Rain, and newsprint, and Grace

The sky continues to lighten behind the steadily falling rain outside. It's rained here more in the past week than it usually does in a month. I still have the trailing edge of the sinus bug, but I can live with stuffed sinuses more easily than with the mental haze of a fever, and anyway I'm trying not to bitch about such things.

Last night was our first Production Night of the year. We were missing a couple editors, but by and large, it's a good crowd. We staged and shot the cover (listed as a "photo illustration," rather than a photo) around a noise violation story, News and Scene continued what looks like it's going to be a more or less permanent friendly rivalry, the idea of a newsroom D&D group was thrown around... and we all got out in time to catch Breaking Bad.

The sermon yesterday was strong. Challenging. Not even remotely comfortable, and I do mean that as a compliment. Because of the nature of mankind, it can be really easy - it is really easy - to set ourselves on the side of Lazarus, nod sagely, and stand around discussing the wicked rich man. Yesterday, our priest focused instead on what he saw as the focal point of the parable: the chasm. The chasm between rich and poor, commonly called an income gap, that we have generally decided is beyond our power to do anything about. "What kind of a heart must this man have had, to walk by Lazarus every day, with the dogs licking at his sores, and not even see him?" Which, when followed by a point about the learned ability to walk past homeless people without even seeing them, and winding up resenting them for their existence infringing on your own comfortable reality...

It was the kind of sermon that you're grateful closes with something like "and this is why, in prayer, we say 'We have sinned against you in thought and in deed, in things done and left undone,' so that we can acknowledge our shortcomings and, through grace, work towards being better."

I'm paraphrasing and bastardizing. Point is, grace is important and every now and then or every day constantly or whenever, it's good to be reminded why we need it. Not just as forgiveness, but as a bridge to be better.

There's a long thought in the works about sacraments, and how and (possibly) why I have been struggling with their concept. But that's for later, I think. Enjoy the week's morning, internets.

Back to School, and all that entails

I swear, every year it's the same thing - twice as bad when you start the year with a heavy cold and fever, apparently. The first few days of school, I'm confused, apathetic, listless, and terrified for what all of this means. And then I get to the first straight-up journalism class, and it's like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly the year is not going to be long enough for all the badass stuff I'm going to do with it.

...unfortunately, enthusiasm about my major does not fix having a godawful head cold, so even though the fever is ebbing/nearly gone, my hearing is still wonky from my head being full of mucus, and my nose is chapped and bleeding because I've been blowing it all week, and my tongue is swollen where I've been accidentally biting it apparently? And I'm still in a room with a handful of people who don't seem to understand that a living space needs to be a retreat from the world, not a place to engage in it even more enthusiastically, so getting work done has been problematic. I'm trying to tell myself that the year is going to be better if I get all this stuff jumped on right away. Gotta get two articles written for the paper going out this Wednesday, plus track down three books ASAP for two classes, and then start pinning down financial aid stuff before it gets too late in the quarter...

but my body is going "now is time for huddle in bed and sniff miserably." So we'll see if I can get anything done anyway.

Went back to church during scripture study to drop off a few bags a friend had lent me, but she split immediately after the discussion had closed, without saying much. I'd be worried, but I know exactly what she was thinking - most of us, I'd guess, were thinking the same. The man who runs the group is crazy smart, knows more about ancient history (and non-ancient history) than you'd think possible, pulls out a new language seems like every week, and has a lot of really interesting thoughts about theology - coming from a Catholic seminary background, he often trades jibes about differing theologies with the rest of us non-Episcopalian-upbringing folks. This sounds like a recipe for an epic discussion group, doesn't it? And frequently it is! The problem is, there's a few people who are really good at going on, and on, and on for quite a ways, and they have a tendency to monopolize the floor for ten to twenty minutes at a time, not letting the group leader get a word in edgewise, and talking over him when he goes to speak up. I've been guilty of it as well; it's something I need to watch for, a behavior that can be really obnoxious - especially as, hypocritically, I notice it in others and not myself.

NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I'm excited. I'm writing about Crows. I have a world-ish, and a very sketchy main character, and something that might be a vague plot. If I can get a laptop screen by the time November starts, I may actually have a novel! In the meantime, hopefully I can figure out some way to make school happen.

New Quarters

I keep trying to remind myself that everything will look different when I am not suffering a head cold; right now, the entire year looms like a threatening volcano. I have two roommates, one of whom is in the same bedroom as me, and both of whom are talkative, outgoing, and... is there a word? Normal? The girl with whom I share sleeping quarters also happens to be a morning person. Her boyfriend lives in the room directly under us. Both of them are friends with our neighbor across the hall, and a group of other folks who enjoy going out to party. My bed and desk are closer to the door. Anthropology looks like a good class - the Observer is, I'm sure, also going to be good. The rest of the world looks pretty bleak, but maybe it will be easier to handle when I have enough energy to face the world.

...okay, between the cologne and the noise I think probably I am going to have to inform my roommate that her boyfriend spending multiple hours here is Not Cool at all. This is why I was looking to grab the solo room! The two of them are okay hanging out in each other's room and I am not okay with this.

Yeah, just gonna die this year.

A Journey on the Equinox

It's a pleasant day; this morning, Daniel and I got up fairly early, and cooked a few omelettes; spinach, onion, and pepperjack for me, spinach, onion, sausage and pepperjack for the rest. Dad hassled Daniel about disliking scrambled eggs, and Daniel quietly voiced a dislike of my father's leaving a pan of sausages to be cooked by a vegetarian (not because I couldn't - he simply thought it rude). Overall though, a good morning (my older sister is massively jealous of Daniel's ability to make pretty omelettes), followed by an excellent walk with the dogs over the ridge at the park. Now I'm sitting at a departure gate, having said goodbyes to family, and a see-you-later to my best beloved, who's on another airline.

I have two bags so full of books I can barely carry them, and a suitcase with the rest; my little sister gave me the coolest painting for my birthday last month (a raven on a background of kiwi fruit), which she'd done over the summer. Yesterday was a barbecue with most of my family - two aunts and an uncle, one of my cousins and his wife and daughters, and the grandparents. So missing... maybe five people? It was pretty awesome to see everyone. Daniel now has near-universal familial approval. All the aunts like him, Grandpa likes him, and that's about all I could ask for; the cousins and siblings and (mostly) parents like him, too.

He also put his finger on something that has bothered me about a more distant relative for some time: "He has different sets of boundaries for girls and guys." And he puse girls' boundaries. Huh.

I'd like to have had more time to visit with everyone, buuuut at the same time, I was reaching my limit of tolerance with my dad, a bit. So that might have been a good time to head out. Anyway. School starts in three days, my family is healthy and happy, and I'll be home tomorrow. Life is good.

Is it a bad sign that my father's disapproval of Al Jazeera only strengthens my ambition to work there someday? I have very little tolerance for hearsay; I still read the Blaze, and glance through the Drudge Report, even if I know Fred Clark's take is going to be twice as well-written and ten times as honest, because assuming I know what they're going to say is intellectually lazy, and eventually dishonest.

But the reaction to them here is, "Well, I imagine Goebbels' radio broadcasts were popular at the time, too." Which, yeah, no. Al Jazeera is one of the few - possibly the only - truly independent news source in the Middle East. "How do you know they're true? Who do you confirm it with?" ...any other international media outlet, two days later with all the context sawed off?

His remaining arguments were: 1) they're anti-Israel (how does he know? they're staffed by Muslims. Duh, don't be naive.) 2) What am I, some kind of Muslim sympathizer? To which it's honestly not worth marshaling an argument; any logic will fail against a worldview that puts millions of people into a "Generic Enemies" category without hesitation.

(I wrote that last on my sister's laptop yesterday evening. I dislike it; it falls trite and pointless and pseudo-philosophical. The thing about words is they're actually quite useless when they're most needed. It comes to this: I am sorry, deeply sorry, for the grief and pain caused by death. And what more is there to say on that?)

It’s been an odd couple days. Back home, a man has passed away after a battle with cancer that lasted years. He was much beloved by all the congregation; I have heard no ill words spoken of him since I joined, and many bright. We never met, and yet the world is darker for his loss - the way every single person would brighten when talking of him, just that. But even in grief, the folks I am in contact with back home say rather, that Heaven rejoices in his life. I would have mourned with them; instead I am here, with my family, so removed from grief and mourning that I have reminded myself of the fact. It’s a strange dissonance.

Monday I went to a cemetery to write. It was a small, grassy plot, encroached a few yards in the back and corners by the surrounding woods and overhanging grapevines. There were no stones apparent - a little ways in, I found a marble plaque set into the ground. At the back, obscured by the trees, was a tall cross, in pink rough granite. There was a small shed, open and empty; all else was untouched. It was one of the most unsettling places I have ever been.

The only information I could find on it explained that it was where the almshouse buried their dead, many years ago. The almshouse is no longer standing. The graves were never marked.

I am glad that at Grace, they celebrate the life of the loved one who has passed beyond this world, and rejoice for the peace he will find at the end of his journey, even as they grieve and mourn his loss. I am glad that such a man, who gladdened every person who knew him, who was so deeply loved, will be remembered so well.

And... yet, I wonder how many lives were grieved, under that unmarked ground, and how many loved, and how many celebrated and mourned. It’s a strange and scary thought, that there were an untold number of people whose ends went so unremarked, because of their places as the castoffs of society.

But then I think about the folks mourning at Grace today, and tomorrow, and I believe - I know - that if the poorhouse was still part of that town, if there were people living and dying there, they would reach out to whatever lives they could, to rejoice with the light of life, and they would mourn when those lights passed.

Structures fall, and graveyards are swallowed by trees and vines, and streets crack and fade, and hospitals and almshouses close or burn or are torn down. But people are still people, and I think that with or without grave markers, every life in that grassy plot was celebrated and mourned here, as well as above.

Theological Roots - they go deeper.

So today, I biked out to a church a few miles down the road; the bike is a hybrid, even tires and a big frame. The shoulders of the main drag here in town are really more like gutters: broken pavement, sand, glass, litter, and occasionally parked cars or trucks. I was on and off the sidewalk half the way out. The church was small, comfortable, but not home. The way the house of a friend might be more comfortable - bigger sofas, better paint, softer carpet, but your house, with its bare floors and tight corners and freezing north bedroom, is home. (That's probably not a healthy way to feel about church; it's not an exact metaphor, but it works.) The liturgy was different, but I think that might be the fact that it just changed anyway, because of the calendar (no, seriously, it takes me about four weeks to get used to the rhythm of a service and then it changes and I love this church and it is challenging and crazy) and the melody of the Psalm and the Offeratory are different. But also I'm thinking that, for all I have thought while reading literature that Grace is pretty laid-back, I realized today that it's a lot more formal than we could be. (I typed "it," but that didn't work, and then "they" feels wrong. We? We. ...huh.) It's hard to put an exact finger on it - there's just quite a bit more... ceremony, perhaps? The sermon, the hymns, the prayers, are said a bit more formally. But the sincerity of the church is exact. Maybe it's the way the building is. This church - Grace & St. Peter, I think - is small, carpeted... homey. The building at Grace is quite bigger, for an equal or smaller (and significantly older, on average) group of people, and it sort of echoes. Then there's the massive imposing organ, the wall faces, the stone floor, the long, immovable pews, the altar rail... yeah, I could see the building influencing worship.

Anyway.

After the service, I talked for a bit with a few of the folks - you can't slip out immediately after an Episcopal service. I mean, you can, technically, but it's quite difficult to pull off, and it doesn't feel right? It feels like a Proper Service involves talking and coffee afterwards. So by chance, I wound up talking to the woman who has written the Sunday School kids' lessons for the past fifty years or so. I was quite impressed - our Senior Warden had me read the few of those she had on hand, when I'd asked her for "as much information on the Church as possible," because she said she'd found that the way they were written often broke down the lessons brilliantly, good for adults as well as kids. That week, for example, had been the one - I'm not going to remember it all - where Jesus heals on the Sabbath. It was good, anyway. Not an easy lesson for kids, because it involved the "God loves us, but sometimes we do things that cannot be loved," thing, which is tough to teach.

And so we come to the point which is the most important, and the central I think, for me. After church, when I got home, the family was preparing to go to Farm Fest, which is an annual get-together for my dad and stepmom's workplace. I suppose I should clarify at this juncture that my dad's boss was, for a good seven or eight years of my life, our pastor. Have I explained the church from which I came? My friends will know. My friends may remember my rants, sometimes in anger and sometimes in sorrow, about how painfully misled and horrifying my early Christian education was. How huge of a part Biblical Literalism, and Bible-Worship, by which I mean idolatry, played in my life. How I feared God, and was taught to fear God, more than love or respect. How very broken I was by the time I would have been old enough to be a consenting Christian. My friends may also remember me talking about how our pastor said this, or said that, or taught these things that led me into such a spiritual trap.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that I sat down with him and his daughter, who was once my closest friend or so, to talk. About life, college, what exactly in blazes I was doing out in Washington, had I turned into a peacenik hippie (well, it depends on your definition - by his, no not even a little), and so on. And what was he doing? His life was good. Is good! Is really, really good - is centered in his faith in God, and love, and so even though his oldest son (my age) had brain cancer a few years ago and is now in remission... well, his faith is strong and his life is love and good. And now, how was I? With, you know, that.

I told him that yes, I was more liberal politically, but my politics are always formed by my theology... and my theology has also become more liberal. He nodded. So I told him that I had started going to church again. That he would perhaps not approve, but it was Episcopal-- and he interrupted me to say, Why would he disapprove of that? That he doesn't care about denomination, and never has: what matters is the Word. Now, my mother would go on, and on, and on, and on, y'all, about this corrupt denomination, or that corrupt denomination, and this poor misled flock, and that poor bunch of fools... and I always figured that was his preaching. Nope. He was staunch about transubstantiation (which I actually totally get), but the rest of it, yeah. That one hit me hard.

So I talked for a little while, about how I'd come to Grace and finally, finally come back to faith in God. That I'd never stopped really believing in God, but faith... was another story. He nodded.

"It's hard, because as humans, we cry out for love. We need it. And when that is shattered - it can take years to pick up the pieces."

"I - yes. Yes, it did. Ten years, at least. Maybe more."

"Some people never get that far."

Now - those lines sound like three lines that could be said a lot of ways, by a lot of people, to a lot of people, in a lot of places. Those few lines of dialogue could be fit into a long and meaningful sermon. But as big as those lines are, they are of equal size with what went unsaid between them. I don't know that I can clarify that any more. Perhaps I could, but it would take at least ten years.

Do you know, for the past five years - stretching out past that towards ten, but definitely not as long as ten - I thought that most of the painful, hurtful, bitter and biting and spiteful theology that formed my childhood was him. Was his preaching. And certainly his sermons were not... what I'd agree with, entirely, now. I'm pretty sure he's still a [young-earth] Creationist, for example. But. But, the more I think and try to remember now, the more I can remember my mother - who, remember, as our homeschool teacher, was with us all day every day - as the one to preach to us the gospel of fear and hate. And the little things: she filed the 'pentagrams' on the hubcaps of my little brother's army jeeps off. Lest they tempt us, or invite demons into our home - their kids had a freaking racecar rug - you know the type, with a road map laid out all over, and you'd push little cars around it. His kids played soccer - yes, with secular outside educated kids. For pity's sake, his girls wore shorts! The more I think back, the more I realize that it was her who was the influence of isolation and scary Quiverfull sort of life aims. He was just a fairly conservative Baptist.

Even the sermon that was based mostly on two punctuation marks was actually one of forgiveness, at its heart. One of our lay preachers gave a long speech during the last study to similar effect... er, with significantly more actual biblical background, but same overall message.

And now, I wonder, as someone who realized too late that his friend's wife had become dangerously insane and, rather than try to intervene, simply asked the family to remove themselves until they were whole, how does he think about how it all turned out? Does he know how bad it got? Would he want to? Probably not. I don't know that I'd want to.

I have drunk my fill of bitter anger, aimed at my mother. I have none left to offer at this realization that it was her who perverted the Love of God into a scourge to straighten her children. What could I say? She tried to kill us all; she made us homeless and destitute, she put us in a living situation with a pedophile, she ignored us until we became wild and uncontrollable, she broke our hearts and betrayed our trust and shattered our faith in love. And I say this all - now, fifteen years later, I can say this all - dispassionately, and with only an old, faraway ache, rather than an urgent hurt. I made my peace with her memory (though she still lives, technically, the odds that I will see her again in this lifetime are pretty small - and if I do, it would be on her deathbed, belike) some time ago - and what is spiritual abuse and toxic theology to weigh, added to the litany of hurts outlined above? She was worse than I remembered; he was better.

It makes me happy to see him, our old pastor, happy. He lives his faith, and lives in love, and that is good. I'm not going to grouse about the fact that his theology is more conservative than mine. He lives in faith and in love - isn't that the whole point?

What a bleeding holiday...

I am writing to you, internet, from my cellphone, in my parents' basement, and I am sitting here - no longer sobbing. I might be again, I will try to control it. Just barely made it over the 48 hour mark. My sister, after repeated warnings, got into politics with our grandparents, who happened to be over for dinner. The talk then was immigration. Specifically, of course, undocumented immigrants/illegal immigration. My sister, of course, got terribly upset (I just stopped listening to them to avoid such) and stormed off. Somehow we then started talking about bankruptcy, and I mentioned the new trend of debtor's prison. Long story short, I wind up listening to my grandmother say people should live within their means: they couldn't afford to send their kids to college. I explain that cannot go to college without ending up in debt, that I have no choice. At this point, given that I am all too cognizant of the fact that I am already in debt and only going to get deeper before I graduate, I am holding back tears. My grandfather wonders, aloud, why everyone needs to get a college degree anyway, since aren't there jobs out there that you don't need a hugely expensive degree to hold?

So I excuse myself, go to wash my face, and wind up sobbing because ever since I was sixteen, all anyone in my family would talk about was how I was wasting my potential and I should go to college and Dad, on and on about how my job didn't pay enough and I needed to get a Real Job, nevermind that I was making $12/hr at a retail store, and saving to pay my own tuition through community college.

Looks like I should've just offed my supervisor and spent the rest of my life as a manager of a retail store, wondering what would have happened if I had taken a chance and moved out west.

Then I came downstairs and plugged in my laptop.

The screen is cracked. The whole display is gone.

It took me something like four months to save up for that, three years ago. Right now, my parents - after a financially stressful summer - are going to spend a bit more than they're entirely comfortable with to get my stepbrother a laptop he really needs for school. I cannot, in good conscience, say a word about this to them. Which unfortunately includes weeping about it or complaining.

But seriously Lord, why? Was this really necessary? All at once like this?

Cleaning, Maps, Tortured Metaphors

So tomorrow night, Daniel is going to give me a ride across the pass, and the following morning I'm catching a flight back East for ten days. Outside of seeing friends and family, which is (of course) massively important, and saying goodbye to my cat (I really, really would rather bring her here. But it'll be another year before I can have a place for her, and it would not be even remotely fair to deny her a happy and loving home out there so that I can keep her with me. Letting her go is still one of the hardest things I have ever had to do; she was my companion and friend for eight years.) my goal there is to go through any and all material possessions that are not books, and disperse them among friends and family.

In the meantime, I'm looking around this room and trying to get it cleaned up before check-out tomorrow. It's been an odd couple of days. I foolishly assumed I'd be able to just stash all my stuff in the dorm for next quarter, but it won't be open - so a friend from church offered to let me put some stuff in her garage. I am more glad than ever to not have tons of stuff. Four boxes or so of clothes, a folded-up blanket, and a pair of half-height bookshelves. Done. God, I never ever want to have lots of stuff. I probably shouldn't be trying to lug this many books back out here, but ye gods do I miss those things. There's so many people I know out here who would really like some of 'em, too.

Anyway. It's half past midnight, and I'm procrastinating because I don't want to vacuum. I should really vacuum. *sigh.*

I have about a million questions about various things about the Episcopal church, and the thing is, although a lot of them probably have simple answers, what I really want to know is why. What translation is the Sunday lectionary done in? Yes, I know there's probably a definite answer for that. But why is that the translation? Is there an official tr okay by now I know how ridiculous it probably is to ask if there's an "official" or accepted/official translation for the Episcopal church, but there must be some common ground - I mean, there's a Catholic Church of Japan (that falls under the umbrella of Anglican Communion), so obviously there's some differences, but for the US Episcopal church is there a standard? Is there a standard with acceptable deviations ranging off in every direction, which seems to be the case generally for all the things? Why? How? Why?

I could probably go into lengthy introspective detail about why I'm so obsessive about learning as much as possible about this church. The simple version, I suppose, is that I don't want to get blindsided ever again. I was deceived for so very long, and although young, at some point I think I was complicit in my own deception. But that faith - such as it was- got shattered... no, not shattered. Bludgeoned repeatedly over several formative years. The painful part is how every figure in my life that was supposed to be trustworthy turned out to be not so. The part that still galls me is how the truth on which my life was founded, from my earliest years, was-- well, not a lie. Well. Yes, a lie. I don't know how to express it. I believe in God, and I do believe in the Scriptures (and in Reason, and, well, I suppose I'm coming around to Tradition), but the things that I believed in then were not God, nor Scripture, nor even truth. It was the false idol of a book with no context and the depth pounded out of it, and the Great Law of Obedience. And because I obeyed and trusted and didn't ask questions, I was deceived for many years and still have not found all of that trust, and in many ways I am still tied to the fear of that idol, and I am still reacting to and against that law.

And there is something, somewhere in me - perhaps the Inner Journalist - that has sworn to never fall into that trap again. I will never follow a church or a priest or a bishop or any authority without question. And yes, that's probably a reactionary way of life - but I want to know. I feel like I was raised on - oh, I don't know, the metaphor breaks down. Like I was raised on mud instead of water, and I stayed away from streams because I thought they were all mud and now I thirst for that water more than ever. Wow, that is an overwrought metaphor. Let's try again.

I was raised in lies - mixed in with truth, yes, but not Truth. And I broke away from that and tried to find the truth on my own, but with no guide and no map and no light - or such a little light as to make almost no difference - and, unsurprisingly, made very little progress. All I managed to find out was how lost I was. Sort of. And now, I'm surrounded by folks with maps and lights and a detailed knowledge of the terrain (okay, sort of, again, not a perfect metaphor), and I don't want to just walk along with them and trust that they know where they're going - even though I'm sure they do! I want to look at the maps, and shine the light around and see the path, and talk about the topography and the geology of the land until I understand it, or at least I have an understanding of it and about it and around it, like they do.

And I'm sure that somewhere, deep down, that's because a part of me is thinking about what the hell I'm going to do if they all disappear - I'll be alone in the dark again. And a part of me is questioning those maps suspiciously yes, not because of a thirst for knowledge but because I almost can't quite believe that they're really there. That they will turn out to be as untrustworthy as the map I was raised with, a ruler-straight line through a very tricky and complicated world with straight lines all at odd angles and forms.

And now I'm going to go vacuum before the screams of the tortured metaphors wake the RAs.

On Family

I have been alone for a long time. There's a post around that theme, that has to do with faith and questions and the ache in my heart that twinges when I come across a new doctrine - in literature or speech or liturgy - that resonates, and think "Oh God, I was alone for so many years and they were here all this time."

(But that is not this post. That post is still just a few pages of cursive.)

When I was ten, I lost my mother. Let's not get into the how. For a little while, my older sister tried to fill that function, but she had school, and was not really suited for motherhood anyway, being fourteen or so. Then she went off into her own life, and we were left with my father to function as best we could. By the time I was fifteen, I had just about withdrawn into my own life; my dad was preoccupied with depression, and I was used to coming home from school, cleaning what I could, cooking dinner (or making sure dinner could be cooked), and then going to my room to write, until it got dark enough that my family was asleep, and I could go out. I'd walk for miles, sometimes barefoot in the summer, sometimes with a jacket in the winter, just alone. Sometimes with music, sometimes silent, frequently to the woods to cry, or pray, or both. By the time I was eighteen, I bought much of my own food, all of my own clothes, and transported myself to and fro and yon, to work and wherever. When I was twenty, I bought a plane ticket to Seattle; my dad disapproved, but understood that he could not stop me, being an adult. I don't remember when it occurred to me that, if I did choose to disappear, fatally or otherwise, I could be gone almost an entire week before anyone noticed. This was an abstraction only; I was never fully tempted to carry it out. (I should clarify - my family was always there. Mostly. It was just that my life was its own thing - I did as I pleased, when and where I pleased. I failed three highschool courses, and I doubt to this day my dad has any idea. This would never have struck me as odd, except that all my friends had parents who were... involved. And were occasionally very sad that I did not.)

Then I moved out here. I had no roommate the first quarter, so I had to rely on life being awesome/interesting enough to keep me going. (That was not a conscious thought - it just was.) Up until the final two weeks, when the depression started going stab-stab-stab, it worked really well. Then the thought kept coming, occasionally at first, then frequently. I could just kill myself. In my room. Nobody would notice for at least a week. If I did it outside, way off campus where nobody would find the body, it would be more than a week. Two if Daniel wasn't-- and the thought would stop right there, because the thought of Daniel finding my body, or getting a call, or whatever the end result was, would stop me cold.

But the thing is, I had no one... watching me. If I didn't show up to class, the negative result was the same as it had been in highschool: I would miss class. Which was, as a general rule, enough of a reason for me back there, both in school and college, and remained such out here. I showed up because I wanted to learn, I wanted to pass the tests, I needed to write and to be able to work on the newspaper. It was never because I thought folks would - I mean. I'm pragmatic about school, and work for the most part; I show up, I do work, and yes, I care about people. But my role in a workplace (or classroom) is, for me, fundamentally about the quality of work I do, and not myself as a person. It came as a fairly huge shock when the news editor gave me Most Valuable Reporter for the quarter; I'd half convinced myself I was the worst fuck-up on the paper.

When summer hit, I had a roommate - Shizuka, from Tokyo. We couldn't communicate hugely, having not a whole lot of words in English, but she was someone I was living with, and someone about whom I cared. I could still disappear when I needed - I still stayed out for hours at a time, wandering barefoot and singing. And when she went back to Japan, I was thinking I was back on my own.

I've been working at church this summer. Showing up in the morning - anywhere between eight and ten, usually - and then working, and working hard, until somewhere between six and eight. Pruning bushes, hauling underbrush, weeding, clearing pine needles, shoveling, sweeping, raking, basically anything that needed doing. Five days a week, that's what I did. For the first part of summer, I'd spend the first few hours of the day walking town, looking for a job, and then the afternoons working. Saturdays, I'd do nothing - clean my room, walk down to the river, write - chill. Sundays were church. Church, I am used to thinking, is a place where you go, engage in worship, smile at people as you head out. That is... not what the Episcopal Church is like. Church is people hugging and smiling and generally being happy and awesome and occasionally-frequently shoving food at you regardless of your excuses/responses. And suddenly I found myself pulled into a circle of people who, to all appearances, were actually happy to see me.

Today, there was a social justice forum at church, involving folks from all over the diocese. I was flat-out exhausted when I got home last night; I didn't actually leave the church until about dusk, because I know I'm running out of time, and I knew folks from all over the diocese would be there, and I'm not sure what it means, but I had a not-insignificant part of me going "Okay, this place is going to look damn well presentable when they show up in the morning, ain't nobody gonna be thinking Grace Episcopal is run-down or shabby." And with the flash flood the other night having thrown the outside into a bit of a lot of wreckage, I had a lot to do. So I got home late, ate dinner late, forgot to take meds until late, and fell asleep well past midnight - woke up after the forum was supposed to start. Still sore, still tired, decided Eh, fuck it, and stayed home to write. (And to read. I got partway into "A People Called Episcopalians," a book lent to me by our Senior Warden, and started sobbing. But again - that's another post, and needs to be transcribed first anyway.)

I finally got around to checking the internet-shaped things at about three or four, and there was a message from our Senior Warden, wondering if I was okay, because folks had missed me there and were concerned. I put the phone down, hung my head against the wall, and cried. I have not, in something like eight years, had someone go "Hey, we missed you at X, are you okay?" My step-mom would have, if I'd been living with her; I wasn't. I have not had a mother in almost fifteen years; suddenly, I have several. I have not had a parental figure who actually looked over my shoulder and... watched out for me, in perhaps ten. I'm twenty-three years old, and suddenly I have folks* who... I don't know. Care. My family cares about me - I don't want to make it sound like they don't. I love them all, and they love me. But. This is the first time in my life that I have not been... alone.

*footnote: Daniel also cares; that is not a thing that stopped happening, or is unsteady. And I care about him. A partner who you love with all your heart and wish to spend your life with, though, is different from... I dunno. I don't know how to word it. (Bryn put it well. Partner caring is like within-unit caring. Family caring is like units caring about each other.)

So...

I think I'm an Episcopalian now.

And let me tell you, that came out of left field. If you'd told eight-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, and loving it, she'd not have believed you. Well, first she'd try to remember what "Episcopal" meant, outside of "One Of Those Poor Misled Not-Real Churches," then she'd probably have asked her parents, who would've told her anything from "Not A Real Church" to "Basically Catholics, Who As You Know Are Actually Secretly Satanists And Just Don't Know It." And then, so armed, she would have told you that she would never attend such a church, because that would be Wrong.

If you'd told thirteen-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, she would have looked at you skeptically and told you she didn't really want to talk about it, but she had a lot of ideas about Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology and the newly-discovered writings of C.S. Lewis that you might have a better conversation about.

If you'd told me, three or four years ago, that I'd be attending an Episcopal church, I'd have either snorted derisively and informed you that churches were deceptive haughty places where souls looking for redemption had the individuality stamped out of them and were led instead to the conformity of today's corrupt society. God, haven't you read your history? Churches just support wars and hurt people. That would be my response by day. My response by night would have been less flip, more honest: I want to believe that there's a church that would have me. But I'm more animal than human, I'm more wild than tame, I'm hurting and alone and I don't want the empty, shallow platitudes that the 'safe' churches have offered me, but I can't go back to the 'true' church because they would burn me and cast me out, unless I lied and hid who I am. I don't want to attend a church, and I never will again. No church would have me - not even Episcopals, or whatever you just said.

Then I moved to Ellensburg. As is my practice whenever I find myself in a new location, I started wandering. During the day, first short little walks around campus and to figure out where downtown was, then longer, and later, until I was walking for hours at a time in the darkest hours of the night, under a chill wind. Evening was best, though - I'd leave maybe an hour before sunset, pick a random direction, and start walking, usually out until well after dark.

Somehow, no matter what direction I started walking in, I always wound up coming back to Kiwanis Park. I'd sit by the creek and pray, or just think in silence, or occasionally write. I had walked past Grace Church a couple times, so in the back of my mind I knew what it was, and I knew, or thought I knew, that I wanted no part of it. But that's always where I wound up. In the depression at the very end of the quarter, when I was plagued by thoughts of suicide every minute of every hour of every day, I was there somewhat frequently, sitting on the rocks at the edge, my pocketknife a steady weight in my hands - bringing me back towards life, not away from it. The form of the building, tall and steady at the back of the park, did not occur to me as a shelter, but as a shadow. But it grew, in my mind, and occupied a steady place.

And then this happened. Specifically, this:

Our doubts lead us to question; and questioning is okay, it’s how we learn. I think the trouble comes when we demand immediate answers to our questions; or we desire easy answers that make us feel good. This, I believe, is at the heart of church shopping and hopping. People say they are looking for a place that feeds them. What they often mean, I think, is that they want a place that only offers what they like. But if St. Luke’s is a place of peace, then the admonishment to not move from house to house applies to us as much as the missionaries. Jesus tells us to remain here. Remain in this house of peace. Remain with your questions and doubts. Remain with those already here and struggle with us as we work through our questions and doubts together. Remain here and eat and drink that which you are freely given. Remain here and eat and drink with us those holy mysteries which are the body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I'd been reading his blog for a while, but that one was a bit of a thwack upside the head. And I went, "SIGH. Okay, fine, Lord, I'll give it a shot." And at that point, given that ReverendRef there had been commenting on Slacktivist for a while, and had generally been a voice of kindness, empathy, and some dry humor, and was known as an Episcopal priest, I had decided some time back that if I ever did give church a shot, it would be the Episcopal (also because of this, which I didn't fully believe, but did appreciate). So I showed up on Sunday, and an older woman with a cane who'd arrived a bit late as I, escorted me in. We sat in the back, and I stumbled my way through the liturgy. The sermon blew me away. I don't remember most of it, but I do remember waiting for the line about Hellfire and Judgement and The Dangers Of Secular Society, and being somewhat confused that I had nothing to push against. At one point, Fr. Vern identified the evil's of today's society as "extreme poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the poor," and my jaw hit the floor. I still wondered whether I should go back. Something in my mind was convinced that a sermon which gave you nothing to push back against was theologically unsound, or un... something. Too complacent, maybe.

The next week, at about one o'clock in the morning, this happened. I got the alert call from campus safety, woke up, took it, and then got up and wrote down the details on my notepad. I got a text from my editor maybe five-ten minutes later, asking if I'd gotten the call and could cover it. The following morning, at maybe six o'clock, I got up and walked down to campus police - the crime scene was in their parking lot. I took a picture, asked the cops for details, got my contact, and wrote the story. Short, you see there, but... big. I emailed it to the editor, and spent the next two hours in painful, tense alertness. Finally, at nine o'clock, I left. Walked past the church two, three times, sat at the edge of the park and stared across at the trees, trying to keep the panic attack at bay, with varying levels of success. At about quarter of, I walked into the narthex and service and I honestly do not remember what the homily was. I should. It meant a lot to me at the time. I remember - ah, talking about Lazarus and Martha and Mary as a very, very unorthodox household, and why that was important.

And then I went home, telling myself that it was okay. That I would be fine. That I'd written the story and sent it in (it was up by now, and our site's hits were skyrocketing by the minute), and the current wavering tension between "someone just died last night" and "that was a damn good, quick story that I wrote" and "what the hell is wrong with me" and a general hyperactive manic phase making things all worse, I walked back and forth in the room, pacing and tearing at my hair and on the verge of tears, probably driving my roommate insane, until I finally realized I badly needed to talk to someone, and walked down to the church. God was with me; Fr. Vern was still there, which is actually somewhat unusual. There was a couple leaving, and I stepped in the door, knocked on the office door, and asked if he had a little time.

One of the things he told me, in that long talk at one of the lowest points of my life, was that I had a choice in how I saw the world. That I could choose to see it as a place of light, not darkness, and that this was by no means the easy choice, but it was a better choice. He told me he'd been there; people often say that, when you are hurting and they want to help, but from him it was not an empty pat on the shoulder. And, for the first time in my life, the choice not to commit suicide was framed in terms of light, not duty. That had never occurred to me. The way I had stopped myself, for the past ten years, had been out of guilt: I can't leave my siblings alone, someone will have to clean up this mess, I will hurt too many people too badly, or at the very first, when I was young and relatively obedient, I cannot throw away the gift of life. However badly I wanted to. Not exactly wrong reasons... but that was not what he told me. "Choose to use your gifts in this life, to keep living, not because it would be a waste to throw them away - though it would - but because it will be a delight."

Twenty-two years old, and it had never occurred to me or been told to me that the choice to continue living could be a positive thing. It was always, as Hyperbole and a Half puts it:

...it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.

That's what deciding not to kill yourself looks like, when you're depressed. I have a feeling, that if I wind up there again - if my strategies for stopping things from getting that bad don't work, if I find myself that far down without help, it will still look like that. But I will strive to know better - to remind myself that the universe is a place of light.

Holy crap did this post get away from me. I intended it to be a brief introductory "Hi! I was raised Baptist, really strict Baptist, but then a lot of crazy shit happened involving my mother's insanity, and Pentecostalists, and then I wandered alone and angry and very very lost for a bunch of years, but now I'm Episcopalian! And this is my blog."

So now you know. I'm Episcopalian, I like to talk about faith, and I have a blog with which I will address questions of faith and reason and grace and love, as I understand them, imperfectly. I'll also probably talk about church. And journalism. And birds.