Someday soon I'm gonna tell the moon about the crying game

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.” 

― Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale 

When you’re depressed, the last thing you want to do is write.  Journaling is always prescribed, but any learned belief that you have that your immediate environment, let alone the world, needs your voice is faint and suspect.  Almost as suspect as the shinny, glossy smiles of past photos, the songs that used to make you come alive with motion, or the old love letters and text messages you used to let yourself pour over.  Reverently absorbing each line as if it was a testament to a future: proof that you exist. 

Now, words are mostly substance neutral.  Your head is awash with them at all hours – and even when you try the last thing you can do is discriminate among them for reason. Instead, your gaze and concentration drift to the furnishings and fixtures that usually maintain their place in the background of life.  Caffeine proposes promise, but you lose minutes studying the shadows cast by your options’ canisters inside the cupboard.  You know you should brush your teeth and get dressed, but you can’t bring yourself away from watching the puddles gather from the rain coming down just outside your door.  Somehow you are stirred to sympathy, even membership, with the drooping patio umbrella, how it burdens all that moist collected weight, and the trauma endured by each individual drop of rain that lets go, or is shoved off, at the edge.  Each one seems trapped in a cycle of abuse.  Autonomous and coherent while in flight, but undetectable upon landing, repeat.

Some will never allow themselves to realize their disposition as something more than languidness – a character flaw that can be remedied and rerouted with a stringent diet of prayer, stimuli, and goal setting.  When assessing their odds of arriving in life, staying the course on the man-made, disk-shaped track flooded with millions of fellow unsuspecting travelers seems like a better bet than navigating the shady terrain of the interior, alone. 

Traveling into the woods involves comfort with ambiguity.  The kind of ambiguity that can curb attempts entirely, and threatens to, at any time, make the pilgrim do an about face into the arms of timidity, mediocrity, and other post-childhood friends. The lobbies of counseling centers, where you feel like another cast aside member of society, or the pharmacy lines, where your very presence signifies dependence and incompleteness aren’t even the most difficult.  The worst moments are more intimate.  The gradual glazing over of your old friends’ eyes as you search for the words to honestly respond to “how you are doing?” and “what you’ve been up to?”  The shuffling of feet, crossing of arms, and patronizing nodding of the head that fills the silence.  And that’s from the people that know you the most.

Everyday you have to remind yourself that your brain is an organ like any other – one that requires care and proper nutrients to perform its tasks well. Then come the questions: If my brain is sick, what made it that way and will it ever get better?  Where is the line between legitimate symptom and just plain laziness in my daily attitudes and habits?  How do I talk to others about the time I’m investing in therapy and self-reconciliation without sounding like the wounded victim or a narcissist oblivious to the pain of others that may never have this opportunity?  How does this period of time account for itself in the eyes of my nieces and nephews, much less on my résumé?  How do I trust that this illness will receive a definite response, but will not define me?

It is our job to remind people how much they are loved, by first remembering it ourselves

Last night I found myself, again, entangled in a conversation with a good friend’s husband – a fallen away Catholic who freely, and quite frequently, shares the reasons why.  The Church is hypocritical.  She continues to screw up and push people away, and she best be changing if she hopes to maintain even the dim, flickering glow of relevance she has within American society. 

I’ve found myself, before, striving to maintain patience – with Paul but especially with myself – during such discussions, especially when I start to sound more like an evangelist attempting conversion more so than like a friend engaging in conversation.  I Nearly unconsciously, I begin praying that my studies in theology will kick in and prove usefulness, allowing their principles to be expressed with a portion of the beauty and logic with which they were learned.  But last night’s conversation ended differently than most those of the past – even with no marked improvement in my apologetics. 

I think it started when I allowed myself to admit my vulnerability, and the at times shared frustration with understanding and forgiving the Church.  Then, I confessed, rather spontaneously, that, even with all of its aloof ecclesiological designs (“What’s the whole obsession with the clergy, and why hasn’t the pedophile priest phenomenon sobered people up to the weaknesses of the elite class they place in positions of authority?”), and supposed gaps in Christology (“What gave some old white men the ability to throw out books of the Bible, and hasn’t the History channel proven that the Arch of the Covenant is really the secret of Christ’s offspring,”), I believe in the Church, not because I believe whole-heartedly in the identity of the Bishops, priests, and laity in carrying out the teaching of Christ, but because I believe in Christ. I may remain a tormented Catholic striving to understand the trappings of an institution that was created to defend and support a community, but I am not tormented in the legitimacy of that community, and the historical fact that Christ entered into human history, walked and spoke among a certain geography, was killed even though he preached healing and peace, and left a devoted, albeit feared and persecuted, group of scoundrels to show for it.

From that point on the conversation took a welcomed, softer cadence.  Love, as completely undeserved as it was and as likely as it is to be misunderstood and miscommunicated until the end of our days, was enough to lift our gaze from the methods of persuasion, and bring merit to our entire deliberation.

“Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known,” Matthew says Jesus said in the Gospel today.  “What I say to you in darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.  And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul … Even all the hairs on your head are counted.”  The love Christ has for each of His children is revolutionary: we can imagine the sacrifice it takes to devote your life to someone who is virtuous and will know for the rest of his days life how indebted he is to you.  It’s much more difficult, and more mysterious, to imagine the devotion and resolve that was required when He who is spotless and good allowed himself to be handed over and killed for a people who could never know the story, never grapple with the significance, and continue to resist the mercy of such an act. 

Even when words seem to evaporate and the ability to draw intricate themes and conclusions hide from our tongues, we have the work of reminding people of this good news, this good story—the good man and how much He loves us.  Because it is so different from the love we see gestured all around us, it may be met with denial, opposition, even spite.  But, that just gives us all the more opportunity to join with the sufferings and the irony of being hated for trying to remind people of how loved they are. 

Walking in another [wo]man's shoes

The following is the first of my efforts toward translating the scenes from the Louisville Catholic Worker home of hospitality into words on a page, and stories that share meaning.

“I look forward to hearing from you,” I suggest, sitting beside her in the backseat, hoping my voice would be inaudible in the background of the voicemail she’s leaving.  Flustered, she looks at me blankly.  Her mouth loosely mimics the basic sounds of the phrase, nearly involuntarily, before she embarrassingly punches the “end” button on her at&t GoPhone.

“I for hear you?” she asks, trying to grasp the tense-layered nicety to which she’d just been introduced.  It was bad timing on my part; I should have let her exit the call naturally.  Today had already required enough patient imitation from this 29-year-old, Mexican mother of 4 recovering from a serious bout of depression.  It was a 20-minute drive just to get to the staffing agency’s headquarters, let alone the half hour we spent holding out for eye contact from one of the job placement personnel in the lobby.  There must have been a misunderstanding, the job candidates are only called in once there is a placement available.  She should return home and await further contact. 

She rustles through her purse, a black faux leather bag with decorative zippers.  It was probably a practical purchase back when her weekends still included the occasional salsa dance and cerveza.  Now, it doubled as a filing cabinet.  She’s learned to cling tightly to any shred of identification or liability; her temporary worker ID card, the most recent LG&E bill, an “authorized pick up” permission slip from her children’s daycare still awaiting signature, a notice from her work of her upcoming FMLA expiration, and the prescription for the anti-depressants she still refuses to take. Surely fiberglass assembly would be a welcome replacement for meatpacking, which, after 2 years, had left her nearly as cold, sterile, and severed as the slabs of pork and chicken she hurriedly sliced and packed daily.

Her eyes loosen in severity as she pulls out the small, sturdy travel calendar she’d been searching for — its bright pink, plastic cover echoes its transport in contrasting her emotional state.  Flipping to the few lined pages of “Notes” in the back, she sounds out each word as she jots it down, stringing them together like beads on a chain.  She even chooses the proper form of “hear”.  Knowing her reputation of being doggedly independent, even to the point of obstinate, I am struck by the need she’s exhibiting for certainty, order, consistency. She’s gradually putting into practice some of the techniques emphasized in her group therapy sessions.  Take time for yourself, find the root source of your feelings and address them, allow for the people around you to help.

You Gotta Protect Somebody

The universal Church, that is, this great big body of people who suspect all of humanity was implicated by God coming into time and space some 2,000 years ago, has experienced a lot these past few months.  Before travelling the spiritual path of Lent, Easter and Pentecost – heading into the desert with our Lord; cowardly handing Him over to the powers that be; desperately seeking Him among the dead days later; and then undeservingly being washed by His glory and forgiveness and receiving the Holy Spirit while all trembling together in an upstairs room– we as Christians were asked to contemplate some of the more practical aspects of our tradition.  Why do we have a Pope?  Who should it be?  The world watched us and we watched the world and ourselves, as the responsibilities of being a “perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful” was passed down to yet another frail human being. (CCC, 882)

Before we ever saw the resignation coming, Pope Benedict XVI used the occasion of his Lenten message to reiterate the symbiotic relationship shared by faith and charity.  Faith is the gift that allows us to recognize how much we are loved by Christ, and charity is its response – the action that impels and propels us to love our neighbor. 

While commentators continue to point out the differences between Pope Benedict and his successor, Pope Francis has been building upon this foundation in word and deed since he assumed the chair of Saint Peter.  After receiving the vows of obedience from the Cardinals, the lambs’ wool Pallium and fisherman’s ring that represents the authority he has over 1.18 billion Roman Catholics worldwide, Pope Francis used the occasion of his inauguration to speak of the “vocation of being a protector,” modeled by Saint Joseph, whose solemnity marked the occasion on March 19. 

“Joseph is a ‘protector’ because he is able to hear God’s voice and be guided by his will; and for this reason he is all the more sensitive to the persons entrusted to his safekeeping,” Francis said. 

No doubt, Francis is speaking of the role we all have in the lives of those we who rely on us, echoed in the role he is assuming as the Holy Father.  In an era where individual freedom is the gold standard in matters of ethics and politics, it’s hard to see the value of caring for more than just one’s self. But Christ’s example dares us to look for ways we can complicate our lives.  Not with never ending tasks, business, or patterns of consumption, but with connections of loyalty and compassion for others.

 The story of a Pope who woos the national media by deviating from the script, wondering into the crowd, and placing the pastoral care for a people above the maintenance of an organization is the story of what a little randomness, sincerity, and devotion can do in all of our lives.  It expresses something about the unpredictability of the Holy Spirit, the radical-ness of the Gospel, and the counter-culturalism each Christian is living.  What people around us, who would otherwise be caught in the cracks of life, go unheard and unprotected, need to be reached out to and lifted up?

Stand in the Place Where you are

About a half mile away from the house in the historic district is Louisville’s “Central Park”.  The weather has been nice enough lately to ride my bike here with a blanket and book, and soak up the sun for a few hours after a lunch shift waiting tables, before the kids get off the school bus and the mother comes home from work.  People walk their dogs, play tennis, throw a Frisbee, and I sit and think.  When will I find friends, wouldn’t it do me some good to join an intramural sport, is it in the books for me to be married, will I ever be able to mold myself enough to the contemporary order of things to put my education toward a stable, satisfying job, and my upcoming 30^th birthday.  It’s usually not long before I catch myself delving into the type of “de-habilitating self-introspection” Dorothy reportedly admonished. 

Then, I remember voluntary poverty.  An untapped well, you can always drink from it better than you are, and lately I've been dabbling in other wells. I’m not quite sure the poor ever really have the choice.  They also likely don’t have laptops, brand name clothing, or entire afternoons to breathe in fresh air and check in with themselves.  Even people enjoying the flexible work schedules, afternoon frappes, and the automatic sense of accomplishment that comes with stepping into a suit or the elevator of a sky rise for work every morning suffer from fragmented thought, cloudy memory, adrenal fatigue, anxiety and self doubt.  Imagine the frail mental, emotional, and physical systems of the millions of fathers, mothers, and children whose diet consists of Mac and Cheese and hotdogs; whose sleep schedules are tacked onto the ends of constantly shifting work and/or feeding shifts; and whose leisure and quality time rely mainly on public transportation and television – perhaps a small trip to the mall or Sonic as a special treat.  21^st century poverty requires the altruist to look beyond the exterior, along the seams of the plates of the shells we all construct to help us get through the week unscathed.  In the rare occasion one feels at home, inspired, or accepted by those around them, those plates shift, and reveal deep tissues of vulnerability and uncertainty.  Oh, that those less-claimed characteristics – those dark, creeping weaknesses we all fight in the morning and take inventory of at night– will be tools for shared crosses and friendships rather than apathy, disenchantment, and exhaustion.

Little pink houses

What is it that attracts us toward one another, that brings us together?

The downtown streets of any city, patching together various neighborhoods, teach how differently that question can be answered, and yet how similarly.  We all scrape things together to cloister ourselves away-- from the elements, from the unknown, from each other.  Yet, created for relationship, we each rely on a circle of people and exchanges in order to survive. Some are primitive, some sophisticated, irregardless these circles start from our first social habitat, and thus can always be drawn concentrically from the nucleus that is the home.

Our homes reflect that which we deem as important.  Gated driveways, mulch and shrubbery, spacious rooms furnished with rich fabrics and inviting hues -- some speak to ambition, success, stability -- questions answered well.  For others, the choice seems to have been removed from the equation, and the aesthetics are a result either of what was most available or comfortable.  Mismatched, plastic to-go cups line the cupboards and serve up the various libations to accompany emotionally-fragile meals, Little Debbie snacks, and an evening's hard-earned lottery ticket. The foundations may be shaky, and the trimmings slipshod, but the "Beware of Dog" sign precariously placed in the snagged and bulging screen door of a home in the East end communicates a sense of ownership just as much as the security system of the home in the Highlands.

Today being the rainy day it was, I roamed the streets in a car, instead of on foot and with company, instead of alone.  Things look different that way.  Looking out of the window, I noticed the skepticism I normally adopt when venturing outside of my fixed walls giving way to something less weighty.  People live in these places, big and small -- people populate society, no matter how misled it seems.  Families, like any of God's basic building matter, adopt and survive, even under constant pressure.

Sometimes the light that radiates from a home is a kind of florescent -- transmitted by shared consumption and frenzied activity.  Around others, there is something more natural, more warm. Those are the homes where practices of listening and sharing are being learned.  Where people, strong and weak, can share a story with each other, and the looking into each others' eyes that is such a vital part of the process doesn't live in constant danger of being uninterrupted by the glow of some screen, or a lull in the plot.  That is a home.

I thought that I heard you laughing

If the thoughts, emotions and experiences one has throughout life can be seen as the thread gradually assembling their life's garment, I think I would be immediately able to spot this year's patch in mine.  It would be visible by the course thread that shoved itself obstinately through two fabrics.  That thin, veil-like material that comes in bolts of feigning pink and angry fuchsia -- that is the one of my identity.  It's very existence testifies to indulgence rather than durability, and the seamstress has to use fine scissors when cutting it, so as not to offend.  The thick, earth toned corduroy that lies underneath is that of the Church.  It is used to being summarized as the institutions, personalities, and ideals one person encounters as she gradually becomes convinced she knows it.  The very fact that needles have to be changed in order for it to be penetrated begs the question if the veil will withstand the stitch -- or if it will get caught and sent into fraying fits along the way, tight fists of fabric and thread to be patiently unravelled and salvaged before continuing.
My first week of classes here, alone, were enough to prove valid the sneaking suspicion that I was silly to think I could trip into this continent, and insert myself into the Roman system.  Since then, I have talked myself down from furious promises and solemn swears made in the dark.  Promises I made to myself to abort the premature mission, cut my losses, and return to safe ground before the already vulnerable flame of my personal identity was suffocated to the point of exhaustion.  I would rather, I have been certain, maintain the spontaneous warmth I could count on feeling at least from time to time among the passageways between my heart and mind than have it permanently highjacked. Before my personality, body, and creativity were shoved underground in some wet corner of this cold, stone city, I had to return to where I could know, where I am known.
But, what if I stayed?  Would it be pride?  Fear?  Or would it be the beginnings of reconciling the materials I have been given in this life to where they may no longer need to be so blatantly contradictory, or laboringly dramatic, but just whole.