Sundays At The Church Of The Internet

For the first quarter century of my life, I went to church every Sunday.  I didn't mind the Mass so much, but the sermon did me in.  As a child I fidgeted in the pew, but as soon as I became capable of critical thinking, I fidgeted inside my head.  Proud of my book learning, I passed the time identifying logical fallacies and deploring the oratorical style, or lack thereof, of the man in the pulpit.

After the Ite, missa est released us, I would tear the chapel veil off my head and complain to my mother about yet another ridiculous sermon.  She, who probably had the same objections as I, would counsel humility, the suspension of judgment.  "But," I would counter in full adolescent preen, "if God didn't want me to use it, why did He give me a brain?"

Then for many years I didn't go to church at all.  But when life got difficult and my sense of invulnerability faded, I became aware of an annoying longing for spiritual guidance.  This led me to join crowds of lapsed Catholics and Jews at the local Unitarian church, but my old critical habit soon reared up its wizened head, and I stopped showing up.

After we moved to Vermont I started listening to On Being because it came on NPR while we were eating Sunday breakfast.  And because I usually missed part of it while I was out feeding the chickens I would later, when I thought of it, go to the website.

And I was off.  With the wind of the Holy Ghost in my sails, I discovered Viktor Frankl,  Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein.  Eckart Tolle, who looks like a Dark Forest elf, reminds me of the German nuns who were my first teachers.  Also, he owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  Do these sound like frivolous reasons to listen to a spiritual teacher?  If those priests of my childhood had owned a dog--or had a wife and children--I might have understood them better.

The vagaries of links led me to someone I would never have looked up, Geneen Roth, who lost all her money to Bernie Madoff and wrote beautifully about it, and to the illustrator Jennifer Orkin Lewis, whose works make me want to draw, or write, or something...

I know all too well the orthodox rebuttal to my digital spiritual wanderings.  I am picking and choosing what feels right--as opposed to what IS right--which is utterly non-Catholic.  But I'm not so sure about that.  No Sunday sermon on the dangers of mortal sin was as stark as Pema Chodron's message about the need to accept the impermanence of all things, to give up hope for good.

These digital homilies are hardly touchy-feely--at least the ones I read.  They deal with the inevitability of suffering and the need to be present, because the present is all we have.  And if an internet sermon makes me want to write or draw or stop thinking for a minute and just look into the green woods, isn't that all God's work?

A Spring Day's Thoughts About Death

Today I accompanied my spouse to have one of those tests that, according to the medical establishment, ensures that adults of a certain age will stave off death until...whenever.

In the waiting room, I thought about the situation.  Here I was, sitting comfortably and assuming that after the procedure we would drive home and have lunch and a nap and then get on with our lives.  But what if the procedure took longer than expected, and then I was called into another room, and had to wait for the doctor, and he finally came and made sure I was sitting down before he said the unthinkable?  It was entirely possible.  After all, that is what these tests on asymptomatic people are for.

Year after year, as I tie on the soft cotton gown in preparation for my regular mammogram, the same thoughts run through my head:  this is no big deal;  on the other hand....

We carry the seeds of our own death inside our body.  They are waiting for the right combination of light, temperature, hormones and whatever else to put out their malignant rootlets and cotyledons and eventually bloom and destroy us.  And all that doctors can do is to try their best to uproot these sprouts before they do us in, the way I pull up garden weeds in the spring before they get big.

Meditations on mortality are not new to me.  Decades before I qualified for a mammogram I would kneel at the altar rail once a year to hear the priest mutter "pulvus eris, et pulvus reverteris" ("thou art dust...") as he traced an ashen cross on my forehead.  In school, beginning at age twelve, we had annual spiritual retreats whose purpose was to remind us that, despite our surging hormones, we were vowed to death.  And before that, shortly after I learned to speak, I was taught to ask the Mother of God morning and night to pray for me now, and at the hour of my death, amen.

In this secular age, it is up to the medical establishment to remind us, through their choreography of blood tests, colonoscopies, EEGs, mammograms and sonograms, that we are dust.  They don't put it that way, of course, it being their purpose to stave off as long as possible the dwindling into dust.  But as we sit in waiting rooms reading cheery articles about eating healthy and staying young through exercise, the hour of dust grows closer every day.

The problem with the medical approach is that it doesn't tell us what to do about the eventual turning into dust--it just tries to postpone it for as long as possible.  But we all know that one day, no matter how carefully we have exercised, eaten anti-oxidants, and gone for check-ups, the doctor will call us in and make sure we're sitting down before he speaks.

The approach I knew in my early years, on the other hand, was full of helpful hints.  No matter how young you were, you became aware of the inevitability of death.  Having done that, you could devote yourself to ensuring that what came after death would be as good as possible (and it could, you were told, be very good).  And at any moment you could pray for assistance, as in "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death.  Amen."

We  are in such an in-between era.  The old solutions are gone, for the most part, and what do we have in their stead?  Tests and more tests, and an anti-oxidant-rich diet, and lots of exercise....

BTW, my spouse is fine.  Or I wouldn't be writing this.