no, no, very seriously, i love lent very deeply & very seriously because it is like waking up in the world after a long & despairing winter & realizing
there is a lot of work to do. & doing it.
so here is the thing: i think of lent as work, not as deprivation. i have read me some oscar romero & i believe that it is our work to build the kingdom of god on earth.
& dear prophecy girl, i don't know if i believe in messiahs or in salvation, but i believe in faith & in works & i believe in my good friend the thief in the night.
& dear with-a-K & everyone else, i am catholic because something drew me to it, because i had a moment one spring that was like an arrow through the heart, & i suddenly understood bellini's st teresa (how she swoons & seethes!): the whole world lit & my body lit, too, & i did what the arrow-through-the-heart asked me to do.
(f i trust you enough i will sit down & tell you frantic stories about growing up near a monastery, about sitting through how many hours in the dark looking at slides of vistations & conversions of saints & descents from the cross & agonies in the garden, about kierkegaard & vermeer & saint clare. i will expect you to sort through the hurried mess & get something out of it.)
& anyway the point, the point is that i get very frantic because i don't know how to talk about this, because i don't talk about it for two big reasons, the first (i pretend it is noble) being that i don't like to talk about my morals in front of other people because i resented having a townful of war-ish fundamentalists talk about their morals in front of me for eighteen years; & the second (which is just weak) is that i think of how much i resent that townful of fundamentalists & worry unnecessarily that no one will like me if i reveal my fervor, my belief.
this is as up-front confessional as i get, my loves.
also i have had a lot of caffeine & every time i am at a loss for what to put down next i sit back in my chair & rub the palms of my hands together very fast like a masseuse before a massage. only very fast.
i am going to step back & stop the thing with the palms of my hands, & i am going to tell you this: it was almost three years ago & i did have the thing that was like an arrow through my heart, & i had spent my entire life, even when i was tiny, staring at things & trying to find god in them, & suddenly i knew that nothing would be the same, & even if i don't know what to think about salvation i think it is probably the best thing for me to go to mass & pray & celebrate the eucharist, & so far the arrow-in-the-heart has been right, even if sometimes it fades & sometimes it burns up again.
it is like being in love only better because i never come up with catty things to say about it.
& maybe if i had had any sort of decision to make about joining a religion, i would have been a quaker. but it was not a decision. it was turning a corner & discovering this about myself around the other side.
i've stopped worrying if i'm making sense. i'm going to write some things about the sky now. i'm going to recommend listening to some things.
