the still point

It's hard to describe my love affair with my piano. Yesterday I thanked Mom for not getting rid of it; I'm the only person who plays it, and it does take up a good chunk of the dining room. Coming back to it was like...like taking a walk along an old path in a patch of woods bordering a town you haven't visited in years, and just as you stop on the pine-needled trail to look down at the creek pouring through the gorge a remnant of a poem you used to recite from memory just at that spot seizes your brain and you lose track of time completely trying to summon to your consciousness the entire piece. Or seeing an old friend for the first time in many years and watching the past collide with the present, the half-forgotten expressions, the sound of your friend's laughter, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and swimming in the wash of what used to be, what still is, and what has changed.

There's a trick to triggering memory. Once again, my technique at the piano was never masterful, and I didn't advance to hugely intricate compositions (more's the pity; I'd love to take lessons again); but I loved expression, and while I went off on a Jim Brickman spree toward the end of my lessons my senior year in high school (my gosh, it's been almost ten years), now as I leaf through the old books and sit down to old music, I find that I still love best the classical pieces. Nonetheless, I started out with Jim Brickman a few weeks ago, for the excuse of playing Christmas music too early, and found that, in his case, the trick is to fudge it. His pieces are fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to, full of eighth and sixteenth notes and tons of syncopation, and having once gone to great pains to place each note just so, metronomically, it's just a matter of getting back into that mindset to gloss over the playing, glancing at a string of notes and seeing the chord they piece together and making of it what you will.

Unfortunately I didn't find that very interesting; fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to don't present a strong compulsion to the player. (Sorry, Jim.) So then it was Grieg for a couple of weeks, and then a lovely simple little piece, "To a Wild Rose," by Edward MacDowell; and finally, tremblingly, this week I returned to my oldest and most passionate love, Claude Debussy.

I love Debussy for so many reasons. As the only Impressionist composer during the Impressionist period of the arts, he wrote his pieces expressly for expression. If you play his compositions in technical, metronomic perfection, you've lost the soul of the music; and finding the soul of the music is what I've always loved best. Kerry selected Debussy for me for that reason, as a way to rescue me from my miserable and terrified method of playing grilled into me by my first teacher. I believe one of the things he told me, opening my book to "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin," was, "Don't worry so much about rhythm with Debussy. Be expressive."

So in this composer I found a measure of salvation from my own private Reign of Terror by the woman who forced me to play Sonatinas erased of emotion. Debusssy paints portraits in notes and chords as rich, textured and vivid as anything Monet did with paint. I loved "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") because the notes and chords spun in my mind a scene: a young woman with long, unbound yellow hair walking through a blowing green hilltop field on a late spring day, barefoot, with dandelions and sunshine in her hair, and then sitting on a rock to look over the landscape with her hair moving around her in the wind.

I memorized that piece for a recital, and when I sat down to it this week, I was surprised and thrilled to find that some of the notes, in some of the more difficult spots, hadn't left me; my fingers knew exactly where to go. I couldn't play it perfectly, of course; in some places I had to stop and pick my way through; but on the whole it still sounded pretty. Encouraged, I finally turned back ten pages to my everlasting favorite, "Clair de Lune."

I started it holding my breath. I'd memorized this one, too, and had kept it memorized long after I stopped taking lessons, and I loved this piece with my whole lonely beauty-stricken heart, and I was terrified that I would butcher it, that it had left me, that I had forgotten.

But there's a trick to Debussy too -- at least, in my case, to the songs I'd once memorized and now through which I found myself trying to wade through memory as I sight-read: Let go. I don't know how the physiology would look; but it feels like I stop using my frontal lobe and somewhere in the back of my head -- the part of the brain they say is wired for prayer, the part of the brain that seems to expand when I read good poetry -- I lose the boundaries of myself, step over them, and become a conduit, a radiant filament blazing with the music pouring through my body, and my arms, my hands, my fingers go, not where I tell them, but where the music directs. I vanish. There is only the heart and the soul of the music.

Flawless playing, for me, depends almost entirely on that loss of self. When I think, about the music or about anything, when I become aware of me, aware of the notes on the page, of my uncertainties of getting it right, I fall out of that perfect state of grace and my fingers are my fingers, my hands my hands, and they slip and stumble and then it's just me attempting to play a song. The moment I notice that I have lost myself in the music, I lose the expansiveness and return to this "beating heart...in the walking bones," these boundaries of me.

Usually I can only soar in the arresting of space and time, that still dance, that whirling center for a few seconds; and I can only exist there with pieces I know, or once knew, well. It's an amusingly choppy experience at the moment -- a measure that gave me trouble the last time I played it suddenly blossoms under my fingers in perfection; the next measure, which seemed to reach its perfect embodiment through my playing the last time through suddenly becomes as though I've never played it at all. Which necessitates careful, conscious practice of the whole thing -- frustrating because the moments of remembrance come and go, like being suspended in the ocean and caught between wave and wave: One moment I'm borne along by something much stronger than I am; the next I'm floundering; and then I'm caught up again.

So it's sort of muddy at the moment. But the times when my consciousness doesn't betray me are perfect. I feel vibrantly, gloriously alive; and, because I'm caught in an eternal kind of now, I don't realize how alive I feel until later, like a scrap of poetry I wrote years back (you can tell) to describe the experience of reading, which bears itself out similarly to playing music:

When I read
I am in a bare room

where dust motes drift
over rough pine boards

and a braided rug
draws sunlight into color,
warm on my feet

and where the rockers of my chair
ruminate upon the stillness.

In the light heat
kindled by the twigs of letters
I glow like coals,
so intense
that I do not even know
I am perfectly happy.

My favorite part of "Clair de Lune" is actually the last run of notes, converging in a deep, widely ranging chord, held together by the damper pedal. When that last high A flat drops its ethereal ring into the air, the deeper notes suddenly reverberate beneath it, the middle notes thread throughout, and they all waver, pulse, breathe for a few perfect seconds, and the beauty makes it hard to draw air into the lungs. Something in the pit of my stomach comes untied, and then the pedal and the fingers lift, the notes fall away with a "dying fall," and in the silence something echoes that shivers along the lines of time; and the chest expands, the clock ticks, and everything is ordinary, and at peace.

then sings my soul

So it's been a long year...
~Over the Rhine, Snow Angels

What a year so far. I love that Thanksgiving comes just close enough to the end of the year that the remaining month can fall into a certain peaceful perspective as everyone prepares for the increasing rigors of Christmas. (Although I'm wondering if the state of the economy, and everyone's basic poverty, will make for simpler, more joyful Christmases this year -- stripping things down to the essentials, as it were. Hey, I can hope.) There's always something to complain about, and life is always difficult to some degree; I love, and am growing to love more as I get a little older, the institution of Thanksgiving -- a day consecrated to the pondering of blessings, to the celebration of good things even in the face of hardship, to joy.

So for what am I thankful, this Thanksgiving of my twenty-seventh year? I am thankful for how I have been brought through one of the most difficult times of my life; I am thankful to be home; I am thankful for the weapons forged in my hands against fear; I am thankful for my parents, for my sister, for my brother-in-law, for how miraculously God has raised a phoenix from ash in our family; I am thankful for the work God is doing in me, for the transformations taking place that I hadn't thought possible; I am thankful for a job (yes, a job! I am now gainfully employed at Borders -- hardly prestigious, to be sure, but in many ways I'm looking forward, greatly, to returning to retail...and income!), for God's timely and promised provision.

I am thankful for snow, for brown leaves on almost-bare trees, for the brooding half-winter lake, for the hills. I am thankful for friends new and old, for loved ones here and far away, for deepening closenesses, for Meg and Phillip and Josie. I am thankful for Simon, whose cuteness and absolute trust comfort me immeasurably. I am thankful for the redemption of time. I am thankful for new beginnings, for bends in the road whispering of new and thrilling unknowns to come. I am thankful for things and people that are too full to put into words, too deeply moving to render on this blog. I am thankful for language, for love, for mystery. I am thankful for the laughter that prevents me from taking myself too seriously too frequently, that unites soul to soul, that heals. I am learning to be thankful for life in the question. I am thankful for promises, and for change. I am thankful for what I have learned through the difficult things of the past year, and for the beautiful things that have sustained me through the difficult things.

I am thankful for you, my dear and faithful readers, whose encouragement over the past four years has kept me writing and sharpened my vision and my focus. I am thankful that somewhere, out there, the private thoughts that I scribble from a keyboard in Western Pennsylvania are heard and understood all over the country, the continent, the globe. Some of you I know very well; some of you I have never met; but on this American holiday of rendering thanks to the Giver of all good things, I give thanks for, and love, all of you. Thank you, so much, for reading.

the lovers, the dreamers and me

I'd like to say that I've always found them magical and mesmerizing. I'd like to pontificate on how they've impacted my soul my entire life, signified something incredible since my childhood, but none of that really applies. Unlike most of the signs in the created order which I hold personally dear (stars, trees, thunderstorms, dew-decked spiderwebs, fireflies, fog), rainbows, like rain, only began to emerge as reminders of divine promises in my early adulthood.

Rainbows themselves as a scientific occurrence always fascinated me, I suppose -- some of my earliest childhood memories involve Mom and Laura and me dashing outside after a rainstorm and jumping around ankle-deep in wet grass looking for a clear view of the sky (our yard boasts more trees than any on the block) in hopes of sighting a rainbow. Science and art class yielded their own fruits on the subject which I also enjoyed. My favorite source, of course, was Genesis, featuring the rainbow as the conclusion to Noah and the Flood, and also hallmarking one of the only specific origin myths of a natural phenomenon in the Bible.*

But while God's setting the rainbow in the sky as a sign of His promise never again to flood the whole earth is a fabulous story, it never struck me as immediately compelling every time I saw a rainbow. I didn't really think, "Oh, look, a rainbow -- thank God there'll never be a worldwide flood again, I was really worried about that, whew." I was more inclined to ponder prisms and light waves, and the beauty of a dark waterlogged sky alive with sunshine.

Something happened over the past year, though -- I kept seeing them everywhere, far more frequently than I'd ever remembered noticing them before. Possibly the flatness of the landscape in southwest Michigan, and the resultant broadness of the expanse of sky, had to do with it; but it still struck me as weird that they were pretty much everywhere, and cropped up when a rainbow was the farthest thing from my mind. Driving to Meg and Phillip's on a Friday night, looking casually up to check the weather on my way out the door from work, heading south into Mishawaka to catch dinner with Boss-Lady -- quite often the least intentional glances pinned my vision on a glowing ribbon of spliced light hanging between sun and cloud.

They usually materialized (or whatever; although now that they've proven that E = mc squared I suppose I can talk of light in terms of matter) just before, during, or immediately after a rough patch -- a bad day, a bad week. A rainbow sighting began to feel comforting, though inexplicably. I felt that maybe God was telling me something, and my antennae was on the wrong frequency to pick up the meat of the message. I kept casting around in my brain for any reason why a promise not to flood the earth would have any meaning for me in a difficult time. I can be something of a literalist, you see, and worldwide floods didn't seem to have much to do with the difficulty of my little life.**

Then one morning a couple of weeks ago, I didn't feel like reading further in Galatians and, yielding to whimsy, flipped to Isaiah, my favorite Old Testament book (such divine passion, such beautiful promises, such poetry), and let the pages fall where they would. My eyes fell on this:

The LORD calls you back,
like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
A wife married in youth and then cast off,
says your God.
For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great tenderness I will take you back.
In an outburst of wrath, for a moment
I hid my face from you;
But with enduring love I take pity on you,
says the LORD, your redeemer.

This is for me like the days of Noah,
when I swore that the waters of Noah
should never again deluge the earth;
So I have sworn not to be angry with you,
or to rebuke you.
Though the mountains leave their place
and the hills be shaken,
My love shall never leave you
nor my covenant of peace be shaken,
says the LORD, who has mercy on you. (Isaiah 54: 6-10, The New American Bible)

Falling as it did in the middle of the beginning of my discovery of God's unchanging love for me, this passage brought tears to my eyes, and I underlined it and read it several times and loved it, savoring in particular "I have sworn not to be angry with you," and "My love shall never leave you."

I still didn't make the connection.

Then about a week later, on the phone with my mother, I noticed that the snow-sleet-rain mix pouring from the sky was lit to glass by a ferocious sun. Running out to the porch, I scanned the eastern horizon and located the rainbow, a broad sash in the sky over the orchard. I told Mom about it, and then suddenly stopped hearing her as the implication bowled me over.

This is for me like the days of Noah...

How had I missed that? How had anyone? How had no one in all my years of Bible study ever mentioned how the symbolism of the rainbow took on a profound new significance in the context of grace and unconditional love? Rainbows aren't just a sign of no-more-flood; they signify a "covenant of peace."

So now rain, which has over the past five years come to signify to me (on experiential, and not textual, basis) the presence and provision of God, has deepened and broadened to include the rainbow, signifier of the love of God.

Which meant a lot to me today, admitting the resurgence of yet another bad stretch (well, I knew it wasn't going to be cured just because I was going home) and taking a deep breath to start fighting again.*** It meant a lot to me particularly because on the way home from a difficult weekend, feeling stretched a little too tightly and brittle in the face of all the unknowns yawning at me, while I talked on the phone with my childhood best friend I looked out the window and there, in the overcast Western PA sky, despite a hazy sun dim enough behind the clouds to look at directly and no precipitation falling at all, hung a clear slash of rainbow, stillness to my motion, but seeming to match the pace of the car, so that as I talked I could stare at the spliced prismic beauty of a multilayered promise, and know that however difficult things are, have been, will be, however I might fail in faith and hope, the love of God will never leave me.


Footnotes:

* Obviously I'm not including the entire Creation story of Genesis, where everything that exists is attributed to the creative power of one God, or the Tower of Babel, which explains the multiplicity of human languages; by "specific" I mean an explanation of why something is the way it is in nature. Greek mythology, for example, specializes in origin myths -- the rebellion of Prometheus explains the existence of fire; the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the subsequent wandering search of Persephone's mother Demeter, goddess of agricultural growth, and her neglect of her tasks explains winter; Zeus' weapons of anger explain thunder; etc. The Bible places the coming-into-being of almost every natural thing at the very beginning, and all from the hand of God. Rainbows therefore are interesting in that they come into being later, and stand as a sign of a promise.

** Yes, you can think me obtuse and stupid, especially when the words I generally use to describe depression involve trying to stay afloat in vast bodies of water without any land in sight. That connection didn't occur to me until just now, which strikes me as amusing; but even so, I'm generally wary of drawing sweeping parallels between a promise to the world about something literal and a promise to me about something metaphorical.

***I decided today that depression is the hibernation of the will and diseased hope, since human beings cannot live without hope and a person mired in depression begins to see life as an endless stretch of colorless unchanging days blank of excitement or interest or companionship or vitality or joy. Of course immediately after that decision I started thinking about The Neverending Story and the Swamps of Sadness, and how death in the swamp came from giving up hope; and then I started thinking about Paul's brief statement And now these three remain, faith, hope and love, and then the author of Hebrews' Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see, and how faith and hope and love are all interconnected and depression swallows all three which is what makes life to the depressed individual so untenable, for if these three are the only things that remain, and they're gone, or veiled, no wonder the void is so horrifying, like The Nothing, which consumes everything, which is worse than death.

And then I thought how fighting depression requires the forcible resurrection of the will -- the will to will, if you will -- which is why it's so difficult. I also thought about despair, which is etymologically the literal absence of hope (the English word "hope" is Germanic in origin, so we don't tend to catch the Latinate "sperare" -- the root for "hope," noticeable in the Romance languages, e.g. "esperanza" (n.) for "hope" in Spanish -- which renders "de" "sperare": to be without hope). Despair is only definable in terms of hope, in terms of hope's absence. And I believe that the will is vitally connected to hope, because the will, which involves volition and desire as well as choice, seems to have little purpose in human terms without hope, because why would one will anything if not for the hope of something good to come out of it? -- and hope also has to do with desire, and hope involves faith, since hope is partially comprised of belief, and love is at the foundation of everything.

But it's funny how, even when everything seems melodramatically to be dead, mired, sunk, drowning, empty, void, remnants of faith, hope, and love still remain (perhaps Paul was talking not just about their existence but their stubbornness -- they remain, as if they choose to remain despite all odds) to buoy the will. Also I have finally admitted to the hilarious, contrary fact that despite all my struggles with this stupid affliction, I am incurably an optimist -- for which I am extremely grateful, and for which I give myself absolutely no credit. Life is too beautiful, and there are too many promises (one of my favorites: I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living...), to allow the will to curl up and die. Sorry; there's too much left to see, too much to do. It will all turn around one of these days. Keep on keepin' on. Keep on tryin'. And then, unexpectedly: joy.

this is how my dad is evil

Here's the brief introduction.

A number of years ago, Erie, Pennsylvania decided that it needed to boost its tourism by commissioning area businesses to decorate big identically shaped sculptures that would then be placed all around the city.

The first year was fish. The fish were ugly and the only people who cared about them and drove around taking pictures were the natives. Then the city decided to try again, this time, inexplicably, with frogs. I mean, fish make sense. Erie, obviously, borders Lake Erie, and Lake Erie sports a number of fish, which people are finally beginning, slowly, to be able to eat, though it's still not terribly recommendable; the lake spontaneously combusted in places near Cleveland in the 70s due to the industrial waste dumped into the water, and although the environmentalists have done fabulous work cleaning it up, most people who live in Erie won't eat Erie fish.

Nonetheless, fish make a certain kind of sense. But frogs? I never understood. It's not that we don't have frogs; of course we do; but we're not known for frogs, frogs don't make the City of Erie remarkable in any way, so why frogs?

Oh well. Unsolved mystery. Anyway, while the fish were unattractive and humdrum and not very noteworthy, the frogs were simply scary. I spent one of my college breaks after the unveiling of the Frogs from the Nine Levels of Hell driving around Erie with my arm over my face. Apparently, where fish fail to inspire, the local businesses found the frogs to be perfect to display the essence of the fearsome and disturbing.

Shortly after that college break I returned to Grove City, where nothing scary lives beyond townies and cows, and then I received an email from my father. An evil email from my evil father. He just found it in his outbox and after five years decided I needed to read it again.

Here it is.

***
Hello, Sarah!!!

Remember Me??!!??!??

I REMEMBER YOU!!!!!

My friends want you to know

Don't worry

Sleep safe

We'll see you in your dreams, tonight!!!

BWUHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA

***
I mean, what the frick.

falling like forgiveness from the sky

Cold and rainy today. I rather like rain, but at this time of year, I prefer it to come in its crystallized form: more Christmasy. (There's no way to spell "Christmasy" that looks right, although this variant, along with "Christmassy," appears in acceptable format under "Christmas" on dictionary.com. "Christmasy" looks off, but "Christmassy" is just weird and "Christmas-y" stupid.)

My parents and I passed the weekend in southwestern PA with my mother's family -- always an interesting experience. I'm actually surprised that anyone on that side of the family believes me to be intelligent; I never talk when I'm there. Although I have received my own strong dose of their Scotch-Irish temperament (vocal, opinionated, strong-willed, story-loving, clan-loyal, wry-humored, quick-tempered), when faced with those traits in concentration, I tend to retire into poker-faced staring at whatever falls directly in my line of vision. Perhaps the lack of drool convinces them that I'm not actually retarded.

Adulthood has brought a measure of freedom, however: Now I can go grab a drink with my cousin Adam away from the people we still term the grown-ups; and this time an old friend of ours, Dustin, came along as well, having relocated to southwestern PA for the first time in well over a decade. Great times were had, much Yuengling consumed (Yuengling! On tap! Joy! Rapture!), old stories rehashed, new stories relayed.

It's funny watching my cousin in his young adulthood. He has acquired the knack inherent to the males of that side of the family, which is a sort of genius for a colloquial style of oral storytelling. When we were little I mostly wanted to kill him, though I don't know if anyone really knew this, since I sat quietly in a corner masking my glower; now I think he's generally hilarious, with occasional flashes of amazing insight into his character or his family.

He also called me a fucking idiot for not getting any of my poetry published yet, and since I don't think he's ever read anything I've written, I pretty much love him for it. Few things quite match the warmth of having a loyal family backing you up, however little they might actually know of what you do.

The weekend was kind of tiring; my grandfather's health is deteriorating and everyone is bearing the strain. I feel worst for my mother and grandmother.

But, we got through it, it was, overall, a good visit, and the parentals and I trekked home yesterday evening (we made a quick detour at the Grove City Outlets so I could spend a little of a gift card burning a hole in my pocket; I don't spend a great deal of time or money on clothing, and although I wasn't in a shopping mood -- I don't share the love of clothes-shopping pervasive among my sex; I'd rather buy groceries, kitchen gadgets, movies, music and books -- I still found a darling sweater and some bangly jewelry fabulously on sale, and remembered the joy of new and pretty clothes). After over 48 hours of being surrounded nonstop by people, I had reached my limit and felt more than a little frayed, so I spent the evening at home with Simon recharging my introvert batteries on solitude.

Happily, I made progress on the Clytemnestra project as part of that recharging process. As I've blogged here and there in the past, the sticking point on that one, as much as I'm playing with narrative form, has been the organization: The more free-wheeling in appearance, the tighter in organization a piece has to be. So last night I booted up my college laptop, which boasts one of the more recent versions of the non-linear, seventy-odd-page tale (I used this computer long after I graduated), and my other hand-me-down laptop, which doesn't short out as often as the Compaq, in order to work on an outline of her early life events in linear time.

I think it's going to be beautiful. As I mapped things out sequentially, more and more scenarios and realities kept occurring to me, things that made the characters what they are, things that led the characters to do what they did when they did. So satisfying to discover more details and greater depth in an already beloved story.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, of course (that has to be the most tired, overused, cliched, dried up and largely meaningless metaphors in the English language; I'm only keeping it so I can keep my derision of it in this post. Yesterday at the grandparents' house the History channel used it on a program about underground tunnels and secret passageways and I fumed about it for an hour); before I'm through I envision entire documents and hard copy printouts littering my hard drives and my living room, all carefully labeled and with several different methods of organization all at once. But the start is always fun.

So today I'm dressed in my new apparel and feeling like a million, I spent the morning housecleaning, I have a few different jobs to apply for in the continuing quest for work, and a good deal of thinking to do. All in all, a surprisingly promising Monday.

antidotes

In the interest of getting out of my own self-embroilment (getting a job is looking a little more promising, thank God -- the worst thing I can do for my own wellbeing is pass weeks and weeks and weeks alone in my house) I spent today helping a few people from church decorate the community's youth center for Christmas.

So much fun. (They even let me decorate the front window!) Good conversation, the pleasure of being useful, having something to think about external to Sarah. I've been getting restless and bored and frustrated; today was perfect.

Tonight: hot tubbing in the snow at the parental residence. (Hm, where's my champagne? At least I know where my bathing suit is: with everything else I own: in my car.)

And this weekend: a trip to catch up with old friends (and wacky family) in southwestern PA.

Big huge enormous sigh of profound relief. I've felt caged.

further caveat to the previous post

Whew. I just got a phone call from Pator Bob at the Baptist church regarding a brief conversation we had after the sermon on Sunday, and my parents were right: I was being waaaaay too sensitive. He's pretty awesome, and dedicated to Christian unity and change, and clarified that he was denouncing a mindset (which exists in every denomination) and not any one demonination in particular.

So I feel a whole lot better, and am extremely grateful for God's little nudges that tell me things aren't as bad as I sometimes think they are. Also reminders that everything looks black when I'm tired and all I need for the whole world to be rosy again is a good night's sleep.

from morn to night, my friend

[Preliminary caveat: This is my phantom post from yesterday, which I have hesitated about publishing because my family reads my blog and I don't want to give offense. Also, after discussing the subject of this post with my parents last night, I concluded that perhaps I'm being hypersensitive and need to knock it off; certainly no one wishes me ill, and the pastor of the Baptist church reacted well and kindly months and months ago when my parents told him of my decision to become Catholic. At the same time the weekend put a strain on me, and I'm sure there will be times in the future when the sensibilities of the following post resurface; and this is, however much a result of oversensitivity, a legitimate part of my experience. And the Science Girl's comment injected enough courage that I thought perhaps it's best to publish it after all (thanks, J.).]

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
~Christina Rossetti, "Uphill"

I'm sitting in the church seats wrapping my coat around my knees and wishing I had dress pants. I glance at the clock: 10:20, almost two and a half hours into my Sunday morning church-a-thon; I've just finished singing at the front of the church with the worship team, and the sermon is about to begin.

Last night I couldn't sleep; the wind beat against the trailer like a circling ring of charging bulls, bearing the news of coming snow, and my bedroom was so cold four layers of blankets and thermal underwear couldn't warm me, so I lay awake for hours too torpid to sleep or to cry. I had to be at the Baptist church at 8:30 a.m. to practice the songs before the service, and Simon woke me at 8:05; I had set my alarm for 7:30 p.m. So here I sit, tired and headachey and wishing I could skip out on the sermon and go take a nap. After this I have the noon Mass to attend, and then a full afternoon.

I pick at a sticky spot on my little red journal. Today the thing God has impressed upon me to do seems impossible. When I joined the Catholic Church in March, after five years of conscious consideration and eight years of refusing to affiliate with any church at all, I almost couldn't swallow. The beauty of the Easter Vigil Mass held me arrested in my seat, tension kept me electrified, thinking, This is it, this is it even as I searched obsessively through the ritual songbook for the Order of the Mass to show to Meg and Phillip, braced in their seats to my left, filling the spots of my family, with Josie napping in her carseat between them.

The moment just before my official reception into the Church remains the sharpest in my memory: I knelt before the altar in the golden brightness of the stage lights with my fellow candidates and catechumens and said the Nicene Creed, and at the words He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end my voice gave out and I finished in a whisper, too full to speak.

I asked for the Confirmation name of Jude. Typically Catholics are Confirmed in the names of saints who match their own sexes, but I have always held a fondness for St. Jude, patron saint of police officers and lost causes. The symbolism carried a dual purpose: a tribute to my father, and an affirmation of my idealistic aspirations.

When I glowed with the balsam scent of the chrism oil marking the Sign of the Cross on my forehead, hearing the echoes of Father Joe's voice receiving me into the Catholic Church under the name of Jude, I had no idea what God had in mind for me, or how true the significance of Jude's patronage would turn out to be.

I can't tell what this brown spot on my journal even was. Coffee? Gum? It won't even flake under my fingernails. I can't pay attention. Coming home has been interesting in a number of ways. I had resolved, upon what people term, to my dissatisfaction, my conversion, that whenever I visited my parents I would attend the Baptist church with them as well as Mass by myself, in the interest of keeping peace, honoring my parents, and revisiting the community of good people who watched me grow up and have prayed for me fervently ever since. I had figured to keep my Catholicism quiet, so as not to offend anyone, and do the juggling act as best I could without stirring up resentments or bitternesses or angers; the sorrow of my parents and the church members I couldn't help, but I could keep the friction to a minimum.

Moving back presented a new series of challenges. After praying about what I should do, I decided to stick to a variation of the original plan -- be involved in two churches at once. It's an idea I've toyed with for a long time now, actually; it doesn't seem to me that differences in theology should translate to divisions, particularly in families. The longer I thought about it, the more I felt the impression, an internal command, to try to breach the gap between Catholic and Protestant, and between other denominations in general, to the best of my ability.

It has been, so far, at best confusing, and at worst extremely painful. Baptists and Catholics share an antipathy unmatched by almost any other Christian denomination, and I don't feel that I can talk freely to very many people in the Baptist church about my newfound and unprecedented joy in the faith which I have received from Catholicism. Because of it, I have been able to "bury my ballast and make my peace" with much of what I hated from my adolescence and early adulthood. All of the bitterness, the despair, that I carried with me from the church of my growing up years has begun to loosen like a crusty weathereaten knot of old rope, and come clean; I have finally begun to believe in the love of God for me; all the rituals and the prayers and the candles and Communion wrap me in a two thousand-year embrace and turn my shoulders to face the wind and give me the freedom to live in what The Shack calls our purpose in being: As a bird is made to fly, we are made to be loved.

Much of this I don't feel I can quite share with most of the Baptist congregation, and a lot of my involvement is a huge amount of work in diplomacy, keeping the lines clear between honesty and offensiveness, maintaining what is appropriate. Which usually means keeping my mouth shut, and which has grown more punishing over the last couple of weeks. However much I might emphasize to the handful of people in the congregation who know my new church membership that I have no interest in proselytizing them, I'm a little worn out by the close-mouthed tension that seems to paralyze people's ability to converse with me normally. Maybe I'm just getting paranoid. What I need (and for what I'm waiting on a phone call regarding) is more involvement with the local Catholic parish -- at the moment I'm involved with Sunday School, a small group and the music team at the Baptist church, and I only attend the Catholic church -- the imbalance that has begun to exact a toll. A person can only feel on the defensive for so long before that person starts to sink into discouragement.

The Baptist church is promising in that there are other young people like myself who are itching to unite all the Christians of the town to common purposes, to begin to break down the walls that keep Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Episcopals, Lutherans, Catholics from associating with one another. At the same time, the Baptist church is the place where, so far, I do the hardest and most difficult work -- which only makes sense. The Catholic church is where I can kneel and lay my forehead on the back of the pew in front of me, breathe in the smell of candle wax and let the tension seep from my sinews as the Holy Spirit moves through them like the slide of hot cider down a cold throat. Last week, after I mentioned my Catholicism to my Sunday School class in the interest of a.) honesty and b.) illustration of my hopes for a united church community, and fended off a few arguments (Sunday School being an inappropriate forum for that kind of discussion; I made it clear that I welcomed questions after class if anyone had them) -- the overall reaction was in fact kind, but I sat through the class in a forcible self-containment that left my shoulders aching -- just the smell of the hot wax in the loveliness of the little cathedral afterward helped a tremendous deal.

Whatever is stuck to my journal isn't coming up, so I open the cloth cover and listen to the pastor begin the sermon. For whatever reason the bulletin I was given goes to last week's sermon, so I start taking the occasional note in the journal to focus my attention. I like Pastor Bob; he's dynamic and passionate about change; and I always find it interesting how certain undercurrents of his own former Catholicism flavor bits of his teaching.

Today, though, as he talks about the necessity of devotion as demonstrated by the early church in the book of Acts, he castigates ritual: "The way I grew up, you took Communion to get on God's good side. You said this prayer or that prayer to get points with God. That's not what it's about..."

He glances at me a time or two as he says this. His eye contact with the congregation at large is direct and engaging, so I'm sure he isn't consciously being pointed; but in my current state of mind it feels like a blow. I'm so tired. I look at the little pencil in the pencil holder on the back of the seat in front of me, reach out to fiddle with it, thinking desperately that there's no way he could know that I agree with his sentiment, that there's no way I can tell him right now that it's not about that, that rejecting Catholicism is part of his story and he has his good reasons, this is a Baptist church, of course this path God put me on isn't easy and isn't going to be easy, at least he didn't mention Catholics by name, nobody enjoys standing in the gap but it's what I've been told to do, I can be strong enough, I'm not strong enough, God make me strong enough...

The little sliver of pain that has been living in my stomach since last Christmas, the Christmas of my decision to become Catholic and the family discord it created which has never healed but filled itself with silence -- the little sliver that has been working its way deeper into my stomach since I embarked on this choppy voyage, sends up a hot red flower behind my eyes and I stare down at my lap. Pastor Bob has moved on to say something really interesting and valuable about how our worries indicate our real passions, and I write it down, trying hard not to yield to fury at my indefensibility, at the questions that no one but one person has asked that might lead to understanding, at the painful hesitant silence of people who think I'm wrong and possibly hellbound and who are either indifferent to my position or afraid to talk about it. It's not their fault. It's not their fault.

I focus on the words I've written in my journal but they don't really mean anything. While the beige guidelines on the pages waver in my vision all I can think about are the pastor's words, and I feel more alone than I've felt since leaving Michigan because I hear, or think I hear, all the things he's saying underneath the things he's saying, and I imagine to my left the silent, motionless stiffening of bone and muscle that means my parents' awareness of those same things, and I think how no one will believe me that it isn't about empty ritual for its own sake, because Pastor Bob grew up in that culture and knows more than a mere convert could; I think how every week I will have to hear, somehow, my chosen branch of the faith on trial, my freedom and my joy condemned; I think how everyone will think me misguided, misled, apostate and never say so; I think how some of the people I love best won't believe me or won't listen, I want so badly to get up and run to Mass but that would be rude and cowardly and Mass hasn't even started yet; I think how I will keep being obedient to this particular calling; and the journal disappears and the tears are streaming down my cheeks and I can't stop them.

little notes of happiness

I can't wait for the Christmas season. It's all snowy and gorgeous here.

Song of the Day: "White Horse," by Over the Rhine, from Snow Angels. Love the harmonies at the end. The whole album is spectacular; I've been playing it all day.

I do this thing with singing along to music, which is finding a harmony that, if possible, no one on the track is singing. This probably annoys people, so mostly I listen to music alone. But living in the fullness of a beautiful chord is one of my little joys, and I love to do it over, and over, and over. (Current song of choice for this exercise: "Hard Times," by Eastmountain South.)

And the piano has been begging me to play Christmas songs on it. In my family this was our only escape from the No Christmas Music Before Black Friday rule: "But Daddy, I have to, I need to practice!" Sometimes I think Kerry assigned us Christmas music at the beginning of November for that very reason. (Favorite Christmas song to play: "Do You Hear What I Hear?" arranged by Jim Brickman. Simple but fun.)

oh...crap.

Yargh. I keep trying to write something essayish, or bloggish; there are certainly plenty of thoughts milling around in my brain; but my Muse has forsaken me this week, at least as far as nonfiction is concerned.

Oh, I know: I'll tell you briefly about my Muse.

Marianne and I, years ago, loved to compare and contrast our muses. Our muses didn't get along. Hers is (or was) this vain, arrogant, sarcastic, hilarious, gorgeous, well-muscled Greek Apollo-type. Mine is...well, for a strange wonder, Alexander Pope (for whom I harbor, historically, no great affection) described her best:

But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose:
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,
And breathes a browner horror on the woods. (Eloisa to Abelard)

Substitute "The Muse of Sarah" for "Black Melancholy" and there's my inner picture of my Muse: A ghostly woman with salt-colored skin and black hair, eyes and robes standing still in the November woods -- silent, voiceless, terrible, knowing.

Not that she is without joy. Not by any stretch. Or humor. Actually, she seems to disappear altogether when I write essays and poetry, perhaps transfigured into something of a different kind of beauty. But today she has reappeared and pointed toward the fiction which I have neglected for years, and which lends itself badly to the blogosphere. I'm not her most obedient ward -- I am, for instance, writing this -- but I find myself itching to give voice to a silenced woman of mythology, and to that work I must turn my hands.

But there are a lot of things spinning around in my head about the love of God -- my favorite subject lately -- so once I have something coherent spun out, I'll set it down for you, my faithful readers. I beg your patience for a little longer.

eminently practical

My dear boy, this is the sort of day history tells us is better spent in bed.

~Uncle Willie, The Philadelphia Story

After a long afternoon swimming in nausea (I have concluded, and mater corroborates, that it's a nasty viral thingummy), I decided the best remedy would be to sit down with pater over beef stroganoff and, for the first time, watch Sweeney Todd.

It was a brilliant plan.

a face to meet the faces that you meet

I feel Prufrock-y lately.

Today finds me tired and feeling a bit unwell. A migraine descended upon me Saturday night, and has lasted well into today. Fortunately the headache hasn't been too terrible; but the nausea keeps worsening, and I wonder if I've picked up a bug somewhere.

Yesterday I enjoyed a day of being snowed in -- not because we got a lot of snow, but because the couple of inches that fell possessed the consistency of pudding and Henrietta's brakes need a lot of work -- a bad combination for driving. So I stayed at home, drank a lot of orange pekoe, took a nap, cleaned the kitchen, simmered Marianne's Best Spaghetti Sauce You'll Ever Have on the stove for hours (the local Farmer's Market peddles excellent fresh sausage), and committed what in my family amounts to a nearly unforgivable sin: I put on Christmas music before Black Friday.

Christmas in my family begins on Black Friday, and not a day sooner. From Black Friday to New Year's Day the only music heard in my parents' house is Christmas music. Over the years I've cultivated a selection of "cheater" albums, most particularly George Winston's December and Linus and Lucy; but last year, when I didn't feel like Christmas at all, and this year, when once again I can't wait for all the absurdity and overexuberance and warm fuzzy magic and mystery and unspeakable holiness, I find I like to break these lifelong rules and play whatever I want, whenever the mood strikes me.

So yesterday the Christmas album of choice was this cheap thing Mom and Laura and I bought a number of years ago at (of all places) Big Lots, called Winterlude (it appears to be one of a series, but they're all discontinued), which quickly became a family favorite. All instrumentals, very calming, perfectly suited to a wintry evening with a glass of wine and a good book and a slant-eyed cat drowsing on the back of the couch. In particular the album boasts one of the most lovely piano renditions of "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus" I have ever had the pleasure of hearing.

Speaking of couches, it's so great to have my very own, full-size couch. Since my senior year of college I only ever had an ancient and hideous loveseat in large leafy floral prints of brown and orange on a hairy white background, obviously a relic of the inexplicable 70s, which graduated from sheet drapery to ill-fitting slipcovers as the years went on. Ironically, the trailer is the first place in which I've ever lived which will accommodate a couch; the Ivory Tower was too crammed with my other jumbled bits of eclectic furniture, and The State of Denmark too cramped. And while I had grown accustomed to sitting exclusively in my delightful, deep, amazing, funny-looking armchair, I now enjoy the pure delight of sitting on the couch of an evening with books and laptop and cell phone and teapot and papers strewn around me. (And, despite the fact that the couch is in actuality a sofabed, it's a rather comfortable sit.)

I spent awhile yesterday evening laughing at myself. The only laptop I have available at the moment is the ancient doorstop given to me by the college administration my freshman year, which went out of mode about a week after I got it (it's a Compaq, if that tells you anything). It only works sporadically (I maintain that has nothing to do with its catching on fire one Christmas break), but it's better than nothing when handwriting in a journal is too slow and the fiction bug has its mandibles set firmly in my brain and I'd like to be lazing on the couch instead of sitting at the PC. So I pulled it out last night, got it fired up, and started picking through all the bits and pieces of writing I had stored on it from college.

This is always a humbling, embarrassing, and humorous experience. Ninety-eight percent of everything I wrote is shit. For about eighty percent of that I harbor a lingering fondness, and I read those first; some of it even bore the seeds of potential, in idea if not in execution. But some of it was so hideously awful (back in my Christian fiction days...ahhhh, it's painful to admit!...but in my defense I at least wrote dystopic fiction, not crap romance stories) I cringed and laughed and closed it out quickly, groaning, "Ohhh no, Sarah."

The funniest moments came from the content: Most of it was so depressing. I laughed my way through about ten different documents which I remember taking extremely seriously, telling my younger self, "Omigod, it's going to be okay," and telling my present self, "Aren't you glad you're taking pills? Geez."

So there's a time to rejoice in growth. I'm not as crappy a writer as once I was. I have improved, and learned a little about taking myself more lightly. (A little.)

I'd like to start picking up some of the threads of my Clytemnestra project -- a vast undertaking conceived the spring semester of my senior year, when I grew in dissatisfaction with Aeschylus and Euripides and decided the villainous women of mythological history had more to tell than their own evil. I read through some of that last night and it's mostly good. There's just so much intricate organization, I've let it rest on the shelf for about four years now, and I'm not sorry; I think I'm reaching the point where I might be mature enough (or at least on the verge) in character and in skill to do the story justice.

And there's something about writing of a winter evening, the tapping of snow on the windows, the tapping of fingers on the keyboard...

I love the first snow. I love the muffling effect, love the silence, love the beauty of watching falling snow from the warmth of a window. After dark yesterday evening I wrapped myself in scarves (presenting a ridiculous figure in cashmere wraps, a sporty jacket and sweatpants, had it been light enough for anyone to get a good look) and went for a quick walk around the park to revel in the wet chill of an air that barely feels cold, and the harsh caress of a northern wind stripping the day's dreamy lethargy from my face.

There's a magic to walking in the snow at night. In the silence of a sleeping world you can really be alone. The world is crowded, choked with traffic and pedestrians and clamoring with the thoughts of a thousand people, and most of the time a person can only feel alone in the absolute wilderness, or in the anonymity of the city. Snowfall, however, changes a lot of that. People stay indoors; and the darkness and precipitation mask your face from any faces that you meet, so that you don't have to pretend anything. You can let go, and be.

And it's kind of fun and weird to see snow with falling leaves coating its surface. Some of the trees here are still green.

I still have arrived at no definite places for this season of my life -- my living arrangement is temporary and subject to change at a moment's notice; employment prospects are grim (though 'tis the season for part-time holiday retail positions, so hooray, I won't starve!); but somehow I'm not worried -- I have greatly enjoyed this period of rest, the chance to sleep, to recover from a difficult year, and I'm happy to be where I am. I have this increasing feeling that something amazing is just around the corner, and, like a child anticipating Christmas morning, I'm all alight with wondering, and with waiting.

Sisyphus

I really wanted to write something. Really. I had this nebulous blossoming something in my mind, waiting for me to wrap its misty tendrils around my hands, to string them from finger to finger like pearls prized from the mouth of dusk, to listen to the whispering of shades and shape their wordless murmer into language, to give them mouths, give them tongues, give them a place among the living.

I had myself all set to do it, and do it well. I sat down, I poised my hands over the keyboard, I waited. I felt the drifting shapes moving in the ether.

I thought maybe I was supposed to talk of rainbows, of rain, of the seres and golds and ochres that mantle November and squeeze the heart with their desolate beauty. I thought I was supposed to talk about God, about promises, about love and the freedom love gives from the constriction of fear and the way in which wounds I was too young to remember receiving have broken open and are being restored. I thought I was supposed to weave those things together, the threads from many shrouds, into breathing woolen warmth to swaddle you as you sit chilly and alone on the couch, or pace sipping coffee, sipping tea on a rainy or sunny day, or stretch out for a nap, or turn your hand to the always unfinished labor, or take just a moment to stare at nothing and breathe. I wanted to do it -- wanted the words born of that something to reach out and arrest you with the loveliness of truth, give you something to drop into your pocket and carry with you through the day. I wanted that something to say something. I wanted to be just the right kind of channel, write just the right words, hit upon that one thing waiting to be said.

But I don't know what it is, the film keeps wafting just away from my fingertips, and I can't quite move lightly, quickly enough to take what is formless and forge it into form. I'm watching it on a day dying down toward winter, watching it borne away from me trailing hints of secrets, hints of undiscovered, life-giving truth, and I'm rooted to the ground with yearning, watching it fly, because I want to capture it and give it to you, want to draw out the truth and secrets with loving skill, show you the colors lifted perfectly from the gray. I want to tell you, and I don't know how, and all I can tell you, in the end, is the wanting, and the promise that what I wanted to say was beautiful.

sand and sky and sea

Today began with a hormone crash and then progressed steeped in a black mood, so I'm taking a little mental vacation to a year ago, when Laura married Keith and I went for the first time out of the Continental United States (also, for the first time, on a plane) to Grand Cayman to be their honored maid.

All my life I haven't been much of a beach person. I like, and liked, the rocky shale shores of Lake Erie, I like, and liked, Presque Isle; but on an ordinary day, give me the woods. Give me secretive green trees and fragrant pines, give me the noisy silence of cracking branches and leaves in the wind and running creeks and foraging squirrels, give me the red-brown-gold interplay of light and shadow on the carpeted ground.

So I didn't expect to like the Caymans much. I went, for Laura's sake, because she has always loved the beach, and I decided to suffer it with a smile.

I was completely romanced and swept off my feet by the ceaseless salty wind. I was lifted to joy by the absolution of serenity in the sky. I was moved by the moving, the susurrating water to a peace deeper and more all-consuming than I have ever felt before. I was happy. I was light. I was beautiful. At the edge of the water-loving, water-loved world, I was unbound, reborn, utterly myself, anonymous and intimately known, empty and filled, whole and hollow and present and now and young and limitless -- content, and wild, and free.

I spent every morning and evening walking up and down the beach by the inn, looking over the water, watching the colors change and the force of the waves break against the reef, and scouting the sand for interesting bits of shells and glass and coral and pottery. I walked in my two-piece, or my long backless dress, or my cotton pajamas, uncaring who might see me, unselfconscious. I learned to light a cigarette from a match in fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. I loved the briney smell in our suite, the little balcony in my room that overlooked the street, the frigid bathroom with beautiful tiles, the innkeeper's cats who would step inside for a visit and ask to leave at five. Everything was bright and fully manifest. The elements were merciful. Living was gracious and easy, that quiet time of the year; the people were kind.

And the night of the wedding in my sea-green dress I watched my sister radiant with her husband, I laughed with her friends, I danced till I couldn't breathe, I waded in the surf, and I felt giddy with champagne and a forceful surge of completeness, of love and joy and hope all meeting in that space around me like the sand and sky and sea, and I knew for certain that I was immortal, and deeply loved.

just a little batty

[Progress Note: This one isn't finished; I'm posting it bit by bit as I go, or it would be sitting around forever.]

I've always had this thing for bats. I have no clear notion of where this passion, called morbid by the ignorant, originates; but I've always loved the fuzzy winged things, in their insane zigging and zagging contributing to the bewitching magic of a summer night.

Bats feature prominently in my childhood memories, and mark several pillars and milestones of my maturing life. A little weird, I suppose; but let's just say the macabre seems to have set me apart for its own in some ways from my infancy. The following are some free-association anecdotes (some plotless and pointless) relating to one of nature's most curious mammals.

I. There Goes the Fear Again

Mom hates bats. Mom fears bats. Mom lives annually in dread of the night a bat will squeeze its way through the attic trapdoor into my parents' room and make a beeline for her hair. For this reason she always looks a little tired in summertime. She reacts to bats the way I react to spiders when I'm lucky enough to have someone else around: Every muscle seizes and all power of speech flees but the involuntary shriek to "KILL IT!"

For countless years in my growing up, Laura and I would awake to muffled screams and thumps and muttered curses from our parents' room, and we'd leap out of bed and dash into the hall and celebrate the carnivalesque of the indoor bat, adding our jumping around and shouting, "Where is it?" to the general din.

Also for countless years, after Dad patiently caught them in an old towel we kept around for that purpose, he would take them outside and come back and tell us he'd let it go. It wasn't until I watched from my bedroom window one night, after Laura and I had been banished back to our rooms, that I discovered that "letting them go" meant swinging the towels with superior masculine strength against the sidewalk.

In all fairness, I'm sure he let a good number of them go, until they kept coming back. Even so, I thought this all very barbaric -- I loved bats -- until the night our parents were out late and Laura and I had to contend with a fluttering panicked intruder on our own.

II. Scrrrrritch Goes the Rodent

We had a cat. A very smug, intense cat exuding a confident awareness of his masculinity from kittenhood. He kept his claws meticulously sharpened. He stared out the windows in daylight, his entire body quivering with the desire to kill, emitting strange squeaky mews every now and then when the quivering could no longer adequately express the desire.

Alexander Pennington Farnsworthy (also known, for reasons understood only by my mother, as Greubie) lived for the kill. We never allowed him outside, and so he had to content himself with window sitting and quivering and squeaking...until summertime, the Season of the Bat. In those months he came into his element. And we stopped having bat problems.

Specifically, we stopped having live bat problems. Laura, upon whose bed Alex preferred to sleep, began waking up in the mornings to see, with her nearsighted pre-contact vision, blurry dark splotches in the middle of her carpet. Clambering down from the bed, she crouched and bent close and peered at the splotch...which resolved itself two inches from her nose into a bat lying curled up on its back with its face contorted in a silent, openmouthed snarl of death and its beady eyes fixed lifelessly on hers.

So then her shrieks announced the summer mornings. But Mom began sleeping through the nights, as Alex, whom we titled Bat-Killer, or Batsbane, with his deadly prowess kept vigilant watch over the house. Quick and efficient, our Greubie, we would say, boasting of his skills to our friends. Never wakes us up.

Until the night Mom and Dad were out quite late, and Laura and I were left to our own devices. Being the Brady Bunch teenagers that we were, we actually did our homework, ate dinner and went to bed on time. (Disgusting.) As I turned out my light and hit the hay, I thought with satisfaction how proud Mom and Dad would be to find everything so orderly when they came home.

An hour later a hideous screech brought Laura and me bounding terrified into the hall and staring down the dimly lighted stairwell.

"What was that?" she whispered.

"I don't know," I whispered back.

"I think it's in the living room."

"Let's go see."

I grabbed a MagLite (if you don't have a gun, a MagLite is the next best thing -- it won't do any damage from a distance, but smash the handle weighted with four D-cell batteries onto someone's head and they won't bother you anymore), Laura retrieved Dad's old nightstick from under her bed (those were the days before they were completely outlawed) and we crept down the stairs.

It was in the living room. As the stairs groaned under our timid weight and the bannister permitted a straight line of vision downstairs, we froze transfixed at the tableau beneath us.

Greubie sat in statuesque stillness in front of the entertainment center. Before him, feebly attempting to climb the wood, hung a bat leaking blood all over the carpet. Greubie watched, let it climb an inch, and then, with an air of absolute detachment, reached out a single claw and jabbed it into the bat.

It screeched again. The sound reminded me of stones grating against each other underwater -- it brought goosebumps rippling over my arms and sank right into my bones. Scrrrrrrriiiiitch.

Alex removed the claw. The bat resumed its attempted escape. Cocking his head to one side, the cat then stretched out his other forepaw and jabbed again. (This is one of the reasons I say cats are scientists. His entire attitude clearly said, "Hm...I wonder what will happen if I do...this.") Scrrrrrrrriitch. (And then he sat back as if to say, "Huh. Whaddaya know.")

"Greubie, stop it!"

Laura and I came out of our paralysis and ran down the stairs and shoved Alex away. Having prevented cruelty to this mortally wounded animal, we now faced down the problem of what to do with it.

"It's too hurt to let it go, it's going to die anyway, it's suffering."

"We'll have to kill it."

"How does Dad do it?"

"He catches it in a towel and smashes it against the sidewalk."

"Ew."

"Yeah. I don't think we're strong enough."

"Well, let's get a towel and go from there."

We dashed down to the basement and rummaged through the rag bucket and grabbed a ratty old towel used to wash the dog. Running back into the living room, we dragged Greubie away from the bat, who had only managed to climb another inch, and with the towel I gently knocked it onto the floor and wrapped the towel around it.

I could feel it biting at my hand through the towel, and I was wrung with equal parts pity and fascination. Laura and I slipped to the back porch and tried to decide the most merciful way to kill it. On the floor by the door lay one of the huge beach rocks we liked to use as door stops, and Laura seized it, and I put the bat down on the floor, where it wriggled under the towel.

"Better let me do that," I said.

"No," she said, her face fierce and white in the dark. "I will."

"Okay. I'll count to three. Ready?"

She gripped the rock and bit her lip and nodded, staring at the towel.

"Okay. One..." She raised the rock. "...two...." She held it over the towel. "...THREE." She faltered.

"I can't!" she said.

"Okay, we'll try again. One...two...THREE." She faltered again.

"Here, give it to me." I reached for the rock. She yanked it back, yelled, "No!" and smashed the rock down on the bat.

One horrifying crunch and the towel stopped moving. We both stared at the still towel and cried while I said things at random. "It's not hurting anymore...it was the best thing to do...you did good..." And then, "Should we save the towel?"

At that Laura stopped crying and snapped her head around and said, with her trademark profound disgust, "No. Are you crazy? How are we going to wash bat blood out of a towel?"

"But it's Mom's."

"Mom won't want it after this. Let's just go throw it in the garbage."

So after torture, a gruesome death, and a brief mourning by two teenaged girls, the bat wound up unceremonially tossed in a garbage can on top of the cat litter and coffee grounds. Batsbane spent a few days in the doghouse, so to speak, and Laura and I proudly recounted our mission of hard mercy to a bemused Mom and Dad, and ever after Greubie meekly brought his quick and efficient kills to the center of Laura's carpet.

III. No Thank You, Mickey Mouse

I'm nine years old, and Mom and Dad have scraped together enough money to take the family to Disney World. We're roughing it old-school (for Florida): borrowing my grandparents' motor home and camping close to the park. Laura and I spend our evenings splashing in the campground pool, where I finally learn how to swim, and squealing at the swarms of red ants.

Laura and I are young enough that even the boredom of waiting in endless lines is exciting. Everywhere the huge figures of Mickey and Goofy and Donald and Daisy and Minnie walk around waving and hugging the children. I'm old enough to know they're costumes, and to feel a mixture of pity and revulsion at the damp heat radiating from their felt skins when I give them the expected hugs -- it's so hot.

Money is tight, even on this vacation, and souvenirs are small, but to my dazzled happy eyes even the tiniest dolls are magical. I clutch my little skirted Minnie (I've never liked Mickey much) in one hand and one of my parents' fingers in the other and stare around at everything with huge delighted eyes.

The names of the rides mean nothing to me, divorced as they are from sensory experience, so ever after my memories blur together like a strange spliced montage -- dark misty rivers with allosaurs and brachiosaurs looming through the palm fronds overhead (I explain to my parents the identifying differences between the allosaur and the tyrannosaur -- the trip falls in the middle of my dinosaur phase), teacups carrying us into a night sky over a tiny London after Peter Pan, the hour sitting in a big saucer when the ride breaks down and Dad almost loses his sanity listening to enormous mechanical people singing "It's a Small World" ceaselessly, the sketetal feet of reveling pirates swinging over our heads (the guy in the car in front of us jumps up and grabs a bony ankle), the vivid colors of flowers and cloth at EPCOT, the utter darkness of Space Mountain.

But the ride I anticipate the most is the Haunted Mansion. Anticipate in terror: My nightmares often wake me in a cold sweat in general, and I live in cringing fear of spiders and ghosts and monsters under the bed. But I grip my father's hand tight and follow my family into the car.

The ride goes by in a fuzzy breath-stopped awareness of mirrors and curtains of cobwebs and greenish light, but I leave the gift shop with one of my childhood's favorite toys: A life-sized plastic vampire bat. As we walk back to the park entrance in the dark and fireworks explode over the Disney castle, I clutch my new friend in wild happiness, all fear forgotten. The thing in my hand is scarier than the things in my mind, and I keep it like a guardian icon under my pillow.

On the long trip home, I decide my vampire bat is a girl, and that her name is Gloria. I have my mother cut the elastic loop from the back of Gloria's neck so that she goes from creepy decoration to creepy toy, and for years afterward, of the vast array of plastic animals from which my sister and I have created entire kingdoms of good and evil filling the living room, Gloria always leads the armies of light against the armies of darkness, and even then the irony is not lost on me.

IV. Another Reason I Hate Girls

I've never been much of a "girly girl." I prided myself on my tomboyishness in my childhood, climbing trees, scraping my knees, beating up all the boys, catching all manner of disgusting worms and insects with which to terrorize the other girls. As an adolescent, I learned to paint my toenails and I loved to talk about boys, but science classes always revealed my truer nature: In freshman Bio no one in my group would touch the lamprey eel to dissect it, and in contempt I seized the scalpel and dove in and took great pleasure in grossing out my group members telling them how cool and smooth the insides felt.

I grew into an appreciation of pretty clothes and the domestic arts, and have been often told that I am in all ways feminine, even in my hard-nosed appreciation for the grotesque and in the ferocity handed down to me by generations of woad-wearing Scots; so everything evens out in the end, I believe. Even so, or perhaps because of that, I hold in deep scorn the women whose idea of femininity comprises professional helplessness and wilting fainting terror at anything creepy and crawly (I hate spiders myself, but after four years of living alone or with people who were more frightened of them than I, I have learned to cope with grim efficiency) -- mostly and especially wilting fainting terror in large numbers. Nothing irritates my librarian Virgo soul more than an enormous gaggle of screaming girls (and I do mean only girls -- a big group of bellowing men from time to time holds a certain testosterone-laden appeal).

My sophomore year in college I was unfortunate enough to have been selected based upon my academic standing to join a sophomore girls' service honorary. It looks great on resumes but comprised the most profoundly and obnoxiously boring stretches of time I ever spent in college. Of the thirty girls in the group, twenty-seven of them were the girliest on campus, and all our meetings were presided over by the ancient VP of Student Affairs: She of the Red Kirtle, whose sole purpose in living was to marry us off to Grove City boys. I spent most of the meetings sitting silently in the back with the other two normal girls who, like me, thought the whole matter a frivolous joke, and when I wasn't exchanging revolted glances with them, I was fiddling wistfully with my pen, contemplating the cost-benefit analysis of sticking it in my eye.

Of all the stupid 1950s Junior Ladies Society things we did, my least favorite came in the spring: a town-wide service cleanup headed by our honorary and its male counterpart. A lot of campus organizations participated, and while I looked forward to sweeping out semi-derelict buildings, I dreaded the initial gathering: Grove City-style, the men were to meet in one place and the women in another to have a little pep rally before heading out to do good deeds.

Early on a Saturday morning the girls convened in the grottiest lounge our college could boast, in the basement of the largest girls' dormitory. Everything was painted white, from the cement block walls to the naked piping latticing the low ceiling, and the smallest whisper echoed as if in an endless cave. I sneaked in the back way to avoid having to talk to all the girls making the walls pulsate with their giggling, and waited for the circus to begin.

It began far more interestingly than I had anticipated. As the president of the girls' service honorary stood up to begin her saccharine speech, everyone began to scream. My head snapped around looking for an axe murderer, but then I followed the pointing fingers and saw what was causing the commotion like a massacre of banshees: A single bat, a dark shadow relieving the stark white of the room, had lost its way among the piping.

As the screams and shrieks intensified in volume, it threw itself frantically at the tops of the pipes, and before I had formed a conscious thought I was shoving through the crowd of helpless idiots hissing, "Shut up, their ears are sensitive, you're making it more upset," and hurling myself toward the bat.

Quiet began to fall as I threw my hands into the air and began to herd the bat toward the back door and the maze of basement corridors. I felt infinitely sorry for the wretched creature whose life depended on its keen sense of now-deafened hearing, and deep camaraderie in our mutual plight of being stuck in the middle of a group of morons with no sense. It allowed me to direct it, and soon we were out of the Rec Room and I closed the doors behind us and tried to find the nearest exit.

In what I can only imagine was exhausted relief at the sudden silence, the bat began zooming back and forth, just out of reach of my arms, and for a little while I could only stand and keep an eye on it. I was trying to direct it toward an outside door when it took off in the opposite direction, flying six inches from the floor. I followed it around a corner and saw, to my horror, a cafeteria worker attempting to step on it.

"No!" I shouted, and she stopped and looked at me, a confused expression on her blocky face, but I hurried toward her and said, "Help me get it outside -- shoo it toward me."

Her face said plainly that she thought I was nuts, but perhaps the fierce look on my face kept her quiet, and she started flapping her apron at it. I ran back to the door and pushed it open; the bat came toward me; I waved my hands and practically pushed it outside. I watched its zigzagging flight in the free air before it disappeared toward the darker corners of the courtyard.

I took a happy breath, thanked the mystified woman who demanded to know why I wouldn't want it killed, said, "I want it free," and headed back to the basement lounge and the girls whose very existences now annoyed me.

As I pushed open the doors, every eye in the room turned toward me nervously. They looked at me as if I weren't quite human; as if they didn't know whether to thank me or to be even more afraid of me than of the bat.

"Is it gone?" someone finally asked in a small voice.

I looked around and said calmly, with just a hint of condescension, "Don't worry. It's gone."

A few more cautious questions followed, a few muffled exclamations about my bravery and insanity, and, my weirdness solidified in everyone's mind, they turned back for their pep speech. I stood alone in the back and half-listened, wishing I too could dart into the morning air and wing my way toward a juniper bush, replete with my own darkness, quiet, free.

at least backwards is interesting

As I talked with Meg last night, I brought up the subject of my champion worrying, and how lately I've made progress in paring down that particular (exhausting) talent, which has stemmed mostly from my longtime idea that God doesn't really love me, and therefore life is scary. Addressing the root of the problem -- beginning, slowly, to bask in God's love and start to trust Him -- has begun to do wonders for one of my very worst habits. (Now that smoking is off the Bad Habit List, some other ones that I've laughed off as Not Being as Bad as Smoking have surfaced and demanded attention.)

I then began to recount a Cop's Daughter story, which took place the other night: A friend of mine was driving me home along the back roads of our hometown and telling me all about her experience in Sweden last year, and all the while she was talking I was staring at the sideview mirror, tracking the suspicious patterns of the driver behind us -- highbeams on, alternating between falling way behind and flying up to ride our tail -- and there were no convenient side roads on which to turn.

I interrupted Linnea's story to say, calmly, "Hey. I don't like the way the person behind us is driving. I think they're drunk. So why don't you pull over and let them around us so we can keep an eye on them."

She started to panic. "What? I didn't even notice! What do I do? Oh no!"

"Don't worry, it's no big deal," I said. "Just pull over slowly, right up there in front of that house. If the car stops behind us, then we'll take off in a squeal of burning rubber and drive home really fast. But I think they'll go around us, and then they can't crash into us from behind."

Meg started laughing. "This is one of the things I love about you," she said. "You freak out over these little insignificant things, but when something happens that would give you a legitimate reason to worry, you're the most cool-headed person I know." (This from one of the most level-headed crisis respondents I know.)

I laughed too -- she's seen a lot of both the petty anxieties and the calm catastrophes the past three years. Like the number of years I spent worrying aloud every spring and summer over tornadoes, which terrify me...and the time a tornado was actually sighted heading straight for the town I worked in and she called me at work to warn me and I said placidly, "Oh yeah, I heard about it. Well, I can't get home to Simon because it's hailing too hard, but there's a basement here, so it's okay. It's passing you over, right?"

Or the number of times I worried about mothers' reactions at the Center for the Homeless to any potential little accident that might befall their toddlers...and the time a little boy started choking and all the volunteers panicked and stood around him in a nervous circle and I heard the choking sounds and turned around and calmly brushed the volunteers out of the way, said, "Stand back, give him some room," knelt behind him and administered the Heimlich without batting an eye.

Or all the times I gnawed over the fear that someone would break into my apartment in South Bend, and all the times I started awake in the middle of the night hearing the creak of the house settling and thinking it was an intruder...and the time someone almost did break in, and I stood in the hallway gripping my shotgun and quietly waiting to see if they'd make it up to my door, an iron curtain of certainty having severed my terror from my conscious mind, so that I could only think, coolly, "Well...this is it. I'll kill someone if I have to." And I began mechanically going through the mental checklist Dad had given me -- don't touch the body, call the cops first, then a lawyer, then Dad...hopefully I can at least shut Simon in my bedroom so he doesn't get down the stairwell and outside -- while I waited to hear the sounds of the downstairs door splintering. (Fortunately the would-be intruder gave up and went away. People have asked me, when I tell the story of why I moved out of South Bend, why I didn't call the cops right away, and I always answer, "There wasn't time. To quote a popular expression, 'When seconds count, the cops are there in minutes.' ")

Or learning infant CPR in high school and thinking of all the horrible things that could happen to a child while I babysat, and almost weeping with pity for the gray plastic doll on whose back I was banging...and the moment two days later when the baby I was babysitting started to choke on a piece of one of the STUPID dried flower arrangements on the floor that I'd already complained about to his mother, and without pause I lifted him up, flipped him over, and thumped his back until he vomited and started breathing again. (Then I got all shaky and called my mom while clutching the baby.)

Or in the year after 9-11 when terrorist threats seemed to be everywhere, and a girl with whom I was loosely acquainted in college was telling me, tight-voiced and terrified, about the latest anthrax attack and worrying that biological warfare was about to break out over our own little campus, I shrugged and told her, "It's kind of unlikely that anyone's going to go after Grove City, there's nothing important here...and even if it does, we can't stop it, and it's too exhausting to live in fear."

She looked at me as if I were nuts, and I very well might be. I suppose it's that my vivid imagination gets me in trouble, but I'm one of the lucky people that isn't usually fazed by ugly reality. Growing up a Cop's Daughter has in a lot of ways prepared me for the worst of many situations, and dealing with a real crisis is just one more thing to be done. I might have nightmares of being chased by faceless monsters, I might turn pale at a newspaper story and feel sick at what happened to yet another innocent victim (but then I'm also evaluating where the innocence translated to foolishness and how the horror could have been prevented by a few precautions), but I snap into a different head space when reactions count.

So I'm a little backwards. But now I've started to confront the useless worrying I do, especially recognizing that if the worst were to happen, I wouldn't be worrying about it, so there's no point in worrying at all. Why borrow trouble?

Of course worrying is an old, old habit, one that I don't see evaporating overnight, but one on which I can whittle away bit by bit on a daily basis, converting worry to prayer, and turning and returning to my newfound trust in the constant, ceaseless, unchanging love of God, even in the most horrific of circumstances.

I'm looking forward to living free, finally, from my nagging little fears. If I'm not a worrier when things are dire, I don't need to be a worrier when everything is fine. There's no sense in that.

And now...on to a little exercise in celebration of my reborn lung capacity (three weeks entirely smoke-free, folks! huzzah!) and in hopes that it will ease this week's monthly unpleasantness. And then on to jobhunting. Whee...

Another Impassioned Post on Church

I have been feeling for a number of years a sort of subsonic rumble in the fabric of the soul, a tectonic shudder, a long low buildup toward something huge. When my spiritual emancipation began in college, as I waded through a Sargasso Sea of bickering theologies, I often felt that if I looked over my shoulder I would see...something. Something beckoning.

I didn't know what the something was, and as I left college to wade through the even more cluttered shoreline of Christian definitions of community, I often grew completely disgusted and left the beach altogether to hide in the pine barrens alone. I knew it wasn't the answer, knew it wasn't the "home" to which Something was beckoning me, but it was the only place I could find clear air and space to breathe freely.

I'd like to write a proper treatise, but I'm afraid some of the more sophisticated, research-oriented writings will have to wait for their appearance on the blog until I have internet access in my own living space; these days I mostly only have a few minutes here and there to begin assembling my thoughts, without the materials I'd like to use ready to hand.

So, in the place of something thoroughly well-drafted and beautifully thought, I'm just setting down the beginnings of the thought process -- you get the raw ore, not the finished tiara. Lucky you.

Coming down from the pine barrens was made possible by the peace I found in Catholicism. I learned, in joining the Catholic Church, that the pine barrens are indeed home, but the beach is where I must presently do my work. And the work isn't so much sorting the debris into "keep" and "discard" piles as to find how they all fit together.

In less metaphorical terms, the thing I really want to do is begin to work with others to unite the people of my hometown, starting with the churches. My hometown -- less than a square mile in the downtown area -- boasts at least a dozen churches, none of which interact for much of anything at all. Back when I attended (the public) high school, my church built itself a fine reputation for judging and condemning other churches in the area -- down with the Masons and the Rainbow Girls (and therefore down with the Presbyterians), down with the Catholics for being Catholic, down the the Methodists for being wishy-washy, etc.

Fortunately all of that took place under the old regime; with a new pastor in place, the Baptist church of my hometown is now, slowly but determinedly, taking new steps toward common ground with the other churches. And a lot of the congregation are completely on board.

I've been gone a long time, and so I'm less familiar with the positions of the other churches; but I've felt for a long time now a certain conviction that, in the words of Paul, "as far as it remains with you, be at peace with all men," and so my goal upon returning home is to try to work in two churches simultaneously -- the Catholic parish, and the Baptist church. These two breeds of church tend to disagree the most sharply, and I've been looking forward, greatly, to seeing what I can do to bring them together in whatever little ways I can.

See, as far as social justice is concerned -- and God throughout the Bible repeatedly emphasizes His own concern for social justice -- as far as social health is concerned, I'm one of those old-fashioned people who believe that the life of a society is the family, and the health of the family is the church. Not because church saves souls or anything, but because church is where families come together under one faith to strengthen and be strengthened in love and goodness in the name of God, and to create wholesome and positive change in the community. In a society where people live increasingly isolated lives, the church is one of those great places that gathers people together and bids them live alongside one another and love one another -- not vapid, saccharine love, but love that is the bedrock of all existence -- the love that is God, since God is love.

When we love other people truly, love them well -- love without conditions, love that takes into account less the feelings than the wellbeing of the other, love that yields up the self to the other, love that meets real needs in practical as well as emotional ways -- we don't just show them the love of God, we show them God. And in light of that, the separations that exist between Christians based on theological arguments seem stupid.

I'm not saying, of course, that people ought to give up their theologies; but what if, instead of seeing one church congregation as its own little "body of Christ" -- a unified group of people who live out the principles, teaching, and most of all love of Christ, with the members of that congregation serving different functions as different parts of the human body serve different functions but together make one living being -- what if, instead, we began to see different churches within a community as different parts of one body, and that, for that community, the churches are all, ultimately, one whole? Different theologies have slightly different emphases and a slightly different focus on changing the world -- why not bring all of that together and really help people in a concerted and unified way? Church A on 1st Street is big on world missions, Church B on 2nd Street is big on serving the homeless, Church C on 3rd Street is big on support groups, etc. Couldn't, instead of each church trying, and crappily, to tack on other programs and concerns to the primary concern in a doomed effort to do everything, all the churches recognize and organize themselves so that if a member of Church A likes the theology of Church A but likes the social concern of Church B, he or she can do a bit of both? Can't we channel our gifts and energies so that each church is playing to its strengths, with the support of the community's other churches?

I'm sure all of this sounds kind of pincko and crazy, wishy-washy on principles, but come on, people. Christianity is to be defined by love, not argument -- by unity, not difference. I think it's too much to ask that people chuck their different ways of thinking about their faith into the wastebasket; but surely, when it comes to bringing real love (the kind of love that meets real needs and heals real problems) to the community on all its levels, we can at least come together and agree about those very simple things?

My goal as a "Christian" is not to save souls -- that's not my job, and not in my power. My goal is not to convince people that my way of thinking is right (especially given that even Christians can't convince each other of one way of thinking). My goal is to love people, whatever love means for each person across whose path I come. To know the love of God, to be transformed by it into the person I was made to be, and to pass around that very deep, very gritty, very seeing love to everyone I meet. Of course I'm not perfect at that; oftentimes I really suck at it; but other times I'm not bad at it, and those times are the times that illuminate my life, that make me know what it means to be alive.

That goal -- to love, not save, people -- also opens up the way for me to experience that same love from others -- from people who don't even claim faith in Christ. (I'm going off on a little tangential rant here.) I can't stand being told that my friendships with "non-Christians" "are a wonderful ministry to them." When people say that to me, I think of Meg and Phillip, I think of how they have loved and supported and befriended me when no one else did, I think of how they have always accepted me for exactly who I am and loved me for the simple fact of my being, how they've encouraged me to make healthy decisions but respected me when our opinions and/or choices differ, I think of how in more ways than they will ever know they saved my life, I think of the unconditional love of God that they have taught me just by being themselves, and a rage flashes into my skull that transports me into Instant Headache, and I tell the well-meaning but horribly misguided person attempting to turn my friendship into a proselytization, "No. It's not a ministry. If anyone's ministering, they minister to me. It's not about 'ministry'; it's about love. It's a friendship, not a project. Wanna hear something else? If they never believe what I believe about God, it has no bearing on my regard for them. It has nothing to do with our friendship. I'd be overjoyed if they did, but nothing can affect my love for them; I love them too much to want to make them believe what I believe. [And if I really want to say what I'm thinking, I add what I've said a hundred times before: I wouldn't be in the least surprised, if some bizarre accident snuffed out all three of us at once, right now, to see both of them right next to me in line for those 'pearly gates.' I strongly believe that there are more ways of belonging to Christ than we might know.] And that's the same love they have for me."

Part of that is simply how I relate to people; part of that is truly a conviction that evangelism, in terms of "witnessing" (I won't go into yet another rant about how much I hate that verb in conjunction with Christianese), has a specific time and place, and "Christians" are often so desperate to "save souls" that their attempt to "share the Gospel" drowns out their ability to hear what the person to whom they're "witnessing" really needs from Jesus at that particular moment.

But hey; some of that "street evangelism," and some of those "altar calls" at big conventions work, and so they do have a time and a place, and some churches are wonderfully suited to those styles -- and some churches prefer deed over word (that's more my style), and have programs and services structured around that.

So why not channel it all? We're all freaking out over the Presidential Election just around the corner; and while it's crucially important to vote, real change in society begins in communities -- in churches, and in families.

If we want to change things, it's up to us. If we identify ourselves as Christians, we already know that we work better together than alone. And so if we want to impact others' lives in a real way, if we want to bring the love of God to a lonely and agonized world, we must redefine unity in order to come together in the love we want that world to know.