Easter

I'm celebrating the night before Easter with depression and a gin and tonic.  Looks like the amount we owe for taxes this year is rather astronomical.  Which depressed us utterly.  How did we come to owe so much?  It's hard to understand how two established professionals with a single child who live modestly can feel so financially behind in life.  It's going to take us forever to pay off that educational and consumer debt and build a savings.

So, enough about that.

Tomorrow, with the celebration of family and spring and (for some) the miraculous Resurrection, my Spring will officially start.  I will wear a colorful dress, clad my son in a pastel green dress shirt, and with my husband join a few very dear friends for a restaurant brunch. This is the first Easter in a long time I will not be celebrating with blood family and a huge food production at home.  Instead, I will be celebrating effortlessly with some family of the heart and mind.  And for a religious type, and ironically, I will be celebrating a highly spiritual day with some very fine atheist skeptics.

These skeptics, which include my husband and the two friends, are so very dear to my heart.  Of the four of us, I'm the only religious type to stay religious.  The rest are religious types turned atheist.  Their reasons are varied, profound, convicting and honest.  And although it may be bewildering for some to look at me, an intellectual, and hear me say that I'm still religious, I have indeed kept my faith throughout everything.  Through the disappointment of how nasty and boring church people really are.  Through the deconversion experience my husband went through a few years ago, which tore my heart out and undid me.  Through every day's NPR broadcast of famine, war, strife, injustice and bigotry.

But why?  Why am I able to maintain a grasp on my spirituality while the other three didn't?  I don't know.  But right here and now, I would like to defend them - and me - and vie for a view that all humans are spiritual, whether they are religious or anti-religious.  My dear friend, let's call him Bob, pointed out that there is something categorically different about the human response of awe and wonder to the universe.  Even religious things can be argued to have come from evolutionary need.  (I'm not sure I agree 100% on this, but this is a complex discussion in and of itself.)  But there is something unique, profound, and deeply affecting about looking into the stars (for example) and feeling... something.  Skeptics feel, and they feel deeply.  I know, because I'm married to one.  Skeptics are deeply misunderstood at this period in time, and that's unfortunate.  All I'd like to say today, in the midst of my gin buzz, is that they have hearts and minds both.  And tomorrow's brunch will be no less joy filled because they do not share my faith in a miracle.

I hope.

Shabbat Struggle

I'm a non-Jew trying to institute the practice Shabbat in my life, and it's hard.  Not because I can sing the typical song of modern woe about just being so busy all the time (though I am), but because for me work is comforting and life-giving.  And I have come to understand that Shabbat is about doing life-giving things.

Writing grocery lists or plotting out the next month's budget.  Cleaning the kitchen (sometimes) and sorting old clothes to go to Goodwill.  These things bring me satisfaction. And I'm not a codependent person; it's hard to explain, but I just really get a kick out of getting stuff done.

When I contemplate what a meaningful Shabbat is  - a 24 hour period of intentional stillness -  it's hard to parse work from rest.  To pare down to a minimal pattern of rest is sometimes like entering a recently moved-out house.  It's dirty and hollow, just barely echoing of what used to be so cheerful and full.  It reminds me of the First Testament episodes when particular characters would go into the wilderness (aka wild places, lonely places, places of non-cultivated land).  They would often go without food in their questing, but the stories record most of them finding something significant out there.  There is this extreme dichotomy of starvation and plenty in those stories, for although the people physically starve and thirst, those significant experiences they bring back with them become life markers, things that redefine their past, present and future.

I wonder what I will find.  My relationship with this emptiness is volatile.  Some weeks, I long for it and anticipate with joy.  Other times, I find myself, like today, longing for activity to bring solace to a patternless day.  One thing I've learned so far is that simply having fun isn't necessarily life-giving.  Too many video games and movies can make life grey instead of glorious.

Gosh this is hard work!