Jesus Has Come!

It’s funny how much we think about what’s missing at Christmas time: friends and family who aren’t here, things in our lives that didn’t come to pass, things that did and left us feeling empty. It can leave you feeling like a bit of a Grinch if you don’t feel the holiday cheer. Sorrow, darkness, anxiety – the opposite of the Christmas story, no?

The Nativity stories tell us that this is precisely what Christmas is. Christmas is about a woman scared of what is to come; about a man who doesn’t understand what has happened; about lonely shepherds in a field; about a difficult and dangerous journey undertaken at someone else’s whim; about a couple desperate to find a place to bear their child. Our sad and empty feelings are exactly the place in which the Christmas message appears.

These last weeks, we’ve been calling on God in our prayers to return and rule the world, to free us from darkness and pain – our Advent prayers expect us to be experiencing these difficult feelings. Sorrow, waiting, hope. Waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The joyfulness is in the hope, and not necessarily in the lives we’ve been living.

Our community in particular has experienced a great deal of loss and sadness. We’re faced with the reality that none of us will be getting our Christmas hug this year. Forty days ago, we celebrated our first Mass after Father died, some of us learning for the first time that God had taken him from us the morning before. Forty days we’ve been in the desert. What have we been preparing for? What, like Elijah, have we been calling for? Where have be been journeying to, if not the promise of the Lord?

Today is the forty-first day: today, as our Savior is born for us, we are coming out of the desert. Tonight we light candles in the darkness and see anew in the glow of that flame.

That promise – that light in the darkness – is fulfilled, the answer given to us in the Nativity story. Although Mary is troubled and afraid, so scared of what will happen to her that she hides at her cousin’s house for three months, she accepts God’s promise and is given a beautiful baby boy. Joseph, who is angry and confused, listens to the message of an angel and enters into the greatest story ever told. The shepherds are gathered together amid tidings of great joy. The Holy Family makes it safely to Bethlehem. In their hour of need, God provides through the kindness of a stranger.

We, too, experience this amazing love and joy, this great gift of light. And it isn’t because we’ve forgotten our sadness, or because we’ve left it behind and no longer feel it, but because God’s promise is fulfilled in the midst of it. Christmas is about those feelings, that sorrow, darkness and anxiety, and about how God embraces those feelings – those moments – in something greater. A light so great that the darkness did not comprehend it.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Pink Sunday?

So I’m wondering whether or not there is more than one Advent wreath tradition. I went to the local Anglican church today, and they lit the fourth candle, which was the pink one. Apparently it’s the ‘candle of love.’ I didn’t know there was a candle of love aside from the Bethlehem candle (the second one). Also, I didn’t know that ‘pink Sunday’ was, like, moveable. I knew it was optional, but not that it could be relocated from the third Sunday to the fourth. They also lit the white candle in the centre of the wreath.

I am so confused.

On the other hand, their children’s Christmas pageant was very cute. I’ve never seen a pageant that wasn’t on Christmas Eve, so I found it rather odd, but I’m going to just assume that this is an acceptable variation…sure, why not? I guess that’s why the white candle was also lit: Jesus is born!!

That is just so not right…

I keep feeling like I’m living in some horrible dream; not a nightmare, just a kind of stepping through the looking glass, a kind of disconnection of an image between one mirror and the next, something misaligned, distorted or missing. It’s not a nightmare, but a world I’ve fallen into in which I don’t exactly belong. Like a life lived sideways.

Back Off My Sparkly Pink Flower!

One day in November, I was alone in the chapel for evening prayer (I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but it isn’t like I’m a stranger to obsessive repetitiveness), which actually doesn’t happen that often. Anyway, so I’m there by myself in this chapel. It’s a very pretty chapel. What do I decide to do?

I decide to sing evening prayer. Not all of it, just the hymns, canticles and psalmody. Got to do the psalmody differently, too: with antiphon, psalm and psalm prayer – bonus! Since no one else has to try and copy me with my no-actual-music, I can do what I want.

After I finished evening prayer, I got one of the hymn books and sang all the songs in it that I knew (except the ones about Jesus dying, which would be liturgically inappropriate, I think), which were depressingly few. Still, having memorized a few of my favorite songs anyways, I ended up staying there quite a bit longer than the usual half hour. It was great!

I realized when I was leaving that I was super happy, which was an interesting and welcome departure from my usual moping and despondency (cue the violins). I think it just felt like…I was doing what I was meant to do, that for a moment things slid into place, that this was what I wanted.

Do you think Medicare would subsidize building a chapel as a medical expense? Hey Medicare: build me a chapel! In the long run, it’ll be cheaper!

Absurd notions aside, it isn’t the building that gave me that feeling, though I must admit the sound was great. The praying, that’s the key…But of course praying can’t be the entirety of my life: I’m not trying to be a twelfth-century German anchorite mystic.

More’s the pity.

There are other things that make me happy in my life. I mean the kind of happy that is just pure and unreasonable – that is, there’s no reason at all for such a thing to make me happy like that.

I really like snow globes. I gravitate toward them in stores. I keep forgetting about how much I like snow globes until I’m actually standing in front of them. *happy sigh* I like the sometimes-sparkly little snow and the way it drifts down after I turn the snow globe over. I like watching it settle. I like looking at the little scenes inside of it. Simple snow globes are the best: easy to turn over, simple enough little worlds within them, a perfect little image. Thus, I am somewhat annoyed by complicated snow globes that try to integrate multiple scenes and globes in the same structure. You know, like the dragon and wizard war ones where the dragon and the wizard are in separate bubbles that are stuck on the same unwieldy base, which is also thematic. You can’t watch both at once. One bubble per globe is enough for me. Though a snow globe may come with the ability to play pretty little music, I almost never wind it up.

So far, I have prayer and snow globes.

I also really like balloons. If snow globes make me a kind of relaxed happy, balloons are their excited brethren. People don’t randomly give each other balloons nearly often enough (I don’t randomly give people balloons, either, mostly because I’m afraid they won’t want them). I love getting balloons. *happy dance* I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because they’re so innocent and joyful all by themselves. Helium balloons are so cool! I admit that the tin-foil looking balloons shaped like other things (a heart, for example) kind of annoy me. This doesn’t make any sense because I think balloon animals would make me happy – I haven’t actually had any, but they seem like so much fun in the movies.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was…you know those garbage cans with the round hole in the top that you put things through, that’s a bit smaller than the circumference of the actual can? The reason for these holes and discrepancies is mysterious to me. Anyway, one day I was walking to the tunnel that connects Place Ville Marie with the Eaton Center, and I saw an upside-down red balloon stuffed into one, part in and part out because it didn’t fit through the hole. I don’t know why it made me sad…there’s just something wrong with throwing out a perfectly good balloon. Letting them up in the air is fine – freedom! FREEDOM!! – but stuffing them into a garbage can just isn’t.

So I’ve got prayer, snow globes and balloons. I think that’s enough.

Which is kind of funny, because I don’t actually have balloons or snow globes, and sometimes even prayer, but somehow just knowing they exist is enough.

Color Me Happy

I was planning to go to Anglican church downtown today but, having woken up at the early time necessary to catch the morning train, I decided that falling asleep during worship wouldn’t really be ideal. So I slept in and went to Catholic church instead.

This turned out to be a good idea, since our choir organist just came back from Australia, so I got to see her and give her a hug. Yay!!

At the beginning of Mass, the priest made a comment about how it was one of the two Sundays a year where clergy wear pink…he said that priests hate wearing pink, but that there is a good reason for the color: happiness, lightness, celebration, a break from penitence.

But his comment about pink isn’t true: Father loved wearing pink. It really brought out his coloring and he looked good in it. He thought so, too. One time he went into the hall to turn on the heat before Mass and accidentally locked himself out of the church – and, hence, the rectory. He called one of the wardens to come and let him back in. He was wearing pink pajamas and his Toronto Maple Leafs slippers. I’m not telling the story nearly as funny as it was.

I wish there was more pink in churches.

In his homily, the priest talked about stillness, about finding that moment of stillness where you can just sit and be with God. Likewise, Evagrios the Solitary, whom I happened to be reading today, says that “the practice of stillness is full of joy and beauty; its yoke is easy and its burden light.” He connects this stillness with asceticism, with charity, with wilderness, with constancy, with rejoicing (which sounds very much like Advent). He also says that, in order to be a space in which a person can really live his life, one's ascetic disciplines must be flexible enough that they can be modified or dispensed with if a person is sick or tired, so that he can return in strength to them. He also says that they should not limit the way a person participates in the lives of others, as for example would be the case if one were invited out to dinner.

In a way, this joy in stillness is exactly what ‘pink Sunday’ is about. A break from those burdensome or difficult aspects of devotional life, a place to stop and just be happy and recapture that stillness, recapture the meaning of all the preparation; a bubble of calm that can be carried out of that day and into the rest of life as the liturgical seasons flow on. A space in which to sit and be, of lightness and joy. In a way leaving the expectation and preparation behind for a while and just living in the simplicity of being, in knowing that in God all is already accomplished, that there is already a place for you and that God welcomes you into it even now, even in the middle of a life not yet fulfilled.

Maybe this is something I should try and take to heart. That I need to accept my own limitations in my prayer life without feeling guilty or ashamed or sad when I can’t accomplish everything I want to do. That I need enough flexibility to be able to live in that joy and stillness instead of always seeking to do something I haven’t had time to do, or obsessing over the ways I have failed. I’m not living a religious life, and that means that I don’t always have the freedom to live a God-centered life in all the ways I feel drawn to do, in all the ways I want to.

Maybe I’m supposed to understand that that’s okay.

I’ll try to work on that.

Son Of God: Yum!

I’ve been eating my ‘Advent’ calendar for a week now. I must say, Well done Laura Secord (whom Heritage Moments tells me is some kind of heroine): excellent, excellent job. I still miss the old calendar from when we were children, the one with the felt Christmas tree and the twenty-five Velcro-backed felt ornaments, the star being for Christmas morning, of course. My brother and I took turns from year to year. That calendar was the best, but this one is a good approximation.

So, at the La Trappe store – which used to be run by, you guessed it, Trappist monks – this is a season to stock up on Santa-shaped chocolate lollipops and suchlike. One of the things that always creeps me out about the store now that they’re gone is the uniforms: employees wear these black ‘aprons’ over white clothes in an approximation of the Trappist habit. In other words, they’re trying to look like monks. What, do they think no one will notice the difference? Sadly, this may actually be true in some cases.

Despite the ‘resemblance,’ I’ve not yet found one of them to discuss radical Catholic theology and Church happenings with while paying for my cheese. O liberal (and heretical) Trappist monk at the cash register, how I doth miss thee!

Along with the calendar, one of the things marking my approach to Christmas is setting up the crèche. The original one had its own little stable with a grass-like roof that tended to shed, a loft and a barn-like main area. I would put all the little porcelain figurines – once liberated from their bubble wrap – lovingly inside the stable, whose floor is much like its roof. Jesus and the angel of course have to wait until after the Christmas Eve Mass. The three kings get lined up in various places and I move them a bit closer to the Nativity scene each day: look at them go! Unfortunately there aren’t figurines of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt. *awkward cricket chirping*

There has been a more recent one with bigger figurines and no stable. I think they’re shinier. I don’t actually remember much about it. But the most recent one, which we’ve used for the past two years, is a Veggie Tales version of the crèche and characters. Two attached peas are dressed as sheep, for example, and one of the other people is an asparagus spear. On top of the crèche is a star that sings something unintelligible, supposedly a little Christmas song, when you press it. Since Veggie Tales are used to teach children, this can’t be sacrilegious, though I admit it feels that way somewhat.

At La Trappe, they sell a variety of approximations of the Nativity scene. This itself is not a problem. The problem is that some of them are made out of chocolate and marzipan. Now that just seems so wrong, eating the baby Jesus, manger and all.

I know, I know: we eat the actual Jesus when we receive Eucharist, so what makes this so different, especially since it isn’t real? I think the difference – the gap between reality and a replica – is exactly where the problem lies. Because Eucharist is real, a real gift with substantial effects on us and on the world, allowing us to participate in a reality greater than our own, which includes the entire life Incarnate of Jesus Christ. So yes, we are actually eating the baby Jesus, but it is real and spiritual food, making-present the very reality to which it points.

While chocolate and marzipan are also real food (no kidding?), they lack this manifestation. The chocolate baby Jesus figurine symbolizes the reality of Christ in the same way a crèche does: by providing an image of that which we believe, an image inherently containing that belief in who the Christ child is. That this is not an ordinary baby, though to all appearances and according to all rationality, he is precisely as ordinary as any other human being. What we have in the chocolate Jesus case is someone consuming that reality for nothing but transient, meaningless pleasure.

I doubt that even a vehement atheist would seriously consider eating an Icon or a crucifix. Why then would the baby Jesus be any different? Because the baby Jesus is most clearly a joyful offering of God for all the world, because Jesus is for all of us, because he’s cute? Maybe. Ultimately, it doesn’t really manner. What it expresses is that we’ve turned Jesus at his birthday into something to be consumed like an object, like anything else; it expresses a rejection of the beginning of the greatest Story ever known, and therefore all the rest of it as well; it expresses the modern meaninglessness of the Christmas Celebration - a profound transformation of faith into an occasion for a possessiveness that turns one away from God through a desire for things.

Maybe I’m overstating things: you will have noticed that I do that sometimes. But it feels to me almost like a desecration of the Nativity, eating the cornerstone and meaning of faith.

p.s. I am eternally grateful for this title to my source of inspiration.

I Mistook My Bible For A Cell Phone

I went to one of the downtown churches today that I’ve only been to a few times, mostly because my local Anglican church wasn’t having Eucharist, which still seems strange to me. In the priest’s homily, she talked about how Advent requires us to go into the desert in order to get to Jerusalem: it isn’t a comfortable place to be, and it isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to be prepared for the journey.

I like that. It gives me hope that this place where I am is part of a journey and not a meaningless side trip along the way.

Where I am right now is fairly uncomfortable; I think this blog as of late has made that pretty clear. Bloggerific.

I went to pull my cell phone out of my bag to call for a ride home and grabbed it, as I usually do, based on the feeling of the case it’s in. Belatedly, I realized that I had in fact pulled out my Bible instead.

Maybe this is a message from God. Maybe it symbolizes that what I’m trying to do is call someone, anyone, who will help me get home. Maybe the word of God is precisely that way home, precisely that to which I must turn, to which I must reach out. Given that I was brought up Roman Catholic (whoda thunk it?), it’s not like reading the Bible is the first thing I do when I’m trying to figure something out in my faith life.

Maybe I need to do more of that: more turning to the Word itself and less trying to find someone to talk to who’ll help me sort out this emotional turmoil that is my life right now. Although I believe that human relationships, in all their imperfections, are an indispensible source of healing, it just doesn’t seem to be something that’s in the cards for me right now (although I must admit I am not a Tarot expert). So, less asking people for help and comfort and more praying with the Bible. Maybe that will work out and maybe it won’t, but right now it’s all I’ve got.

Here We Go A Wassailing

So today (Friday) I went to an Advent Carol service being put on by the Anglican chapel I normally go to. It was really, really pretty, with candles and readings and singing. But I was having a really, really bad day. I skipped saying the Rosary this morning, so I lost that little bubble that I usually have, and it just went downhill from there.

I had really been hoping to hear from someone, because I wanted to see them, so I was a bit disappointed about that. When I got to my carrel, all my books had been moved (again), and I had to wait for the girl using my desk to come back from God knows where so she could move her stuff. And I was tired and, due to exertion-induced asthma, couldn’t really breathe and needed to get my wind back, for which sitting is helpful.

Then, my kidneys etc. were doing that thing again where they don’t function properly. So that was frustrating as well as worrying, since I thought I’d gotten a handle on that. In any event, it causes a good amount of pain, so that didn’t make me cheerful. My meds were making it impossible to eat, so I was dizzy and lightheaded but couldn’t eat anything without getting nauseous. I skipped Advent devotions and evening prayer, which I’m sure was a bad idea. Coming home so late, I’ve also missed Compline. So I’m out a good, oh, two hours of prayer. That always makes me a bit cranky. I wrote a draft of a letter requesting medical leave – a concept which is itself worrying and stressful, ironically – but didn’t get a response to that, either. Also, I’ve had a constant headache since Wednesday. Ugh. I haven’t been sleeping and so I’m exhausted.

Anyway, so I go to this service and only actually know one song, which made me feel like a bit of an outsider, especially having spent the last few days with people singing songs I know. Holding the candle made me think of J---, God † rest his soul, who I was always afraid was going to light his music on fire during the Vigil. I’ve been missing him a lot lately: singing songs we had parts to together, expecting to hear his voice in my ear and sometimes almost hearing it.

I guess I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood. I also thought about B---, God † rest her soul, that time driving back from St. Mary’s hospital when my mother and S--- convinced her that Styrofoam grew on trees, and I was trying not to laugh. Or was it plastic bags?...What it felt like when she didn’t sit next to me in choir anymore. About S---, God † rest her soul, who sometimes drove me home from choir, and how much I cried at her funeral. About B---, God † rest his soul, whose funeral I altar served at and then cried later, realizing how much I never knew. About T---, God † rest his soul, and the first Christmas that he was sick. About my grandfather, God † rest his soul, where there was never any service and they wouldn’t let us into the hospital room to see him when he was dying. About P--- and R--- and K--- and R---, God † rest their souls. About Fr. S---, God † rest his soul, whose CBW I hymnbook I just got. About my friends and family who are dying. Most of all, I thought about Father, God † rest his soul; I got a Bible that belonged to him, and now I carry it with me.

I’ve been surrounded by so much recent grieving this last while, but I haven’t had the opportunity to share my stories with anyone, to have anyone hold me while I cry, to have anyone willing to be there in all my sorrow. I’ve been trying to be that person, the person I don’t have and have never had, and it’s at the point where I’m not sure I can deal with this all alone anymore. At any rate, I don’t want to, but there seems to be nowhere to go.

Add to this the fact that I already kind of dread Christmas – the year I was really sick, some horrible things happened and were said in the family that kind of tainted it forever for me – and you have a mixture of everything that’s fucked up about me, and it’s really volatile.

So I leave after the service and go sit in my little alcove, where, of course, I cry. Some really cool friends saw me and came and made me laugh, and I felt a bit better. But I had been bursting into tears all day. I was afraid to go to the thing they had afterward because, well, it’s humiliating to cry in front of people, especially when they have no idea why it’s happening. I was also really embarrassed to see the person I had wanted to meet, because I think it’s not really fair for me to ask, again, for someone to help me out by listening. I mean, really Kat, get a life. I’m sure everyone now thinks I’m even weirder than they thought before, but I’m not sure I actually care. Better to seem like some sort of social phobic person than some sort of crazy freak who keeps crying. That’s my theory, anyway. I am grateful I was able to make it through the skit part, which is what I really wanted to see.

Going back toward the train, I had to keep stopping to cry. I thought about jumping in front of the Metro, but then I realized that that’s stupid. Having been in the position where I’ve almost died, waking up in the ICU freezing cold with monitors and IV’s and various other medical stuff, not knowing what happened, I understand that just because everything happens to hurt right now isn’t a good reason to not struggle to live. You know that you’re a bit of a wreck when random homeless people ask if you’re alright, though.

So, it’s been a long day, full of me sobbing and trying unsuccessfully to hold it together, of me gathering yet more proof about why it is I need to get off my current medication cycle given that it’s actually making me physically ill, full of me embarrassing myself and whatnot. Retrospectively, I probably shouldn’t have tried to stay at all. But I wanted so badly to try and be normal, to try and do a normal thing that I used to do all the time, to do something that I really wanted to do, and I underestimated how much everything is still affecting me. It’s difficult to explain it to people and it’s difficult for people to understand. It actually really hurts when people make fun of me for it, because it isn’t something I can control, nor do I fully understand it myself. But that feeling of hurt, which makes it harder to think even of trying, is something that I can’t really articulate because it makes me more vulnerable and more fragile in the face of future making-fun-of-me. So I don’t talk about it. Except in this blog, which has no bearing on or effect in the real world.

Wow: it’s Saturday, and I’m still crying while typing this stupid post. Aren’t I special.

Where Shall I Find Rest

The other week – a Wednesday – I went to mid-week Mass at the Anglican chapel I usually go to. I was coming back after a (fairly) long absence, especially considering my penchant in days of yore for attending Mass every day. Anyway, the point is that, right before the consecration, I felt suddenly overwhelmed and cried a little. I’m fairly sure no one noticed. Fairly.

This really drives home the fact that I feel like I’m experiencing a sort of religious angst that was both unexpected and not: at a very deep level, I still feel incredibly torn between two paths – one that I’m leaving and one that I’m seeking. Conflicted. Confused.

The day before, I had gone to Mass at the university’s Catholic center for the first time, for reasons that were both whimsical and practical. Practically, the schedule for Mass intentions at my home parish has been thrown into complete disarray, since it was based on the presupposition that Mass was being said every day. Therefore, to ensure a timely Mass intention which I could attend, I got one at the Center. Whimsically, I went because Father was always saying, “Are you going to go to the Center? You should really go to the Center. Have you gone to the Center yet?” Anyway, it seemed perfect that now, after he died, I finally did what he’d nagged me to do for years.

I confess that I experienced the comfort I always do at Roman Catholic churches that comes from knowing the liturgy and being able to participate in the service without any sort of book. (After all, We Are Church, are we not?) I also received Eucharist: I’ve been doing that ever since Father died, which makes that about, oh, five times now. It was interesting that I decided to do that in the first place, since I had always sworn not to, and even more interesting that I felt no conflict at any time while I was doing it, or in the time surrounding.

However, when I went to Anglican church on Wednesday, less that 24 hours later, I felt a profound sense of…having done something wrong. As in, what have I done? I knew that by the laws I grew up with the idea of receiving Eucharist in two denominations at once is, well, frowned upon, though that doesn’t quite convey the horror orthodox, law-abiding Catholics would feel at the suggestion. Oh, I had all sorts of nice reasons planned out. ‘I still believe in the Apostolic succession of the Episcopate and the doctrine of Transubstantiation, so I’m not really separate when it comes to Eucharist.’ ‘It’s about me and Jesus, not the Church.’ ‘Now that Father’s dead, no one will be hurt.’ But those are really all justifications I came up with after having already acted on the basis of what I felt compelled to do.

I just feel…so profoundly confused. I don’t really know how to name what I feel, or even if it has a name. In many ways, I long for the certainty that I had in my youth. I am forced to ask myself why I decided to leave the Catholic Church in the first place. My blog has actually been very helpful in this: I looked back over parts of it and was able to say, ‘oh yeah, now I remember.’ But to base this decision primarily on private experience is, of course, profoundly un-Catholic.

I miss my community, the people that I love, singing hymns I know, being familiar with the liturgy to the point that I can reflect on it instead of trying to figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be doing. I wish I knew what the Anglican Church is, the beliefs, sacraments, colors, documents, prayers, movements, fundamental beliefs (aside from the shared Creed, of course)…I wish that there was someone to just, I don’t know, teach and discuss these things with me, so that I might find a way to catch my footing. I feel lost, and therefore conflicted about where it is that I am meant to be. I wonder if I’m supposed to go back to Catholic churches, if that’s what recent events have been pointing me towards, even though I do not believe, fundamentally, that this is true. In a way, my recent experiences of comfort represent a profound temptation to slip back into what is easy and familiar rather than to seek out in difficulty what path it is right for me to take.

In the Roman Catholic Church, there is a highly structured catechetical program for adults who want to be initiated into the Church, complete with discussions, teachings, and guidelines for experiencing what the corporate beliefs are. I don’t know if the same thing exists in Anglican churches. The Alpha program is not what I mean: I found it interesting but ultimately unenlightening and insufficient when I did it at my home parish several years ago. I want…I don’t know…someone cleverer than me to help me make my way through the tangled branches of it all. All this is assuming, of course, that there are shared corporate beliefs, at least sufficiently for such a program of study to be viable. Even looking at the latitude for variation is important, I think, since this is not something the Roman Catholic Church itself excels at.

Thus far, I have been unable to find this mythical mentor. For one thing, the church I’ve been going to places no importance at all upon actually belonging to the Anglican Church. For another…um…I’m not sure the priest there is actually suited for dealing with me in this way: I’m afraid I might actually trample him with my incessant questioning. I need someone to challenge my assumptions and show me new things, who isn’t going to get confused by what it is I’m asking. I have an unfortunate and sneaking suspicion that I already know more about liturgy and doctrine than this priest, given my hyper-dedication to studying catechism, tradition and law, as well as classical philosophy and theology. This actually puts me at a disadvantage, since I am well-schooled in the doctrines, history, and documents of the most systematic church currently in existence. The Roman Catholic Church is not exactly known for its brilliant expression of mystery…oh, there’s mystery in the doctrines and teachings, but it’s lodged firmly inside a logical and thorough account of the mystery in question. For example: transubstantiation. It uses the language of substantial ontology to capture the reality of what Eucharist is. The idea is that the accidental properties of the bread and wine remain, but that their substance is effaced and replaced by the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. Yes, this remains a mystery, and the doctrine does not pretend otherwise. But the doctrine seems to, in a way, take away this fundamental aspect of mystery in gratitude and replace it with a kind of gratitude-in-understanding. Which is the only problem I have with the doctrine of transubstantiation as such.

But I digress.

The point is that I desperately need and want to learn about this way of being Christian that I am circling. But it just doesn’t seem to be happening. I also don’t have a confessor I click with…ideally, the two would be combined, since the idea of sin and understandings of doctrine are sometimes tightly bound up with each other.

Oh, my heart! There is such a great temptation in my longing, for that which I know and have known. I returned to my home congregation because I needed and wanted to be there, to grieve with the people I love and who love me, to face and experience loss in and with the community entire. I’ve gone to the funerals of three people from that church now whom I have loved deeply, and if there’s only one thing I’ve learned it’s that grieving is never done alone, not really. We come together and prepare, together, to go back out our separate ways. Although the healing and the returning to our separate lives is done individually, the process of that healing, as well as the sending forth, is only really accomplished in communion with one another. But now, out of this need to be home again, is the fear – and secret longing, as well – that I will not be able, not be willing, to go onward again as before. The tendency to return to the people who love and miss me, whom I love and miss, and the Church as I have understood it for so long, is a powerful one. In so many ways, I just don’t know what to do. It’s isolating and heartbreaking and I don’t know that I am strong enough to try and do this on my own anymore. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the place I need to turn to and lean on for support if I am to change doesn’t seem to exist, at least for me. I world of mirage and doubt and fear…where is this place that I have taken myself? Where shall I find rest?

To quote Jeremiah: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.’” (6:16)

Or, Psalm 62: “My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken […] Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him […] Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” (1-8)

Or, Frodo: “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”

Or, with Matthew: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (11:29)

Or, with St. Augustine: “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”