My review of Acedia & Me (Kathleen Norris)

I'm determined to finish the last third of the book, but if it were a different author, I probably wouldn't. Norris is at her best when she tells stories from her life and connects them to spiritual and theological truths that connect with all Christians, or even all humans. Acedia & Me separates this integration, containing long lectures on acedia and depression (acedia, the 'deadly sin' of sloth, is both like and unlike depression). Separate from that is the story of her marriage, which is wonderfully written, but broken up in chunks and served like a trail of cake crumbs that keeps the readers strung along through a really long theology lecture.

Her storytelling in this book, compared to others, makes more sweeping generalizations about the past and offers less specific, nuanced detail. Honestly, it reads more like the biography of an 80-year-old (which is a fine genre, but often memories of the distant past become more sweeping and general) than the memoir of a 60-something.

And acedia is an interesting topic, but I would read an article about it, not a book. For readers who experience frequent acedia, this might be a life-changing read. For those of us mired in others of the deadly sins, it's an offense to our selfishness to try to focus on something other than what directly affects us.

What I'm gaining from her book, though, is insight into marriage. I had asked here earlier for books on marriage, and what I specifically do not want to read are Christian quick-fix, self-help books that focus on communication, needs, or sex. I would not like to fix my marriage quickly; I would like to just live in it for a very long time. I ended up with two history books on the nature of American marriage over time, and Deepak Chopra's The Path to Love, and Acedia & Me. Norris' husband died recently, and always suffered inconsistent physical and mental health. Her way of describing him, and her way of loving and living with him, would be insightful for anyone who lives with or loves family members who are less than perfect. So I am really enjoying that part, but honestly, I'm skimming the theology parts, and really reading just the story parts.

On the one hand, I feel like a shit for saying anything bad about an author who has helped me so much in my life. But on the other hand, I'm feeling really good about loving other spiritual memoirists, and my idiosyncratic reasons for loving them. There are other amazing lives, other spiritualities, and other writers who are absolutely amazing, but maybe there just isn't market space for very many famous spiritual memoirists. I don't know. But I'm re-reading and re-loving Mary Rose O'Reilley's Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology (she's got a bit more anger than acedia).

Did you read Acedia & Me? Please do, and let me know what you think of my review.

Of Woman Weaned

Shame. Shame on me. I finally named the emotion I lay on myself every time I pick up Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris' new book. I just don't like it, and it's less painful to blame myself as a reader than to critique her as a writer. But there it is. On the other hand I'm loving Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born , an early 1970s consciousness-raising book about womanhood and motherhood under patriarchy. If I get to choose a deadly sin (and perhaps I do...), I'd take anger over acedia.

Rich writes, "The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born." The book is about motherhood as an institution, an obligatory and obliterating use of the female body in service of patriarchy (obligatory for women who don't give birth, too, in terms of failed identity). She says death to the institution, for the sake of the experience of motherhood. Motherhood should be an optional, freely chosen experience to which we apply the same inginuity, diligence, and joy that we do all other human work. She's an angry lesbian women's libber poet...and also the mother of three grown sons, which she writes about so lovingly.

She speaks the truth about secular American motherhood of the 1950s and 1960s, which isn't so far from contemporary Christian motherhood. Our love for our children keeps us silent about the dehumanizing elements of the social organization of motherhood and child-raising. "The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown." Adrienne Rich is highly concerned with choice -- access to birth control and abortion as ways of controlling one's own fertility. But for me, even with all the medical choice and marital egalitarianism and absence of domestic violence and my own education and a full-time job... the institution of motherhood still shames me.

Why this, why today? I weaned Max yesterday cold turkey. Well, I'm pretty sure I weaned him. He wasn't up crying about it during the night, but I was. We'll see whether we can maintain our resolve today (and by "we", I mean "I"). I'm on pencillin and it's making him very sick, and as I considered what to do, the num-nums lightswitch in my mind flickered 'off' for the first time, and I decided to go with it.

I've been nursing, pregnant, or on fertility meds all but five months since early 2003. Do I have a self to return to, or will I become someone new? The institution of motherhood says it's over for me -- youth, beauty, fertility, appeal. I spent my womanhood on the production of sons. All that lies ahead is shriveling, drying, and death. What I really would like is to feel at home in my body like I used to, like it is mine to care for, not just to spend like money I don't even have. And I'd like a resurgence of ambition and productive energy. I'll keep you posted.

The institution of motherhood still oppresses women for many reasons, but not with the same legal and economic intensity of sixty years ago. For many of us (all of us?) the experience of motherhood is there to be had, and so is the experience of womanhood. Am I able to silence the voices in my head, and just step out into a formless, unmilky future?

Free association and a favor


If I asked myself to free associate when I hear the phrase "the last two weeks", this is what comes to mind: vomit, diarrhea, tantrums, tylenol, pencillin, snot, coughing, sore throat, tummy hurts, fever, headache, muscle aches, tired. Unfortunately it wasn't just the boys - I got sick twice myself, and am hoping I can get through 3 hrs of lecturing today without losing my voice. So that's the reason for blog silence -- I couldn't even gather the wherewithal to complain in full sentences, much less write about anything else.

A favor: I'm preparing a talk for The Ancient-Evangelical Future conference in Chicago next week (anyone going to be there?). I'm going to describe Valerie Law's 2002 art/poetry/physics project. She spraypainted words on the backs of sheep and let them write haikus (haik-ewes) as they wandered their fields. It somehow demonstrated quantum physics.

If you had a word spraypainted on your back as you wandered the world, contributing to collective poetry, what would be some words you would like?

(I'll make a powerpoint that has lots of words on it so people in the audience can think of possibilities...but won't use your names).

Impermanence

While supervising a pack of children yesterday, I found myself alone in the woods with two seven-year-old boys and two of my little boys. Without detracting their full attention from an offensive assault they had launched in a battle of pinecone versus woodpile, the seven-year-olds regaled me with stories. They were all about bikes and sports, epic tale upon epic tale of both heroic success and spectacular failure.

Meanwhile, my sweet baby lay flat on his back on the ground laughing at tree branches. My three-year-old had said he was running away, and would I come along, which is how we got to the woods. My boys are still mostly with me -- their boyness is evident, but they like their mother to be as close as their own skin. (It's what drives me crazy -- the neediness, the always-touching, the constant chattering about cookies and potty and Elmo -- that I can't bear to lose.) Only four years away from having two seven-year-olds like these who brag to me in the woods, am I about to exchange my intimacy with my children for the longing of a woman for a man? As I have for boyfriends, will I learn minimal base vocabulary of sports, tools, and war and speak it awkwardly like a second language, just to try to get to where they are? If these sweaty, athletic, war-minded pinecone launchers are any indication, from when my boys turn seven until eternity I'll be left behind with a stuffed bear under my arm and sweaty animal crackers in my fist, hoping someone will come to me. I don't see why it's called having a baby -- in no way is a baby yours to have. "Catch and release" describes it better.

The battle of boys v. woodpile ended, but the woods remained dangerous. A new pinecone battle flared -- now it's each boy against the other. In shock and awe, my three-year-old is struck motionless and mute. He gathers his senses, looks at me and says with reverence, "Oooooh, dat's nice." He picks up a pinecone and starts throwing.

Stone-hard beautiful juju

Our house has bad juju. Or I do. Or my kids do. In addition to all three of them having vomit/diarrhea for several days, I hurt my foot, Oliver got a wasp sting on his foot, the ceiling leaked water, the furnace broke, Wesley vomited blood from scraping a penny against the inside of his throat, and there's been more poop on the carpet. My family always lives in the borderland between human society and animal farm, and this week we once again crossed over to the feral side.

I guess the best way to sum it up is that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. This week was a pig.

The brightest spot was this poem I found by Mary Oliver, which helped me see where my complaining belongs. Because honestly, if you said, "Gosh, you're lucky you have three kids alive and healthy enough to project vomit in your direction," I'd agree without hesitation. (Someone comment please if it's a breach of copyright to post the poem).

The Poet with His Face in His Hands
Mary Oliver

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water-fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

The Church For Me

While sitting in one on Sunday, I listed all the things I can't stand about church (in general, not specifically the one I was at). There are thirteen: performance, facade, corporate organization, sexism, synthetic fabrics, fluorescent lights, ego-centered leadership, stupidity, racism, legalism, shame, insularity, and irrelevance.

If someone made a church just for me, it would have natural lighting, lots of silence, no skits, Gaither Vocal Band music, and a graduate-educated female pastor. But then when I get tired of Gaither music, I'd like the church leaders to change it to Al Green or Glen Campbell. But as for myself, I would not like to be in leadership or take much of any responsibility for the church.

But really, I don't go to church because it pleases my preferences -- needless to say, no church yet has captured each and every thing I like. I go because going to church is what Christians do. It's a practice. I'm practicing being part of a religious community (clearly I'm not very good at it yet).

Instead of asking church to rise to the level of my preferences and high expectations, I've decided to lower my expectations. The church for me is one that doesn't interfere with my spiritual journey, and one where my children are not sexually molested. By those standards, there are plenty of churches for me.

Because whatever sharp edges I have toward church, I also have toward myself and all other people. If I can practice love, acceptance, and joy while surrounded by polyester, rayon, and pastors who insist on dumbing it down for the masses, then surely I can practice spirituality anywhere.

All the way

At a faculty dinner at a Christian college, the anthropologist said to the theologian, "In our scholarship, anthropologists rarely - maybe never - decide who is or isn't a proper Christian. Most of the time (all of the time?) we seek to understand people's self-definitions, and then try to describe, interpret, and understand local expressions of Christianity. Of course, the vast majority of us are not Christians, so maintaining purity or regulating boundaries of the religion is not our concern. As a theologian, do you ever find it necessary to determine, for another person or group, that their Christianity is not, in fact, Christianity?"

This guy has written volumes about religion and Christianity, even a book describing the basics of the religion. He said regardless of one's own personal views or the boundaries of one's local church or denomination, it's possible to be gracious in conversation with other believers. He said he doesn't decide for others what their standing in the religion is, because "What may look like walking away from faith may be, for that person, the straightest and surest path to God."

Just that morning I was singing this song and believing it.

All the way my Savior leads me;
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt His tender mercy,
Who through life has been my Guide?
Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,
Here by faith in Him to dwell!
For I know, whate’er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well;
For I know, whate’er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well.

We are led by our God, not by our knowing. How wonderful when people -- occasionally even theologians -- reflect God's tender mercy.