back to research    Thanks for reading, anyone who does.

I can play in Christian imagery.

Does that qualify as “being a Christian?” Does it quality as “believing in God?” I don’t think it does, but it seems to be worth something, anyhow.

I’m sure it seems like a minor, unimportant question – am I a Christian? Plenty of people (probably all who read this blog) would say: it doesn’t matter what you call yourself. It’s all about following Jesus.

Well — it so happens that this minor question causes me inconvenience throughout my day as a student of religion. In hermeneutics a few of us were talking about if “insiders” can read a religious text better than “outsiders” (more complicated than that but not necessary to explain.) I feel like an outsider when I read the Bible. I wanted to bring up the point that I am totally willing to say that I can’t understand the Bible the way that Christians do. But it felt weird to say that in my current spiritual-religious-emotional state, so I had to make quick substitutes in my point and pose hypotheticals instead. This kind of thing happens often. It’s inconvenient.

I am not a Hindu or  Buddhist; I can love their images and appreciate them and learn from them, but I can’t play in them. They aren’t mine. I haven’t been there long enough, I wasn’t born into it, etc. A year ago I wouldn’t have been able to say I can play in Christian imagery either; I couldn’t tolerate any of it.

I read Rilke’s Book of Hours last night for the first time since 2006 and was able to love it again. Feels good.

I spent the weekend at my parents, as I do every other weekend during the academic semester. I go up there because my husband has to do a Saturday night and Sunday morning church gig, so I don’t really get much time to do my school work on weekends. My parents are gracious enough (and happy enough to see their grandson) to welcome us a few times a month and let me shut the door upstairs while they entertain Lukas.

This particular weekend I agreed to play harp for the choir anthem at the church where my dad is a choir director. He’s been there for, oh, ten years or so, maybe less. The pastors at this church (RCA) irritate the hell out of me.  They really aren’t awful, they’re just… not my style. Extremely dorky. Very non-artistic/creative. Inaccurate at times in their sermons (particularly when referring to other religions.) Simplistic. Hokey. Not terrible, you know? Just… bad. Stylistically offensive to me.

So I sat through service there this morning ready to endure whatever came, but the whole service was surprisingly benign. I mean, you can’t get away from dorky if that’s what you are, but nothing offensive came out of the pulpit. Still I sat there feeling tense, cynical, … and in the middle of his sermon, I realized, I am feeling angry.

I’ve always been puzzled, and sometimes disturbed, at the lack of anger I felt since 2006. Many times I felt like I needed to calm other people who were angry for my sake. And of course, I took anger directed at me as well. I absorbed it. It was so hard to fight back about anything, anything at all, I really just wanted to sit and take it all and be destroyed by the process.

But today in this church, staring at the wooden, backlit cross on the wall, it occurred to me that what I had been identifying as cynicism for so many years might actually be more anger than cynicism. I mean, anger at its root, anyhow. I mean, wanting to scream “shut the fuck up!” at pastors when they are telling the story of the last supper before blessing the bread/juice  all of a sudden seemed to me to actually be more based in anger than just in a pessimistic view of religion. I know. I’m brilliant.

I had the same kind of gut-anger reaction earlier this week in school, in my Liturgical Spirituality class. It’s a fantastic class with a great prof and good chemistry amongst the students. But of course, it is a Catholic University and they are all Catholics and so take a rather spiritual approach to things. On Thursday we were discussing the role of emotions in liturgy, particularly in regards to “conversion.” As you can imagine, this word means something pretty different in a Catholic context than it does for someone trained by Baptists, but I still felt the need to bring up the issue of emotional manipulation, and as I was making my point, found myself describing how much trust is needed in order for a congregation to enter into a worship experience. After class I got into a discussion with a friend about the power dynamics behind planning a worship service, and how power is always involved. This seemed to me to be a perfect expression of my cynicism (even if there is substantial truth in what was being said.) But as I was driving home that afternoon, I thought about our discussion on conversion and trust and I felt like smashing windows.   I don’t want anything to do with trust, and the mere suggestion of it in a church setting apparently makes me very, very angry.

I “said” (and shared) communion tonight for the first time since 2006.

It was always my favorite part of being a pastor. Well, that and blessing people.

We also sat together beforehand and listened to each other read a Psalm… and then talked about it.

It was good. More reflections to come, probably.

I had a cathartic Christmas season.

In some way the story begins last August, when I began classes at CUA. For the two years prior to that I had applied/been accepted/been ready to start classes for a Masters in Social Work, but each time, right before school was supposed to start, I would decide the time wasn’t right, or that the program wasn’t right. When I finally decided that I should go for that PhD in Religion, it was mainly because I realized I really wanted to teach – teach anything – at the college level, and since I already had a masters in theology, that the best thing to do would be to build on what I already had, instead of starting from scratch. CUA was probably my very last choice of schools because it is so religious and I was really craving a secular environment. However, rejection letters and the terrible housing market conspired to keep me in DC and attending CUA. Now that I look back I think it was fortuitous – although painful at times, being in such a religious setting forced me to confront things, keep wrestling with things. At a deeper level, it helped me work towards the re-integration of myself – that is, making peace with my life pre-2006, when I loved – LOVED!- being a pastor, when I trusted so many things, when I “believed in God.”

In any case, being at CUA forced me to confront not only theology and an occasional liturgy, but also really wonderful, kind, devoutly religious people. Of course, the other kind of religious people have a presence at the school as well, but my friends are, for the most part, very dedicated Catholics who are really, decidedly, NOT assholes. Through all of these experiences I started to wrestle with the idea of religious belief as “resonance.” Or I started to think of myself as an “imaginary Christian” – one who could imagine it to be true, and could wish that it was true, but could not believe it was true. “Belief-as-resonance” was helpful (and continues to be) here. I don’t know if I ever “believed” the way that I wished I could, even prior to 2006. I wanted to. I couldn’t really, not in the way I thought I should. That was all very much beaten out of me (sometimes you just have to stop fighting) but in school, Christian resonance began to surface in me. I found myself, when hearing certain phrases, for example, “the love of Christ,” or “grace and peace,” feeling my soul resonate, the same way a harp begins to sing in the summer breeze – just a slight, eerie sound of vibration in the beginning, but becoming stronger and almost overwhelming as the breeze continues. Definitely not “belief” as I had thought of it – but worthy, in my particular situation, of notice.

The next stage of the story might be the lecture I heard in the fall. John Haught, a theolgian from Georgetown, came to speak at our school, and he was a lovely, kind person who spoke with me with sincerely and who gave an absolutely stunning lecture that really reminded me of perspectives I had forgotten about. I think the perspectives had more meaning to me this time around – something about God as the Omega point really worked for me. Also, the beauty of the quotes he worked in from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin -who I will hopefully be reading soon – just brought me to my knees. It was poetry. More resonance. Less fear of hope, and the seeds of hope starting to grow in me.

I think the next development was when we decided to allow a former student of Nuc’s and her mother to live with us. We did this with much resistance and fear. As you may be aware, our house is quite small, made smaller by the plethora of large instruments strewn throughout. There were also issues of fear regarding the abusive father/husband they were escaping and how that would impact our family/Lukas, and just general cynicism over how the arrangement would work out. After a week of trying to find any, any other solution for them, and wrestling with how badly we did NOT want them to come live with us, we relented. After a few bumpy days in the beginning it became very nice and has only gotten better. It occurred to me at some point how their arrival, had I been “a Christian,” would have been interpreted as an answer to prayer. I had been feeling very me-focused lately – that is, focused on my school, my child, my husband, my house – and had really been feeling at a loss about how to be more generous, being both time- and money-broke. Over the summer I heard an NPR interview about the Big Brother/Big Sister organization and had felt such sorrow over how long I had wanted to be involved with that organization, to mentor a teenager and help them succeed, and how I felt like there was no way I could do that now without taking time away from Lukas (and already feeling pressed to spend more time with him.) Having a 10th grader and her mother move in with us provided me with – truly – the only way possible for me to mentor a teenager, at least with my current lifestyle. And it has been so wonderful. September and October had been very difficult for us, adjusting to a heavy teaching/class schedule for me and a new part-time job for Nuc – and we felt, often, completely flattened by it. Having them in our house breathed life into us. Selfishly, perhaps, but – well, not feeling lassoed by Christian emotion management patterns, there was no problem just feeling good about providing shelter for someone, even if everything else in my life seemed to be balanced precariously. Even if everything else fell apart, I knew we were doing something good for them. I think sometimes being (uncomfortably) generous can really open up one’s soul – and I think it did that for me.

The next part of the story involves the HBO series “Big Love.” If you haven’t seen it, or don’t know what it is – it is a (fictional) show about a polygamous Mormon family attempting normalcy in Utah, and it’s depiction of religious issues is, in my mind, so incredibly spot-on, from relationships with Catholics to the relationship between fundamentalists and established churches, to how religious people negotiate sacred/secular space… the list goes on and on. It’s fantastic. We’ve been watching it on DVD. The final season was available in early December, and surprisingly, the show began to deal with feminist issues in the church. Specifically, one of the wives begins to believe that women should also be able to “hold the priesthood” in the Mormon faith. It would take me too long to describe all of the excellent scenes regarding this sub-plot, but one in particular seemed to really get into my soul. The wife is confronted by the husband who, exasperated, asks her, “what would you get by holding the priesthood that you dont already have?” – seeming to assume that she wants the priesthood for some kind of power, some kind of authority in the family, as that is often how it is used by the men in the family. She responds, equally exasperated, “You know what it would give me! I could bless people, bless the sacrament, and help lead people to our heavenly Father!” – Something in this scene affected me. I remembered how much I adored serving communion, and blessing people. Giving blessings was probably my favorite thing to do as a pastor (of course, one doesn’t need to be a pastor to do this, but the opportunities were probably more frequent.) I think for the first time in these past years I was able to see my own path not as some kind of sick power-grab – which is how I had come to see it and therefore despise it – but as something that may have actually been, well – genuine and real, and even beautiful. After watching it that night, I began to think – “I could do that again.” – whereas I have not had any positive feelings about doing anything even remotely related to it since 2006.

Then, Christmas Eve. I was playing at a beautiful old Lutheran church in Frederick, and enjoying singing Christmas carols in church for the first time since Christmas 2005. This had always been one of my very favorite activities and so was really a huge loss of 2006. I had kind of given up on enjoying it again, but this year I actually craved it. it was just the experience – I craved the words, the poetry of the lyrics, and singing them. Especailly “Joy to the World,” … all of the verses. When they served communion, for the first time since 2006, I went forward to receive it. It was a powerful experience for me.
At the next Christmas Eve service that night, I was playing harp behind the pastors as they served it, and so was able to watch the people coming forward, see their faces, see them receive communion as I played. I think because serving communion had always been one of my favorite things to do, it has, since 2006, been one of the most painful things for me to think of. I have felt hatred for the April that served communion. It’s not rational, it just is that way – needing to reject everything that was true about me before 2006. But this Christmas Eve, as I saw the people come forward, I felt this strong feeling of “I belong here.” And it didn’t nauseate me, to feel that. I felt like I could trust myself, to feel that way.  Again, powerful.

Had I not been required to play harp as people came forward to kneel at the manger scene, I probably would have done so. This is such an enormous change for me, from even a year ago. I feel so integrated.

And though I have never liked, or trusted, the idea of “a calling,” particularly for ministry, as we were driving home late that night, it occurred to me that what I felt as I was playing behind the pastors was in fact the closest thing to “a calling” as could be. It didn’t feel manipulative, or power-hungry, or all of these other things that mis-use of the term can bring about (and have been amplified in the past years in my mind) – it just felt very natural, very right, very me.

This is not to say that I’m planning on trying to get back into some kind of pastoral role any time soon. In fact, I’ve been teaching this past semester at CUA, and feel just as confirmed in my decision to teach undergraduates as ever. I’m just saying… integration is good.

On top of all of that, I glanced at an icon (on the wall)  in class yesterday and felt like a window was opening up. Am I back in the fold? It’s possible.

I’m not sure where to begin.

Today was my last day on campus for the semester. I was there for a meeting with my lead professor and the other TA for the World Religions class. I am going to miss teaching that class next semester. Especially towards the last few weeks, I started to feel pretty connected with some of the students and got to know them a little better, which led to more interesting questions and discussions on Friday mornings.

It’s become apparent to me that I just love teaching this age – undergraduates. What do I love about it? I think I love helping people think clearly about things that matter to them. I love pointing out interesting things along the way. And my god, in a World Religions class, there are plenty of interesting things and things that matter that these students were always wondering about in their years of Catholic school, and it is a privilege to get to walk with them through those questions, for however short a time it is.

And to be honest? I also like that the time I have with them is short.

We have two people living with us now who would otherwise be homeless – a high school student and her mother. It was with great, great hesitation that we decided to allow them to stay with us. The first two nights were everything I feared. Since then, it’s been terrific. They are so nice and easy to be with, and once we got some ground rules ironed out we haven’t had any problems. To be honest, they are starting to feel like part of the family. I like having a teenager in the house. And it struck me a few weeks ago that I really enjoy being able to mentor someone younger than myself in this more personal way. Even though it involves some annoying hours and some extra chauffering time for me (and the loss of some personal space), the whole situation is just bringing me deep joy. And I really, really appreciate the fact that my joy has nothing to do with Christian ethics. I just enjoy it – and that’s all.

But to the Christian ethics piece, well, not ethics, but Christian, piece – I think I have started to make peace with and possibly take a step towards reclaiming something sacramental. (Initially, I wrote “reclaiming a Christian identity” but then deleted it – because that is very definitely not what I am reclaiming – but maybe you’ll see how I could make the connection.) We just finished watching Big Love, an awesome show about Mormon polygamists. The final season deals with, among other things, one of the wives who starts to believe that women should be able to hold the priesthood as well (big no-no for Mormons.) Watching this characters journey has untied something in me. Specifically, one night there is a scene where she is about to give a(n illicit) blessing to someone before she is caught. The moment of her offering to give a blessing felt so familiar to me. That was what I loved the most about pastoring – blessing people, blessing the eucharist, anointing … anything sacramental (understood loosely, for any theology nerds who might read this.) As I watched it, my inner voice said, “you could do that again.” It just felt so recognizable to me, all of the emotion, the moment, the transparency.

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest thing keeping me from religion/Christianity/church/pastoring (in that order) is the issue of transparency. I strove, sometimes psychotically, for transparency in everything I did as a pastor. Sometimes I feel like that very transparency aided in the trauma that took place. It’s normal, after a bad situation, to not trust people, to not want to let your guard down. And I wonder if because that transparency – which could be a sibling to something mental health experts refer to as “loss of boundaries” – was so integral to the work I did as a pastor, which I loved with every bit of my soul, it has been impossible to approach anything resembling faith, because of my own deep reticence (bordering on inability at times) to really be transparent in the way I felt was necessary to, say, give a blessing to someone.

Due to my obsession with being employable post-PhD, I joined the Student Association this year. I took the position as the “rep” for my program (Religion and Culture,) mainly because there was no one else running for the spot and the only duty I knew of for this position, being at the orientation night for new graduate students and getting to know them, seemed like a genuinely fun thing to do.

What I didn’t know was that it would require me to schedule, organize and publicize a lecture at the school. So I found myself desperately seeking a scholar to come speak, and through another professor of mine, grudgingly asked Dr. John Haught from Georgetown to come give a lecture. Grudgingly because Haught is a theologian and I am decidedly not, and neither, by the way, is the program I am supposedly on the SA to represent, although at this school everyone is apparently required to be in love with Thomas Aquinas.

So I did all of the work, went through all of the red tape, and Tuesday evening found myself face-to-face with an extremely likable and pleasant gentleman who also happened to give a beautiful, inspiring – I’d say breathtaking, even – lecture about the harmony between evolution and Christian belief. I swear to god, this lecture is going to be what gets me reading theology again. It was stunning.

What is kind of funny about the evening is that halfway through I texted Brian M. and asked if he had ever heard of John Haught, because it seemed so resonant with Brian’s writing. He didn’t text back right away, so after the lecture as I was walking Dr. Haught to his car, I had to ask: did he know Brian? In fact, he knows him rather well, he said, and even came to speak at his church 8 or 10 years ago. Then it clicked – guess who organized that lecture at CR? Yours truly. It was during that week-long emerging-churchish kind of conference. I was about 22 and Brian “hired” me to organize the whole thing – food, lodging, etc, etc. Including tracking down speakers and getting them to come in. John Haught was one of those speakers.

My reaction to the Haught lecture again got me thinking about the nature of belief. Since I last posted on this I’ve discovered that John Hick wrote about the difference between faith and belief, right along the lines (in a more technical nature) of what I was thinking – how I might be able to say that I have faith, but definitely not belief. Now I’m thinking about the nature of belief itself. Religious belief has got to come in more forms than just cognitive assent, right? Especially because belief is formed through so many more things than just logical/philosophical deduction. If I think about belief as resonance? I may have posted about this before, because it’s been on my mind all semester. Belief as resonance, the same way as how when wind blows through the strings of a harp, the whole instrument begins to vibrate and you hear all of the tones at once, an eerie, shadowy, yet surprisingly thick sound that gets louder as the wind continues. If I can say I resonate with Haughts lecture? It’s more than simply liking it, but isn’t what I’ve always thought of as belief.

Just pondering.

I’m sure I’ve taken too long to post since the last time, and so have lost whatever very small reading audience I had.

This semester really just hit like a tsunami. It’s 3 classes plus TA-ing a World Religions class. The TA-ing takes up more time than it should, I think, mainly because I have a very good lead professor who treats this as on-the-job training for graduate students. This means I am getting a lot of excellent experience and being mentored in a very effective manner, and that it is taking up an incredible amount of time. So the rest of my classwork (which, I should admit, is less than inspiring right now) is in triage mode.

Of course I’m also involved with the normal day-to-day life activities: parenting, maintaining something of a professional musician life, teaching lessons in the evening. Etc.

It is so bad that when I got the wonderful news that I had an article accepted to a journal, I just shut the computer and turned on the tv. Because of course the article needs to be revised in a million different ways before they will *actually* accept it, and the deadline is one month (!) and really, how am I going to do this?

So I’m sitting on the living room floor right now surrounding by just-organized papers that had been stacking up over the past month listening to S. Carey (who is a great listening choice for a rainy day. I’m not even opening the curtains of my living room because I don’t want to see if the rain has stopped. I really need a good rainy, cloudy day with very little stimuli, beautiful or otherwise.)

In terms of spirituality and religion, being at Catholic University is taking a toll on me right now. It’s not the rigid, closed-minded systematic theologians that challenge me, it’s the other side. It’s the remarkably compassionate, kind, intelligent and funny Catholics. I could substitute any religion in there for “Catholic.” The main point is that these people are all of those things (made more difficult for me perhaps because they are Catholic and therefore, inexplicably, somehow bound by magisterial teaching and actually believe the Pope is some kind of sacred guy by virtue of his office, and don’t accept ordination of women, etc, etc) at the same time. It’s difficult for me to say this, but it’s true: I encounter a different depth of humanity when I encounter people who are all of these good qualities while at the same time being devoutly religious. There is something that feels different to me about these kinds of people, those who have what seems to be a mature faith.

And as I feel completely outside of this possibility for life – I just don’t see any way to swallow it all again – this challenges me.

My husband is at his first paid rehearsal for the new “minister of music” position he just accepted. It’s at a Methodist church about 40 minutes from our house. It’s starting to sink in that I am now back, in a spousal capacity, in professional ministry.

I’m wondering how I’m going to navigate these waters of identity. I plan on going to the church with Lukas at least a few Sundays out of the month, mainly because I know it’s important for people working in a church to show they have a well-adjusted, faith-loving family, and for financial reasons I consider it imperative that my husband keeps this job. A second, almost-as-important reason, is because if all goes well, I’ll be teaching in a university or a seminary someday, and if it’s a seminary, I’ve seen that commitment to the local church can function in their job descriptions.

A third, much less important reason that I don’t really understand myself is that there is a still a part of me that believes that being a part of a church can be a good thing, this despite the fact that we have been to church maybe 20 times in the past five years, about 25% of which were paid appearances.

It’s the community, right? It’s got to be the community aspect. But it’s not just that. I have plenty of community, really. Much of it is from churches I’ve attended in the past, but much of it is unrelated to churches (although I do tend to attract religious people as friends. Don’t know why.)

A few months ago I was talking with a Jewish friend of mine who is something of an atheist, probably more of an agnostic, about whether or not she would want her future children to have a Bat Mitzvah or not. She said she didn’t care one way or the other if they did, but I pressed her on it. I remember how important her own Bat Mitzvah was to her, and how greatly she was shaped by her upbringing not only in her synagogue but also in the Jewish camps, organizations, etc. She eventually had a falling out with much of American Jewish culture because she’s very anti-Zionist, but still, having seen her formed so profoundly through her interaction with the religious culture (and in fact, developed the ethics in some sense through engaging with Jewish social teachings that eventually led her to reject Zionism) that I was surprised she wouldn’t try to hold on to some of it. The liturgies, even. The Shabbat dinners, Passover, whatever.

She countered, quite matter-of-factly, that all of that could be taught without religion. That’s true, I agreed. But it is still lacking for me. I don’t miss theological belief systems, and I think ethics/service do just fine without them, but I do find ethics/service a lot more attractive when it is infused with seeing the world as sacred through myth and art. And all of that is even better when it’s a group of people signed on to the whole deal. I’m not sure I can find that anywhere except in religious settings, but I’m not sure being in a religious setting is worth it.

Anyway, I’ll be attending somewhat regularly with Lukas. I’m wondering how I’ll be. At school most people know me as a “none.” Some assume I’m more atheistic than others, and some know much of how I interpret Christian beliefs and religious undertakings in general. At church I’m not sure I’m willing to be that honest, and I’m guessing it won’t come up anyway. But I’m going to start hating this gig if I have to go but only make surface-type friends.

Well, hopefully no one will notice that the music ministers wife doesn’t sing along to the CCM tunes (I never did that anyway.)