April 2007

Blake began this morning by racing his Hot Wheels cars down the front hallway. He lined them up, then launched them quickly one at a time, rolling them and letting them go until they flipped up and around, hitting walls, or spinning out. When all were done, he’d line them up again.

The entire venture, as with much of what he does, seemed to have its greatest meaning for him if we watched. It was very important that we watch. Stand up from the sofa, go to the front hall, and watch. I exclaimed with all the “Cool!” “Wow!” “Smash!” I could muster, and could not wipe the smile off my face. My son was creating something — energy, entertainment, what artists call “creative space” (well, sappier self-important artists anyway). Love, really. His urge to do this, to give a performance and have it transform the experience of someone else, to manufacture energy where there was none, is utterly built into his DNA. Luckily, it’s utterly built into my DNA to want to watch him with that shit-eating smile on my face that says “I can’t believe this remarkable kid is actually mine!”

Our souls ache to transform the world for others. Even the craziest among us aches for this. Whatever psychologists and neuroscentists say about human emotional and cognitive development, this one urge to change our surroundings and be witnessed in doing it, to spread the love that is at our essence, is in every last one of us.

Langston Hughes wrote of the “Dream Deferred.” Biographies of Adolph Hitler have hypothesized that he was unseen by his father and unacknowledged as an artist. Thwarted, the desire to create, to leak love all over the place, can come out sideways in violence and addiction of all stripes, including consumerism. We all ache to continue the creation we started, to make every moment a big bang of our energy releasing on the world, making it somehow different, larger, more beautiful. We don’t all get that opportunity early in life — the opportunity for someone to look at what we’re doing, no matter how lame or how small, and tell us how great it is.

The creation story in Genesis (a metaphor, but a powerful one about the nature of love) seems to speak to this notion of God. God’s love was so great it could not be contained alone. God had to spill outside of the unitary consciousness, create, see and be seen. Babies die for a lack of this kind of spiritual feedback loop. I would say that the creative force, the one that explodes outside of us and needs to come back as acknowledgement, God and love acting as some sort of spiritual photosynthesis, is the REAL first rung on the ladder of human need, with a nod to Abraham Maslow for the imagery

Once again, Blake this evening asked me to watch as he lined up his cars and sent them careening down the front hall. Smash, bang, crash, the universe once more created itself, and the infinite possibility of the world became even more infinite. Blake knows at some cellular level that God’s love simply cannot be contained. And it’s my job to make sure, however imperfectly, that he always feels that way.

There are some vessels that simply cannot hold the volume they are called upon to contain. Most times, I feel like one of those vessels. At those times, I spill out of myself, in words, tears, sometimes rage, sometimes gratitude, most times in confusion and wonder. Lately, the blogosphere, for all its breadth, has seemed too constrained to hold all I feel, all that’s transpired in this state, in this country, in my life, over the past two weeks.

Easter was utter bliss. Trusting in God, in the people in the congregation, in the minister, in my husband, in those who love me, I walked into the baptismal waters with all the awkwardness of a child on their first day of school. It felt like my first holy communion day — something special was happening, the bulk of which was a mystery to me. The difference between this experience, and the communion experience, was age, experience, and the absence of scary nuns. Oh, and this time around, I didn’t have to go home and watch my father beating my brother’s head into the staircase. Such is the association I make with holy communion, and its apparent brittle disconnect from my real home life.

But this time it WAS real life. My son asked why I was taking a bath in church and wanted me to show him the swimming pool. I took him up there the following Sunday to peek underneath the floor boards to see the bath. He giggled, and asked if I took a bath there. I said “yes,” and we left. He was giggling again. I loved that the irreverence of the bathtub, the giggles, the wetness in public, the messiness of it all transcended the perfect wedding-dress denial of first holy communion, where nothing awkward or ugly was allowed within the church walls. That was saved for afterward. Such was Catholic domestic life in the 1960s.

After the baptism, I felt carried by something, safe. Our day was so beautiful. Repeated easter egg hunts (we kept re-hiding them and our son found them, then we hid them, then we found them). Dinner together, time with my husband, hugs from the folks at church. What a day.

The week descended into something utterly else. I had a meeting scheduled with the University president on Wednesday morning. I got a call late Tuesday that it had to be re-scheduled. I got a call an hour later from my friend who’s partner was threatening her an needed me to get her out of the house and get her kids. With her and the kids in the car, on the way to drop her off at a safe house, I got a call about an hour later from my boss. Apparently, the president had been arrested for a DUI in Fredericksburg. Friday we learned that there was another DUI warrant for him in Fairfax. Then yesterday, the horrific happened at Virginia Tech. What a time this is.

I remember when I first got sober. I thought on some weird level that the whole world got sober when I did. As though the consciousness of everyone was on the same trajectory, all in the same boat. There is some truth to that. I do believe that humanity is, collectively, moving towards the light. I’m an eternal optimist for all my humorous cynicism. But, the ability for me to perceive that movement from my single perspective as a solitary dot in infinite space is, at best, limited. I don’t have the processing power to calculate the algorithm of human spiritual homeostasis. That’s for mathematicians and philosophers — bigger containers for these bigger ideas. I’m just a gal with a lot of un-realized promise

So, in the midst of all this, what relevance does my descending into a tank of water in church have to do with anything? I guess I can’t contain hope, but I can be used to transmit its potential in a small way. As many of us who come to faith later in life, we have been tossed and torn by life, a bit damaged by our own bad choices bumping up against a world with its own forces of resistance. Sobriety taught me that getting out of the way of myself is the best way to at least forestall the bruising. But taking on a life of faith is larger than me. I am no longer a container, but I’m swimming around in the pool with every soul that was ever born, not born, or that will be born. I am a small piece of the infinite, and I don’t have to fix everything anymore.

This is part of my learning about what it is to evangelize. In AA, they talk about “attraction, not promotion” and I think that’s a wise approach. There is something inevitable, for me, in Christ’s love that it seems simply to somehow transform with little effort from me. With the big issues facing us — war, murder, president’s acting out — all I can do is pray and witness to a love greater than ourselves. That is the love of Christ, and I feel it inside me every day. I wish the sensation of that palpable love for this earthly world, which may be the smallest container there is for a love so infinite as to give itself in pain for the sake of the flawed, stupid human race.