Pious or Present? Food, Religion, and the Promise of Saturday Morning

My subconscious left me a message when I was sleeping. It was right there on the doormat of my consciousness. I lay there in the dark, wondering what time it was, and a phrase kept echoing in my head: pious or present?

I had been lying there thinking about the Biggest Loser competition at work, and how I lost 13 pounds and gained 2 back. And about how, at work, we Biggest Losers talk about food as if it were a religion. There are the confessions (Bless me, for I ate pizza last night. It has been 3 slices since my last confession) and there are the prayers for the nearly impossible (Before I step on the scale, please let my 2 short walks somehow cancel out my 3 lengthy buffet dinners). And there are plenty of carnal sins: raspberry cheesecake, non-diet soda, deep-fried anything.

So I was thinking about the religiosity of it all, and how I often conjugate my goodness in terms of food: I was good, I want to be good, I am being good. And then real faith (not food religion) came into my head (that’s what happens when you read Annie Lamott before bed). I thought, I don’t want to be pious like that, about food or religion or anything. I want to be here, now, aware of what I am doing and at peace, not labeling myself or anyone else as below par or above par or at par (sorry to throw in the golf analogy).

I had to look up pious in the dictionary, to see if the negative vibe I feel from the word is all in my head. It turned out the definition I had in mind was the third one down in Webster’s: practiced in the name of religion. To me this connotes jaded, going by rote, yawning behind the hymnal. If I’m going to participate in a religion, I don’t want to be practiced. I want to be surprised and renewed at every turn, which is really just calling God on his promise, Behold, I make all things new. (I love quoting God back to him. I’ve got it all in writing.)

My mother’s blood runs in my veins, and I am church shopping as she did over time. Her shopping was slow-paced: she tried Methodist for a while, Christian Science for a while, Lutheran for a while. She has stopped shopping and has been a faithful Catholic for many years. My search is like speed dating: let me visit this church and make a decision, fast. Not one has made it past 3 dates recently.

I have ruled out, just by Web surfing, some churches that sound too hierarchical, too chock-full of missionary zeal. And I realize I may be doing what I tell Tom not to do: I may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If I evaluated men the way I evaluate churches, I never would have met anyone, let alone married. There would always have been a flaw that kept me away.

Of course, the word present, which I infinitely prefer over pious, has many meanings. There’s the gift part, and there’s the being there part, in the sense of being mindful and in the moment. The part of being present I seem to struggle with is the showing up part, especially for church. I have to work on that (as soon as I figure out where to show up!)

So much philosophizing so early on a Saturday! Writing, as usual, was a good sorting out for me, and a great way to start the day. In fact, it made all things seem new. Aha! God snuck in there when I wasn’t looking.

Traveling Blog

I started writing this blog in the dingy, overcrowded lounge at O’Hare airport, laptop balanced on its lumpy case. My flight was delayed. I had an enormous wet blotch on my silk blazer from the restaurant ice cube I rubbed on it earlier (after I dribbled chile con queso all over myself). I was washed out and bleary eyed.

The Chicago work trip I was sent on was an exercise in endurance. I worked from noon to nearly 11 Friday (after getting up at 4 to pack and catch my flight), and from 5 until 4 Saturday, helping speakers run through their slides and setting up their presentations, fielding questions from bewildered travelers. My room was cushy (but I barely saw it). The Aaah- I’m re-energizing sign from the door handle was nothing more than a wish (of course I took the sign home; it now hangs on our bathroom door with a glimmer of hope for a long bath).

After I made it to the airport, my wonder at the fascinating stream of multicolored, multisized, multilingual masses was truncated by my hasty choice of seat at Chiles, facing a lone and lonely male diner in checkered shirt. I had to stare into my tostadas to avoid his too eager gaze. I was glad when he left.

I was tired and cranky, and now chile stained, but a remote corner of my tired brain and body looked forward to my time alone in a strange place. A visit to the airport-ubiquitous Hudson News woke me up a bit. I drooled over magazines before finally choosing Harper’s and The New Yorker. Further up, Hudson Books provided more enticing choices. An Eric Carle book for Gavin, a Thich Nhat Hanh book for Tom, and Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith for me. What joy, to walk through the airport with (gulp) $50 worth of promising new reads! I had to chuckle at the endorsements on Thich Nhat Hanh’s book. When the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Thomas Merton all have nothing but praise, I guess you could say those are pretty good endorsements! No Dalai Lama for Anne Lamott, but I see she is working her way there. (The New York Times and the LA Times are the worldly equivalent).

The Book god smiled on me, and that would have been enough. But then a new god, the First Class god, also lit my way home. I was commiserating with my fellow delayed passengers about the exodus from H18 to K18, the continual posting of later and later departure times, and incoherent announcements over a fuzzy loudspeaker when, simultaneously, we marooned strangers voiced one breathy, relieved word: finally. They were starting to board at long last, calling out passengers by zone. Like a lottery winner I had to verify what I was reading on my ticket, and leaned over to my neighbor. Does this First mean First Class? Yes it does, channeled the First Class god through a middle-aged woman.

I am still not sure how or why I was seated there, but I was a first class virgin about to be decoached. And everything they say is true. It really is better up there, and not just by a small margin! The flight attendant was amused by my innocence (later, he crooned How was your first time?), and treated me especially nicely (you’re not supposed to tip up there, are you?). I am not sure whether it was the freshly roasted (still warm) nuts, the hot towel for my face and hands, the focaccia, the tortellini, the wine, the dessert I had no room for, or the leg room that sold me the most. But, boy, coach is going to be hard to take next time.

It is late Sunday now, and I have been home since late last night. This blog got added to over several states, at my dining room table in Connecticut, and finally from the bathroom as I watched Gavin soak in his bath.

Last week I had the joys of travel with family, and so much of the joy was about our companionship, our family-ness. Our little family does and enjoys things that we know are unique to us: the kitschy Catskill hotel, the Israeli food in Woodstock, an uphill hike at the Overlook trail. What is best about both my family of origin and my own little family of three is that we all genuinely enjoy each others’ company (well, at least most of the time!). And that is a gift: I know many families who avoid each others’ company.

My travel time alone is all about being alone. I choose what I want when I want it. I linger too long at places where, if I was accompanied, I would surely be dragged away. I watch others drift by and tuck away secret thoughts about their lives, their reasons for travel, their distant destinations. Both kinds of travel enrich me. And in another way, both kinds exhaust me. As Dorothy said, even after Oz, even after meeting three very good new friends, There’s no place like home.

Wrens, Woodstock, and the Universe

Thirty six hours from now, I will be having dinner in Vermont with my sister Linda and her family, a long overdue visit that I anticipate with great joy. After Easter dinner the next day, Tom, Gavin, and I are headed to Big Indian for a mini-getaway. Big Indian is a Catskills town outside of Woodstock, NY, and Woodstock is near and dear to our hearts. We love the free spirits, the artsy feel, and the country air. We gawk a bit at the hippies playing bongos on the square, eat falafel at Joshua's, and buy too many books at the Golden Notebook. I am sure we will love every minute of it (although I don't think Gavin will eat falafel!).

A prophecy of mine has been fulfilled. Two blogs ago, I wrote: I checked the porch eaves for the wren that comes every spring (no sign yet, but she is coming). And then, last night, there she was. Wren has a special meaning to me: I wrote an entire essay on her visits to our porch: Wren occupied the ledge at the edge, quite literally where my inner life met my outer world.... Watching Wren, I was interested, patient, protective, savoring the moment, graced, illuminated, and waiting for the next illuminated moment. The best thing about Wren's debut this year was the fact that Gavin got to whisper good night to her. She opened her eyes and peered down at us sleepily, didn't stir. I felt blessed by her presence.

After I wrote last week's blog on synchronicity, serendipity, and luck, my mom handed me a book she had just finished on the same theme. I thought Paul Pearsall's Making Miracles title sounded hokey, and I was turned off by the fact that he has written a lot of self help books (not my thing). But this book has new ideas that are sparking some good musings for me. Pearsall writes a lot about quantum physics and chaos theory, and I contemplate these more abstract areas in a vague way until I get to anecdotes, where I can really relate. There are lots of great stories about the power of thought and perspective. Basically the message is that we are one with the universe, and that the universe offers messages for us. When I write it this way, though, it sounds so Shirley MacLaine, so spacey, and that's not it at all. To me, it's about being open to possibility, to the appearance of something that will lead you in a good direction.

One interesting thought has been to pay attention to coincidences. The first coincidence was writing the blog and then getting the book on the same themes. This led to a great conversation with Mom on some challenging issues. Then there were 2 moments where I thought of friends who called at that same moment. And finally, Wren appeared. My more jaded side asked, Am I searching for meaning where there is none? But my believer side was answering before the question was even complete: If it has meaning to you, it is valuable.

I guess all these musings boil down to one thing for me: connectedness. There are birds, books, friends out there that seem to appear at the very moments I need them. Whether there is anything mystical about this, who knows? Either way, I am grateful. These birds, books, and friends make me think, they are reassuring, they add meaning to a life sometimes heavy with routine and obligation.

Enough philosophizing. Off to the very concrete pleasures of good food, good company, possibly a date (thanks to Linda's babysitting service!), an Easter egg hunt, and long walks in Woodstock. There is nothing like the pleasure and relief of a long-anticipated vacation.

Serendipity, Synchronicity, or Luck?

(Speaking of serendipity, a friend Googled me and found that I was a selected entry for a contest at HappyNews.com. I didn’t win the $1000 prize, but am still optimistic about the future (the theme of the contest!).

I feel lucky this week. My mother, brother, and sister all got good news, a mixed bag of good fortune involving improved health, enhanced wealth, and creative opportunities. My work week was a nice mix of research, writing, and camaraderie. I got a precious window to write on Tuesday night and milked the hell out of it. Life is good.

I’ve been thinking about synchronicity this week. Having been an 80s teenager, I hear the tune Every Breath You Take from the Police album Synchronicity whenever I hear the word. So I struggled to get Sting’s throaty voice out of my head while I contemplated the concept at the Paperback Café.

It often happens that I have a sudden, limited opportunity to write, and a 5-minute window in which to grab something to write on (still haven’t fully integrated the laptop concept). I run down the basement stairs, or up to my bedroom, and grab one of multiple blank books, or even an unbound sheaf of paper with some scribbled pages at the top. If my journals were a barometer of my potential creative success, I’d be doomed. My writing is never in one place. It is on the computer, it is on a disk at the bottom of a bag, it is in one of the blank books but not in any linear fashion. Whatever I pick up gets written on or in, with no logic or forethought. Hopelessly scattered; emblematic of the chaos theory (more on that later).

Synchronicity, in case you are also distracted by Sting’s voice in your head, is the temporal incidence of 2 or more events linked together by meaning, without any causal connection (Webster's Dictionary). Synchronicity comes alive when when I write.

For me, synchronicity is running into something or someone seemingly random who is practically holding a sign that says Count your blessings. Pay attention to your thoughts. Look how far you have come. Look at the potential you can tap. Case in point: the Paperback Café. I grabbed an artist’s sketchbook before I ran out the door that night. The gilded pages drew me, plus the fact that I hadn’t grabbed this particular diary in ages. As my black coffee cooled, I perused what I had written. I was still at my former high-pressure job for my last entry, and Gavin was still not quite at peace with the potty concept. I thought, you’ve come a long way baby. I paged back in time to read a writing exercise I had completed from Vinita Hampton Wright’s The Soul Tells a Story (I have been meaning to write to her; her middle name is my maiden name. Synchronicity again?). Wright says: From the moment we are born, our souls are spinning stories and gathering wisdom. Well, I was reading my soul’s wisdom back, something I needed to do in the midst of a happy but hectic week. Those exercises, completed at a retreat nearly a year ago, spoke to me about possibility, reminding me of sketchy ideas now ready to be fleshed out.

The dates in the diary got closer and closer to anniversaries of the current date. April 22, 2001: I wrote Friday night was sad – I had a negative pregnancy test. I think that Tom didn’t know what to say or do. The universe again screamed that I was blessed. Loose pages from a different journal, April 7, 2002, were randomly stuck in by the sad entry. I wrote about my first out-of-state trip away from Gavin – just a short ferry ride to New York to bring my niece home. I was swollen and sore from lack of nursing for several hours, and fretting about my baby across the Long Island Sound. On the way back, I relaxed into it and had my first tentative admission that I could balance time away with being a good mother. How far I have come from that negative pregnancy test, and from those first nervous months of motherhood! I chuckled to myself when I saw the date on the diary’s inside cover. April 4, 2001. I had picked up the journal I started five years ago to the day. Things like this happen all the time.

I have always gotten synchronicity and serendipity confused. Serendipity is the faculty of happening upon or making fortunate discoveries when not in search of them (Webster's again). So it is more of a happy accident than a perception of meaningful convergence. Still, they go together nicely. I am fully aware that cynics would sneer even at the title of today’s blog, but I happen to like the idea of stumbling about rather haplessly and then stepping into good fortune. I even believe that God puts events and people in my path at regular intervals.

Back to chaos theory: one Web site remarks that chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. So, to me and apparently to some much more physics-friendly folks, chaos is not really as chaotic as it seems. There is order to be found. Sort of like the piles of paper on my desk (I can always extract the right reference from the seeming black and white abyss) or my crazy quilt of journals.

And then there is luck. I have always hated the axiom We make our own luck. It makes unfortunate people sound so lazy! But the flip side of that for me is the constant presence of opportunity (knock, knock). Damn Interesting has a great article on Professor Wiseman, who did a 10-year study on the nature of luck. He looked at the lottery winnings from people who consider themselves lucky as compared with people self-described as unlucky, and affirmed that your perception of luck before a lottery has no relationship to winning (I can attest to that: I am invariably convinced I will win!). On the other hand, people who were supposed to be counting photographs in a newspaper, if they viewed themselves as lucky, were much more likely to notice a disguised message on page two: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. Wiseman concluded that a major part of one's good fortune is due to one's state of mind and behaviors. In other words, luck has a lot to do with psychology.

I spend all week scrutinizing randomized, double-blind, controlled medical trials, seeing whether the statistics really prove a theory beyond random chance, and whether the study was adequately powered. And in Dr Wiseman’s case, I haven’t read his book. I have no idea whether he is a fruitcake, or a self-fulfilling prophet. But you know what? For matters of the soul I suspend this scientific approach. My own experiences, some of them decidedly not rosy, have proven to me that openness to the lessons of circumstance brings good things.

I only realized recently that I surround myself with like-minded people. (My closest friends totally “get” the whole no coincidences mindset, and even frame particularly trying situations as fraught with potential opportunities). Am I another self-fulfilling prophet? Perhaps. But I have created a new equation, which should make me seem more legitimate. Coincidence + insight + faith + openness + optimism = synchronicity + serendipity + luck. No matter how you parse the equation, it all adds up to me.

Something’s Coming

I had a lot to say last week on being jealous of Joyce Carol Oates, particularly her 24/7 idea factory. I picture the third shift churning scenes and plots out in her brain as she sleeps, few breaks for the hardworking neurons on the assembly line. She awakes to a fresh batch, maybe boxes some extras for charity, and still has enough left for a lifetime of novels.

I rarely read fiction, but this week I am reading Oates’ We Were the Mulvaneys. I am usually drawn to the flat truthfulness of personal essays, put off by dialogue and the attentiveness required for plot twists. And yet, when I do indulge in the other-world that is fiction, it intrigues me deeply.

The Mulvaneys seem as real as my own family. I can see and feel their rambling farmhouse. I mourn over the bleakness that their tragedy introduces. My real-life tragedies have been different, but my emotions have been right there with the Mulvaneys. Stephen King admits the sin: Fiction is a lie. However, he adds an important afterthought: good fiction is the truth inside the lie. I keep relearning this when I pick up a good novel.

Fiction seems natural enough for Gavin. This morning he added a centipede storm to the list of natural disasters his Rescue Heroes must face. He wanted me to remember his “making things in the junkyard” dream—surely I was there! I love the all things are possible mind of a child. The hardwiring for censorship and propriety has not been installed yet. I want to get back to that place.

But I am pretty hardwired, at this late age of 38. Despite reassuring quotes on the hidden truths, writing fiction feels like lying. I sweat as if my keyboard were a lie detector. Still, all of the arrows keep pointing to fiction of late. I just got an invitation for a fiction writing workshop. I may just sign up.

It feels like it’s time for a sea change. Spring is here, and it feels long overdue. We stopped the car twice to hear peepers in the marsh. I walked without my jacket. I checked the porch eaves for the wren that comes every spring (no sign yet, but she is coming). There is a story somewhere beneath all of this sweet, ordinary life.

I am a slow burn, not an idea factory as I would wish. But even with my low simmer, ideas are brewing. I can feel them bubbling up from below the surface.

When I was pregnant, relentless gentle kicks reminded me that something great was coming. This joyous anticipation, also conceived in the spring, feels just like those kicks. Something good is definitely coming.

PS: Yelled to Tom and Gavin, I’m just putting my blog up. I thought of farm women I’ve heard on TV, canning their best fruits and “putting them up” for the winter. I love to think of the storehouse of blogs I am tucking away on the shelves of this cyber root cellar. Maybe Gavin will harvest them someday, and learn a bit more about me. Maybe I will harvest them and craft a book. The prospect is juicier than canned tomatoes.