Lent. Again.

Here we go again. Lent starts on Wednesday. And am I ready for this? As usual, no – not in the slightest. One of the nuns I follow on Twitter tweeted that she’s hoping Lent will help her to recommit to her New Years resolution. Brilliant, right?  I thought so. Except my New Years resolution was to stop making resolutions. Ha ha ha –  yeah – so that’s not much help to me for Lent, now is it?

The last couple of years, Lent has been weird. Actually, anything and everything related to church has been weird for quite awhile. I don’t fit anywhere and add to that I feel like I’ve lost Lent and Advent since I went back to school. Both fall mid-semester when there are exams, papers, and projects due and instead of reflecting on life and my relationship with God, either here or in my private journals, I’m focused on objective, well-sourced papers on religion and ethics. Now here I am, with two midterm papers and an exam over the next two weeks and thinking, Damn, I really don’t want to go through another Lent on autopilot. 

What to do about that is an interesting question. My inner honor student likes interesting questions, thus I have spent more time this weekend than seems wise reading my own writing and thinking that maybe something from years past would offer direction for this coming Lent. It’s always a strange feeling to read things that I wrote more than six months ago. After awhile, I feel like I’m reading something someone else wrote. I mean I remember these things but somehow I’d forgotten how deeply they affected me at the time. And maybe that’s why they seem so strange now, because I’ve changed and grown so gradually, it’s easy to lose track of where I started. Or more precisely who I was then and who I have become.

And what did I learn? I have a few recurring themes: guilt and confession, being too hard on myself, trust issues, learning surrender, separating God and church, and finding God in little things. And in the process I remembered that this long-running New Years resolution of mine didn’t come about because I’m too lazy to make or keep a resolution. It came about so that I would stop crucifying myself for being human and so that I would stop setting difficult and/or impossible goals to be reached by arbitrary dates. Little by little, I learned to stop. And little by little, I’ve learned to see myself with kinder eyes -as I can give myself the benefit of the doubt – on most days anyway.

So maybe this year, Lent will be a time to spend time with each of those themes I found. Maybe reading through my own writings asking God to let me see what God sees would be a good start. Maybe working from there try to understand what has changed and what has not, what needs to change and what needs to simply be let go of makes more sense than plowing ahead trying to spiritually ‘get somewhere’ by trying to give up Twitter (that would require an intervention) or chocolate (that would be ugly) or trying to unravel every last one of my church dating questions between now and Easter (that just ain’t happening).

Between the nine years of blog posts and the decade plus worth of journals in the box under my bed, this should be interesting. Lent – again. God help me.

 

 

Trust, Love & Ice Missiles

 

Race Point Beach

I spent last weekend on Cape Cod enjoying my annual pilgrimage to solitude and sanity. I had hoped to leave everything behind but alas, life conspired against me and I ended up bringing homework with me. As it turned out, that was precisely the way it was meant to be. Uninterrupted, I read voraciously, finishing one novel, reading another cover to cover, re-reading half of Eve and dabbling in some rather basic Lutheran theology. New England weather was at its finest with everything from 50-degree temperatures and blue skies to wicked snow and 50 mph winds. In short, this was heaven!

Two rainy mornings left me with some time to reflect on what I learned about trust during Holy Week. Being a student is an escape for me. It’s so easy for me to examine trust as an abstract thing. I look for proof or evidence to make an argument for the existence of trust. I can see it in others but what I miss is that I’m also already in the midst of a trusting relationship. How else would I be where I am right now?  On top of being physically able to be in school, through every assignment, every 5 a.m. paper, every registration decision, I have been led and guided all along the way. Deep down, if I let myself feel, I know that. But there’s always that lingering fear of being abandoned. Maybe that goes away. Maybe it never does. Maybe trust is hanging on in spite of that fear. One thing I’ve come to understand: trust isn’t an abstract. It’s a gut feeling and it comes only with experience. God hasn’t left me yet so I’ll take the next step and see what happens.

Those same two rainy mornings left me the time I needed to finish a paper on relationships and love. Ah yes, love, another gut feeling that  I prefer to hold at a safe distance. ‘Love bites’ was clearly not going to be a great starting point so I had allow myself a less jaded approach. What is love?  Digging past all sappy romantic notions, love is seeking the good of the other and a willingness to hold open space for the other to grow, to be and to become who they are. After all, isn’t that very simply what God does for me? God works for my good and allows me the open space that I need to be who I am, even when who I am is deeply flawed. I have been given the open space I need to grow, to fail, to explore, to be and to become. That same space has allowed me to accept love or to hide from it, to trust or to go it alone. No matter what I choose, that space is always open for me.

Typically, I spend my Sundays at the Cape on Race Point Beach but this time I had planned to spend Sunday morning at church. A little church dating sounded like a good idea. I combed through Google and social media and found a little Lutheran church about fifteen minutes from me. Instead, my last full day dawned to rain which quickly turned to sleet then to snow. 50 mph winds whipped snow into blinding curtains and kicked up whitecaps in the inlet outside my window. Driving would have been a very bad idea. By noon, there were a few inches on fresh and melting snow on the ground and the skies cleared to deep, clear blue. Church hadn’t happened but Race Point still called my name.

I found the driver’s side of my car completely clean. The passenger side was encased in ice and snow. That should have been a clue. But I was so thrilled to be headed to my happy place, knowing the storm would have whipped up the surf and the winds would be wild that I cleared the car without even thinking. I queued up an hour of good music and started driving. I drove the first few miles admiring the snow on the trees and the blue skies. I made it about three miles before the ice missile hit my windshield and scared me half to death. That wasn’t snow on the trees. It was ice. Big, heavy chunks of ice. For the rest of the hour drive I dodged raining ice missiles of death. The closer I got to Provincetown, the more deserted the road became. It left me to wonder if perhaps other people knew something I didn’t. The wind started to really shake my car and I considered turning back but my gut feeling was to keep going.

Snow Squall, Race Point Beach

The parking lot was empty. It took both hands to push the car door open enough to get out. The roar of the wind matched the roar of the ocean. It was worth every second of the hair-raising drive. I walked up to the edge of the surf feeling so completely alive. The blues in the sky and in the water were beyond description. Then I turned around saw the curtain of black cloud coming straight at me. I got caught in a snow squall walking back to the car. I was truly in my glory.

But on the drive back, I noticed something. The shady, leeward sides of the trees were still covered in ice. Unless the sun and the wind could reach, they would stay that way. About eight years ago in the confessional I was told that my penance was to stand outside with my face tipped up to the sun and to let that warmth soak in until it melted all that was still frozen inside me. Most of that thaw been a long, slow process. But during my time on the Cape, something worked loose. Some ice missile of death was blown harmlessly to the ground and shattered. What I keep hidden in the shadows will never thaw. Pulling those pieces into the light and then letting go takes trust and the open space that only love can give. I have both.

The Pendulum Swing

“I think if that was me, I would’ve been gone the first time somebody hit me. Once would’ve been enough.”

“Yeah, well, we all think we’re a lot more of a badass than we actually are and when we suddenly find ourselves in a situation we don’t know how to handle, we find out pretty quick that we’re not as bad as we thought we were.”

It’s a conversation I am so very tired of having and yet it’s one that has to happen. And every time it happens, I wonder how many more times I will have to say it. More often than I want to admit, I wonder if I’m really just wasting my time. But this is my everyday life.

That conversation would become yet another facet to a revealing Week of Guided Prayer. The unique thing about the week is that it’s a stay-at-home retreat. It’s a chance to take a time out of everyday life to pray and reflect and work with a spiritual director and yet stay home in the midst of all the normal stuff of life. This is awesome when you can’t completely walk away from all of life’s responsibilities for a week. But the flipside is that everyday life has a way of encroaching on the retreat, like getting pulled into a conversation you’ve had a thousand times already and really don’t want to have again. Ironically though, that’s precisely why I love the week. The constant pendulum swing between the sublime and the ridiculous is simply the rhythm of life and if I can’t learn to find God in that swing, I am so royally screwed.

I went into the week with an important question to consider: the question of dating church. I was offered the opportunity to teach religious education at my Catholic parish. One of my bigger pet peeves with the Catholic Church is the anemic religious education programs at most parishes. We don’t teach the kids anything of real catechetical substance but then as they grow into adults we expect them to follow all the Church teachings and traditions. Not only is the expectation is unrealistic and unfair, but some of the best that the Church has to offer is often left neglected in the shadows, forgotten by all but the clergy and a select few self-proclaimed church nerds. So here I was being given an opportunity to be a part of the solution. Saying yes seemed to make so much sense. But…

Yeah, there’s always a ‘But’.  Their religious education program is at 9:15 on Sunday mornings. Care to guess when my ELCA church, and pretty much every other Protestant church within 20 miles, holds services?  Yup, sometime between 9 and 10 on Sunday mornings.  In order to teach, I would have to give up dating other churches. My new Catholic parish is very conservative and, as my readers know by now, I am, well… very NOT conservative. My friend Frank likes to refer to me as The Free Spirit. Maybe this parish needs a breath of fresh air and maybe I could be that. But can I be that if I close the window that’s been opened for me? By the end of the week, in spite of all the encroachments of everyday life, I knew for certain the answer was no. By Friday night, I knew for certain that God has put me on a path for reasons all His own and, while I don’t get it, I will go where He’s leading. Dating church is decidedly part of that path.

Sunday night, as if in confirmation, I had one of my vivid watcher dreams. Somehow, being beyond time, I walked down the same city block over and over and over. I watched as the block shifted from one time period to another to another, with centuries passing by as rapidly as my own footsteps. As we reached modern times, my guide, a wise woman slightly older than myself, said to me, “He will be there. In every generation, He comes. Whether as an inerrant preacher or as a mendicant child, He comes. Your job is to recognize Him.”

I can’t recognize Him if I’m not looking. So I’m paying attention. And somewhere, in between the swings of the pendulum, in the midst of both the sublime and the ridiculous, He’s there.

God of Partial Credit

Determine the validity of the argument. NO PARTIAL CREDIT

I knew I was screwed the night my professor drew five symbols on the board and said, “Don’t worry. This is easy. It’s like algebra but with arguments instead of numbers. And we get rid of all those useless things like words.”

1. I barely passed algebra.
2. Words are the air I breathe.
3. How in the hell do you determine the validity of arguments without the words?

I might not have been quite so freaked out if I only needed to pass this class. But passing isn’t good enough. I need to ace this class so that I can respectfully (translation: with gritted teeth) ask that my first semester grades from 1991 be waived so that I can be taken off academic probation now in 2015. Had I known that my dean’s list level performance last semester wasn’t going to be good enough, I never would have taken The Art of Thinking this semester. All I’d heard were horror stories about how difficult this class is, both from students and from my advisor.

My first two tests grades were decent but not stellar. I had one writing assignment which bolstered my grade but there is no wiggle room. So when the third test rolled around, I was more than a little anxious. I studied as best I could for a test that consisted of letters, squiggles, dots, sideways horseshoes, wedges, and horizontal lines laid out in braces, brackets, and parentheses and called an “argument”.  Honestly, I know what an argument looks like.  I have them all the time. Follow me on Twitter and you’ll see. None of them look like this!

I did the best I could. I was confident on some of the basics but towards the end of the test, my brain was fried. My professor had drilled into our heads that it only takes one error to render an entire truth table incorrect. The words NO PARTIAL CREDIT glared back at me from the page. I laid out the lines one by one, adding true or false under each letter in every possible combination and working through the symbols to determine what was true, what was false, and finally, whether the entire mess was valid or invalid. Then I handed it over and waited for three long weeks to find out how erroneous my tables would turn out to be.

Three weeks can be a really long time. I saw truth tables in my dreams. I woke up mumbling, “If this is true, then this is true and this is false, so this is true but this is false…NO PARTIAL CREDIT!”

Meanwhile, off campus, life went on. After Easter, my dating church adventures included scoping out a new Catholic parish. After thirty years in a parish that was about close to Protestant as one could get and still be Roman Catholic, I spent a few Sundays in a church that took me back to traditional Catholic practices from my childhood. There was something deeply nostalgic and comforting there. Nostalgia isn’t going to bring me back to the Catholic Church, but it might be enough to anchor one side of the bridge I find myself on. One of the hardest things of dating churches is not judging one against another. Each space I enter has something to teach me, and just maybe something for me to teach them. It would be so easy right now to give up dating churches and let myself completely relax into the Lutheran community I’ve found. But that would be like accepting a marriage proposal from someone I’ve known for only a few months. I remember all too well that I did that once and it didn’t turn out so well.

I’ve realized now more than ever that, when it comes to religion, for most of my life I’d accepted only a single line of what is actually an entire table of truth. I accepted that A was true and B was false without bothering to figure out what that meant for the unknowns of G and F.  Add to that, I’d gone through life with a God of NO PARTIAL CREDIT. Get one thing wrong and EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE IS INVALID. That’s an awful way to go through life, especially when I know I’ve gotten more than one thing wrong along the way. The last couple of years have been a matter of figuring not only what is true and what is false but what is unknown and even unknowable, what is of God and what is of man. I reached a point where the single line I had based my faith on no longer served as a solid foundation. I need an entire truth table, letter for letter, symbol for symbol, with every combination of true and falsity. That simply is not possible. There are too many unknowns to ever have that level of certainty. All I can do is work with what I know is true and build from there. Two things I know for certain: God loves me. God is infinitely, mercifully patient with me. Which logically leads me to believe that God is indeed a God of Partial Credit.

After three long weeks, I finally got my test grade. I cringed as I unfolded it. My grade? 100. NO PARTIAL CREDIT. Fully earned, in spite of my doubts. When I shared my news on Facebook, my friend congratulated me and then told me, “Next time, don’t doubt yourself.”

Unsettled Waters

After the way Lent has gone this year, I was more than happy to get away last week. I had five days alone on Cape Cod, days which included my birthday and Palm Sunday. I had completely reached my capacity for dealing with other human beings so I was not at all disappointed with there was fog, mist, rain, sleet and snow in the forecast. Cold and damp means empty beaches. Empty beaches make me very happy.

My first day up there, I went out to Head of the Meadows just before low tide. As I’d hoped the fog had kept everyone away.

Wreck of the Frances – sunk in December 1872

There in the shallows, was the wreck of the Frances, easily visible from the shore. The sand bars went almost right up to it and I seriously considered wading through the shallows to get out there but then I remembered that I had promised my mother that I wouldn’t do anything stupid. So instead I opted for a long walk down the beach. I love the fog. It was impossible not to feel it wrapped around me and equally impossible not to breath it in. The smell of salt water and fresh mist felt so good and so clean. I kept my eyes on the fog, watching it roll down from the high ground to the beach and to the edge of waves. It might have been wiser to watch the sky behind the high ground because after I had meandered a couple of miles down the beach, the sky opened up with cold, steady rain. I meandered my way back towards my car and just before I got there, the sun came out. Gotta love God’s sense of humor. I headed back to the resort to dry clothes, a long hot shower and to curl up with my Kindle by the windows.

My second day started out rainy and I knew I was going to get wet. I have a thing for water so I don’t mind the rain. For the last couple of years, the only thing I wanted was to see a seal on the beaches. I hadn’t bothered with looking at a map. I pointed the car East and drove until I hit water, then turned South. I wound up at Chatham Lighthouse. I parked the car and looked out across the water to one of the many islands. There in front me were seals. Hundreds of seals. An entire colony of seals. There were cars parked, with people taking in the view from the warmth and dryness of their cars. Not me. I was down the stairs on to the beach in a heartbeat.

Chatham Coyote

The rain switched over to sleet and walking North on the beach would’ve meant walking into the wind and sleet. I’m a little crazy but not that crazy. I started to walk South but hadn’t gone very far when I saw something move on the bluffs about a fifty feet away. I was being watched by a very large coyote. It decided to run up and down the beach between me and the only way to back to the car. It wasn’t afraid of me in the slightest. I, on the other hand, have enough sense to know I didn’t want tangle with it and was suddenly very much aware of the fact that I was the only one on the beach. I made my way back to the car, timing a dash for the stairs as the coyote was a little further up the beach. Gotta love God’s idea of surprises. I headed back soaking wet, half-frozen and giddy after my close encounter with the wild kingdom. Another long hot shower and a lazy afternoon with my Kindle. But as night fell, I caught myself doing dishes, restless and just rattling around the townhouse, staying up far later than I normally do. I realized I was keeping vigil for my Dad the way I had when I was younger. When my Dad died, it was shortly after midnight, a Friday night into Saturday, not very long into my birthday. I hadn’t stayed up to watch the minutes tick by like that in years.

Saturday morning started with rain but quickly changed to wet snow. I decided spending a quiet day curled up in front of the windows, reading and watching the snow come down sounded like a perfect way to spend a birthday. I ordered in delicious veal parmigiana dinner, completely enjoying the silence. I read. I wrote in my journal. I read some more. I wrote some more.

Palm Sunday was the lone day of sun and gorgeous blue skies. I stopped in Wellfleet on my way up to Race Point. Wellfleet had huge chunks of ice washing ashore a few weeks back.  Alas, I had missed them so I continued on my way up to Race Point.

The folly of man

My usual parking lot was closed, buried under a foot or more of sand. Seeing the arrow for the parking area pointing directly into an impassable pile of sand amused me to no end – the folly of man and the power of nature. I wanted so badly to go in the water but with a windchill of 24 and a water temperature of 38 and rough surf, I thought the better of it. I stood at the edge of the breakers and argued with myself. My more sensible side won out. That’s a rarity.

I spent a lot of time reading during those days. Deacon Ron recommended a book to me before I left titled If You Want to Walk On Water, You Have To Get Out Of The Boat. I made it through six of the ten chapters before driving home and I’m still reading. It made me think how much my life has changed in the past year, far more than I’ve taken time to appreciate. Taking that five days to stop and rest and reflect made me realize that it’s no wonder I drove up there feeling overwhelmed. In the space of one year, my RA went into remission, I lost my beloved furry companion, I went back to school, my younger son started middle school, my older son explored his passion for engines, and I’m still figuring out this whole dating church thing. Trying to balance my life’s changes with the changes in my kids’ lives has been almost too much at times. I needed a quiet, calm, reflective Lent. I guess God thought otherwise because instead I was reminded how passionate I can be about the ordination of women, how deeply my past has affected me, and just how unsettled I feel right now and that’s just for starters. Deacon Ron asked me before I left for the Cape if I felt like I was on a bridge between two places. That’s pretty accurate and what became clearer during that time away was the image of that bridge: a scary high rope bridge with space between the planks and neither side being very securely anchored.

I love Triduum and I wait all year for those three days. And yet this year, I dreaded them. After Ash Wednesday and another incident in mid-March, walking back into the Catholic parish that had been my home for so long was an unpleasant prospect. But the idea of stepping into something entirely unfamiliar wasn’t any better. Holy Thursday, I couldn’t bring myself to get my feet washed like I had in years past. I couldn’t let my guard down that much. Good Friday wasn’t much better. The kids refer to the Passion as “that service where Mom cries the whole time” but aside from the uncontrollable flinching as the spikes were pounded into the cross, there would be no tears. I was edgy and uneasy until the end. As I came up to venerate the huge wooden cross, I rested my head against it and most of the junk I’d been carrying rolled off. Yes, I said most, not all, only as much as I would let go of. Easter Vigil was amazing and by the time it was over, I had let my guard down as much as I possibly could. I walked away feeling like I could make a clean break now. There was nothing left open and raw now.

So am I walking on water? I jumped out of the boat almost a year ago. Now, I’ve panicked and started to sink. I’m not looking for the boat yet. I’m still reaching for His hand to pull me up.

The Best of Intentions

Several years ago I was invited to join a meeting of exceptionally talented writers, all teachers, professors, and published authors. And then there was me with my small yet loyal blog following. Back then Wholly Jane was still just a half-finished work in progress and I was feeling entirely out of my league, an insecurity which I quite openly voiced. I was assured that I was precisely what this group needed because I wrote from my gut. Our task was to write the Prayers of the Faithful for all Sunday and Holy Day Masses. The feeling was that this vital piece of the liturgy had grown stale. People mentally checked out and were composing their grocery lists and checking their watches. The hope was that by bringing a variety of voices to the liturgy, we would recapture them by making the prayers more meaningful. These prayers are a key role in the laity’s participation in the Mass. They are intended to represent the prayers of the community, to bring before The Lord the everyday concerns of those sitting in the pews. So in order to keep them meaningful, they needed to be tied closely to Liturgy of the Word and also be in touch with the real world issues that lay just beyond the church doors. This was something that none of us ever took lightly. It takes time. It takes thought. Most of all, it takes prayer. Lots of prayer.

Over the years, we learned to recognize each other’s writing voices and we each have developed our own unique way of connecting the community to the liturgy. For me that always meant trying to speak for those who were barely seen and rarely heard. The forgotten, the lonely, the abused, the addicts, those facing spiritual darkness, those who felt unforgivable and unloved, the sick whose illnesses were not always obvious: all of these fell within my bailiwick.

As my regular readers know, over the past year my growing discontent in the Catholic Church has led me to other denominations, to begin dating other churches so to speak. And yet, here I am, still writing these Prayers of the Faithful, lending my own unique voice and life experience to the Sunday Mass that means so much to so many of my family and friends. I struggle now more that I ever did and I find that I will pray most of the week with those six relatively short sentences.

Who am I missing? Who hasn’t been heard this month? Lord, show me.

And He never fails me. The voices of the unheard come to me.

Over the years, I have been asked on a handful of occasions to change the wording on what I’ve written. The reasons varied. Perhaps the language felt awkward or unclear or perhaps could be construed as leaning too far towards one political party or another. Sometimes no such request came and the priest or deacon who read them simply made the alterations himself. There was no drama in any of it as we all did what we felt called to do.

Last week, as I read the reading from Romans, what deeply struck me was the image of the Spirit praying within when we don’t know how we are to pray. And the voices that came to me were those of all the Catholic women I’ve come into contact with over my lifetime. The issue that all of us have had to grapple with at some point or another is the issue of women clergy and our feelings and convictions on that topic. The truth of the matter is that many, many women don’t know quite what they feel. And the prayer that emerged was this: