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aquabeanBefore anything else, I want to say a profound thank you to everyone who left comments of support or understanding about yesterday. Getting back to you is something I very much intend to do, it's just been a bit tired around here lately, so it might take a few days. But not too long. Promise.
I spent my morning, hiding behind the large flat screen of my computer monitor quietly crying to myself. Tears slid, like tiny snails, down my face and into the corners of my mouth, where I licked them away before I rubbed away their trails with the cuff of my black turtleneck sweater. Crying that hard, for that long will make a person's nose run, which mine did, so I sniffled through the morning as well. When it finally came time for lunch I was a damp puffy mess who needed to get some sun and maybe pull herself together.
Ages ago. Or well, something close to it, the end of September at least, Gracie gave me a copy of Anne Lamott's, Traveling Mercies. She handed it to me in the car and I took it inside with me where it then sat on the little wooden bar between the kitchen and the living room for a while. Sometime in there I was struck by a sense of remorse -- having books I haven't read yet just laying around has always been a kind of sacrilege to me -- and so it was moved up stairs with several other books, including a graphic novel about zombies, and deposited in the pile of "things to be read" beside my bed. Which is where it sat until this morning.
Yesterday left me feeling drained and numb, and for all that I'm not all that worked up about everything, I woke up this morning feeling as though a light bulb in the billboard of my mind had gone out and I had no spare with which to replace it. Still, I showered, and packed up my knitting and my laptop and was half way out the door when I remembered that I'd finished a book yesterday and hadn't put anything new in my bag. Trudging back upstairs I though, briefly, of grabbing that one vampire book I'd already read and enjoyed before deciding to grab something off of The Pile.
Traveling Mercies wasn't on top. It was actually under the zombies, but when I closed my hand around it, meaning to move it so that I could get to a novel I'd half finished -- one about a world with only kids and no adults and where kids are hunted or turned into machines by a strange alien race -- I looked at the clock, realized I was running late and just left, the small paperback still in hand.
Lamott's book is about Faith. About finding it, about losing it, about having it even when you don't think you do. It's about Belief and Grace and any large number of words that all begin with capital letters. It is an intensely personal story, this journey and discovery of faith, a thing she says "did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another."
She speaks of her family and the abuses she wrought upon herself. There is darkness there, and hopelessness, but also bravery and a small hungry piece of herself that found belief and gave her life.
She spoke of finding a church and I found myself in tears.
It's been years since I felt as though there were a church where I belonged. Raised in the warmth of a church family at once fiercely protective and dying of old age, I had learned that God loved you but only if you Followed His Rules. His Rules were very clear and were spelled out to me by loving people who knew that we were Right and everyone else was Wrong. I worshipped a God who demanded fear and awe and reminded me more than little of my mother, who didn't believe in anything but herself.
In college I wandered among Christians and christians, in and out through churches, only to discover that my communions with God were most often to be had in moments of solitude rather than in the pews of the Presbyterian church in town.
When I flunked out at the end of junior year I didn't return to the church of my childhood. At home with my parents, surrounded by a house where the clutter has spent the last two decades wearing down walls and flowing through our lives like a glacier, God showed me greater things than what a church or bible study could do. He showed me that I could get up in time to be at work at 8:00am and that if a class was interesting enough, or even if it wasn't, I could get an A just by actually doing the work. It blew my mind.
By the time I went back to Kenyon I'd realized other things about myself and about Him and about how those things that I'd always Known were still true, if sometimes so harder to find in my own life's clutter. But I still hadn't been shown these things in a church. And some part of myself was profoundly proud of how independent my faith was. I didn't need to be surrounded by a people to know that God was there, because I already knew that.
And then there are days like today. When my car has broken down again -- no, you're not wrong, I did just get it back from the shop yesterday -- and I feel as though I've failed on a fundamental and personal level. When the engine sputtered and died at the bottom of the exit just off the 125 South, something and my heart went tight and I was filled shame so dark and thick you'd think I'd just taken a hammer to the distributor myself. Guilt this irrational and useless is never alone though. Only terrible people, stupid and useless people, take such bad care of their cars that the cars break down with the kind of determination and spite that Trixie has.
Sitting in the front seat, waiting for my father to come and decide if it's worth trying to maneuver through traffic to their house or if a tow truck will again be called to our rescue, I knew, deep within myself that I was exactly one of those terrible stupid people. And ugly. Too thick around the middle, with a plain face and that no one would ever love me. Because I'm wasn't even smart enough to keep my car running.
Except that with the exception of the fact that my car isn't running, I know that all of this is total crap. True, I'm not thin, but I've been informed that I have incredible breasts, and while I'd love to lose 50 pounds, my legs still look dangerously good in heels. It was in the front seat of that car tonight, as I promised myself that today would be the last time ever that I ate a fast food hamburger and how I'd start jogging every day so that the Girl wouldn't have to be ashamed to be seen with me, that I remembered something I'd read today.
You see, what struck me most in that moment, even more than it had when I read it earlier this morning, was that I wasn't the only one. Other people out there, people who I admire and would love to be, or be like, have the same fears I do. And there are people out there who love them in spite of it. There are people who love me it spite of it.
These amazing, wonderful people, filled with their own fears, and worries and enough life to keep themselves busy until they die, still take the time love me. They love me in my humanity, and with their own humanity and I am reminded that this is what a church can be. A crowd of cold bodies huddled together, hoping and praying and keeping each other warm, and then, when the sun comes out, these are the people who laugh with us and remind us to wear sun screen and smile when we tell them that all this love has made us too hot.
God has opened my eyes to all kinds of things, once even at the top of mountain looking down on the stone ruins of a city made by people who'd called Him something far different. Today He decided that the time for me to figure a few things out was the front of that dying old Ford. Waiting for my father with my engine idling He decided it was time I saw that I need people. I always have, but today, in a book, and tonight, in that car and then in a conversation, He lead me to a place where there are green pastures and there is still water and shown me that I am allowed to need all this. Most importantly I'm allowed to need this from people. In fact He wants me to surround myself with the people who will help me and hold me and lift me up, so that, when the time comes, I can do the same for them.
I'm not any thinner now than I was this morning. My face is still what it was when I glanced in the mirror on my way out the door, with my thick dark eye brows and my nose that isn't quite my mother's or my father's, but it's still the face He gave me. It's still the face that I'll take with me when I leave for work tomorrow morning and that I will wear with shaking pride when I begin my search for a new church.
Reading Lamott's words brought to mind all the old songs I used to sing, and love she described wafted off the page like perfume or the way a whole street will smell when the bakery takes the morning's first loaves from the oven. Those are the scents that make your mouth water, and a hunger is in me now that I had ignored for a long time. Or forgotten. It's a quiet hunger, low in my belly and moist on my tongue, like the memory of an excellent meal.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look a the sky
and say thank you
we are standing y the water looking out
in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chose we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the back of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the backs that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
by W.S. Merwin
I spent my morning, hiding behind the large flat screen of my computer monitor quietly crying to myself. Tears slid, like tiny snails, down my face and into the corners of my mouth, where I licked them away before I rubbed away their trails with the cuff of my black turtleneck sweater. Crying that hard, for that long will make a person's nose run, which mine did, so I sniffled through the morning as well. When it finally came time for lunch I was a damp puffy mess who needed to get some sun and maybe pull herself together.
Ages ago. Or well, something close to it, the end of September at least, Gracie gave me a copy of Anne Lamott's, Traveling Mercies. She handed it to me in the car and I took it inside with me where it then sat on the little wooden bar between the kitchen and the living room for a while. Sometime in there I was struck by a sense of remorse -- having books I haven't read yet just laying around has always been a kind of sacrilege to me -- and so it was moved up stairs with several other books, including a graphic novel about zombies, and deposited in the pile of "things to be read" beside my bed. Which is where it sat until this morning.
Yesterday left me feeling drained and numb, and for all that I'm not all that worked up about everything, I woke up this morning feeling as though a light bulb in the billboard of my mind had gone out and I had no spare with which to replace it. Still, I showered, and packed up my knitting and my laptop and was half way out the door when I remembered that I'd finished a book yesterday and hadn't put anything new in my bag. Trudging back upstairs I though, briefly, of grabbing that one vampire book I'd already read and enjoyed before deciding to grab something off of The Pile.
Traveling Mercies wasn't on top. It was actually under the zombies, but when I closed my hand around it, meaning to move it so that I could get to a novel I'd half finished -- one about a world with only kids and no adults and where kids are hunted or turned into machines by a strange alien race -- I looked at the clock, realized I was running late and just left, the small paperback still in hand.
Lamott's book is about Faith. About finding it, about losing it, about having it even when you don't think you do. It's about Belief and Grace and any large number of words that all begin with capital letters. It is an intensely personal story, this journey and discovery of faith, a thing she says "did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another."
She speaks of her family and the abuses she wrought upon herself. There is darkness there, and hopelessness, but also bravery and a small hungry piece of herself that found belief and gave her life.
She spoke of finding a church and I found myself in tears.
It's been years since I felt as though there were a church where I belonged. Raised in the warmth of a church family at once fiercely protective and dying of old age, I had learned that God loved you but only if you Followed His Rules. His Rules were very clear and were spelled out to me by loving people who knew that we were Right and everyone else was Wrong. I worshipped a God who demanded fear and awe and reminded me more than little of my mother, who didn't believe in anything but herself.
In college I wandered among Christians and christians, in and out through churches, only to discover that my communions with God were most often to be had in moments of solitude rather than in the pews of the Presbyterian church in town.
When I flunked out at the end of junior year I didn't return to the church of my childhood. At home with my parents, surrounded by a house where the clutter has spent the last two decades wearing down walls and flowing through our lives like a glacier, God showed me greater things than what a church or bible study could do. He showed me that I could get up in time to be at work at 8:00am and that if a class was interesting enough, or even if it wasn't, I could get an A just by actually doing the work. It blew my mind.
By the time I went back to Kenyon I'd realized other things about myself and about Him and about how those things that I'd always Known were still true, if sometimes so harder to find in my own life's clutter. But I still hadn't been shown these things in a church. And some part of myself was profoundly proud of how independent my faith was. I didn't need to be surrounded by a people to know that God was there, because I already knew that.
And then there are days like today. When my car has broken down again -- no, you're not wrong, I did just get it back from the shop yesterday -- and I feel as though I've failed on a fundamental and personal level. When the engine sputtered and died at the bottom of the exit just off the 125 South, something and my heart went tight and I was filled shame so dark and thick you'd think I'd just taken a hammer to the distributor myself. Guilt this irrational and useless is never alone though. Only terrible people, stupid and useless people, take such bad care of their cars that the cars break down with the kind of determination and spite that Trixie has.
Sitting in the front seat, waiting for my father to come and decide if it's worth trying to maneuver through traffic to their house or if a tow truck will again be called to our rescue, I knew, deep within myself that I was exactly one of those terrible stupid people. And ugly. Too thick around the middle, with a plain face and that no one would ever love me. Because I'm wasn't even smart enough to keep my car running.
Except that with the exception of the fact that my car isn't running, I know that all of this is total crap. True, I'm not thin, but I've been informed that I have incredible breasts, and while I'd love to lose 50 pounds, my legs still look dangerously good in heels. It was in the front seat of that car tonight, as I promised myself that today would be the last time ever that I ate a fast food hamburger and how I'd start jogging every day so that the Girl wouldn't have to be ashamed to be seen with me, that I remembered something I'd read today.
...And most important I have discovered that I am clinically and objectively beautiful.
I really mean this in the literal sense. I believe that if you saw me, you would say, "Wow! What a beautiful woman."
I think.
I'm almost sure....
Until recently, I was afraid to say that I am beautiful out loud for fear that people would look at each other with amusement and think to themselves, Well, isn't that nice. And then they would look at me with cruel scrutiny and see a thinnish woman with tired wrinkly eyes, and flabby thighs, scriggly-scraggly hair, as my son once described it, and scriggly-scraggly teeth.
You see, what struck me most in that moment, even more than it had when I read it earlier this morning, was that I wasn't the only one. Other people out there, people who I admire and would love to be, or be like, have the same fears I do. And there are people out there who love them in spite of it. There are people who love me it spite of it.
These amazing, wonderful people, filled with their own fears, and worries and enough life to keep themselves busy until they die, still take the time love me. They love me in my humanity, and with their own humanity and I am reminded that this is what a church can be. A crowd of cold bodies huddled together, hoping and praying and keeping each other warm, and then, when the sun comes out, these are the people who laugh with us and remind us to wear sun screen and smile when we tell them that all this love has made us too hot.
God has opened my eyes to all kinds of things, once even at the top of mountain looking down on the stone ruins of a city made by people who'd called Him something far different. Today He decided that the time for me to figure a few things out was the front of that dying old Ford. Waiting for my father with my engine idling He decided it was time I saw that I need people. I always have, but today, in a book, and tonight, in that car and then in a conversation, He lead me to a place where there are green pastures and there is still water and shown me that I am allowed to need all this. Most importantly I'm allowed to need this from people. In fact He wants me to surround myself with the people who will help me and hold me and lift me up, so that, when the time comes, I can do the same for them.
I'm not any thinner now than I was this morning. My face is still what it was when I glanced in the mirror on my way out the door, with my thick dark eye brows and my nose that isn't quite my mother's or my father's, but it's still the face He gave me. It's still the face that I'll take with me when I leave for work tomorrow morning and that I will wear with shaking pride when I begin my search for a new church.
Reading Lamott's words brought to mind all the old songs I used to sing, and love she described wafted off the page like perfume or the way a whole street will smell when the bakery takes the morning's first loaves from the oven. Those are the scents that make your mouth water, and a hunger is in me now that I had ignored for a long time. Or forgotten. It's a quiet hunger, low in my belly and moist on my tongue, like the memory of an excellent meal.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look a the sky
and say thank you
we are standing y the water looking out
in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chose we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the back of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the backs that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
by W.S. Merwin
