The Incarnation Next to Me

Emerging Women is currently posting entries about the incarnation, so I reworked an older piece for a contribution on their site entitled, “The Incarnation Next to Me.”

The God Who Was Not There–or Here, Today

“‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ gave way–here is the heart of the story–to ‘But into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Jesus handed himself over to the God who was not there. And found God there.  In trusting the One who was not there, Jesus was resurrected…” –James Carroll, from Practicing Catholic

Sometimes, this is what it feels like to be a Catholic–like handing myself over to nothing.  Handing myself over, but with hope for some future resurrection.

In his autobiography, James Carroll writes the lines quoted above amidst a story about one of his mentors, American poet Allen Tate.  As a young seminarian Carroll visited Tate at his home, finding upon his arrival that one of Tate’s infant children choked and died in his crib only a week earlier.  Tate’s Catholic priest refused the infant a Catholic funeral, as the child died unbaptized and because, according to Tate, the child’s father was a “bad” Catholic.  The young Carroll was dismayed by the circumstances, and did his best to respond to his mentor with compassion and the message of a loving and unceasingly welcoming God.

In this quote, Carroll is telling his friend who God is–who Jesus is.  I can only imagine that Tate, this grieving father, could relate to Carroll’s description of Jesus, for Tate was also a human encountering the absence of God and the difficulty of handing oneself over the to this very real experience of despair.

When I read stories like Tate’s I am angered by the cruelties committed in the name of Catholicism.  I face these representations of the Church, and I think, “God is not there.” –Yet, Catholicism is my faith?

I also read about men and women like Carroll, though, and I remember why I still believe in Catholicism’s resurrection.  I am challenged to believe that God even brings resurrection to places and people that seem to be without God.  I am reminded that I still experience the same strange paradox of Jesus’ experience–and Tate’s experience: I have handed myself over to the God who was not always there–not always in Catholicism.  Yet I still find God there, in Catholicism.

It is comforting to know this strange reality belongs to more than just me.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/colerichards/3975660771/

Going Home

Check out my latest post at From the Pews in the Back: Young Women and Catholicism, entitled “Going Home.”

If Your Voice Is Shaking

“Speak your mind, even if your voice is shaking.”  -Maggie Kuhn

I have memories of being a typically-gregarious little girl who was afraid to speak in class.  Maybe it was more self-consciousness than fear. My young male peers taunted me on the basketball court at recess and inside the classroom walls–”like children do”–because I was a young female with something she wanted to say.   They told me this.   They explained to me my boundaries “because I was a girl.”  Even though I sensed that all of us knew these were untrue, these young men said all this because it had power.  It had power because we all knew it had once been thought to be true.  And that was a powerful reminder.  (Where do second graders learn this?  Probably Nickelodeon sitcoms).

Generally speaking, I imagine these situations evoke two types of reaction: Either young females learn not to speak up in class; studies have confirmed this.  Or, they start talking louder.  With the impassioned cursive script of a second grader, I decided to report gender confrontation after gender confrontation in our class “Conflict” notebook, which my teacher read aloud once a week before facilitating a detailed lesson and class discussion concerning conflict resolution skills.  I started talking louder.

And I’ve been loud ever since. I’m the kind of person who steps out into the middle of Boston traffic to yell at taxi drivers who spit out racist and homophobic slurs in moments of senseless road rage.  I have this intense moral compass (undoubtedly learned from my mother) and I will simply shatter if I don’t speak up sometimes.

That’s why I don’t know what to do with the trembling voice and unsteady pen I have found myself with in recent times.  In moments like these, I don’t recognize myself.  I ask myself, “What happened to that little girl with that strong, loud voice? The young woman who believed in the potential power of her voice?”  I am second-guessing my words, projecting onto myself the presumed judgements of others.  I doubt whether anything I have to say could possibly make any difference for the causes I address.  My voice trembles when I speak, and I struggle to silence its shaking doubt.

I keep speaking, though. I keep writing, clearly.  One of my favorite quotes reads, “No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”  It’s from Rilke, the writer who told a young poet to keep writing when he doubted himself.  I think my voice shakes these days because I have given myself to a sort of danger–to the danger of a challenging academic environment, to new friends and brilliant peers, to a world far from the comforts and tangible love of home.  It feels vulnerable. But it is getting better.

I still believe that one day I will open my mouth and the words won’t shake anymore.  I hope they will resound louder and stronger than before.

Until then, I’ll keep talking.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/manjidesigns/2924530940/

A Catholic Middling

When did this begin?  When did I become a Catholic?

I started reading a book on major themes in literary theory this evening, and (naturally) the first chapter detailed the topic of “beginning” in literary criticism. The opening lines of Dante’s The Divine Comedy were among the examples treated in the chapter. These lines read: “Midway in the journey of our life I find myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”  The book’s commentary describes this beginning as a “middling”–a beginning in the middle of life, in the middle of a dark wood–suggesting that Dante’s opening communicates that, “there are no absolute beginnings–only strange original middles.  No journey, no life ever really begins: all have in some sense already begun before they begin” (3).

I thought of my faith when I read these lines. I think the beginning of my faith was a middling.

Some people teach that Christian faith begins in baptism.  (This idea of beginning seems particularly fitting for consideration, as it is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord today!)  They might say that when I was baptized a Catholic by my parents as an infant, something about my existence changed in that moment.  I became a Christian.  Or, they might say that in baptism my parents established the context that would determine my faith in the the future.  Baptism was the beginning of what would unfold in me later in life.

Others cite a one-time proclamation of Christian faith as the definitive beginning.  When one accepts Christ as his/her Lord and Savior from sin, he/she becomes a Christian. Many people tells stories of this moment when they knew something in them changed.  They became Christians.

But I think my faith began with a middling more like the one described in this textbook of mine: “There are no absolute beginnings–only strange original middles.  No journey, no life ever really begins: all have in some sense already begun before they begin.”  I cannot tell the story of how my Catholic faith began, so much as I can look back at the story of my faith and realize that it began before the moment that I recognized it.  When I try to pin down a moment, I always identity some precursor–some prior person or event or moment or memory full of grace and faith and god–one that complicates any notion I have of “beginning.”  Every “beginning” I consider becomes more like a “middling.”

I cannot tell of my faith’s beginning, only that it began.  And the story continues.

[This entry is cross-posted on CTA's Young Adult Catholic Blog]

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/traerscott/3167629678/

Mother Teresa’s Footsteps

Check out my New Year’s entry on CTA’s Young Adult Catholic Blog, entitled “Mother Teresa’s Footsteps.”

Learning to Give Birth

Socrates often called himself a “mino,” a midwife; it was one of his favorite metaphors for the teacher.  He believed that teaching was not a matter of bestowing information upon a student, but rather coaching one through the process of giving birth to the knowledge that is already within oneself.  I think there is something to this pedagogy.  Even when one encounters “new” information, real learning and radical comprehension requires that one situate it within the complications of his/her greater intellectual framework.  Surely, that is an active and arduous process.

I feel as if I have been in labor for the past four months, trying earnestly to birth the nascent knowledge of my time at Harvard Divinity School.  There have been times in the last few weeks when I have reached out desperately for the hand of a partner, my mind amid intellectual exhaustion, my fingers tired from pushing, pushing the keys of this tiny white keyboard.

Wally’s Cathedral

The liturgy begins when a handsome young man, dressed neatly in an argyle sweater, lifts the worn brass trumpet to his lips. His eyes are closed, his composure calm.  With just one breath, everything in the tiny cathedral comes to a halt.  We remove drink classes and beer bottles from our lips.  Bar chatter hushes. We join the trumpeter’s band in shifting our eyes toward the sound—toward the man who is filling this tiny Boston bar with the most commanding, memorizing music….

Throughout the years I have experienced the benefits of going to worship services at unfamiliar churches.  Foreign religious environments force me to face my own assumptions about God and religion—about who God is, how that God is to be worshiped, and what God’s worshipers look like and think about.  When I stand with charismatics lifting their hands in praise, or kneel with Muslim women as they whisper Arabic words of prayer, I ask myself, “What can I learn from this genuine expression of worship? How does this push me to think about God in new ways? Who is this God before me?”

Last night in Wally’s Jazz Cafe, I found myself asking these questions.

Fire.

Lately each time I enter the gates of Harvard Yard from the concrete and brick of the Square, I am greeted with the opening word from Pascal’s Mémorial. The demanding red foliage of this one large tree declares, “Fire.”

Mémorial is Pascal’s cryptic account of the two-hour mystical vision he experienced one night at age 31. “Fire” begins the montage of parsed phrases, utterings of fear, wonder, reverence, and conviction. Pascal had the text sown into the lining of his clothes, which is where the account was discovered upon his death.  Perhaps he brought it with him because he could not escape it.  I have often found that if you listen closely, you can hear his heart racing between the words on the page.

Sometimes when I am sitting in the library here at school, I look out the large windows at the burning trees, and I think of Annie Dillard.  In one of her essays she describes a moth flirting with the flame of a candle, irresistibly circling its blazing wick.  The moth moves closer and closer, until it is too close; the fire consumes it.  The moth is burning, but it has become the wick of the flame it so desires.  Then my gaze returns to the book over which I hover. Fire.

It isn’t strange to me that God spoke to Moses through a burning bush. Aren’t we all met with moments of fire? “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up,” concluded Moses when he saw it (Exodus 3:3).  There are moments of fire that capture us so much that we cannot cease returning to them.  They are people, and experiences, and visions we must circle around; we must return to them. We must sow them into our clothes.  We must give ourselves to them even if they consume us. Fire.

Fire.

Go Ahead, Again

In the process of juggling the heavy chalice and coarse white napkin during my first occasion of serving as a Eucharist Minister, I managed to spill the sweet, red, consecrated wine—the Blood of Christ.  It spilled all over my shaking hands. It formed a tiny puddle atop of the burnt red tile of the Mission Church floor.  I shook with panic and embarrassment, but could not manage any productive move in response to what I had done.  I had been careless with the gift of the Eucharist. I had spilled the Blood of Christ. And everyone watched me.

I was amidst an intimate evening liturgy with the Jesuit community and a small collection of guests from our university community.  There were maybe thirty of us in attendance.  Everyone could see me as I fumbled around with our Faith.  This was at the heart of my momentary, paralyzing anxiety.  My panic did not stem from a burden of personal shame about carelessly handling the Eucharist—I was confident this mistake was not unforgivable in God’s eyes.  It was the gaze of my fellow Christians that terrified me.  I knew how much the Eucharist means in our tradition, and I feared being judged a sloppy, unfit Catholic because of this incident.  In my struggle to participate and serve the community, I had committed a grave liturgical sin, and everyone watched me do it.

Sometimes I think this is what it is like, being a theologian, or a minister, or simply just a Christian in our world today.