While the contrast of the dark tunnels and the light of day are enough to shake passengers from their subterranean daze, on sunny days we have another reason to perk up in our seats during this part of the ride.  As the T crosses the Charles, passengers turn around in their seats to capture a view of the city skyline and the sun reflecting off the tall windows of its high-rises. We can see a flock of white sails shifting on the river and its verdant bank speckled with pedestrians and cyclists.

On sunny days, the T passengers get a lovely, elevated glimpse of all this—which makes dreary days on the redline a bit heartbreaking.  Lately, we arise onto Longfellow Bridge surrounded by low gray clouds and the sticky mist of Boston summer rain.  The cars fill with light, yes, but a heavy, dim glow instead of the summer rays we long for.  We don’t turn around in our seats because we know that the sails are still folded in their boathouses, and the pedestrians probably walked to the cinema instead of the riverbank below.

But yesterday, amidst another damp afternoon, the young man sitting next to me turned around in his seat anyway.  As his gaze lingered across the river for those few long minutes, I found myself surprised and no longer so interested in the book resting on my lap.  And as I eventually turned with him to watch the skyline before us, I thought about conversion.

The word “conversion” has its origins in the Latin verb “convertere”—to turn around.  Pop culture often portrays religious conversation as it is understood in Christian evangelical traditions where it is a one-time, dramatically life-altering event in a person’s life.  Surely, this is the experience of conversation for many people, and surely, one could understand this as a “turning,” a sort of dramatic pivot in the path of one’s life.  But I never experienced a religious conversion like that. For me, religious belonging was not a one-time decision as much as a recurring experience.  I constantly struggle to turn toward Catholicism—to continue to convert.

Yet, as this young man turned around in his seat, he reminded me why I do continue.  “This guy doesn’t want to miss a potential glimpse of that beautiful view, so he even turns around on the ugliest of days, just in case,” I surmised.  I think I continue to convert because of the glimpses of beauty, and truth, and goodness I have seen in Catholicism—visions that somehow sustain my hope and faith through the very dark days of the Church.  Certainly, there are days when I think the hope that sustains my conversion might just be naïve.  Catholicism has had some very, very ugly days, and I think it is important to take that seriously.  But, surely, it is also important to take seriously the goodness that I witness in my experiences of Catholicism, too.  And for the time being, they keep me turning back to the Church.

Suddenly, the redline sunk below the street level and into the darkness again. The young man and I turned back around, and I began to collect my things. The next stop was mine.  But as I departed the train into the bustling station of raincoats and umbrellas, I smiled to myself.  I was thankful to know that in only a few hours, I would be boarding the train back home, and once again it would ascend to the Longfellow Bridge where I could turn to take in the view, rain or shine.

Mother, Washing Dishes by Susan Meyers
She rarely made us do it—
we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased
that some day we’d train our children right
and not end up like her, after every meal stuck
with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.
The one chore she spared us: gummy plates
in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,
globs of egg and gravy.

Or did she guard her place
at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss
of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.
Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings
of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,
delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

On Holy Thursday, I kneel down on the cool hard floor of the sanctuary before a small basin of water. I take a stranger’s feet into my palms.  With my small hands I tip the heavy pitcher of water, and with great care, I wash these feet. I dry them.

And every year when I am through, I look up at a warm, humble smile. And for a brief, still moment, I offer one too.

I would never want to give that up.

“No reason to feel bad about it,” he said, matter-a-factly. “Even God took a break.”  Even God took a break.

Indeed, at the conclusion of the first creation narrative in Genesis 1, God takes a break–a seventh day sabbath.  Surely, God’s break warrants my own respite from the creation process, right?  This was consoling for a time…until the guilt began to encroach upon my psyche again.  ”God took a break after doing something,” I told myself. “I haven’t done any writing at all lately!  And what’s more, God didn’t just create something. God created something ‘very good‘!” This logic only brings me right back to where I began.

This swirling mess of self-justification and degradation so often frames my daily reflection on life–not just my blogging life. If I’m not bemoaning my lazy writing practice, then it’s my inability to keep up with my growing email inbox or to-do lists, or my desire to work harder or fast or better, or harder and faster and better. The more I indulge this mindset, the more I find myself trapped in a world of insatiable demands.  This cannot be the “very good” world that God created…right?

“I feel like I’m drowning,” I recently said this to someone on a particularly overwhelming day of tasks. It’s something I have said a hundred times before on a hundred other days like that one, but on that day the figurative image flashed before me: my arms flailing about, splashing water everywhere, grasping for air.  Suddenly, I said to the drowning image of me, “Don’t you know that once you stop, you will float?”

It takes great courage to float–to believe that our survival does not depend on our own capacity to sustain ourselves.  Such a risk stands in opposition  to the myth of the self-made man that dominates the “American dream.”  That is a dream of insatiable demands. But that’s not the “very good” world I want to live-into anyways.

The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The world was brought into being in the six days of creation, yet its survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.”  I’m trying to live like this–to live out the belief that my creation, my own hard work, will not alone sustain my survival. Sometimes, we all need to rest–to float–until the gentle current pulls us into another space of creativity again.