Searching for Faith

The essay below sprang from a Facebook post I made wishing my friends a Happy Winter Solstice and Joyous Yule. I planned it a few days in advance and spent more time than I expected finding just the right image and message. I realized once again, I was searching for faith.

I have been seeking  - seeking somewhere, something to put my faith in, for decades now.  When I was a child, I dismissed Christianity. It could be because we lived in the Mid-East for two years. From the age of 5, I knew there was more than one way to believe. I didn't question this. In fact, I didn't think about it much at all. 

When we returned to the States, I attended Sunday school sporadically. One morning at a small chapel at Ft. Ord, the Sunday school lesson was about hypocrites. I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10, my beliefs still not fully formed. What I took away from that lesson was not to act like you believe if you don't. And I knew I didn’t believe. I discussed this with no one. I was not a questioning child and I kept my own counsel, even then.

Throughout the rest of childhood, I went to church now and then. At the last place I moved with my family when I was a junior in high school, I went to youth group purely for social reasons. I stuck out like a sore thumb in that town but I craved acceptance nonetheless. I watched what I said at school until I realized I was also monitoring what I thought. I still wanted to be accepted, but from that moment, I went my own way. I didn't think much more about faith or religion until college.

 The most "shocking" thing I learned my first year in college was  communion wine in some denominations is not grape juice. It actually is wine!  In an anthropology class much later, I learned of Weber's belief that he had an "unmusicality" with religion. I latched on to that phrase and have carried it with me all the years since, believing I, too, am tone deaf to faith and religion. But I envied (and still envy) those who have faith and believe in a power higher than themselves, whether it is a monotheistic Goddess or God, a pantheon, or the spirit and essence of nature. 

In my early 20s, I researched Wicca by reading a few books.  I did some rituals for a short time.  I didn't do them long enough for it to become a habit and I don't remember talking to much of anyone about it. A few years later, I discovered Unitarianism.  That's the closest I've to faith, though for a little while in 2008-2009, I flirted with Christianity .

That was largely a function of where I worked at the time, a faith-based organization. I was surrounded by people of faith, many of whom were conservative. I sensed a power there, and a surrender to something other than self. It would have completely altered my belief system and politics.

I became a member of a local Unitarian congregation when I moved to Rockford. Even though I only planned to live there for a few years, I felt the need to put down roots to establish relationships. It didn't work out as I intended. I slowly drifted away, first because of illness, and eventually because the groups I tried to be part of fell apart for whatever reason. My regular attendance ceased in 2011.

The roots I put down were shallow. Part of the blame lays squarely on my shoulders. After services, I did not stick around for coffee hour. I felt especially awkward at the time and abhor small talk, so I usually fled straight from the sanctuary to my car. Besides, once people find out I don’t have kids, pets, or a favorite team, they're often at a loss for conversation with me. On my side, I can be tongue-tied. It's improved over the last several years but there are still moments I can't think of a single thing to say.

Nearing 50, I still seek something to believe in and a community to belong to with that belief. Maybe I am tone-deaf to religion like Weber. Maybe I am faithless. Maybe I don't need any more faith than what I already carry. Yet I keep coming back to this search for the spiritual, something higher, more elemental than the woman that I am. Maybe if I knew what I was looking for, I would have found it by now.

Faith is a very personal thing. This is why I haven't discussed it openly before  now. It has not been for lack of people to ask.  Since I was a teen, I have had access to people of faith, whether pagan or Judaeo-Christian or something else. Some have been classmates, casual friends, co-workers, or friends on social media. Others have been close friends or more, the very people I could be vulnerable enough to ask.

But I have never liked to pry. Yet I keep coming back to this question of faith. I poke around the trailhead but can't a path. I love research, but there is only so much you can learn from it. I need to stop googling and reading. I need to ask real people.

Will you share your story (or a piece of it) with me? What led you to what you believe in? I genuinely want to know.  It may help me find my own path.

---

Conundrum

(Written on a receipt during a Crane Wives show, inspired by the niggling thought that I'm a little too self-absorbed, a glass of wine, and live music.)

     The Chardonnay,

     The past angst

           and the present

    The reflection,

    The inner turmoil

    The words, the

     heart on my sleeve

            Why can’t I

    I just write about

    the mundane…

    a toaster…

   the weather

Mid Life #1: We are Here

Generation X didn’t start the fire. We looked at it and said, “Whatever.” We are no longer young adults. Most of us have not and will not set the world on fire. The demographics say there are far fewer of us than the generations that book end us. We hear about them all the time. but we are here, too. We exist.

Sometimes, I think I’m old. Awhile back, my boss referred to my younger office mate and I as Laverne and Shirley.  She didn’t know who that was, so I sent her a link to the opening credits. A couple of minutes later, she turned to me and said, “I get it.” More recently, she told me she hopes she’s as cool as me when she’s my age. That is the best compliment I’ve been given in a long time. My office-mate, is one of the good ones.

Talking with a friend recently, I mentioned that we are getting old after the phrase “a quarter century” was used. He countered that no, we’re just getting started. You know what? We’re both right. By the time you’re in your mid-40s, a lot of milestones are behind us, but there is a lot ahead of us, too. Don't look behind. The past is gone. Look ahead.

https://www.thehenryford.org/visit/henry-ford-museum/exhibits/your-place-in-time/

Making Sexy Awkward Since 1986

A boy named Tom sent me a rose during Homecoming my freshman year of high school. I was 14, new in town and shy.  I didn’t know what to do with the idea that a boy might think I was pretty. He was a sophomore and must have been shy, too. I don’t think we ever spoke the entire year. But I did press that rose in my scrapbook, where it continues to decay to this day. 


On the last day of school that year, I received a note from  another boy, Brian.  It was in English class, and our desks were arranged in a circle. I remember seeing the note passed from one kid to another. When it reached me, I was surprised to see it had my name on it.


I opened it. “Jennifer, will you go out with me?” it read. I glared in Brian’s general direction. I wrote my reply, “I think you have the wrong Jennifer.” There were at least two other Jennifers in the room. Surely it reached the wrong one. I sent it back. It came back. He had the right Jennifer. I thought he was being mean. There was no way he could be serious.  I looked right at him, tore up the note, and crushed it under my heel. I never saw him again. Four years later, it dawned on me he actually was asking me out on purpose. Sorry, Brian.


I moved that summer and soon met James, my first boyfriend. Probably the only reason I thought he was serious is because several friends I trusted told me he was…and I had a crush on him, too.  We were at the mall on a busy Saturday. He pulled me into a corridor. I knew where this was going. I thought I was ready. We were pressed against a wall, his lips coming toward me, and oh no! Probably his tongue, too. I ducked. He never tried to kiss me again.


Three years later, it is the tail end of my freshman year of college. I have had a mad, mad crush on Scott since the moment I laid eyes on him in the fall.  He has also had a mad, mad crush on me for several months. 


Our friends were not oblivious to any of this. But we were. They went home for Memorial Day weekend.  Scott and I decided to go out for dinner together. This is not a date. We will not admit or see that it is. After an awkward dinner devoid of conversation, we sat under a tree, picking green aphids out of each other’s hair. 


Two years later, Scott and I were not together. We are taking a break. I am a mess. How will I live without him? I am strong. I don’t need him. I cry. I write. I study more. I write some more.  I am woman, hear me roar!  How will I live without him?  


This is how: I discovered a computer bulletin board system.  I spent hours online talking to people I would never meet in person. But there’s one person I joke with more than anyone else and pour my heart out to. I learn to flirt because of him. Eventually, we tell each other our real names.  We email and send a real letter or two. We have a fling online. That fizzles. We remain friends. 


A few months later, we start talking, on the phone in the middle of the night, for hours and hours. I do most of the talking. He listens. I am preoccupied with my final semester and oblivious as ever.  Still, the desire to meet in person is strong. We do meet in person, but not before Scott tells me how much he misses me. I have to make a choice. I don’t know who to choose and am bad at risk-taking.  So when I finally meet my online friend, I threw on more ice queen armor than I ever have before or since…for an entire weekend. To ensure it lasts, I avoid eye contact. But somehow, we remained friends. He still tracks me down every so often. And I appreciate it.


Years pass.  Now it’s 2002. I am at a friend’s house for a costume fitting. I am prancing around in leggings and a t-shirt, almost oblivious as usual. There’s a guy there I suspect is going ask me out at some point. A few weeks later, he does. That’s the one I marry.

August, 1989

August 1989: 

Bombing down country roads I’d never seen before or since, driving a car that took my family and I from Michigan to California and back again and Michigan to Virginia and back to Michigan.  When it rained, water inexplicably filled the back-seat passenger’s side foot well.  The dusty light blue upholstery on the ceiling sagged around the dome light.

The car I drove in wooden shoes, very briefly, just to see if it could be done, the Tulip Time we taped the fortune cookie fortune “A thrilling time is in your immediate future” to the dash with band aids.

The car that when it was cold out, made you wonder every time if it was going to take off again when the light turned green

The car I rode in the year I was seven, when in the middle of the journey cross country, I saw snow for the first time in two years, when at the end of the journey, we were greeted by the same ice plant ground cover we’d left on the other side of the world just months before

The care I drove and drove and drove, almost never filling the tank back up.  (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

The car I learned to drive in, early on Sunday mornings, past the mall where I would later to duck to avoid my (almost) first kiss

The car with an after-market cassette deck that I was ever grateful for because almost all the radio stations were crap in my teen aged opinion

The car, weeks before, I’d ferried around friends from Washington, D.C. and Detroit, showing them the corn fed, tulip-bedecked wasteland I now called home.  (What else did we do that week besides dye my hair red with McCormick food coloring?)

The car I drove when I accidentally lost Lake Michigan that spring when I was a miserable square, dark-minded peg in a school of round, pure-minded pegs who’d known each other forever.

The 1979 Malibu station wagon I grew up in from Michigan to California to Virginia and back to Michigan,  we took one last long ride together, bombing down roads I’d never seen before or since, windows rolled down, open to the blue August sky, blasting Disintegration.

It’s Only Words: Thoughts on #metoo

The #metoo campaign has been on my mind since it first appeared in mid-October.  I am saddened but not shocked that so many I know have been assaulted or raped.  In the midst of that first week, a male friend made light of it.  I wanted to tell him off, but I bit my tongue.  We were in mixed company.  This group of friends is thicker-skinned than me.  It is assumed this particular friend is just joking.   We make allowances for him.  I bit my tongue because I am the quiet one in the group who feels she has to speak loudly and rudely to be heard. I bit my tongue because I knew saying something would do no good.

Unlike a lot of women I know personally and virtually, I am fortunate that I have never been assaulted. I’ve never been in a situation where I was absolutely powerless.

In tenth grade, another student on the school bus described in detail how he would like to tie up me and a friend and what he would do.  We said nothing.  I remember to this day feeling threatened and vowing never to be alone with that kid.  He was two years younger than me, but bigger and stronger.  I’d found him creepy before, but now I had a definite reason.

A year later, at a new school 150 miles away, I walked home from school one day when two boys decided to follow me home in a car.  They drove slowly, keeping pace with my steps, yelling that I was a bitch and that they would kill me.  I did nothing to provoke this.  I barely knew these kids.

That time, I did say something to my parents.  They followed up with the principal.  The principal followed up on something unrelated my Dad told him.  It was associated with the shouted death threats but as far as I know, there were never any repercussions for them, just confirmation what my dad said was true.

Years passed.  In college and grad school, I did a few stupid things like walking alone across campus well after dark and accepting a walk home from a man I’d never met in person.  I never felt unsafe with any of men I socialized with at the time, whether they were friends or something more.  I trusted them and never felt any of them would be violent towards me.  

In my twenties, I settled for a relationship with a man I did not fully trust, who I was not completely comfortable with.  He was verbally and emotionally abusive.  I truly believe he would have been physically abusive had he thought he could get away with it.

These are the experiences I remember.  These are the times I remember feeling unsafe, the times I was made aware that the men hurling words at me could physically overpower me.  

Words have power.  Words can summon fear.  Saying what you would like to do to another person does not make you more attractive.  It does not make you stronger.  It does not make you better.  It is not funny.  It is behavior that should not be brushed aside or laughed about.  This behavior is not acceptable.  If it makes you uncomfortable, call people out for it.  Don’t bite your tongue like I did.  The next time it happens, I am speaking up.

My experiences pale in comparison to what so many have had to endure. But I will stand by the women and men who have experienced assault and abuse.

The Words I Don't Keep

The words I don’t keep

That I set free on paper

Are my gift to share

If they are too easy,

Too plain, too transparent,

Pass by

If they are too obscure,

Too hard, too much,

Seek them only if you choose

If my words sing to you,

If they solve a mystery,

If they make you wonder

Know I am grateful

Know that I am honored

The words that I set free

Are my gift

Accept them as you please

  

Inspired by an interview on NPR with Instagram poet Rupi Kaur, found here:  http://www.npr.org/2017/10/09/554561078/poet-rupi-kaur-art-should-be-accessible-to-the-masses