Shaky Egg

eat pray love and penn and teller’s bullshit

I can’t believe I didn’t have a religion category for this blog before now. Crazy! I think about religion, and pray, all the time. What the hell, how did I avoid giving it a tag here all these two years I’ve been doing this blog?

Tell me spirit, what has not been done? I’ll rush out and do it… or are we doin’ it now? I’m so behind on my contemporary independent music. But this My Morning Jacket song just sticks so sweetly in my head, and it’s so right.

What I have on my mind is something I’ve been thinking about for a good month, but haven’t been able to sit down to write about it for various reasons. Tonight I’m so tired… but I’m going to try to knock it out quickly.

My women’s book group read a book called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. There were so many transcendent moments, and so many laugh out loud moments. She writes in a clean, self deprecating style that, if you’re not careful, will slip the profound sweetness of her experiences right past you. She had me from the first sentence, where she is lying on the floor in her bathroom at two a.m. in a pool of tears and snot, bawling because she doesn’t want to be married any more. She doesn’t want babies… she is depressed… she has always looked outside of herself to figure out who she is and what she should do… she is at an all time lifetime low and she has no idea what to do with herself. Somehow, though, doors open and she travels to Italy to eat for three months, to India to an ashram to pray for three months, and to Bali to learn from an old medicine man and find balance.

I’m calling this a three meeting book. I have only been able to meet once, but there was a meeting about it before that, and we need to have one more because some of us still couldn’t make it and I know so many of us have so much more to say. We read Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb in January, too. With both of those books, I just want someone to tell me– is there or isn’t there? Within us, or outside of us? And I just want to share it with the girls as much as I can.

Then around that same time I watched one of my husband’s Penn and Teller Bullshit dvd’s with him. It was about the funeral industry, life after death, twelve stepping, and a wonderful trick on bottled water drinkers– they filled different fancy bottles from a hose in the back of a restaurant in LA, and had people saying all kinds of ridiculous shit about the different kinds of water that had supposedly come from raindrops collected in the rainforest or whatever.

So to sum up, Penn and Teller said you need to live now, and be cognizant of the bullshit  you or your family will face from the funeral industry when you or they are vulnerable when a loved one dies, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to do so, call your mother.

They also said that the bad thing about twelve stepping was that it forces people to admit that they are unable to handle addiction or its effects alone and must call on a higher power to help them out. Now, is there anything wrong with that, really? Not for me to say. I think their beef was more that folks are forced to go to AA meetings and espouse some kind of religoius belief whether it’s right for them or not, when twelve stepping isn’t the be all to end all in recovering from addiction, their success rate is no higher than any other method, that such meetings reinforce one’s sense of one’s own inadequacy, weakness and helplessness which helps to create the addiction in the first place, and that the slogans and rules and sense that you can’t kick it alone and you must continue to come to meetings smack of cult.

I dunno… I kinda like my twelve step stuff. But the bit about how the power of positive change– or negative choices– resides firmly within oneself is pretty important to me, as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I turn outward to see if I am okay, look for reinforcement as to who I am and whether I am good enough or ’doing it right’. I bust my ass, throwing parties, cooking dinners, helping others, serving, in my career and in my family and in my social life. Am I okay? Dunno, let me look at my paycheck, or around my house, or ask my husband, or my best girlfriend, or my mother, or God, but God doesn’t usually answer (or does s/he? that was one of the discussion questions for Eat Pray Love, and I am just not sure, in the context of her story, or in real life.). The greatest source of my okayness is actually my daughter, and that has got to be fucked up. Or is it? I think the love of a parent or a truly loving caregiver for a child (or other helpless entity) is the closest we get to God in this world– and all of us have experienced it, whether as a child or as a parent, no matter how briefly or how it is manifested.

But I’m so drained. My happiness, or sense that I’m doing it right, come from things I have to work really hard for, things I never can get quite right, not from some certainty within me. I’m spread so thin, and while I haven’t had the breakdown or the opportunities Elizabeth Gilbert describes, I think I recognize her crisis as my own, and as one every thinking person must go through, and as the nature of coming of age in our society.

And I’m still working on that. Stay tuned.

Well, I don’t have the answer to is or isn’t, within or without, angels and heavenly fire or spaceships and aliens or– just ravings written down long long ago to try to get people to act right. I think a lot of thinking people don’t honestly know for sure, either. It’s not that I don’t worship, or find happiness… my garden, my child, vegan cooking, literature or art that touches me, certain friendships or moments with family… so many things are both idols and sources of true understanding of the goodness in this universe.

But I do, at least, have an answer when people push me to go to church.

My marriage counselor encouraged me to go to church on Easter. She turned the knife by telling me to take my baby– I’m a bad mother if I deny her that comfort. I tried saying my husband is a bit of an atheist, and she said, well you go, because it nourishes you. I tried saying, I hate church in this town because church is segregated and she said, well mine isn’t. Sigh.

I feel like such a dumbass, going only at Christmas and Easter, although I have to admit it did my heart good to go to the Unitarian church Christmas Eve this year. The message was right up my alley, if you’ve read my annual post about the true meaning of Christmas–every time a baby is born it is a holy night.  But…

I didn’t have time to, or didn’t feel she had the time for me to, explain. Three years of healing school… many years more of study in various religious traditions, not to mention feminism, marxism, and historicism… I actually embrace my husband’s atheism, at least for him, although my spiritual life has had a bit more dimension than his… hell, the hand of God has reached down and literally touched me a time or two. It was unmistakable. But… healing school… Jewish and Sikh friends… Penn and Teller… But now I think– well I can’t explain my whole belief system right here and now. But at least for that case, I think I have a pat answer that will shut most people up.

Don’t get me wrong. I love church. I miss it. I am telling you, I can spout random scripture for any situation. But…

So here’s my pat answer.

I’m actually ordained to minister by the Estuary in Nashville. I am my own church. Sometimes I worship by doing yardwork. Sometimes I worship by being the best parent, librarian, or social activist I possibly can be. Sometimes I worship through delicious vegan cooking, or through tending to relationships. Sometimes I worship through my healing work or consumption of literature or through my own writing or through spiritual study.

I don’t have my liturgy and apologetics quite written down yet– but I am my own church and I am pretty solid in a lot of my beliefs. I  am ordained. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And that’s a key part of my beliefs.

As my dear friend Annie Pearl said to me when we were both working in a terribly dysfunctional, abusive office (that’s not her real name, but I call her a pearl because she is just so amazing, one of my dearest mentors)– when you are a leader, it is just you and the lord. You can’t go giving your power away. You have to suck it up and stand up straight and do the work.

But it’s not just when you are a manager of a large agency or business. It is when you are trying to figure out what do do about your marriage. It is when you are suffering from loss, grief, illness, or paralytic anxiety. It is when you are biting your tongue when you are at your wit’s end with your child, or trying to figure out what do do with your life, or what you have done when it’s too late to change. It is just you and the lord. But really, it’s just you, and, well, you.

It’s just me. That’s not hubris talking. That’s humanity, humility, anxiety, and doing the best I can. That’s an open mind, an open heart, and some serious imperfections and knee jerk psychological defenses talking. I don’t know. But I do know it’s me, and me.

And I don’t need to go to church. Well, maybe I do, but not for that reason. I am my own church. And it’s just me and the Lord.