AREWP Week 12: Refocusing

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


I'll just come out and say it: last week was a disaster.

Between a teething seven-month-old, a teething 20-month-old, and disastrous setbacks with potty trainwreck training my three-year-old, it was a really rough week. I had not only fallen behind on laundry and other housework, but the stack of unopened mail on my desk seemed to be somehow breeding and growing larger by the hour, and every time I tried to catch up on email I just felt like crying and legally changing my name to Sisyphus. My husband was helping as much as he could, but it didn't seem to even make a dent in all that had to be done. I was so overwhelmed that I kept forgetting to observe my prayer times. I felt like I was drowning.

One of the emotions I felt most strongly throughout the flameout of last week was simply surprise. "How has this happened?" I kept wondering. Things had been going to amazingly well ever since I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'd had other tough weeks since then where I didn't fall off track with prayer and maintained a sense of peace even throughout tough days. I kept wondering what had changed, what it was that derailed not only my prayer life but the wonderful sense of peace I'd found in daily life. After about the third or fourth time I forgot to pray one of the major hours because I was distracted by something else, I finally realized:

My mentality had totally, fundamentally changed.

For the first couple of months that I structured my days around the Liturgy of the Hours I never forgot to pray, because that was the purpose, the very center of my days. To give you some specific examples, here is a glimpse into my mentality throughout the past few months when thinking about what I needed to do the next day. Let's use examples from Thursday evenings, when, say, vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor were on my to-do list for the next day:

WEEK 1: "Tomorrow my goal is to serve God first and foremost. I will observe the universal prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours -- even when it's not convenient for me or what I want to do -- and thus anchor my days with prayer. No matter what else happens, these prayers will get said. Hopefully the structure of having my days guided by set times of turning to God will help me accomplish the other things I'd like to get done, like vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor."

WEEK 8: "Tomorrow my goal is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, but I really need to make sure I vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor too."

WEEK 10: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor. Oh, yeah, and I need to remember to pray too."

WEEK 11: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor."

I was so amazed at the practical benefits of having my days revolve around prayer that I slipped into the mentality of seeing those practical things as the end I was trying to achieve -- and it all fell apart.

The reason my house was so much more clean and orderly after I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was not because I'd found a great organizational routine. It was because the way I approached daily life had fundamentally changed. Praying Lauds, Matins and Vespers at their scheduled times was a great exercise in obedience to God: it was never convenient to stop what I was doing and get out the prayer book. It always involved setting aside something else I felt like I should be doing. But in making these little sacrifices I was reminded, three times a day, that life is not about what I feel like doing, that I need to let go of what I want to get done and foster only a calm trust in God.

The grace and peace that entered my life after I started living this way set off a domino effect where everything else fell into place. The order that these prayer times brought to my days meant that housework fell into a gentle rhythm, and it was easy to fall into a routine without even having to think much about it. As I mentioned here, since my working hours were cut down to make more time for prayer, I had more energy to pick up the pace in the times that I did work. To my great delight, the result was a cleaner, more orderly house.

But then the temptation arose to take a shortcut: I loved having my household running so smoothly, so I began to elbow God aside and focus on that alone. As I showed in the example above, the thought process of "Tomorrow I will pray; and vacuum and sweep if it's God's will" drifted into "tomorrow I will vacuum and sweep; and pray if it's Jen's will."

This weekend I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict that I excerpted in greater detail in my first post about scheduling my days around prayer:

When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.

[Excuse me for a moment while I go tattoo that on my forehead...OK, I'm back.]

At the end of last week I felt like everything was in shambles. I felt like there was no way I could ever catch up on all that I had to do and regain a sense of peace in my daily life. With a laser-like focus on all those important practical matters I needed to take care of, I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, feeling crushed under the weight of it all. I looked at all the notes scribbled on my to-do list, on the disaster area that was my living room, and thought, "I can't do this." And in that moment I realized: it's true. I can't. I can't do it all. I need to let go.

And when I did just that, when I set aside my to-do list and stopped asking myself "How can I get X, Y and Z tasks done tomorrow?" and started asking myself only, "How can I pray tomorrow?" I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, and knew that I was back on the path to peace.

New URL: ConversionDiary.com

It just occurred to me that, other than some whining, I never officially announced that I have a new URL for the site, conversiondiary.com. (If you link to me, you do not need to update your links. The old URL, et-tu.blogspot.com, will still work.)

Weekend joke

I don't normally do too much cross-posting from my links blog, but this was too good not to share.


I've been chuckling about that all weekend ever since I saw it over at With a Grain of Salt. (Not that I would know anything about that from personal experience, of course!)

Comic from xkcd

Motherhood, work and socializing

In my post from earlier this week, I compared the internet to a tribal village water well: a gathering place where women can have quick, casual conversations in the course of their daily lives. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot as I read through all the fascinating comments is the ways in which the internet is not perfect replacement for a real village well. I think one of the biggest things missing, as a many commenters have pointed out, is that our children are not involved in our online interactions. If we had a real well to go visit, our children would be running around and playing as we chatted -- filling our need for casual interaction with other adults would be something we did with our kids.

Yet the modern alternative, going to playgroups or other get-togethers involving moms and children, is missing something as well: it doesn't involve any aspect of our daily household duties. Again, if we had a real well to gather around, we wouldn't just be there for the chatting: we'd be accomplishing a vital household task (gathering water) in addition to meeting those needs #2-4 that I talked about in that last post. From what I remember from those anthropology classes, the daily gathering places that women have always had were places where they also washed clothes, collected water, prepared food, etc. (I recall a commenter offering a lovely glimpse into this sort of life in the first comment to this post over at Mothers of Many Saints.)

Personally, as my family has grown, I've found it harder and harder to put all daily work on hold to pack everyone up and go socialize. Though it's well worth the effort to occasionally go to good friends' houses for meaningful conversations and quality visits, it's increasingly difficult to make it to playgroups or other sources of casual get-togethers. It takes a large amount of time and effort to get everyone packed in the car and out of the house, and doing that too often leaves me exhausted and puts me behind on all that I have to do to just keep the house at a "probably not going to be condemned by the health department" level. The beauty of having a real community water well area would be that life would be decompartmentalized: I'd have an opportunity to chat with other adults, my children would be part of these interactions, and it would all be part of my daily work. "Time with my children" and "work time" and "socializing time" would all blend together as one (to borrow from Steve G.'s term) community liturgy.

So here's what I've been pondering this week: is there any way to recreate this in modern life?

I would love to draw on the brainpower of my brilliant commenters and see if you have any ideas here: can you think of any solutions, either short-term or long-term, that would help us combine our daily work with gathering with others?

To give you some examples, my husband and I were thinking that some short-term solutions could be to, say, meet other moms at a laundromat once a week and do our laundry together, or perhaps start a garden with another family, or join a mothers prayer group. A long-term solution could be to have opportunities for socializing heavily influence our housing choices, i.e. either living in an urban, walkable area or intentionally living on the same street as friends or family members. We even threw out the crazy idea of getting together with other families and buying a bunch of land outside the city limits and all building houses there. (Some of those are more feasible than others, and I'm not saying that any one of these would definitely work or is a perfect solution -- just some quick examples from our brainstorming session.)

So...I turn the question over to all of you: What do you think about this? Can you think of some ways we could combine our daily work with community interaction? Have you found something that's worked for you?

Review: Behold Your Mother

For a while now I've been a fan of Heidi Hess Saxton's eloquent writing about adoption and motherhood over at her blog Mommy Monsters, so I was delighted when she offered to send me a review copy of her new book, Behold Your Mother: Mary Stories and Reflections from a Catholic Covert.

I could relate to many of Heidi's experiences that she shares in this little 70-page collection of reflections, including the strong, clear way that God guided her to cultivate a new respect for and appreciation of his mother. "Why go to Jesus' mother when I could go directly to the Source of answered prayer?" she writes. "My relationship with God had always been a high priority. I wasn't afraid of Him, and knew that He heard me...the very idea of talking to Jesus' mother held no appeal." She then tells the story of how some kind words from a friend, an unexpected gift, and an incredible series of answered prayers that changed her outlook entirely.

The rest of the book is filled with one-page chapters, each with one of Mary's traditional names as its title (e.g. David's Daughter, Mother of the Lamb, Our Lady of Sorrows, Lady of Courage, etc.) In each one Heidi begins with a Bible verse, then offers a poetic personal reflection on the verse, and concludes with a prayer.

I enjoyed using each of the verses at the beginnings of each chapter for my own meditations, and Heidi's imaginings often offered intriguing starting points for visualizing Christ's life. For example, she pictures Joseph telling Mary about creating a cedar chest for a publican over a steaming bowl of stew. And in one of the most haunting reflections in the book, she muses on John 19:25:

Together they pushed aside the gawking crowds,
Holding one another down the twisting
way of sorrow, to Golgotha Hill
Tenderly she pulled Mary close, shielding her eyes
as the nails were driven home.
She could do nothing about the sounds.

She could do nothing about the sounds. That line has really stayed with me. Too often when I meditate on the horror of the crucifixion I focus almost exclusively on the visual. In general, when I picture any part of Jesus' life, in my head it's more like a silent movie than a real event with not only sights but smells, textures, tastes, and sounds -- sometimes terrible, terrible sounds.

Picturing Jesus' life as seen through the eyes of his beloved mother -- as well as asking for her prayers that I might better understand the One whom she was blessed to know so intimately -- has deepened my connection to Christ's life and actions by breaking it out of the silent movie and bringing alive the colors, sensations, smells and sounds that were a part of it. I found Behold Your Mother to be a great resource for these types of meditations, and plan to keep it handy to flip through when I need some inspiration.

You can read of Heidi's writing on this topic at her book blog, Behold Your Mother.

Mommyblogging and the water well

As I mentioned back in February, closing comments for Lent gave me a lot of insight into the role that the internet plays in my life. I didn't want to get into too many details in that post since I knew it would lend itself to discussion, so here is the promised Part II.


Back in college I spent a couple of semesters as an anthropology major. I found the study of different peoples and cultures fascinating, and drank up all the material in the courses. One thing that always jumped out to me was that in almost every group of people we studied across time and place, one thing they all had in common were clear, cohesive communities: whether we were studying the ancient peoples of the Fertile Crescent or villages of medieval Europe or modern-day tribes in the jungles of South America or even early 20th century American neighborhoods, one thing almost all these peoples had in common was that they lived around people they knew -- the same people, including all their family members -- for their whole lives.

I think often about how different modern American life is, particularly for those of us outside of the workforce. Many of us experience the historically new phenomenon of living around strangers: we don't know many of our neighbors, don't run into people we know at the grocery store or the post office, don't live close to immediate (or even extended) family members, etc. If we feel part of any kind of close community at all (e.g. a church group), it is often not people who live close to us, whom we run into casually. As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, other than planned, scheduled meetups, I could probably go a couple of weeks (or maybe months) without running into anyone I know in the course of daily life.

I've talked a lot about this phenomenon with friends who are immigrants from places where cohesive communities still exist (e.g. rural France, Mexico, India) and have come up with a lot of thoughts on the subject. And, hey, why have a blog if you can't write up this sort of stuff and tell the internet about it? So, for your reading pleasure, here is my little theory about social interaction and modern life, based on extensive studies and research (read: I thought about it while washing dishes):


I feel like I need four different types of social interaction (broadly defined) on a regular basis. In order of importance, they are:

1. Quality interaction with others -- forming new friendships and strengthening existing relationships with friends and family members
   
   
2. Casual interactions with people I know where my expected participation level is flexible
   
   
3. An awareness of the events and concerns of my community as a whole
   
   
4. Simply running into people I know in the course of daily activity, even if we don't have much direct interaction
   

I feel like regularly having opportunities for each of these types of social activity is ideal for my psychological wellbeing; and, looking at human history, it would seem that we're designed to have these things as natural parts of our lives. Yet here in my part of suburbia, I only have #1 (and even that is with great effort). So what am I to do about #2-4?

I remember back in those anthropology classes, I noticed that a common community setup was that there would be a central area where people, especially women, would gather as part of their daily work, e.g. a tribe might have one community fire pit for cooking, or there would be one spot on the river where the women would all gather to do the washing. In particular, one visual that stuck with me was that of the village water well: in some long-forgotten textbook I read the description of a tribal village that had one central well where the women would go to get the family's water. There was some sort of central oven nearby, and this area, of course, became a bustling hub of social activity.

By virtue of having the community water well area, women didn't have to separate their lives into "work time" and "socializing time" in order to get needs #2-4 met. Socializing would be interwoven into their daily tasks, rather than something that had to be sought as an entirely separate endeavor. I've often imagined how helpful this must have been: when you arrived at the well, you could listen to the conversations and jump in if you were feeling talkative, or hang back and mostly listen if you were feeling tired or reserved. Unlike the carefully-orchestrated playdates of today, casual interaction could be just that: casual. You had an opportunity for social interaction, to hear what others in your community were talking about, without an obligation to be "on" if you weren't feeling up to it. Ever since I read about that village well I've often wished that we had something similar today, a community gathering place that would meet our desire for casual interactions, to fill needs #2-4 in my list above.

This, I believe, is where the internet can be a great thing.

In the past few years since the explosion of blogs, I've come to feel like my laptop is my village well. In between loading the dishwasher and vacuuming the living room, I can stop by the well and see what folks are buzzing about. Simcha's children are seeing if they can sustain life on Easter candy alone, Ann is finding beauty and deep symbolism in an ordinary task, BooMama is having technical problems like mine, Abigail shares a lesson she learned about parenting, Danielle Bean reflects on being a mom and an introvert, Veronica Mitchell is undoubtedly vowing to never mention Esperanto again (ever), and Maggie's son still won't take naps.

In a five-minute scan of some of the blogs I read, I can get a quick pulse for what's going on with women who have similar values and lives to mine. It's wonderfully unpredictable: sometimes I might be challenged intellectually, other times I might be moved to tears, and other times I might laugh out loud. I see the familiar names in the comments at other blogs, often people whose blogs I follow as well. I can join in the conversation by leaving a comment, or just sit back and listen. In addition to following others' stories, I can start a conversation of my own by writing a post for my own blog and inviting comments, or I could just check email to see what friends and family have to say today.

This is, ultimately, what I was getting at in my last post on the subject: for a lot of us, I think the internet is the closest thing we have to the community water well. It's not necessarily a good place to try to form deep friendships, but it is a place where we can quickly, casually throw out the question "You ever have days like this?" in the midst of our daily work; a place where we can just listen to what's going on with other people we "know" when we're feeling too tired to make conversation ourselves; a way we can feel like we have a pulse on what's going on in a larger community throughout each day.

To be sure, I don't think it's a replacement for real-life friendships, and I don't think that virtual communication can or should ever replace fostering quality friendships with people whom you see in person. It's not even a perfect replacement for a thriving community center. But, when you have three kids in diapers and you're the only person on your suburban street who's home during the day and you never see anyone you know at the grocery store, there are some days when it's all you've got in terms of opportunities for casual chitchat with other adults. And on those days you feel really, really blessed to have your own little water well sitting on your kitchen counter.


So those are my little musings on the subject...what do you think?


UPDATE: A part II to this post is here.

My life on stained glass

Yesterday was only the third or fourth Easter since I came to believe in God. I sat in our church overwhelmed with the joy of someone for whom the Good News is still breaking news.

As I looked around the sanctuary, teeming with life and color, the stained glass windows kept catching my eye. The last time I'd seen them was at night, for the Good Friday service, and the way they now exploded with color in the sunlight made them look like something entirely different than the dark, muted windows I'd seen the night before. That contrast sparked the memory of something...I just couldn't put my finger on what it was.

When the choir began to sign the now-familiar Communion hymn, I became overwhelmed with gratitude on so many different levels; and as I wiped a tear out of my eye, I realized what was familiar to me about the dazzling windows:

Stained glass is designed for light. To look at a stained glass window in the dark is to miss the artist's intent. Its true beauty and full meaning cannot be understood without light pouring through it -- the more light, the better. Even someone beholding a stained glass window for the first time could see that it was crafted by a loving, intelligent hand, and that the artist's sole purpose for creating this object was for it to diffuse light.

My life before God, I realized, was like a stained glass window in the dark. Only now that I have found the Light in which it is meant to be viewed, only now that I understand that the very purpose of my existence is to let as much Light pour through it as possible, do I see it as it was designed to be seen. It is only when I allow Light to shine through the stained glass window of my life that can I see its true, glorious beauty.

Blog awards and posts from Lent

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who voted for Et Tu? in the Catholic Blog Awards. I am humbled and honored by all the votes, especially in the Most Spiritual category -- second place, wow!

Also, thanks for bearing with me through Lent while I closed comments. It was an extremely helpful, fruitful and necessary exercise for me to take a step back and write in "silence" for a while. Though I'm not going to retroactively open comments to those posts, if anyone has a question or comment about something I wrote during Lent, feel free to email me or leave a comment to this post.

Thanks for reading!

Easter Vigil, one year later

How could a reasonable person living in the 21st century actually believe that at the Catholic Mass, bread and wine are truly (like, not symbolically) changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ?

This was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when considering Catholicism (notice that "Christ's real presence in the Eucharist" was conspicuously absent from the "five Catholic teachings that just kinda made sense to me" list). When I first heard that the Church still believes that the Mass makes Christ's one sacrifice at Calvary present here and now, that the bread and wine is seriously turned into the flesh and blood of God himself, I prayerfully thought: "Are you kidding me?" I thought I must be missing something. I'd never heard a more bold, audacious claim made by a modern religion.

There was a part of me that kept hoping I'd find that it was all a misunderstanding, that Catholics were only required to believe that the consecration of the Eucharist was a really, really, really important symbolic event, that all that crazy talk about drinking blood and eating flesh was just some old fashioned superstition that us enlightened modern folks weren't required to believe. I was a lifelong atheist, after all. It was enough of a feat that I even came to believe in God in the first place. It was enough of a leap of faith for me to believe that some miracles might have happened a few times throughout history. But to ask a former militant atheist to believe that a miracle happens at every single Catholic Mass, that bread and wine are actually changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ despite the fact that they look exactly the same...it seemed too much to ask.

It is surprising, then, that as I sit down to write my reflections for this Easter Vigil, when I think about all that has happened in this first year since my husband and I entered the Catholic Church, as I marvel at how different this year has been than any before, I find that there is really only one thing to talk about: the Eucharist.

For my one-year anniversary post I could try to pen a great ode proclaiming my joy at having come to know God on a level I never imagined possible for someone like me; I could write about the challenges we've faced, and the oasis that our newfound faith provided for us when we felt cast out into the desert; I could have my husband do a guest post about the transformation he's seen in me (and in himself) in the past year; I could talk about how my role in Christ's sacrifice is finally real to me; I could say something about how my life is unrecognizable from what it was only a few years ago. But when I started to write on each of those topics, I realized that each one of them -- everything, really -- comes back to the Eucharist.

Though God certainly could work in my life if I didn't receive the Blessed Sacrament (as he did tremendously before I became Catholic), the way he's slowly but steadily infiltrated my body and soul since I began to receive him physically at Communion is something new -- I am united with him now in a way I was not before.

To be honest, I am surprised by this.

When I received my first Communion at Easter Vigil last year I had come to accept that the teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is true. Or, perhaps more accurately, I was willing to accept on faith that it was not false. I was undoubtedly being led to the Catholic Church, and found its defense of this teaching to be solid and compelling, so I trusted that it was true in some mysterious way, even though I didn't really get it. That was the best I could do, and I never expected to understand it any more than that. Even as the months have rolled by, after receiving Communion week after week, I still don't know how it works. I don't even have a visceral reaction when I first see the consecrated host held above the altar, and don't think I ever felt the Holy Spirit hit me like a ton of bricks the moment the consecrated host was placed on my tongue. And yet, despite the lack of immediate emotions, despite the fact that I can't tell you exactly how it all works...I believe now with all my heart that it is true. I know that I eat the flesh and drink the blood of God at the Mass, and that it is the source of my strength.

I know it for the same reason a baby knows that its mother's milk is the source of its nourishment: the baby can't tell you how the milk is created by the release of prolactin and the cells in the alveoli. He can't tell you about the importance of immunoglobulin IgA and fat-to-water ratios. He couldn't even begin to understand how and why the milk nourishes him if you tried to explain it. He just knows how very much he needs it. He knows that the mysterious substance that his mother gives him is the source of his strength as much as he knows anything at all in his little life. And so it is with me and the Eucharist.

This belief in and love of the Eucharist is the most surprising thing that's ever happened to me. Never in my dreams would I have thought that I could believe such an incredible, outlandish claim. On some occasions I have even taken a step back to look at it all as objectively as possible, to set everything aside and honestly ask myself if this is all in my head, if perhaps I am eating bread and drinking wine at the Mass, but that its great symbolic value has led me to put myself in a different state of mind. And all I can come up with is this:

If this is a symbol, then I am insane.

It's not Tolkien, but that's about the best I can do. The way this Sacrament has slowly transformed my soul and given me a connection to God that I never knew before, the way I could easily move myself to tears at the thought of not being able to receive it, the strength I have drawn from having this direct communion with God...if these things are not real, then nothing is.

As I reflect back on this year and compare it to years past, the whole story of my life comes together in a very simple way: I realize now that my entire conversion process, really, my entire life, was one long search for the Eucharist.

Surrexit Dominus vere, alleluia!

A video that sums up the way I feel today

Blog of the Week: John C. Wright (updated)

Over at my links blog I just posted a roundup of some fascinating, thought-provoking posts from science fiction writer and former atheist John C. Wright. If you like my little ramblings here on this blog, you will love reading what an actual smart person has to say about converting to Christianity from atheism. I highly recommend taking a moment to check out some of his posts.

UPDATE 3/22/08: John C. Wright announced yesterday that "after three years of prayer, thought, and debate, and an honest attempt to follow where the spirit leads me, I am joining the Roman Catholic Church this Easter." Please keep him in your prayers.

Good Friday

I found this stirring video this morning and wanted to share. It's St. John's account of the Passion sung in Gregorian chant, with images from The Passion of the Christ. (This is Part 4. Here is Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)



It's all the more difficult to watch in light of a stunning fact that Simcha recently reminded me of: if I were the only person on earth, this still would have happened...for me.

God and computer problems, Part II

Back in this post I talked about how some technical issues were about to drive me insane. To summarize, I thought I would make a simple change to my blog (getting a custom domain name), and it ended up causing all sorts of errors because of a technical glitch on Blogger's end. After researching the issue and talking to other people in the Blogger help forums, I came to the realization that there was not a single thing I could do about it -- nothing -- and I didn't even have a way to directly contact Blogger technical support to let them know the problem was happening. Most people were getting an error page when trying to access my site, and I didn't know what the problem was or whether it would be fixed in an hour or a day or a year (or never).

After informing my husband of my plan to resolve the situation by throwing my laptop through the window and stomping on it for a while, he asked an interesting question: "Why are you so mad about this?" When the only answer I could give was something along the lines of, "Because...just BECAUSE!" it occurred to me that perhaps I should think a bit more about what had me so bothered by this situation.

As I alluded to in my last post on the subject, it came down to trusting God. As my husband pointed out, I should trust God with the technical problems on the blog where I write about trusting God. And that should be easy, right? After all, I've made a lot of progress in terms of letting go of my white-knuckle grip on the major areas of my life, so it should be no big thing to let go of my anxiety about this. Yet when I tried to do just that, when I tried to cultivate a peaceful state of mind in which I rested in the knowledge that the only thing I needed to do was listen for God's will and it would all work out according to his plan...I couldn't.

But why?

It's not that I thought that the fabric of the universe was going to fall apart if people couldn't read my little blog. It's not that I felt that the errors were inexcusable -- my background is in the tech industry so I'm sympathetic to the fact that those things happen sometimes. It's not even that I thought it would have any noticeable impact on my or anyone else's life. So what was the problem?

Lack of control: I was completely, totally powerless.

As a modern American, I realized, there are very few things in my life over which I have no control. I've never experienced food shortage or crop failure; I've never had a well dry up; none of my children have ever had illnesses that couldn't be at least partially treated with medicine; when I'm in pain there are drugs to make it go away; and thanks to air conditioning and central heating, I can even have a sense of controlling the weather by keeping my house and car at temperatures that are comfortable to me. I. Am. In. Control. All. The. Time.

I decided to brainstorm to come up with a list of situations I might experience over which I have zero control, where there is not one thing I can do to change the outcomes. Some of the few things I could come up with are:

• Computer problems where technical support is not available
• Getting stuck in traffic
• Turbulence on airplanes
• When I need to get in touch with my husband while he's out and he forgot his cell phone at home
• When I've lost something irreplaceable and can't find it anywhere
  

When I looked at the list, I was amazed: sure enough, these are the times when I am most anxious and/or angry. I am more discontent in those types of situations than I have been when I've faced life-altering events like, say, when I got a life-threatening blood clot during pregnancy and found out I had a serious clotting disorder. Even though the latter situation was far more important, I had more control: I could research the best medicines to take for the blood clot, switch doctors to get better treatment, modify my activity to lower the risk of a pulmonary embolism, read up on the best diet for people with my disorder, make sure to stay at a healthy weight, etc. I could say that I trusted God with the outcome, and I really did...yet I still had some amount of control.

As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I've made a lot of progress in terms of trusting God with the long-term plan for my life. Interestingly, it all started last year during Lent. The day I wrote this post was a turning point in my life. It was the moment that the concept of "trusting God" finally clicked for me, that I finally understood what it was all about.

I can't help but wonder about the timing, then, that another piece of the puzzle fell into place for me during Lent this year, almost a year to the day after my first lesson on the subject. Last year I began to understand that I needed to work on trusting God with the big picture. This year I am beginning to understand that there's a lot more to it than that; that to really put my life in God's hands means to trust him with everything -- everything. I'm realizing that even if I can prayerfully turn to that famous line from Matthew 26:39 when facing major crossroads, I will only have truly abandoned my life to God when I can find myself stuck in traffic or staring at an error message on my computer and calmly say, "Not my will, but Yours."

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Confession

As soon as I hit Publish I'm going to head out to confession.

In my long road from atheism to Christianity, one of my favorite memories is when I made my first confession, the Wednesday before Easter of last year. When I think back on it I first remember the ethereal chant music that wafted throughout our beautiful church, and the surprising sense of stillness and peace that pervaded the sanctuary, even though there were more than 500 other people there. I remember marveling at the diversity of the crowd: a man in an expensive business suit would be standing next to a young construction worker in muddy workboots, followed by a teenage girl and an elderly lady. We were all so different, yet all united by our beliefs, all there for the same purpose. I remember thinking about all the unpacked boxes that waited for me at home, and how thrilled I was about our much-needed new house. It felt like it was the first day of the rest of my life, and it was.

I don't have time to write much more today, but to celebrate the memory of this wonderful event in my life, here are some posts in which I've shared my experiences with this sacrament:

• A first confession, part I
• A first confession, part II
• Confessing my sins to a priest

Daily bread, for the next 20 years

The the March Write-Away Contest over at Scribbit really got me thinking. The topic is simply: The next 20 years.

My senior year in college a professor actually asked us to write an essay about that very thing: where are you going to accomplish in the next 20 years? Boy, was I all over that one! I opened up my "Goals" Excel spreadsheet, categorized by short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, and started writing. I started with where I wanted to be in 20 years -- the founder and CEO of a thriving web development company with at least 30 employees -- and worked backwards from there. I also threw in the various hobbies that I was going to pursue, such as becoming a published author by the time I was 30 and learning to program in Java by the time I was 28. It felt great to know exactly where I was headed!

The problem was, my life veered off the Excel spreadsheet. At the end of each year I'd review all the great plans I'd laid, only to find that I'd accomplished barely half of them. "Goals for this Year - 2001," "Goals for this Year - 2002," "Goals for this Year - 2003," all had distressingly few items crossed off the list. I started to wonder if I needed to find better ways to motivate myself, if perhaps my tendency to procrastinate was to blame, if I was destined for failure.

And then, somewhere along the way, I started to believe in God.

After a life of atheism, I came to believe that there really is a Creator, that we can know him, and that he has a plan for our lives -- a plan better than anything we could come up with on our own. When I looked back on my discarded Excel spreadsheets with this newfound knowledge, I started to see something: in each of those years there were certain things I'd accomplished that were not on the spreadsheet, yet that brought greater peace and joy to my life than anything I'd planned to do. Most of these things didn't come with much acclaim and didn't have the worldly glamor that my goals had had, yet I could see now that they were far better. I started to wonder just how much more I could have done, how much more my life could have been enriched, if I'd stopped banging my head against doors that were closed, and started peeking into the doors that were open. I started to wonder if maybe Someone else had a better plan for my life than I did.

So, a couple years ago, I decided to set aside the spreadsheets and the goals lists. I decided to stop praying this:

Give us this day a detailed plan of how You're going to provide bread for us every day for the next 20 years with specifics as to what quantities You will provide and at what intervals we can expect to receive them so that I might work that into my goals milestones.

And to start praying this:

Give us this day our daily bread.

I would plan my life around much shorter intervals, discerning what I should do today or this week or maybe this month, and not try to speculate where God would lead me after that. I would seek not to follow my desire for worldly status or other people's approval, but to let go and let the finger of God be my guide. And as I reflect on this seemingly reckless abandonment of my life to an unseen God whom I had barely gotten to know, I keep coming back to the same thought:

This shouldn't work...but it does.

Perhaps it's my nonreligious background, but I continue to be amazed that my life has not fallen into scattered chaos without my planning it out to the last detail. What I secretly worried would happen is that this whole "following God's will" thing would lead to me jumping from one idea to the next, leaving a bunch of unfinished projects in my wake after I drifted off to do the next thing that I decided was "God's will." But that hasn't happened. Looking back at the past couple of years, there's more clarity in my life than ever before. It's like watching a play unfold: I see storylines cropping up, I'm starting to see a clear direction and purpose in where I have been led so far...I just don't know where it's going from here, or how it's going to end. As I've said before, it's more exciting than anything I could have ever planned.

So, what will happen in the next 20 years? It gives me a little thrill to say: I have no idea! There are a couple things I feel pretty sure about: e.g. that we're meant to stay in the city we're in for the rest of our lives, that I'll always do something involving writing, however informally; and we have taken basic measures for planning for the future such as retirement and college savings accounts. But other than that, I have no idea. I don't know where my husband's career will be. I don't know if I'll ever get any writing published. I don't know if I'll ever go back to work. I don't know whether we'll be rich or poor. I don't even know how many children we'll have.

When I think of the rest of my life here in earth, however long that may be, I don't expect that it will always be comfortable or easy. But, if the past couple of years are any indicator, I expect to find that God will indeed give me my daily bread, every day, and that with it will come a freedom and a deep sense of peace that I could have never found on my own.

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Getting out of the boat

Recently I was all excited about doing a little project that I felt pretty certain that God was calling me to do -- the details of what it was don't matter, suffice it to say that it was a small but enjoyable task that I thought would be a wonderful way to show Christ to others. About half way into the undertaking, it became more challenging than I'd anticipated. Then yesterday morning I heard through the grapevine that someone had made a belittling comment about it, expressing some criticism of it in a condescending way that really got under my skin. That was the last straw in making it officially "not fun anymore."

I was exhausted from a busy weekend anyway, and this little comment threw me into a bit of a funk. I was so disappointed that the wind had been taken out of my sails about this endeavor, and thinking about that snowballed into a general malaise. To make myself feel better, during the kids' naptime I drifted off to do what I usually do to mentally run away when the going gets rough: I escaped into a book, surfed the web a little bit and then watched some television. At the time, I didn't feel like that was the right thing to do. These activities were not making me feel more peaceful, and in fact seemed only to serve to make me more unsettled. I felt like what I needed to do was to stop trying to distract myself and step away from the book and the computer and the television and just pray. But I didn't want to. Praying sounded uncomfortable, it sounded like it would take too long, and I wanted to feel good now. So I continued to bury my head in the sand of shallow distractions.

Though I felt somewhat better later, I never did completely pull out of the bad mood yesterday. For the entire day I felt bummed out about that condescending comment, uninspired about the project, and disappointed that God felt distant. I contemplated abandoning my project altogether.

And then, this morning, I saw something that gave me insight into what was going on. I watched a sermon by T.D. Jakes called The Last Night on the Boat, and as soon as I turned it on I knew it was what I needed to hear -- not what I wanted to hear -- but what I needed to hear.

"Where do you go when you're traumatized? Where do you go when things are too much for you?" he asked the audience. "That's your boat."

His sermon was about the symbolism of the boat, how the boat was where Peter and the other disciples felt comfortable and safe, how they wanted to cling to it in times of trouble, how they had to get out of it and leave their lives as fishermen in order to become fishers of men. When the going gets tough, Jakes pointed out, when things start to get painful or uncomfortable in our spiritual journey, we say to ourselves, "I'm going back to what I can control. I'm going back to what I can handle. I'm going back to what I'm good at. I'm going back to what's safe for me."

And in an oratory technique a bit more startling than what I'm used to from my soft-spoken priest, he implored the congregation to "slap somebody and say 'GET OUT OF THAT BOAT'!"

After taking a moment to imagine just how awkwardly I would have carried out that order had I been there in person, I realized that that was exactly what I needed to hear: GET OUT OF THAT BOAT!

What happened with that little project is what's happened over and over again as I've worked to grow closer to God: I know what I'm supposed to do, but when the going gets rough, I run back to the boat. In my case "the boat" is things like seeking other people's approval, trying to get a big thumbs-up from the world in all that I do, wasting time reading uninspiring content on the internet, watching vapid television or finding comfort in certain foods. Those activities are comfortable and provide immediate gratification with little required on my part.

It was interesting to reread the passage that Jakes alluded to in his sermon, Matthew 14:22-33, where Peter sees Jesus walking on the water. Peter says "Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you on the water." Jesus tells him to come, and he gets out of the boat. He's scared, but he does it anyway. I imagined myself in Peter's shoes, and thought of how differently it would play out given my current attitude: after I came to believe in God I prayed for him to ask me to come to him, i.e. to give me some direction so that I might know he exists, and know what he wants from my life. "Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you on the water," I basically said. And here's how it played out from there:

JESUS: Come.

ME: Who, me? Are you serious, Lord? To be honest I didn't really expect an answer.

JESUS: Come.

ME: How am I going to be able to walk on water? That's impossible! I can tell you right now that I am going to drown if I set foot outside this boat. It's night time, the water is deep, this is too scary! You cannot possibly be asking me to do this!

JESUS: Come.

ME: Ya know, I'd love to, but now that I'm actually looking at the black abyss of water that stands between you and I, I think I'll just go ahead and stay here in the boat.

As I've said before, my problem is not usually knowing what God wants me to do, but actually doing it. In matters large and small, over and over again I've found that doing the right thing sounds a whole lot more exciting when the idea is first proposed; but when I actually take a look at just what I'm being asked to do, when I look down at the inky water that I'm asked to step out into, I want to run back to what's safe. Sometimes I feel like it's too inconvenient, other times I feel like it's too painful or too scary or just too different than anything I've ever done. Sometimes I think it's impossible. But I'll never get close to God if don't step out of the boat.

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God and computer problems, Part I

Remember back when I said that the old domain for this blog, et-tu.blogspot.com, would always work? How I assured readers that, despite any epic sagas that might be unfolding in the custom domain registration department, one rock-solid anchor of stability was that at least there would never be any problems with the old address? In a sanity-testing turn of events, the new custom domain, ConversionDiary.com, is working fine (for now), but the old domain is not.

The reason I spontaneously decided to get a custom domain is because it sounded so easy (excuse me for a moment while I look for a pen and my "Worst Ideas Ever" list...); for some odd reason I thought my original Blogspot address would automatically forward to my new domain so that any existing links or bookmarks to my site would still work. Where on earth did I get that crazy idea? Oh, wait, I remember. Because Blogger said "your original Blogspot address will automatically forward to your new domain [so that] any existing links or bookmarks to your site will still work."

After a lot of researching, posting in the help forum and going through a few mental acceptance/denial cycles about the fact that there is really no way to directly contact Blogger technical support, I finally realized that there is nothing I can do. Nothing. When most people try to access my site through the original address (a.k.a. the only address anyone knows), instead of the promised automatic redirection they get an error page that asks if they want to go to the new address which HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED FOR VIRUSES OR MALWARE (hysteria emphasis mine). Any search engine ranking I might have had has plummeted. Though I have stats turned off for Lent, other bloggers with this problem report that they've lost more than 50% of their readers, and that in many cases their feed subscribers have stopped getting new content.

I was recounting this tale of woe to my husband, trying to fully convey the gravity of the situation with dramatic hand gestures and even a creepy, ominous tone in my voice when I said the word "MALWARE," and he started laughing. Laughing. [Warning: husbands, do not try this at home.] The following conversation ensued:

ME: I couldn't help but notice that as I was recounting my tale of blog agony, you broke out in laughter. Would you care to share what you found so funny? [Probably not exactly how I phrased it at the time.]

HIM: You're talking about the blog Et Tu, right? The one where you're always writing about trusting God?

ME: Yes. And...?

HIM: Umm, do you think that maybe you should trust God with the technical difficulties that happen on the blog where you write about trusting God?

ME: [Ran off to lock myself in a closet and scream.]

I didn't actually do that last part, but I thought about it. Instead I just mustered up that special look that I reserve for situations where I have nothing to say because I have been smacked upside the head with a cluebat, when I have been told something that is annoying but true and I can't even save face by pretending I don't think it's true because I wrote a blog post saying I thought it was true. (Sadly, I actually have had enough practice with that situation to have perfected a look in response to it.)

There have been things I struggled with in my conversion from atheism to Catholicism. The universe has a Creator? There is a loving God even with all the suffering we see in the world? God became a man? He died and was resurrected from the dead? The Bible really is the inspired word of God?

The dilemmas I faced when I pondered those questions, however, were mere pebbles in the road compared to this one, a teaching so challenging and difficult that it sends me into spiritual crisis to even ponder it: I really am supposed to strive for a calm trust in God, even with computer problems? Even if said computer problems could accurately be described as "horribly unfair" or "infuriating"? Even if it's preventing me from writing blog posts about trusting in God?!

Oddly enough, this little Blogger issue has become a sort of crucible for me this Lent. It seemed like it should have been a small matter to let go of my angst about a silly technical problem, and yet I found it harder to trust God with that than with even some of the big medical or financial issues we've faced in recent years. But why? That's what I've been pondering all week, and what I'll go into in Part II of this post.

UPDATE: Click here for Part II

Comments closed for Lent

Thanks to Critical Mass for introducing me to the word "cluebat." I will get a lot of use out of it.

Love and conversion

Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was frequently exposed to the expression "God is Love." I saw it on t-shirts, bumper stickers and the occasional Precious Moments figurine, and figured that I pretty much knew what it meant: it was a shorthand way of describing one of God's characteristics, i.e. "God (that Guy we believe in who's kind of like a dad, only nicer) is love (meaning he's really, really, really loving)." Right?

It is only recently that I realized that I had it wrong. One of the biggest lessons I learned in the conversion process, maybe the biggest lesson I learned in my life, was that the phrase "God is Love" is meant to be taken literally: God is love. God = Love. It's not just some characteristic, but his essence. To paraphrase the Cynical Christian's recent post on a similar subject, when we say "God is love," we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- love is God.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how this understanding of God and love played such a key role in my conversion. It brings light to three issues in particular that would sometimes perplex me as I walked the long path from atheism to belief:


1. It explains the importance of humility.

When I first began to explore the possibility of God's existence, I approached the endeavor the way one might approach proving that something in the material world exists: I put God under the microscope, so to speak, waiting with arms folded across my chest until proof of his existence was presented to me. Occasionally I would read something about the importance of humility, which I took to mean that one should be open to new data. So I'd make a mental note to make sure that I wasn't closing my mind to any sort of proof God might offer me, and promptly return to sitting and waiting with my arms folded across my chest.

This approach made sense since I thought I was seeking an abstract theoretical concept called "God," and saw myself as involved in a process that should require nothing on my part other than observation of data. Yet I couldn't seem to escape this concept of humility -- and the more I read, the more I realized that all these great Christian thinkers were talking about something much more than just admitting that you don't have all the answers. They were talking about embracing radical, self-abandoning humility. I didn't get it. Did these people have hang-ups or something? Why were they so determined to believe that you had to be humble yourself before you could seek God?

Now that I realize that I was seeking not an impersonal theoretical concept but love, Love itself, it makes sense. I won't get in over my head by trying to fully explain the Christian virtue of humility and get into all the reasons it's important; suffice it to say that I came to see a close connection between love and humility. Even in human relationships, I realized, one does not find love by starting with an overly skeptical, "prove it!" sort of attitude. Love is not something that can be dissected under a microscope; to find it requires emotional involvement on the part of the seeker, a willingness to investigate with the heart in addition to the coldly rational part of the mind. It requires a questioning mind, and a humble heart.

Which brings me to the next thing I realized...


2. It explains why it took me so long to "feel" God's presence.

As anyone who's glanced through the archives to this blog knows, I never used to "feel" God's presence. I eventually came to believe in his existence on an intellectual level, but was disappointed that I didn't feel much on an emotional level. It always seemed like I was talking to myself in prayer, and I often felt a bit jealous that other people seemed to "know" God in a way that I did not.

Part of that might have been due to the normal spiritual dryness that most people experience at some point or another, and part is surely because I'm not a very "touchy feely" type of person. But there was another factor as well, possibly the biggest factor: I didn't understand that God is Love. Once I realized that you could replace the word "God" with the word "Love" in almost any instance, the problem behind a lot of my spiritual struggles became clear. For example:

"I'm seeking God" = "I'm seeking Love"

"I want to experience God" = "I want to experience Love"

"I want to know God" = "I want to know Love"

When I considered the statements on the left side of the equations, each sounded like a nebulous, intellectually difficult endeavor that would require lots of passive contemplation from an armchair; but when I considered the statements on the right side, each sounded like an exciting, intriguing endeavor that would require the active participation of my mind, heart and soul. I might not have felt like I knew much about experiencing God, but I did know a thing or two about experiencing love: I knew that you don't fall in love by reading about it in books. You don't increase the amount of love in your life by sitting back and waiting for others to make the first move.

It was when I stopped asking "How does one experience God?" and started asking "How does one experience Love?" that I began to really feel God working in my life.


3. It explains why I now believe in God with all my heart.

In his conversion story, former atheist John C. Wright likened coming to know God to falling in love. He writes: "It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast." I can't think of a better summary of what I've experienced.

Back when I wrote my original conversion story I talked a lot about how much more sense the world made to me after seeing it through the lens of Christian teaching. The profound changes I saw based on that understanding alone were enough to convince me that Christianity spoke the truth about God and the world. But in the year and a half since I typed that up, something else has happened as well: my life has been infiltrated by Love. A real, external, palpable force of love has entered my life, a distinct presence that wasn't there before. I don't mean that I just feel happy more often or that I try to be more loving towards others or that I think nice thoughts more than I used to (though all that is true), but that the very Source of those things is now involved, and it's not coming from within me.

I used to think I'd always have doubts about God's existence. I'd been too atheistic in my beliefs for too long, so it would be too much of a change to think in terms of the supernatural. What I didn't anticipate when I made that prediction, however, is that I would find Love. This Love that has ever so slowly become the center of my life is more powerful than anything I've ever known, and to doubt its existence would be to doubt reality.

I could have probably come to deep, unhesitating belief in God much sooner if I'd understood from the beginning that by seeking God, I was ultimately seeking Love.

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