Catholicism roams around my heart and brain, and maybe, because of those little Necco like wafers, in my body and blood. Blood that was passed down to me and to my children and now to my grandchildren from my father’s side, good Irish Catholics. My mother, God bless her, was not born Catholic, but converted, and this, along with her marriage to my dad, was good enough. Her faith is different from my Dad’s. If my dad was a mystic of sorts, my mom is a pragmatist. Dad was sensitive and so could be very defensive of the church, and I learned to protect him and his faith. When the pedophile priest stories started hitting the news, my dad’s first reaction was shock and incredulity, and as he finally realized these ‘stories’ were true, he was sad. He really wanted to believe that priests were able to attain, and maintain, a holiness that mere regular people could not.
When my first daughter was born, both Steve and I were Catholics, Steve having become Catholic (converting from Episcopalian) before we were married, so that we could have a marriage that was a sacrament. We baptized Kathleen in the same church that I attended as a child, the same church that we were married in. By the time she was almost 5, and I was pregnant with our second daughter, I was beginning to have my doubts about the Catholic faith. I was beginning to be influenced by my sister, a Baptist. She left the church when young and unmarried and pregnant. She and her fiance went to the local priest to marry them; he said “No” and suggested they give their baby up to a nice couple with money. Appalled, they fled to South Dakota, got married, kept their baby, and have renounced the Catholic church ever since.
So, when Erin was born, I put off getting her baptized. I realized by then that babies really aren’t born bad, there was no original sin, and I was leaning towards the belief that if we were to be baptized, it was as Jesus was, as an adult. When Erin was 6 months old, we moved from St. Paul, where we still considered St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic church our church home (in MInneapolis) to Owatonna, where I started attendinga Baptist church with my sister. I figured, Jesus was Jesus, no matter. The basic belief was the same. We believed in God, and in the Trinity, the mystery of God as three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Much of it was still a mystery to me, but without mystery, no belief would be needed, right? This was the mystery of faith.
My dad however, was worried, my mom would tell me, for him, that he was worried that we hadn’t baptized Erin. I loved my parents, respected my parents, but wondered how could I honor them and be true to myself? I decided to talk to the priest at their church, tell him about my reservations, ask him, “Is this okay to baptize her if I don’t believe in original sin?” He seemed a bit put off, and said, “Oh, we don’t even really say that anymore.” He was however, concerned by my choice of godparents, my Baptist sister and her husband, but he acquiesced. Erin was baptized, at nearly a year, with a handful of newborns. But baptized she was, and my dad was relieved.
Two years later, Megan was born, and by now I was a full-fledged Bible reading and quoting Baptist. There would be no infant baptism, and I myself was contemplating adult baptism, although I’d been baptized, of course, as an infant. I had attended a lake baptism with my new church, and was jibed by the summer, the water, the testimonies and the rawness of the emotion and love for Jesus. It didn’t hurt that I was a lonely stay at home mom, and these small town Baptists were mostly loving and could put on a great picnic once the baptizing was done. I hung out with my sister and her friends and I guess I thought this was as good as life could get. Doubts and inconsistencies between logic and religion were locked under the key of mystery.
Eventually Megan, my youngest, my un-baptized; too, chose ‘adult’ baptism, when she was about eight. She recalls thinking that her life would change, that she would no longer be depressed. (She had been diagnosed with depression at seven, we were to find out, nearly ten years later, that this depression that nothing would alleviate, was due to hypothyroid disease.) After realizing there was no ‘magic’ to baptism, she would ‘fall away’ and her succinct musings on religion helped me to unlock the box of mystery that I thought I had firmly secured.
As she put it, as she put her hope in God, her depression remained, her parents got divorced and life more or less went to hell. If there was a God, it was a God she wanted no part of. Can’t say I blamed her. Still not one to give up on God and faith, I continued to go to my Baptist church, mostly along with my oldest daughter Kathleen, even when she was a pregnant teen, even when she was a young mom.
This however, is what happened when we wanted to have her children dedicated, something that Baptists do instead of Baptism; Kathleen was told she couldn’t dedicate her children because the church was not convinced that the children’s dad was really a Christian. No offense, really, we were told; it just wasn’t something the youth leader who was married and childless could in good conscious approve. Where, (I’m sure this good Christian woman wondered) was God, while she prayed for babies and had none, and this young single woman had two? These are the kinds of thoughts you hid away as blasphemous and kept locked away, fodder for bitterness in years to come.
Eventually, this, and the scandal that broke when our youth pastor raped young women in the church, left me too angry to attend this church anymore. Rumor was, that the church council, (that in their godly wisdom barred women), had neglected to do a background check on this young youth pastor. The circle of victims grew, and the head pastor tried to do damage control, but for me, it was insidious and sick, and if this was God, well, I was going with Megan’s logic. Not only were the actions vicious and calculated; the belief systems that allowed this to happen were also flawed. I wrote the head pastor a long letter, and he never responded.
So, where was God? I found a glimmer of love and acceptance in a small Episcopalian church in the middle of town. I’d spent nearly all of my life going to church every single Sunday and not to go felt like the most lonesome feeling in the whole world. In this church, I found a Harvard educated ‘father’ who was recently divorced and a handful of older parishioners who welcomed me like a prodigal daughter, even when I voiced the thought, that, “Maybe I’m not even a Christian.” Their answer, “That’s alright dear.”
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Do What You Love
I am on a quest for clarity this year.
Clarity of mind and emotions. Clarity of vision, and clarity of action. I want to do what I love this year. Small problem, finding out what it is I love, then making that real. I see people finding their lives in places that seem like the right place for them, and I can see some connection that brought them there. It is their belief system become manifest in the outside world, but this is not the same thing as doing what you love.
When my children were little, I loved being with them and being their mom. I did, I loved it. This doesn’t mean that I was never tired, out of control or at wit’s end. Those all go along with being a parent. But what this meant was that all I had to do (most of the time) was look into their bright eyes and round faces and I was filled with an energy and joy that kept me going, day in, day out. Day in, day out, through diapers, through food all over the kitchen, through skinned knees, bruised hearts and having them find out about poverty, classism, racism and war.
I don’t get to do that any more. It’s just not my life. The hour glass of time has run out on my being the mom to little children. Of course I’m still a mom, and blessed as a grandmother (Bubbe) also. But my day to day life is not ebbed up by inquisitive little eyes and imaginative minds. As I’m transitioning to work as a full time therapist, my day job at a university is full of trying to solve very simple problems for grown-ups who don’t want to take responsibility, mostly. These grown ups have lost their inquisitiveness and joie de vivre and instead take pride in their over-developed intellect. They don’t make me happy, and just being a helper to grown ups in this way is making me feel small inside. I guess for a large part of my day, I’m not doing what I love.
When I first had to find a full time job, I was still trying to figure out what I loved and what I could do to make money to support my children. I had no career counseling and I worked in sales and marketing. First, I marketed and sold conference space, and this was fun and amazing, creating marketing plans and meeting people from all over the world. After a while though, this got boring. Then I thought I’d like to sell property, and got licensed as a real-estate agent. This was not sitting in a nice office selling space and services and meeting well dressed professional people, this was selling run down houses to young people and big overpriced houses to bickering couples. This I realized very quickly: I not only did not love being a realtor, I hated it.
Next I tried selling furniture, realizing that I liked sales because you get to meet lots of people, but this occupation had the motive of selling people something tangible, and that gets tricky. People always think that they want something, but that something, that tangible thing, doesn’t really make them happy. As much as our culture touts the fun of shopping, furniture shopping is not so much fun for most people. I saw couples at their worst, and I was not there to do couples therapy.
I knew I had to get out when a person came up to me at a high school conference and took it upon herself to tell me how much she hated the sofa that she and her husband had decided upon and purchased from me. Parenting teenagers was hard enough without this sort of intrusion of my work life into my personal life. This also, was not doing what I loved. When would I figure out what I loved as much as I loved being at the beach with my babies? Hot summer days when all I had to do was bring out the juice boxes and peanut butter sandwiches and I rocked the world. So, I went back to school.
In my evenings now I’m a therapist, it was the career I set out for when I realized that I needed something to do with my time not spent being a mom any more. People told me, “Do what you love.” What I knew I loved I could no longer do, so how do you know what you’ll love doing, when you don’t really get to do it, but train to do it? I knew I loved talking with people, and being present, really present, something that is difficult in most day to day jobs. I also knew I loved finding out how people ‘work.’ This drives my passion for neuroscience and my curiosity about peoples’ schemas and lives.
This is what I’m selling now, I’m selling my expertise in helping people become happier, in helping people manipulate the intangible aspects of their lives so that they can manifest and grow their dreams and live a life they love. In this there is no buyer’s remorse and no dented coffee tables. I’m shifting my life so that my night gig becomes my day gig, and my evenings will belong to me, and my weekends will belong to my children and grandchildren. Clarity of purpose will bring me there.
Clarity of mind and emotions. Clarity of vision, and clarity of action. I want to do what I love this year. Small problem, finding out what it is I love, then making that real. I see people finding their lives in places that seem like the right place for them, and I can see some connection that brought them there. It is their belief system become manifest in the outside world, but this is not the same thing as doing what you love.
When my children were little, I loved being with them and being their mom. I did, I loved it. This doesn’t mean that I was never tired, out of control or at wit’s end. Those all go along with being a parent. But what this meant was that all I had to do (most of the time) was look into their bright eyes and round faces and I was filled with an energy and joy that kept me going, day in, day out. Day in, day out, through diapers, through food all over the kitchen, through skinned knees, bruised hearts and having them find out about poverty, classism, racism and war.
I don’t get to do that any more. It’s just not my life. The hour glass of time has run out on my being the mom to little children. Of course I’m still a mom, and blessed as a grandmother (Bubbe) also. But my day to day life is not ebbed up by inquisitive little eyes and imaginative minds. As I’m transitioning to work as a full time therapist, my day job at a university is full of trying to solve very simple problems for grown-ups who don’t want to take responsibility, mostly. These grown ups have lost their inquisitiveness and joie de vivre and instead take pride in their over-developed intellect. They don’t make me happy, and just being a helper to grown ups in this way is making me feel small inside. I guess for a large part of my day, I’m not doing what I love.
When I first had to find a full time job, I was still trying to figure out what I loved and what I could do to make money to support my children. I had no career counseling and I worked in sales and marketing. First, I marketed and sold conference space, and this was fun and amazing, creating marketing plans and meeting people from all over the world. After a while though, this got boring. Then I thought I’d like to sell property, and got licensed as a real-estate agent. This was not sitting in a nice office selling space and services and meeting well dressed professional people, this was selling run down houses to young people and big overpriced houses to bickering couples. This I realized very quickly: I not only did not love being a realtor, I hated it.
Next I tried selling furniture, realizing that I liked sales because you get to meet lots of people, but this occupation had the motive of selling people something tangible, and that gets tricky. People always think that they want something, but that something, that tangible thing, doesn’t really make them happy. As much as our culture touts the fun of shopping, furniture shopping is not so much fun for most people. I saw couples at their worst, and I was not there to do couples therapy.
I knew I had to get out when a person came up to me at a high school conference and took it upon herself to tell me how much she hated the sofa that she and her husband had decided upon and purchased from me. Parenting teenagers was hard enough without this sort of intrusion of my work life into my personal life. This also, was not doing what I loved. When would I figure out what I loved as much as I loved being at the beach with my babies? Hot summer days when all I had to do was bring out the juice boxes and peanut butter sandwiches and I rocked the world. So, I went back to school.
In my evenings now I’m a therapist, it was the career I set out for when I realized that I needed something to do with my time not spent being a mom any more. People told me, “Do what you love.” What I knew I loved I could no longer do, so how do you know what you’ll love doing, when you don’t really get to do it, but train to do it? I knew I loved talking with people, and being present, really present, something that is difficult in most day to day jobs. I also knew I loved finding out how people ‘work.’ This drives my passion for neuroscience and my curiosity about peoples’ schemas and lives.
This is what I’m selling now, I’m selling my expertise in helping people become happier, in helping people manipulate the intangible aspects of their lives so that they can manifest and grow their dreams and live a life they love. In this there is no buyer’s remorse and no dented coffee tables. I’m shifting my life so that my night gig becomes my day gig, and my evenings will belong to me, and my weekends will belong to my children and grandchildren. Clarity of purpose will bring me there.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
looking for spring
bust open the musty doors
break open the shutters
watch the paint crack and fall gently away
as the sun shines through
the window
and makes all things look
brighter
turn the bed mattress
fluff the pillows
chase the dust bunnies
out the door
shake out the curtains
shake out the rugs
put them back down
to soften the floor
under your feet
smell the fresh air
sweet
break open the shutters
watch the paint crack and fall gently away
as the sun shines through
the window
and makes all things look
brighter
turn the bed mattress
fluff the pillows
chase the dust bunnies
out the door
shake out the curtains
shake out the rugs
put them back down
to soften the floor
under your feet
smell the fresh air
sweet
Sunday, January 9, 2011
1 Down 51 To Go
"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11
Tomorrow we’ll be ten days into 2011. This first week of 2011 was eventful. I met new people, tried oysters for the first time and had my email hacked. All in all, everything is okay, and even having a viagara ad sent to all my email connections had a silver lining; friends I hadn’t connected with in years got back to me to say, “Hey, what’s up?” It reminded me of the bible verse, when Joseph was thrown down a well by his brothers, later he says, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” I still struggle with putting some of these words of wisdom from the Bible in proper perspective, but they are imbedded in my head.
We are creatures trying to make sense of our world, our communities and of every little thing (sometimes) that happens in our lives. I am embracing 2011 with hope, so when I saw the verse from Jeremiah again recently (on a church sign? where was that?) I did feel hopeful, and thought, who wouldn’t want to think that their life had some special meaning to a deity that loved them and had their back (so to speak)?
I shared with someone recently that I was a bit embarrassed by my Evangelical past, and I was thinking about that this morning. Why embarrassed? Is that the same as shame? And so then, what value, what internalized message do I have that would make me feel so uncomfortable about having been in a conservative church? And am I ready to go there? I’ve tried to work this out before and been stymied, so I give it time, and then go back.
I value autonomy, which means the ability to direct one’s own thoughts and actions, but autonomy is never total autonomy, because we all have internalized schemas about how life works (or should work), and we inherit these schemas from our parents, our churches, schools, our billboards even. They work their way down into the very fiber of our beings and affect our thoughts and behaviors. So how autonomous can we be? So our awareness of how things might be influencing us is then very important, but you have to be willing to follow that little uncomfortable feeling down into the whole feeling and pay attention.
Maybe I need to just stop prefacing my past with my present chagrin. Maybe I need to stand up for the person I was, whether it was more alright to be born again in a small southern Minnesota town, and less alright to be born again in a metro area where if someone has Christian leanings, they are more likely to be part of a large church community that along with the tradition of faith, they value the tradition of diversity. I dunno. Even for me, following this trail into my head and heart and past gets murky. Sometimes, it just has to take its own sweet time, and then who knows, maybe in a good amount of time, I’ll get that ‘aha’ moment, and go, “So that’s why!”
So as you move into this new year, may you learn more about your controlling schemas, may you find more autonomy if that’s what you need, may you find more community if that’s what you need, be wary of group think, and you’ll be alright. And don’t open links even from friends that have no good title in the subject line.
Tomorrow we’ll be ten days into 2011. This first week of 2011 was eventful. I met new people, tried oysters for the first time and had my email hacked. All in all, everything is okay, and even having a viagara ad sent to all my email connections had a silver lining; friends I hadn’t connected with in years got back to me to say, “Hey, what’s up?” It reminded me of the bible verse, when Joseph was thrown down a well by his brothers, later he says, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” I still struggle with putting some of these words of wisdom from the Bible in proper perspective, but they are imbedded in my head.
We are creatures trying to make sense of our world, our communities and of every little thing (sometimes) that happens in our lives. I am embracing 2011 with hope, so when I saw the verse from Jeremiah again recently (on a church sign? where was that?) I did feel hopeful, and thought, who wouldn’t want to think that their life had some special meaning to a deity that loved them and had their back (so to speak)?
I shared with someone recently that I was a bit embarrassed by my Evangelical past, and I was thinking about that this morning. Why embarrassed? Is that the same as shame? And so then, what value, what internalized message do I have that would make me feel so uncomfortable about having been in a conservative church? And am I ready to go there? I’ve tried to work this out before and been stymied, so I give it time, and then go back.
I value autonomy, which means the ability to direct one’s own thoughts and actions, but autonomy is never total autonomy, because we all have internalized schemas about how life works (or should work), and we inherit these schemas from our parents, our churches, schools, our billboards even. They work their way down into the very fiber of our beings and affect our thoughts and behaviors. So how autonomous can we be? So our awareness of how things might be influencing us is then very important, but you have to be willing to follow that little uncomfortable feeling down into the whole feeling and pay attention.
Maybe I need to just stop prefacing my past with my present chagrin. Maybe I need to stand up for the person I was, whether it was more alright to be born again in a small southern Minnesota town, and less alright to be born again in a metro area where if someone has Christian leanings, they are more likely to be part of a large church community that along with the tradition of faith, they value the tradition of diversity. I dunno. Even for me, following this trail into my head and heart and past gets murky. Sometimes, it just has to take its own sweet time, and then who knows, maybe in a good amount of time, I’ll get that ‘aha’ moment, and go, “So that’s why!”
So as you move into this new year, may you learn more about your controlling schemas, may you find more autonomy if that’s what you need, may you find more community if that’s what you need, be wary of group think, and you’ll be alright. And don’t open links even from friends that have no good title in the subject line.
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