The Grace of the Church

I had it in my head to put together a sort of Faith Profile of my year with the poems I've been writing.  So picked out the ones I was extra proud of and worked on editing them and putting them in some semblance of order.  I did this right before bed, which was a problem.  For one thing, it got my creative mind racing, and that takes ages to shut off.  For another, it opened up memories and feelings and doubts and worries.  I've been feeling pretty on top of things lately, and then I read my own words describing myself in my darkest emotions.  Not a great idea.

The result was that I skipped church today.  My alarm went off, I hit snooze.  Then I laid in bed for ten minutes thinking about how I was really tired and anyway I didn't want to go.  So I didn't, and I slept until 11:30.

It's funny, the days I skip church sometimes turn into big spiritual epiphanies for me.  That happened a little while ago, but it isn't what I want to talk about.

What I've been learning lately is the power of the Church.  I think I've always thought of it as God's people, I got that part.  I knew it was more than a building, more than a gathering of people who thought and acted the same way.  But in the last year or so, I've been deepening my awareness and appreciation of the sacred. 

One of the sacred things I've been stepping into is Communion.  That's honestly the main thing I miss whenever I'm not at church.  I've grown to love the cracker pieces and wine glasses passed down the pew.  I love taking strength there, remembering that I am here because of Christ, that it is only through Him that I can do anything.  I don't think the bread and wine are literally Jesus's body and blood, but I do think there is something far more sacred going on than I ever realized.  I think there is some special grace in taking Communion, some acknowledgment of our humility and dependency, some concrete action of finding purpose and strength in Him.

The other sacred thing I've been stepping into is the Church.  I just googled "Is the Church a sacrament?" and turns out the Vatican II said there is a sacramental nature to the Church, so good, I'm not alone in thinking this.  The thing is, as I've grown weaker this year, more aware of my sins and the sins of the world, I've found real peace in the Church.  Not as in they encourage me, though they have.  What I mean is, it's so comforting to know that while I struggle and doubt, there are others in the Church who are strong and faithful.  When I skipped church this morning, I took strength in knowing that there were others who went, men and women and children who heard the Word and took Communion and echoed creeds.  It's not a get-out-of-jail-free pass.  It's a genuine grace, I think, this acknowledgment that I cannot be strong all the time, but that God has me as one small piece of a Body--a Body that is strong, that continues when I am not physically present.  There is such comfort in seeing faith as communal rather than individualistic.

I'm turning mystical, I guess, and pretty High Church.  I just love it.  I love stepping outside of myself and realizing how dependent I am upon God's grace, how I need physical manifestations of His grace to eat and drink, how I need relational manifestations of His grace to serve Him when I cannot.  It's all just crazy enough to make sense.

Too Beautiful

I stumbled across this playlist of epically beautiful instrumental music, and I actually had to stop what I was doing to stare open-mouthed at my computer during one song.  It was so beautiful I wanted to turn it off, as if it were too much of a good thing, like my ears and my mind wouldn't be able to stand so much purity and clarity.

Beauty is, I think, sadly lacking in everyday life.  Efficiency and practicality are useful and good, but when we laud these virtues at the expense of beauty, I wonder if we aren't losing something precious.  Beauty is a sign, an arrow that points to the reality of "now and not yet."  This ache I feel around something too beautiful makes me all too aware that this is my life--I am meant for something great, and there is joy and peace in eternity.  But at the same time, right now life is streaked with selfishness and abuse and despair.  Beauty highlights ugliness.  It makes us aware of what life should be and in contrast, what life is.

We need those reminders, whether we find them in music, in stories, in forests, in architecture, in mathematical formulas, in gears aligning, in galaxies, in paintings.  We need beauty.

(Also I just read Rollo Mays' The Courage to Create, which has greatly influenced my opinion on the universality of creativity.  It's quite short and I highly recommend it for those who care about such things.)

Iceland

I'm reading The Geography of Bliss, in which a melancholy man travels to ten different countries to discover what makes them happy.  It's obviously right up my traveling, studying, melancholy alley.  It's also made me decide to move to Iceland.

I mean, not really, although I've long been in love with the name Reykjavik (ever since I learned to pronounce it).  Iceland is one of the most consistently top-rated happy countries in the world.  This is because, Eric Weiner, suggests, they acknowledge life in all its ups and downs.  They celebrate both success and failure.  They live through dark winters and bright summers.  They embrace paradox.

A man named Hilmar told him he was happy and that "I cherish my melancholia...You nurture your little melancholia, and it's like a buzz that makes you feel alive.  You snap yourself a little bit, and you feel this relief of how fragile life is and how tremendously fragile you are."

I love this.  I think part of what's made my foray into depressed thoughts so overwhelming is the idea that I need to get rid of them.  That these are all unhealthy and therefore bad.  The trouble is, there is a lot of truth to my sad thoughts!  The world is hard, and people do suffer unnecessarily.  I'm not about to abandon truth, and so I was stuck. 

I like this Icelandic approach of holding both melancholia and happiness in each hand.  Of acknowledging the fragility of life and living it anyway.  I don't want to be blindly happy, nor do I want to be smothered in sadness.  I thought I had to choose between the two, when I really, I just need to choose to let them both exist side-by-side in my mental space and my experience.

That feels so relieving. 

Looking for Hope

One of the things I've learned from therapy is that I have a generally hopeless outlook on life.  My therapist took me back to middle school when I was most strongly depressed and vaguely suicidal.  I told how my desire to be dead was largely religious.  I was obsessed with Philippians 1:23, in which Paul says, "I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far."  I also took C.S. Lewis's quote to heart, the one about how if nothing in this world can satisfy, then we must be made for another world.  That's encouraging from an eternal perspective, but it has always struck me as depressing for the here and now.  It will never get better.

Had those feelings left? my therapist wondered.  And immediately I knew, no, no, I still feel that way.  I've learned to cover them up with busyness and friendships.  But whenever those things fall apart, I'm left staring at my philosophy of hopelessness.  What a shift, to realize that I don't suffer from periodic bouts of depression.  I constantly live from a foundation of hopelessness, only most of the time I can ignore it with distractions.

Two things have helped.

I'm making some really wonderful friends in Dallas.  One in particular is special.  We've decided to meet every week and get honest.  We've already addressed the fact that neither of us like vulnerability and we move away when things get too uncomfortable, so we're understanding of each other and committed to keep each other close even when the other is trying to run away.

Today we had lunch and talked about shame, casually mentioned some habitual sins, sharing an unhealthy desire to control everything, especially who I am and what I do.  It's freeing to talk with her, because we come from a place of "this won't get fixed immediately, and it doesn't have to.  God is patient, and what I can offer to you is my listening and my care and my acknowledgement that this is really awful for you."  I don't want people to fix me.  I'm tired of advice.  I'm loving having a friend who is screwed up and owning it, who lets me be screwed up and still wants to get coffee.

Life seems hopeless.  The one thing that gives me hope and makes me think I have a purpose is when someone says, "I wanted to be your friend because you're real.  You're not perfect and you don't pretend to be.  You're safe."  That's what I have to offer the world.  My imperfections.  In a screwed up world, that's rather lovely.

The other encouragement I had was from a job-searching book I have to read for class, ironically.  I get bogged down in the big picture, in the global sins and the ways in which nature and humanity cause pain on top of pain.  But this poem that the book quoted reminded me to look at the details for the reasons life can be good.

"What is success?
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded."
--Bessie Anderson Stanley