Thoughts on the Current Lapsing Trend

There seems to be a sudden rash of interest in faith loss of late. Recently, I was invited to talk informally with students about doubt, and many more showed up than had been anticipated. Then I started getting emails from various people on the topic of doubt and faith loss, including a some marked with red "High Importance" exclamation points from a student writing a paper on the subject. And then, in scanning the news recently, I found that the same interest not just among the mostly ardent believers surrounding me but out there in the world. Here are a few headlines from yesterday: Americans Becoming Less Religious, Study Shows (LA Times). Most Religious Groups in USA Have Lost Ground (USA Today). Study: Fewer Catholics in New England (MSNBC).

Having just finished the manuscript of a book on faith loss and strategies for sensing God's invisible presence , I'm excited, of course. Maybe more people may buy my book! (A Field Guide to God, due out in early 2010.) [The book's subtitle—always a difficult part of the publishing process for me—is still under consideration, for which, pray that I'm not talked into anything dorky or cutsey or otherwise offensive or embarrassing. In fact, pray that they let me call the book just A Field Guide to God, which in my view is plenty pfiffy to sell it.]

But there's a deeper level on which the problem, if it can be called one, interests and excites me. All these people leaving the church are, after all, going somewhere else to look for God—potentially somewhere better, if church wasn't where the excitement of God's presence was for them. They're moving. Not just leaving, which sounds so much like an end, but going somewhere. I'm guessing they're not just going home to watch TV and eat potato chips and forget about God altogether. Historically, the death of religion always brings faith growth. This leaving or lapsing or loss is, has got to be, the opposite of complacency and stagnation—both of which worry me more than whether or not people are attending one or the other church.

Not that church is bad. Or necessarily a place where faith stagnates or becomes complacent. Often quite the opposite.

But the biggest danger to true believers, in my opinion, is not that their faith will disappear but that God will. In their perception, at least. They'll start taking God's presence—and all evidence of it in their experience, in nature, in their interaction with others, and in the miracles that fill our days—for granted. Or, as my students write in their papers, for granite. For an edifice, or a set of rock hard traditions, and stop caring much about the divine parent behind it all. Invisible and inaudible and intangible, but, as Paul reassures the Athenians in Acts, "not far from any one of us" (17:27 TNIV). As believers, we can have faith, but lose a sense of God's presence. And that, I think, is a worse place to be than simply questioning or rejecting the practices of this or that group of believers to which they had previously belonged.

I lost my faith entirely, as I saw it, for over a decade of my life, and that was a hard thing. But, as a result of that loss, I think, I later came to believe in a bigger and more relevant way. More questioning and doubt laden. Less accepting of pat answers. More appreciative of God's involvement in my life. More aware of the listener on the other end of my worries and longing, the invisible arm across my shoulder, the silent shuffle of another's feet as I walk in my garden.

Doubt, as I see it, is good, perhaps the best thing that can happen to a believer. If you doubt, you are searching, trying to find God. And God hovers nearby, having designed all of history, every boundary between us, every division, as a way of causing us to notice and come. Or so Paul sums up all of history for the people of Athens, whom he describes as "extremely religious. . . in every way." He told them that "From one ancestor" God "made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27 NRSV).

So that we would search. And perhaps grope and find. I love this verse.

Grope. God wants us to grope, expects us to have to grope—and planned it that way, in fact.

Anyway, that's where I am with this business of doubt and lapsing, in case you want to know.

[There, now, I've spent the entire morning blogging after a year long hiatus while I worked on my book. For me, it's all but impossible to do both well. That's another problem with blogs—in addition to bloggers' tendency to misjudge tone and audience and end up sounding like asses—that I neglected mention in class when we were talking about blogging the other day: You either blog or you write.]

Radio Blues

I was interviewed today regarding my post of 28 February—about allowing my daughters to watch The Hills Have Eyes—on a Christian radio program called John and Stephanie. Stephanie was clearly outraged that I would let Charlotte watch again a movie that had given her nightmares and then that I would let her even younger sister watch it. I explained my miserable parenting as a preference for permission with discussion over prohibition and simply relenting to teenager pressure. And I tried to talk about the other part of my post: the fact that equally creepy stories are found in the Bible, and I see this as evidence that we are to confront and talk about such matters, work them through, even with our children, and not simply forbid the topics altogether and deny their existence.

As is to be expected in any discussion of objectionable or graphic material undertaken among believers, Stephanie quoted Paul to the Philippians: "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things" (4:8). Then she asked me if I didn't think allowing my kids to watch the movie with discussion wasn't tantamount to letting them have sex in the living room or use drugs in my presence. She also wisely pointed out that, while the Bible was made for teaching us how to be, movies were made for entertainment. Her parents had forbidden such movies, she said, so she had never seen them and never wanted to see them. The few glimpses of scary scenes she had caught in her life had stayed with her and damaged her.

I felt bad afterwards. I suppose it shouldn't have been any surprise that my parenting looks exactly as bad to others as I always feel it is. Parenting, I've said many times, is the hardest work I have ever done, and I always feel like a failure.

For the record, though, here's what I'd like my parenting to look like: I seek to be an engaged parent by being aware, really aware, of what my girls are thinking about. I want my daughters to like and trust me enough to keep me in the conversation, so that they will later talk to me openly about more difficult and personal issues—issues that I kept secret and dealt with entirely on my own at their age. I want to allow my children to gradually grow up and away from me. At the same time, though, I also want to have the kind of relationship with them that permits me to retain some small input in their decision-making.

Currently, I am the cool parent among my daughters' acquaintance. Not cool in the sense that I allow my kids to do anything I consider dangerous or immoral, like having sex or using drugs in my livingroom. And not cool in terms of being on top of the latest fashions or able to sing along with the popular music they like, as some of their parents can. Just cool in the sense that I am open to any discussion. I am frequently stern and preachy and demanding, even toward children not my own. I forbid language that they blithely use that, even in jest, belittles and hurts others, and I hold them accountable for racist and sexist views. They have to, in other words, talk nice. But just about any topic, as long as it's seriously considered and not raised purely for the sake of shocking me, is allowed in my presence. So we talk, and because we do I am cool, and my coolness—as well as the fact that my girls like spending time with me—is my main hope in this business of parenting my kids out into a pretty scary world.

My Christian students at JBU often intimate to me that I must be glad not to have been a Christian when I was their age because I got to experience, with impunity, all the stuff they missed or are missing out on. They think my life before I became a Christian must have been, in other words, more fun than my life afterward—and, more importantly, they think that a life without God is probably more fun than their own Christian lives are. I think this sort of skewed thinking comes from never really talking with their parents or other experienced people about depravity. My students grew up believing that sin, however true it might be, was something you just didn't talk about. As a result, they romanticize sin and don't realize such simple truths as that foulness really is foul and feels foul and that immoral behaviors never result in happiness.

There wasn't time in my discussion with John and Stephanie for me to go on about the thinness of the line—if there is a line at all—between teaching and entertaining. I think all art—and I include among it, somewhat reluctantly, even the often bad art of popular culture, even movies like The Hills Have Eyes—has the capacity to teach. Indeed, that's what I think the unconscious goal of most writers and filmmakers and painters and composers is: to teach while entertaining, or, to use Horace's words, to delight and instruct. I think the biblical writers have the same goal, otherwise there would be no complicated organizational schemes, like arranging a psalm's lines in the order of the Hebrew alphabet—no word play, no verse. The stories of scripture, Jesus's stories, would not teach as well if they had not been designed to entertain, and entertain well.

Anyway, I'm somewhere way off topic and must to bed. Sleep well, all.

An Intercessory Prayer of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester

I really like this prayer—the specificity of its generalities, especially. I also like how the selective capitalization—reminiscent of e. e. cummings and Thomas Carlyle—throws emphasis on certain words. The prayer is excerpted from "Prayers for the First Day of the Week," from the private devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, originally composed in Greek and Hebrew sometime during Andrewes' lifetime (1555-1626), here translated and abridged by Florence Higham in her biography, Lancelot Andrewes (London: SCM, 1952). I've become a fan of the biographer, who wrote a number of books about 17th century religious thinkers. I'm also reading a translation of Andrewes' devotions by John Henry Newman, but I don't like it as much.

I covet Andrewes' ability to pray outside of his own experience—to think of farmers' concerns and nursing moms and those who, surely unlike him (he was known for his sweet cheerfulness of temper), are tempted by suicide. Anyway, just thought I'd share it, as it seems as though this wonderful little biography doesn't get checked out much. Here it is:

O Thou that art the Hope of all the ends of the earth,
remember Thy whole creation for good, visit the
world in Thy compassion . . .
O Thou that wlkdest in the midst of the golden candlesticks
remove not our candlestick out of its place,
Set in order the things that are wanting,
Strengthen the things that remain.
. . . . .
Grant to Farmers and Keepers if cattle good seasons;
To the Fleet and fishers fair weather;
To tradesmen [I'm sure Andrewes and Higham meant traders], not to overreach one another;
To Mechanics, to ursue their business lawfully,
even to the meanest of work[ers],
even down to the Poor . . . .
Do Thou arise and have mercy
on those who are in the last necessity.
. . . . .
All in extreme age and weakness
All tempted to suicide
All troubled by unclean spirits,
the despairing, the sick in soul or body,
the faint-hearted.
All in prisons and chains, all under sentence of death,
orphans, widows, foreigners, travellers, voyagers,
women with child, women who give suck,
All in bitter servitude, or in mines, or in the galleys,
Or in loneliness.
. . . . .
O Lord I commend to Thee,
my soul and body,
my mind and thoughts,
my prayers, and my vows,
my senses and my limbs,
my words and my works,
my life and my death;
my brothers and my sisters, and their children,
my friends, my benefactors, my well-wishers,
those who have a claim on me;
my kindred and my neighbours,
my country and all christendom.

That's it. And I agree. Amen.

My Daughters Have Eyes

My fifteen-year-old daughter, I recently discovered, has been watching at her friends’ houses teen horror movies that my husband Kris and I would never think of renting. She’s seen the Saw series, whose storyline follows a murderer who makes his victims hurt themselves—saw off limbs, for example—in order to avoid being killed in some other way. Most recently, she saw The Hills Have Eyes, a sci-fi film about cannibalistic mutants murdering and, in one scene, raping their human victims.

After Charlotte saw it, she had trouble sleeping for a while and one night turned the heat way down, despite the icy weather, so that she could sleep with the covers up over her head to protect herself from dream attacks, metaphorically speaking, without getting too hot. Nevertheless, she begged and begged to be allowed to rent the film and watch it again, this time with her younger sister Lulu. Her trump cards—that viewing it would promote sisterly bonding and that Lulu was liable to see it on her own one of these days with her friends—eventually wore me down. On the way to the video store, though, we talked about why she liked it so much and why she wanted to watch movies that scared her so badly she couldn’t sleep.

“It doesn’t have anything bad in it besides the rape. Just violence,” Charlotte reassured me as I pulled the DVD from the shelf and scrutinized the case—The Unrated Version!, it touted—and balked yet again as we approached the checkout line.

I returned the DVD back to the shelf twice before I finally broke down and rented it, thinking, as I usually do in this sort of parenting dilemma, that anything that causes my daughters and me to talk seriously about problematic issues like rape and evil “others” (mutants) was probably worthwhile in the end. I remembered, too, the movies I had snuck off to see in my teens—Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and, the most disturbing film I have seen in my life, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a frankly erotic and profoundly creepy movie in which young boys not only dissect a live cat in horrifying detail but spy on the widowed mother of one of them having sex and eventually murder her lover.

Charlotte was right, I decided as I laid my dollar bills on the counter. My daughters’ exposure to such monstrosities was inevitable, and I would rather be able witness their response and thereby, hopefully, help shape their evolving beliefs.

Later that night, after the girls had watched the movie and Lulu had pronounced it “not that bad,” we talked about the rape scene.

“You couldn’t really see anything besides the mutant guy spreading her legs, and that was from behind him,” they told me.

“And anyway,” Charlotte said, “after seeing that rape scene, I know I don’t want to be raped.”

“So then, before you saw it, you thought you might want to be raped?” I asked her, trying hard to keep my voice flat.

What if she really did fantasize about rape?, I worried silently. What if rape was as desirable for girls of their generation—influenced as they are by rap music values and parented by mixed up Baby Boomers like me—as all the other creepy things they seem to like? Body piercing. Tattoos. Hooking up. Shaved pubic hair.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I just mean, rape really looks like a bad thing in the movie. Like, I’d rather be killed than raped by one of those mutants.”

It was the qualifications that did me in each time. Not that bad. Rape really looks like a bad thing. Rather be killed than raped by one of those mutants. I groped for what to say, how to reply to my daughters’ unconscious exposés of what it means to be a teenager in our time.

I wonder, though, if things have really changed that much. Consider the rapes of scripture. The Levite’s concubine, gang-raped to death and then dismembered and sent to all the parts of Israel. Lot’s virgin daughters offered up to the rapists at the door. Tamar—raped by the least “strange” of all rapists, her own brother. Bathsheba, sexually harassed and eventually widowed by the devout king of Israel—a man, we’re told, after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). Somehow, although they happened thousands of years ago, these rapes seem more real than a cannibal mutant rape and the twisted relationships they portray more horrific. Interestingly, too, the scriptural rapes and the movie rape offer same grim story: rape happens, our world is depraved, and honest consideration of these truths—and of the escape God offers us—is our only hope of getting out of life alive.

My daughters and I will have much to discuss in the coming days, I’m thinking, as they enter the horrors of human existence laid bare in popular culture and in the book on which we base our faith.

The Other Side—A Lamb Chop for Spring

I will not begin this post by apologizing. Suffice it to say I have been busy. I turned in the mss. for book three last week—a book of essays called The Gospel of Christmas: Reflections for Advent; look for it at Barnes & Noble in October or November—and I have been recovering and trying to get myself to go out in the garden to dig up the dirt and plant peas and spinach. No success. It's so freezing cold and has been raining on and off for days. I haven't even managed to go out for my run today. After getting up to 9 miles every other day culminating each time in a visit with my mother-in-law and then having to lay off for a while due to an injury incurred, I've decided, from not warming up or stretching before a run in 9º weather, I'm now at 7 miles every other day. (Please applaud.) No visit with my mother-in-law anymore and not as far as before, but still. Today not, though. Too cold.

The book is really cool, I think. (The intended transition here, in case you're wondering, was cold...cool.) I had to work really hard to get it done in one month. Most of the essays that make up the chapters were already written, but I hadn't looked at them in years (I write new ones every Advent) and three were brand brand new. The biggest challenge—as always for me, since I tend to write pieces that work independently of one another—was putting the whole lot together to work as a book. Once I managed that, it was such a delight to work on. I LOVE revising. And I love the whole idea of the Incarnation—God coming to us as an embryo in his human mother's uterus, drinking her blood (as my daughters used to say), and emerging from a part of her body she probably wouldn't mention in public, covered in blood and other bodily goo, and stuck in a feed trough. What a way for God to start out his life in our world!

As it happens, I am participating in a Bible study on the other end of the divine visit right now at church. (Yes, I have found, to my amazement, a church of which I can say, so possessively, "at church." It's Presbyterian, even more to my amazement, given my unenthusiasm for certain Calvinist preoccupations. Anyway, more on church some other time.) We're studying the Suffering of Jesus (my word for the Passion) in the weeks leading up to his Resurrection. Everything I'm learning about Jesus' suffering and death seems to be informed by everything I'm learning about his birth in working on the Christmas book. So odd.

Something the Bible study leader—Robbie Castleman, for those of you who know her from JBU—said moved me to do Lent. Really do it—with the idea in mind of coming up on the other side, like Jesus giving up his earthly life knowing that 1. he would take it up again in a few days, and 2. he would resume eternal life after that. So, I'm approaching Lent as a temporary giving up not for the sake of suffering along with Jesus, as I saw it in my Catholic childhood, so much as for the sake of getting to enjoy—as he enjoyed and is enjoying—the resumption of pleasures after the period of suffering is past. Probably that's obvious to all of you and how you've always thought of it, but it has been somewhat transformative for me. I can't tell you how much I am going to enjoy that big, medium-rare steak and glass of Cabernet in a few weeks here!

Which brings me to Spring's promised lamb chop: The other day, a man on NPR's Fresh Air—the author of a bestseller called Misquoting Jesus—was going on about suffering, all the ways in which it can't be reconciled with an all-powerful and kind-hearted God. He lost his faith over it, he said. None of the explanations of suffering offered by Christianity or the Bible obtain, according to this man, and he went through them all fairly systematically: suffering is punishment for sinfulness, God's ways can't be explained, suffering makes you a better person, who are you to darken my counsel with stupid questions?, and so on. Anyway, afterwards I thought of a reason he never brought up that I'm thinking, this Lent, is worth considering. Suffering—which can pretty well be reduced to pain and/or loss, I think—causes you to value more highly the absence of pain and/or to honor the thing lost. It causes you to look forward to—I mean really look forward to—the time, on the other side, when you will no longer suffer pain and when you will be reunited with whatever it was you lost.

I have always thought it terrible for people to long for the next life. I have only personally known of a few people who said that they did. One was a woman (not my mom) who had led a grim life as a prostitute and then became a Christian and not long thereafter was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She opted not to do any sort of chemotherapy or treatment that would prolong her life. She also withdrew from friends who tried to encourage her, as they saw it, that she might live longer than the prognosis. She didn't want to talk about that hope at all. "I just want to be with Jesus," she said.

Another was a woman—again a Christian—who, in a fit of biological timeclock desperation, had married a horrible man who was mean to her. All she ever talked about was how wonderful it would be in heaven.

Longing for heaven, it has always seemed to me, amounts to giving up and despising the life we've been given. It seems a wrong focus, like loving Revelation above all the other books of the Bible (excuse me if I have dissed your pet book) or obsessing, as Jesus' disciples were wont to do and countless others have done since his time, on the end times. I guess I'm too much of a hedonist to be able to get to the hating-this-world point of view. Or—shudder!—I just haven't suffered enough yet.

At church (there I go again) the other day, though, the pastor mentioned several times an elderly woman in too poor health to attend the service. She had been a member of the church since forever and had sent us all a cheery greeting in the bulletin. "She's ready to go," the pastor told us more than once. He encouraged us to pray toward that end—not your usual prayer request, unless it's for a person lingering unconscious in the hospital while the family awaits the inevitable death. I have been thinking about that woman a lot, although I don't know her. I have been thinking that such a desire is not necessarily a deathwish, as I have always thought, but maybe a longing for how fabulous it will be to take up life on the other side.

When we rise again, we will be real, Robbie was telling me the other day in her office, where I had gone to apologize for asking too many questions in the Bible study and keeping us from getting as far in the material as she had wanted. Somehow, while I was there, she got on the topic of the Resurrection and started talking about how, contrary to what many think, heaven was not some puffy fantasy place peopled by spirits but the real world, renewed, where we would be solid, in our own bodies, real. She leaned toward me and, to emphasize her point, punched me in the arm. "Like that," she said.

It was not Robbie's punch in the arm that moved me to reconsider heaven, I think, but rather that overlarge wine glass in my imagination, about a third full of Cabernet. Or perhaps a jammy purple Zinfandel in a globe-shaped glass. I haven't quite decided.

"Truly I tell you," Jesus said at his last meal before his death, "I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25). His words, I'm thinking now, were not so much a lament, as I have always thought, as they were a preview of future pleasures. He took up his suffering, his voluntary loss of an earthly life I am convinced he actually loved—a life which, fully human as well as divine, he was built to love—not with wretched despair, but in the excited anticipation of life beyond the grave, its treasures and delights, of which this world's joys are only a foretaste.

Some Thoughts on Blogging

For their final exam the other day, the students in my Composition Theory course read aloud brief analytical accounts of their own writing histories. I always love it when students read their writing aloud—which I have them do in most of my classes, often at the end of the semester—and I also love it when they tell stories from their lives. I learn so much, not just about them, but about life.

In recounting what they had learned about writing and how they came to learn it and how their writing had changed over the years, my students typically began in early childhood, back before they could write at all and their concepts of writing were determined by the writing in books their parents read to them or that they read themselves. That was my first surprise: the attention they paid to the writing of others, often before they even entered school. They retold or added to, in stories of their own, the stories they had liked when they were younger.

One student perpetuated the Narnia series for a child she often babysat. Another wrote detailed notes just like the love notes her father left lying around for her mom. That student also wrote miniature research papers, sometimes just a couple of sentences long, in which she retold information she found interesting in books and newspapers and such. (In her paper for my course, she referred to these works as micro-essays. You elementary school teachers out there need to consider assigning such essays in your classes!) Another woman told of how, in middle school, she was asked to write from another person's point of view, and she chose the point of view of a fictional character she still loved from a series of chapter books she had read when she was younger, Junie B. Jones. She wrote in first person, but took pains to tell her life in Junie's voice, and she returned repeatedly to check and make sure she was getting it right. Unconsciously, these women, as children, taught themselves to make art via a method that is not often practiced among writers nowadays: mimicry. I found this so interesting.

It may be a gender thing—the class is all women, with the exception of a student who was taking the class via independent study because of a time conflict and stuck his head in the room from time to time—but almost all of them wrote about journaling. For some of them, it was a brief flirtation with writing in which they wrote for a few days in a diary—they remembered and described these in minute detail, the picture on the front, the color of the pages, etc.—and then abandoned it. They felt bad about this. Guilty. There is something about a journal that makes you feel obligated to keep it up. One student returned to the same abandoned journal on occasion throughout her school years, beginning in elementary school and continuing on through high school. Imagine it, that Bildungsdiary. The voice maturing with the events depicted. The focus narrowing to comprise the gestalt of the woman before us. In their papers, my students wrote about how journaling archived the emotional minutia of their lives: their friendships and crushes, their fights with their parents, their reflections on matters of faith, their thoughts about the future.

To a woman, they summed up the essence of journaling in one word: private. A diary was a safe, private place to explore dangerous topics you wouldn't want made public. It was a place to confess, to fantasize, to hope.

One student, in sixth grade, was asked write an imaginary page from her journal that was representative of who she was. "One page from your journal has come loose and fallen out on the floor," her teacher told them. "What would it say? What glimpse would it give of you?" The eleven-year-old incarnation of the student before us wrote, of course, about the boy she liked, and she was aghast when she was asked to turn the page in. You don't turn in journal writing, my student reasoned. Journals are "private property"! Turning them in makes them public. (For the writing teacher these days, by the way, the current and absolutely appropriate lingo for turning writing in is "publishing"—that is, "making public.") The teacher commented on the crush in the margins of the student's journal, counseling her that, at her age, it was better to be "just friends" with boys. That is, the teacher judged the student's confession. And, to make matters worse, years later, she even made mention of it to the student. She joked, at a public event, with others present, about the girl's youthful feelings for the boy. She called him by name.

What's all this got to say about blogging? I know you're wondering. I think my students' way of looking at journaling says everything about my struggles with blogging. The trouble with blogs—and perhaps in some ways it is also their appeal—is that they are like journals: emotionally-laden, but only minimally processed stuff from one's life. Stuff that typically remains private—at least until some potentially smarter, healthier editor-self has a chance to have a go at it. Blogs are the private made public. Boringly public—as boring as a teenage girl's journal is likely to be most of the time. Embarrassingly public—as embarrassing as one's crush, once outed. Self-consciously public—as I often find my blog-voice to be. Careful. Half-squelched. Cramped, like a diary entry, by the date at the top of the page, the inadequate number of lines, the emphatic date on the next page, reminding you that you must do it again soon. Often, it seems to me, my blog-voice as false as the little lock on the outside of my own childhood diary—a chinzy little decoration of a lock that never really felt secure. I opened it with a bobbypin whenever I couldn't find the key.

Perhaps journals, I sat thinking as my students read, should remain private. For the students' sake, at least. Teachers shouldn't give journal assignments, I decided. (I've never liked assigning journals, which I find students often do all at once, at the last minute, as they do their papers but with much more license to say whatever.) Or rather, teachers can give such assignments, but they shouldn't collect them. Shouldn't grade them. Certainly they should never read them or comment on the entries or censor them or in any way stand in judgment.

Assigned journals threaten the privacy of students, but, at the same time, there is this sense that the teacher really isn't reading them at all. The other day my daugher Charlotte was telling me how, in a reading journal she had to keep about In Cold Blood (She's fifteen, and it's a pre-AP literature course, and they're reading true crime—go figure!), she wrote in all caps and wrote, in gigantic letters in the margins, READ THIS!!!, to be sure that the teacher actually took note of some joke she wanted to make.

The voluntary divulgers among us—and, if you haven't guessed, I am one, as are you, if you blog or even comment on this or any other blog—are a mystery, even to ourselves. READ THIS!!! we shout, without thinking much about what that entails. We are blind to all that goes along with the publishing of the private. The boredom. The embarrassment. The falsity. Consider: Blogging is like sending that ill-advised email that, once sent, can never be erased. The email written in a hot moment. The kindly meant email (or so one tells oneself) in which one's real nature is revealed in a glib remark. The email that defines one, as surely as a page torn from one's journal and dropped on the dirty floor.

That's blogging, I think. Much as I try to fight the natural contours of the form—despite my fastidious editing and even though, from habit, I set out to write each post just as I would set out to write an essay that might go into one of my books—I never feel quite in tune in my blogs. Never entirely me. Or maybe it's that I feel too much me: the glib me, the ill-advised me, the messed up me, the pushy preachy arrogant me, me in all my meanness.

I have written here or somewhere—that's another thing about blogs, you lose track of what you said where in them—about this odd thing that happens with my blog posts for Today's Christian Woman (http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/, if you would like to go there). I write what are supposed to be posts on the subject of spiritual formation—I think of them as little essays in which I report on my own struggles to grow in faith—and the people who comment frequently give me advice and try to solve me. I think that, too, is symptomatic of blogging. In blogging, you are submitting your thoughts to the democratic urge out there. You become a project for others. Your secrets become the stuff of the people—solvable, fixed, known—and your voice potentially the Junie B. Jones of other would-be writers out there. Or not.

Anyway, that's what I have been thinking today about blogging. It's funny, too, how bloggers often blog about blogging—resultant from a self-consciousness that, again, has something to do with the public-private tension of blogging, I think. Anyway, as I say. Anyway.

Back Again!

Yes, it's been two months. I've been busy with other writing tasks—not the least of which, by the way, is my monthly post for Today's Christian Woman that you might want to have a look at if you have been missing the comforting voice of the fellow struggler and amateur believer. It's here: http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/. You can also give me advice there, as those who comment frequently do. This initially bothered me. I guess I thought, Hey! I'm the one who's writing this blog; I should be the one doing the advising. But I have come to find it amusing. And often encouraging. A kind of advice column in reverse, where the messed up columnist details her doubts and struggles and questions and her savvier readers write in with counsel. And it brings the added benefit of all these people out there praying for me—people much more secure in what they believe and surely much better at articulating to God what it is I need. I usually don't know. I'm pretting much of a groaner, when it comes to prayer.

Anyway, I reenter this blogspace with new resolve to write shorter, bloggier posts on a more regular basis and thus enjoy it more. We'll see if I am successful. It's part of my New Year's resolution (yes, I know it's early for that; I'm all messed up in my schedule this season) to try, in the context of some or the other daily event, to do unto others what I would have them do unto me. My husband routinely lets this mandate direct his encounters and most mundane decision-making, and it has always impressed me. I want to see if I can make doing what I would have others do in similar circumstances into a habit, as it seems to be for him. And so I thought, what kind of blog posts would I like my friends and former students and current students and interesting strangers to write? I decided each post should be small and succulent. Like a lamb chop. Or, rather, like several little lamb chops, since one is never enough. In their little puddle of that wonderful vinegary mint sauce that the British eat on lamb.

Okay, so that's one new thing. The other is that I have been running. I don't know if I have put this in past posts (and I'm too lazy to check), but I started in the early summer and I now run 9 MILES three days a week. Added up, that's a marathon a week. I don't know how this happened. I could barely get to my mother-in-law's house at first. It is some sort of miracle. I run, in any case, on a straight, hilly road near my house. I still dread it—I am writing right now when I should be running—but I love it once I get out there. I get to notice so many things I never would have noticed—deer, bird songs, a neighbors' buffalo herd, this black mule with a dusty mouth I've fallen in love with that I have named Beautiful. The other day I found a young-looking owl lying open-eyed on the roadside. Seemingly uninjured—just dead. I've never seen one up close before. And I have all sorts of ideas for writing. I've planned so many books that I will never be able to write them all. Something about running unlatches my thoughts. I'm not fast (I go around 12 and 1/2 mintes a mile) and I'm not getting a bit skinnier, since I can't seem to shake the notion that with all this running I should get to eat whatever I want. But it's a great stress reducer, which I especially need at Christmastime, which triggers all my post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

I always have some song at Christmastime that kind of takes over my brain. Whatever I'm doing, from the when I wake up, it's there in my brain. An Ohrwurm, as the Germans call it— earworm. Or, like the Jesus prayer that Eastern Orthodox train themselves to repeat constantly. It's usually a melancholy, almost hopeless song that speaks to my Christmastime misery. Amy Grant's "Breath of Heaven." Or Pedro the Lion singing Longfellow's anti-war carol, "I Heard the Bells." ("There is no peace on earth, I said!") Or that James Taylor version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that came out right after 9/11, in which he reverts to the original lyrics of the song in lieu of Sinatra's cheerier take, singing "Until then we'll just have to muddle through somehow" instead of "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." This year, my inescapable Christmas song is Sufjan Stevens' "Sister Winter," with lyrics just shy of maudlin about trying—unsuccessfully—to be grateful and merry in the wake of a love relationship that failed in the previous summer. The central line is "But my heart is returned to Sister Winter," and he repeatedly tells his friends, "I apologize, apologize." It reminds me of that scene in one of Lulu's favorite movies, Notting Hill, where Hugh Grant apologizes to his friends for having been depressed for so long. That's a really captivating thing about that movie: that healthy, supportive group of friends. I wish us all a group of friends like that this Christmas. Anyway, that's what's in my head these days: But my heart is . . . apologize, apologize. It's there when I lie down and when I get up and when the girls make me take them to the mall. It's enscribed on the lintel of my door. The only place I hear other noises is when I run.

There. That's four little lamb chops worth of my thoughts, five morsels for your reading delight, in their little puddle of vinegar. Advise away, friends. I'm off to run.