Here in Seattle we have had a week of lovely early summer weather.   It was warm enough to sit under my magnificent 40 year old lilac trees at six in the morning, drink tea and read.  I was so engrossed in the book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Swerve that I read it straight through, started over and read it again.  It’s the story of a poem called De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things ) by a Roman named Lucretius Carus (99-55 BCE) who put in verse the philosophy of Epicurus (341-270 BCE).  Now I am working my way through the actual poem.  It’s going to take more than a week of nice weather because it’s 7800 lines.  But I’m hooked.

I will leave it to scholars to squabble about the poet, the philosopher, the physics involved, and the author of The Swerve.  Me, I had an Epicurean experience just from reading the book.  Sitting under my lilacs watching hummingbirds zipping around the branches and my cats quivering with all their senses, it was easy to believe that I am made of the same substance as the world around me.  And that is the core of what Epicurus and Lucretius have to say.

“The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction.” (Stephen Greenblatt,The Swerve)

This is not a startling idea nowadays but it was first proposed as a philosophy in classical Greece long before modern day physicists got a hold of it.  Having no science/math background I had only encountered the idea from studying eastern religions. Its logical conclusion is that when we die, we cease to be anything other than the particles of which we are made.

We may be reassured that in our Death

We have no cause for fear, we cannot be

Wretched in non-existence.

Death alone has immortality, and takes away

Our mortal life.  It does not matter a bit

If once we lived before.

(From De rerum natura , Rolfe Humphries translation)

When I read these words something happened that I was not expecting: warmth, comfort and relief washed through me. These were ideas that felt at home in my internal world.  This doesn’t mean I have now become a complete Epicurean. It’s just that in the surprising appeal of this idea I learned something new about myself: that I wouldn’t mind if when I died, that was it for me.  What was once Me might join the dance of motes in the sunbeam and I would simply cease.

Stephen Greenblatt in his preface—which I’m glad I read because I hardly ever read prefaces—says that the poem struck a deep chord in him because at its core it is a “profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death, and that fear dominated my entire childhood.”  He goes on to say that “art always penetrates the particular fissures of one’s own psychic life.”

The same could be said about religion (and by religion I mean any particular structure and language whereby one can apprehend the spiritual dimension).    Religion and art affect us where we are most vulnerable and idiosyncratic which is why it is so important to listen to each other and let each other be.  Interfering with other people’s processes, demanding they believe something they simply do not believe is like cleaving a sculpture at a crack in its surface.

I learned something else in this remarkable book, something I might already have known if I had paid better attention to classics lectures in college.  I learned about Ciceronian conversation: the “discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness.  .  .  always allowing room for alternative views.”

There is arrogance, indignation and narcissistic rage in both public and private interaction these days.  We think our ideas are correct and anyone who disagrees is incorrect.  We are out to convert anyone who disagrees with us and have no use for anyone who doesn’t succumb to our arguments.  We are afraid of looking stupid. We are afraid of what might fracture if we were open to the influence of The Other.   There’s a good reason for that fear.  We don’t expose our vulnerabilities when the atmosphere is hostile.

When I was in analysis and would practically levitate off the couch with anxiety over something my analyst said, he sometimes reminded me, “These are just thoughts.  We’re just talking here. That’s all.”

I am as bad as anyone at staying detached and curious, and I’d like to get better.  I crave conversation.  I want to treat ideas like motes in a sunbeam.  To that end I started a page on Facebook called Civilities.  If you’re interested, go have a look.  https://www.facebook.com/Civilities Treat me like a shut-in who just wants someone to talk to.

Under the Lilacs

When I was a student at Whitman I had little interaction with the town of Walla Walla.  These days, the town is part of the fun of the visit. But being a Whitman graduate it’s hard to match wits with people outside the college.  Here are three vignettes:

As a student I once rode my bicycle out to College Place just to see what was there, at the time not much that interested me.  But 35 years later, and drinking green smoothies every day for arthritis, Seventh Day Adventist country was the place to go for a fix. In the health food cafe I inquired of a woman whose long gray hair stood out in points like the crown on the Statue of Liberty if she could make me a vegetable smoothie.

“You mean juice?”

“No, I want you to puree the whole food, pulp and all.”

“You know,” she said to me. “Dr Carbolic’s book?  He says that pulp isn’t good for you.”

I had no idea what she was referencing but my evangelical upbringing has taught me to sense one of the species, no matter what the subject matter.

“Yes, I’ve read his book.  I still want the pulp.”

“But he says that pulp is really quite bad for–here let me get you his diagram.”

“No, please. I’ve seen his diagram.”

“He says.  .  .”

“I know what he says.”

She looked flummoxed.  I started over.

“Can you make me a whole smoothie?”

“I don’t actually make them.  Laura?”

While Laura was popping beets and carrots into an ancient blender which was not going to make either a smoothie or juice, Miss Liberty came bustling over with a piece of paper.

“Since you are interested in health,” she began. “You’ll want to know about dangerous fats.  You see, this is how–”

“Thank you very much, I’ll read it.”  I plucked it out of her hand and folded it up.  I wondered if Laura, who appeared to not be listening to the conversation, was resigned to ceding a certain amount of potential business to this woman.  I wondered what the politics were.

“The fat begins.  .  .”

“You know,” I put my hand on her arm.  “I prefer to pay attention to my own body and make my decisions based on whether or not I feel better.”

“Yes,” she conceded doubtfully. “That’s important, too, but Dr. Carbolic–”

“Thank you very much.”  I said loudly.

*               *               *                *                *                 *

I had an odd conversation when I stopped for coffee on my way out of town on Sunday morning.   The girl behind the register looked in her early twenties.

“Do you make espresso drinks?” I asked.  I didn’t see any of the usual equipment.

“What do you mean by espresso?”

“Your sign out front says that you make espresso drinks.”

“You mean like a cappuchino?”

“I mean like an Americano.”

“All we have are those coffee machines.”  She gestured to the Boyd’s drip coffee machines, one of which had a sign that said “Capucchino.”

“OK, well, never mind.  Can I use the rest room?”

“You need the key,” she informed me.

Pause.

“OK,” I said.

Long pause.

“The key isn’t here. Somebody must be in the rest room.”

“It’s 9:00 on a Sunday morning and mine is the only car within two blocks.  Who could be in the rest room?”

She looked like she hoped I would stop asking such hard questions.  “Someone must not have returned the key.”

I stared at her, trying to imagine what she did with her mind in her spare time. I imagine she was relieved when I left but I was both unrelieved and unfulfilled.

*               *               *              *              *               *                *

I saved this vignette for last because I think it’s sweet and because the only sarcasm in the exchange wasn’t mine which in itself is worth noting.

I was on my bicycle trying to work off either the morning’s lemon Shaker pie or the afternoon’s Umpqua ice cream.  Coming around a familiar loop in Pioneer Park I heard boys’ voices.

“There’s another one!”

“My stick broke, hand me yours.”

“No get down, it’s my turn.”

Five boys were clustered around an old Civil War cannon.  One was wrapped around the barrel, poking a stick into its innards.

I stopped.

“What are you doing?”

“There are messages down there,” said one of the boys.

“What kind of messages?”

“This one says, ‘Help, help, I’m a prisoner in here!’”

“Hey, can I take your picture?” I asked

“Are you from the UB?”  That would be the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, which was misguided enough to not give my book signing a listing so we don’t like them.

“No,” I said.  “But I might write about you.  Would that be all right?”

“Can we read it?”

“It’ll be on the Internet.  I bet you guys are pretty good on the computer.”

One of them said –and here’s my next to favorite part– “No, not really.”

Five boys, ages around 10 or 11, playing outside, and not particularly good on the computer.  I bet they’re better than me but never mind.

None of us had a pen or paper (or IPod).  I asked “How will I get ahold of you when I’ve written my piece?”

Long pause.  (Now here’s my favorite part:)

“My name’s David,” said the boy on the cannon.

I smiled.

“Oh, that’ll help,” said the boy withholding the stick.

David, wherever you are, I hope you see this because you were a sparkle on my most recent visit to WallaWalla.

LIVE TV!

I could write a whole post about eating my way through Walla Walla and then put up a few photos of me bloated from days of wheat and sugar.  But I won’t.  At least I won’t post the photos.  But here are some notes from the weekend’s menu:

In my Postcard from Walla Walla I mentioned the bacon and asparagus pizza that former piano student and soon to be Whitman graduate Katie and I shared at Olive Marketplace and Cafe. (http://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/05/postcard-from-walla-walla/) Then there was the penuche I bought every time I walked past Bright’s Candies smack in the center of Main Street on the same side as Olive’s.

The one place where I didn’t eat was the TV station in Kennewick.  I don’t know exactly what I expected other than slightly less of the carnival crowds than at the Today Show in Rockefeller Center.  Actually I do know what I had expected.  I expected a breakfast buffet and someone to do my camera make-up.  There wasn’t so much as a Mr Coffee or a stick of lipstick on the premises.

I had to get up at 4:30 in order to be at KVEW-TV in Kennewick for my 6:45 spot on Good Morning Northwest.  Over the aforementioned pizza at Olive’s, Katie offered to pick me up the next morning and be my chauffeur. She told me she would set four alarm clocks and put them in different places in her bedroom.  Even so I called her at 4:55 to see if she was up.  It is a measure either of her easy-going nature or of how much she loves me that there was scarcely a hint of exasperation in her voice when she said, “I just got out of the shower.”  At 5:10 her car’s headlights were shining up the drive and into the kitchen where Debi and I were yawning and grunting at each other.

Katie and I watched the sun rise through the rear view mirrors as we drove to Kennewick.  At the TV station we loitered outside the control room and watched until we were moved into the studio where the segment before us was some guys cooking crayfish.  Katie documented my TV debut on her smart phone.  We ate some crayfish and drove back to Walla Walla where we had breakfast at Olive’s.

Katie on Main Street outside Olive's and down the street from Bright's Candies

I got on my bicycle to make my rounds of Walla Walla which included coffee and a little nosh at Colville Street Patisserie and culminating with a visit to Willis and Toews, Debi’s law office.  In a spacious room Debi’s head bobbed up from an oceanic desk—handcrafted by husband Jim– and a sea of papers.

“Debi, this is a gorgeous office!”  I said. “For some reason I expected a cramped room in a seedy alley.”

“Why? Because I’m a seedy little person?”

Debi is hardly that.  Beneath her unflappable demeanor, she is funny and outgoing. She recently went through two corneal transplants with grace and humor.

Debi and Jim buy their milk at the dairy, their produce and meat at the farm, their bread at the Walla Walla Bread Co, and their coffee beans at the Walla Walla Roastery out by the airport.  I think the only actual store they frequent is Andy’s Market in College Place, Seventh-Day Adventist country where you can get all manner of herbs and healthy food in bulk.

Jim is the chef at The Toews Towers on Tieton.  Don’t try to make reservations.  It’s their home.  I just have a foible for alliterations.  For dinner Jim made enough savory Cioppino to feed a ship full of Portuguese fisherman.

So endeth the second day.

On Saturday morning we were up and eating again.  I sampled everything available in paper pill cups at the Walla Walla Farmer’s Market.  Debi and I went to the Walla Walla Bread Co where we ordered pieces of strawberry rhubarb pie and lemon Shaker pie. Debi leaned against the display case and said, “Put it on my tab.” Debi can eat like this because she bicycles fifty miles a day.  But as Eeyore says: “We can’t all and some of us don’t.”

Debi casting a spell on the produce at Walla2 Farmer's Market

Really, my book signing at Book and Game Co (across Main Street from Bright’s Candies) that began at 11:00 takes a back seat to the gustatory pleasures of the weekend.   When I had signed my last book and the bookstore had written me a check (yay!), Debi and I made our way north to Klickers which was a seasonal fruit stand when I was at Whitman.  I remember cycling out to it for berries.  Now it’s open year round and has antiques, yard art, produce, cheese, jams, honey, condiments, and what we were there for: Umpqua ice cream.

Four hours later I had just enough room to pack in tender, brined chicken with caramelized onions which Jim had been preparing pretty much ever since we left the house to go to the farmer’s market in the morning.

Now that I’m back home in Seattle, I’m on a diet of herb tea and sticks.

Debi running a tab at Walla Walla Bread Company

Chef James

I am taking a break from raging against the Catholic church and breathing feminist fire to sing a little song of Walla Walla, Washington.  I am here to do a book signing at Book and Game Co on Main Street and to stay with my college roommate Putzer, the attorney, and her husband, Jim.

My earliest memories of Walla Walla are from the late 50s when I was five or six years old.  My great-aunt lived on Marcus Street next to the foot bridge that crosses Mill Creek. My Aunt Ann was the most elegant of Victorian ladies.  College kids have long since taken over her former house and now it’s as unkempt as a dorm room.

I have my little rituals when I come to Walla Walla.  I walk across the Marcus Street foot bridge.  I visit Pioneer Park to commune with the huge, gnarled trees and talk to the ducks.   I cycle to Mountain View Cemetery where are buried the grandparents I never knew.  I always make a tour of the Whitman College campus and spend some time wandering along Lakem Duckem.  I go into the college bookstore to inspect the most recent promotional memorabilia and alumni crap.  This trip I checked to see if my book (99 Girdles on the Wall in case you’re new here) was on the alumni shelf.  It wasn’t because it had sold out (yay!) so I left more copies.

Walla Walla has undergone a renaissance in the past 35 years since I was a student.  When I was in school, there were plenty of wheat fields but no wineries.  The ratio has flipped.  Now there are 150 wineries and a dwindling number of wheat fields.  Main Street is full of  tasting rooms, coffee houses, and boutiques.  Falkenburg Jewelers and Baker-Boyer Bank are the only downtown businesses I recognize.

I applied for my first credit card at the bank. In the 70s, it was hard for a single woman to be approved for a credit card.  If you were of the female species, you could be attached to your husband’s credit card but you couldn’t have one of your own.  However as a Whitman graduate in Walla Walla’s own Baker-Boyer Bank I had hometown cachet and was issued a Mastercard.  I suppose they thought that a Whitman education was so impressive that even a single woman could get a decent job with it.

I always bring my bicycle to Walla Walla. I know of no other place so conducive to bicycling.  Commodious streets with large leafy trees and very little traffic make it a pleasure to meander or run errands.  In Seattle on Thursday morning I lashed it to the bike rack with half a dozen bungee cords.  I further secured it with a length of rope wrapped so thoroughly as to almost obscure the bike.  My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything came over to see me off.

“Do you think the bike will stay on?” I asked.

“I think the car will probably fall off first,” she said.

There was a thunderstorm coming in over my shoulder when I was untying my bike in Debi’s (that would be Putzer’s given name) driveway.  Who would have thought a bunch of granny knots would be so hard to wriggle free but I got the bicycle unhitched just before the squall broke.

I abandoned Debi and Jim to pick up Katie, my former piano student and soon to be Whitman graduate.  We went to dinner at Olive’s on Main Street and shared a fabulous asparagus and bacon pizza.  A long time ago just before I graduated in 1976, Olive’s was called Merchants, was half as big, but just as good.  From dinner, Katie and I went to a poetry reading at Hunter Conservatory.  On the corner of Boyer and Park, Hunter conservatory used to be the Hall of Music and the little Victorian era stage was called MacDowell Hall after the little Victorian composer Edward MacDowell.  As a student at Whitman, I sang in recitals on the little Victorian stage.  The offices upstairs used to be practice rooms.  I practiced singing and piano in those rooms.  The piano I learned to play on, and which stands in my house today was once in the Whitman Hall of Music.

I will skip over how much I enjoyed the readings to complain about the One Who Read for Too Long. The poets had been publicly reminded they should read for no longer than seven minutes and everyone did fine until near the end, someone read a piece about the Titanic that went on for longer than it took the ship to sink.  It was during this presentation that I felt myself crashing.  I needed an early night because I had to get up at 4:30 the next morning for an early morning TV spot to promote my book.

I laid everything out for the next morning in the order that I would be donning it or putting it in my hair.  I fiddled with the bathroom shower fixture which looked like Sputnik.  Not wanting to have to solve a space-age dilemma at 4:30 in the morning, I padded down the hall to Debi and Jim’s room and knocked.

Debi poked her head out, a toothbrush in her mouth.

“Can you show me how to use the shower?”

“Is it 4:30 already?” she asked.

“Ha ha, very funny. Better I ask you now than tomorrow morning while you’re still in bed.”

Debi showed me how to use the shower and I went to bed.  Therein endeth the first day.

Two months ago a woman in Michigan named Karen Teegarden called her friend Desiree Jordan in New York.  They both wondered why women all over this country weren’t marching in the streets in response to hundreds of pieces of state legislation that many of us feel are whittling away at women’s dignity, autonomy and rights as human beings.  Karen started a Facebook page that night and called it UniteWomen.org.  The next morning 500 people had signed on. By last Saturday morning, there were nearly 38,000.

Nancy, my friend who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, and I met up with several hundred of them at Westlake Center.   I hadn’t been to a rally since I went with Nancy to see Bill Clinton, or in this case, his hair, at Westlake Center in 1992.   I almost never do anything that puts me in a crowd.  By Friday evening, I was wondering if it was enough to say I was going even if I instead stayed home and ate popcorn.

But Nancy suggested we go together and take signs.   Slogans poured out of her like water.  We settled on these: Ejaculation is a Choice.  Preach Condoms.  Conception Begins at Erection.  I decided that I would go all out and get a poster made from a cartoon that I have been circulating quietly among my friends because I am just middle-aged enough to feel self-conscious about the word vagina

Thanks to folks like Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a lot of us are using the v-word more freely. Gov. McDonnell is the one who nearly signed into law the infamous trans-vaginal ultra-sound required before an abortion.  The bill was reconsidered when it was pointed out how invasive the mandated trans-vaginal ultrasound truly is, how similar it was to rape in other words.  This had to be pointed out.  Then there’s Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania.  He wants to sign into law mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking abortions but he says, “I’m not making anybody watch, ok. Because you just have to close your eyes.”

When I was in college we were told not to struggle if we were attacked and raped because we could be hurt even worse if we fought back.  Is that what they tell people who go into the armed forces?  One of the effects of declaring a section of the population subjugated, dependent, and defenseless is that the rest of the population can despise them.  That is what we do with adults who don’t fight back when others abuse or try to control them.  We despise them.

This isn’t just about ignorant male politicians.  Truly, the only sour note in the day came from an exceptionally sour-faced woman who looked at the Preach Condoms sign and said, “You should preach abstinence.  That’s what the Bible says.”   If it were possible to have a conversation with anyone who makes statements that involve the phrase “the Bible says,” I would have told her that what the Bible does or doesn’t say was irrelevant to me.  But for the record, the Bible doesn’t say any such thing.

There were a lot of great signs at Westlake. The only one I didn’t like was: “No Uterus? No opinion.”   I don’t agree with that.  I know the risk we run with allowing uterus-less persons to have opinions is that they may have the Wrong One. (For the one or two fundamentalists mistakenly reading this blog, that is a joke.) But the larger point is that if you are male and want your opinion about pregnancy, abortion and birth to be respected, than you’d better plan to spend 20 years of your life shouldering 50% of the responsibility for the consequences of your sperm.

Women are not alone in feeling this way: One of the most delightful aspects of the afternoon was the male support for our signs.  We got thumbs-up and comments like “We’re with you!” and “It’s not just about women!”  And our favorite : “That’s the best fucking sign I’ve ever seen! High five!”

It was supposed to have been my vacation and I spent far too much of it being infuriated by the Catholic Bishops.  And I’m not even Catholic.  But they remind me of the elders in my childhood churches and of Mitt Romney when in response to women wanting to be treated with respect in the Mormon Church was described as having the attitude, ‘Why do you have to stir things up? It has nothing to do with the church and women should be satisfied with what they have.”

Is that so?

The Bishops in the Catholic Church are trying to shut up the nuns because they “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

There’s been enough ironic comment about that last bold faced lie. If only in an effort to calm down, I’ve been trying to think about why women stay in the Catholic Church when their perspectives, concerns, opinions, and obvious moral authority is treated so shamefully.  Why do women put up with it?

I often hear people say “I love the Catholic Church,” sometimes in the past tense but even so.  I’ve never heard anyone say, “I love the Protestant Church.”  Even the smarmiest of the denominations don’t have “I HEART the Baptist Church” bumper stickers.  At least not in the Pacific Northwest.  Protestants tend to say “I love the Lord,” which given my own peculiar theology sounds both smarmy and suspect.

I did what everyone does nowadays when they need to ask a technical question.  I googled “why do people love the Catholic church.”

There was the expected: Mary, the saints, christening gowns, incense, candles, midnight mass, Easter vigil, feast days, St. Joseph’s altars and the sacraments, the “outward sign of an inward grace:” baptism, confirmation, holy Eucharist, extreme unction, penance, holy orders, matrimony.  (I know these because I went to Late Nite Catechism eight times.) In other words, the kinds of cultural richness that made me envy my childhood Catholic friends when I had to sit in plain brown church pews and listen to men in their business suits drone on about sin.

Here’s where I am troubled:   The sacraments don’t apply to women as Persons.  They apply to people acting the role of women according to men’s approximations.  I expect women who “love the Catholic Church” scrape what they can for themselves from the sacraments. There’s a lot of richness and meaning that has not yet been overtaken by any sense of how much they are being screwed.

That rides tandem with another troubling reason people said they love the Catholic Church: One doesn’t have the burden of trying to interpret the Bible on one’s own. In other words, one doesn’t have to think, or to actively participate in one’s own life.  One doesn’t feel the need to revolt when women are treated unequally and their wisdom is disregarded and disrespected, when divorce is considered a sin, when the church’s stand on abortion beggars reason, when an old out-of-touch man and his minions tell them how to live, when priests seem to be disproportionately represented by pedophiles and when so many people passively disregard what the old men at the top say anyway.  Where exactly is the substance of this great traditional church?

Here is the most poignant reason someone gave for why they loved the Catholic Church:  I love the fact that this is the church that Christ started, and it truly can be traced back to him.

No, it can’t.

Enough time has passed since my computer crashed that I am thinking it wasn’t so bad after all.  It’s like one of those awful vacations that ten years later is described as “that wonderful trip to Spain when our luggage got diverted to Iceland.”

It was a Thursday evening.  I had just installed Google Chrome when suddenly the screen went plaid, then black.  I wasn’t too worried because my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything was due home the next day after being out of town for a week.

But Gwen said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”  That was an awful moment.

She loaned me a little Think Pad so I could find out I didn’t know any of my passwords, but eventually I was able to access my incoming e-mail and keep on top of bill pay, library holds and Facebook notifications.  I spent the weekend feeling like half my body had been sliced away from the other half, and wishing it was 1995 before I even owned a computer.

On Monday morning I was the first customer in the door at Seattle Laptop Repair where Nick told me the motherboard had died.  He took out the hard drive, and showed me how to extract my files and install them on Gwen’s Think Pad.

There was a day of rest.

The next step was to buy a new computer.  Gwen was more excited than I was about this. She was researching computers on Consumer Reports days before I got the motherboard diagnosis.  She had one ready to order, but allowed that knowing me, I would need to see an actual computer.

We drove together to Best Buy.  Gwen reminisced about my last computer. “I was all ready for a day of computer shopping,” she said.  “And you took less time than you do to get a Christmas tree.”

I have no memory of buying that computer.  Apparently it went by so quickly, I wasn’t even there for it.

Just to give you a point of reference, here’s me buying a Christmas tree:

I go to the lot that’s three blocks away.  After seasonal felicitations with the boy scouts, I say, “I need one that’s about five feet tall.”

“Well, here’s one.”

“I’ll take it.”

At Best Buy, Gwen and I found our way to the Samsung computers where five or six guys were engrossed in the various demos.  Gwen briefly scoped out the display models and found a modest one that wasn’t getting any attention.

“This is the one you want,” she said.

“Why is this better than these others?”

“This one is enough for you because you don’t do anything on the computer.”

Six guy heads snapped up, all of them grinning.”

“What do you mean?  I do things. I wrote a book on a computer.”

“No, I mean you don’t play games.”

“I play games.  I play Scrabble.”

The guys guffawed.

“You don’t play computer games that need a lot of RAM,” Gwen said kindly. “You don’t get into hunting and killing zombies and dragons.”

More yuk yuk sounds from the guys.  I think one of them spit.  One was definitely playing air guitar.

“Could you not talk so loud?”

There followed a brief negotiation with a salesperson followed by a period when I went to look at autoharps and Gwen walked around looking like a secret service agent while she checked CR for the exact computer we were considering. Eventually we left without the extended warranty.

OK, now I’ve reached a dead spot in my memory.   Let’s see if I can work around events that are still tied up in anxiety.  I got the computer all hooked up and got my files moved off the old hard drive.  Then I couldn’t get the Internet.  The little diddly at the bottom of the screen told me my network was available but I couldn’t access it.

Gwen came over.  I think if I had left her alone all would have been well, but I had to participate, the end result being that by the end of the day, neither my new computer or Gwen’s Think Pad could access the Internet.  Gwen insisted that paying the network tech geeks for a support package was a waste of money.  I’ve never seen her so adamant about something that would have relieved her of work.  But she seemed to think it would have compounded the problem and she is usually reliable about these things.  On the other hand her back was hurting and she couldn’t get comfortable and I think that was making her stubborn.

“I know what they are going to say, and I’ve already done it twice.  We’ve typed in your Wep twice and gotten you a WPA2 and an AES and changed your router password twice because,” she looked at me pointedly, “you wrote it down wrong the first time.”

Then, because Gwen is from Wisconsin and that pointed look counted as the grossest sort of rudeness, she generously invited me to use my new computer at her house on her network until she –not we– figured out what to do.  By the next morning, Gwen was over at my house again.  She had grown a halo and stigmata were appearing on her hands and feets.  She had a CAT-5 cable.

“We’re going to wire you so we can get some things done.  Then someday when you’re out of the house for a long time, I’ll come over and figure out your wireless situation.”

So that’s where we’ve left things for now.  I know that Gwen knows all my passwords better than I do but after this last episode, I think she made note of all the security codes, weps, webs, jpgs, and category fives.  Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s hacked my system and is remotely backing it up once a week. I’d do it for her if she were this much trouble.

Here’s a celebrated quote from Rick Santorum:  “The dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. .  .  It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

When I read this I pictured an eight year old with his hands on his hips blustering away at a room full of adults. Children sometimes do lecture adults and we indulge them because we don’t want to humiliate them.  And adults lecture children.  But adults do not lecture other adults unless one of the parties has abdicated her own mind or the other party assumes she has and doesn’t realize she is picturing him wearing a dunce cap.

It occurred to me that, sexuality and spirituality being so intertwined, this quotation could also be reflective of the Great Fundamentalist Fear: that somewhere out there someone is doing something in the spiritual realm that’s counter to how things are supposed to be.  How fast can you say Fundamentalism Infantilizes its Followers?

When we’re babies, we need parents to be there or we won’t survive. As we get older, we need to think our parents are always right even as we get used to the idea that they’re not.   At some point we understand that our survival doesn’t depend on parents, and we assess ourselves without reference to what was good or bad in the values they bequeathed.  We make choices without resorting to either compliance or rebellion.

Or am I being too idealistic?  Because sometimes when people start in about religion, I wonder.

There’s always a tell when people talk about their parents.  I know guilt is leering at them when they say, “But you know, I really love my parents,” or “But you know, they did the best they could.”  That’s the point that the feeling of guilt over leaving home has trumped the necessity for it.

There’s a tell when people start to feel–what was Santorum’s word?– “libertine” about their religious beliefs.  Anxiety gets slurped into this sentence: “I do believe in God.”  People make that statement as though it’s a talisman against any sacrilegious thoughts they might be entertaining about the meaning of life.  Or they are setting a baseline when questions about life get too confusing.

This is such a sad state of affairs.  Once when I was in my twenties and doing battle against a bunch of evangelicals –I’ve always been feisty about religion– a seminary student said to me, “You know, you can believe anything you want to believe for whatever reason you want to.”  I don’t know how long he lasted in seminary, but what a refreshing thing to say.

I think people get scared because the major religions have been around for thousands of years so they must be Right.  However traditions are not immaculately conceived.  When traditions are used as bludgeons, they kill off the people they’re meant to serve.

We’re all traditionalists is some ways.  You always know what season it is in my house from the holiday altars and tableaux.  On the other hand there are things I do things because my parents went through The Depression, like re-use dental floss.  Both traditions, one is based on choice, the other on an anxiety that was never mine in the first place.

The Spiritual Realm is like the Internet.  No one ever says “Mine is the one true Internet.”  The Internet just is.  We all have our favorite browsers and e-mail programs and web sites and things we like to do on the Internet.

And when your computer crashes and you get a new one and can’t access your wireless network and the tech people at Linksys won’t help you until you’ve bought one of their support packages,  I hope you have someone in your life like my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.  Someone who can come over and say, “Oh please, the experts can’t always fix the problem, and you won’t get a refund if they don’t.  There are dozens of ways to do things on the Internet.  Move over, what’s your password?”

Now that’s love.  The experts might say it’s counter to the way things are supposed to be.

It’s the Christian holy week and I’ve been musing over my changing beliefs about Jesus, the point man for Christianity, the one whose mind so many people profess to know.  Actually we don’t understand what’s in our own minds, let alone anyone else’s.   But since I am one of two people who know the password to my blog’s dashboard, here’s what I think:

I think that what has developed right from the beginning as Christianity is not what Jesus had in mind.  I believe there was a historical Jesus and that he died and that’s where I part ways with traditional Christianity.  I believe the good news is that we are all divine in the same way Jesus was divine.  That was the radical message.  It was only after he died that someone cooked up a story to fit the mindset of a culture and mythos that existed 2000 years ago on the other side of the globe.

I think there is a much simpler interpretation and one that doesn’t beggar belief.

Jesus had an idea that we are all part of an energy and a power that brought the world into being and sustains it.  Maybe we could call it Love, but let’s leave God out of it.  To many of us, God is forever going to be remote, oppressive, male, and dressed in pajamas.  Jesus made new sense of what it meant to be born, to be a person and to grow into the glory of one’s own life.  The point is not to copy his life but to be our own piece of divinity that’s connected to the whole.

Death and transformation were familiar to an agrarian society.  People understood that seeds at the end of flowering  were buried and sprouted into new life.   So it was a useful image until Jesus physically died and someone who didn’t understand the mysticism involved had to cook up something more concrete.   I imagine the reasoning then was much the same as today: we have to get our story straight and everyone has to believe the same thing.  We can’t let people just go off and access their own spirituality, find their own paths, have their own numinous experiences and come to their own conclusions.  What if they get it wrong? What if it gets out of control?

The death and resurrection story had to be linked to the ancient culture’s traditions of sacrifice.  I still occasionally choke when I hear someone ranting about being saved from his sins.  I was raised by a mother who chased me around the house with a fireplace poker screaming that God was going to punish me so I have a jaundiced view of that particular theological point.  It’s been an achievement for me to no longer think in terms of sin.  It makes no sense that this beautiful world was created in love but its pièce de résistance was early in its tenure declared bad.   (Please don’t try to explain it to me. I understand the logic.  It’s no longer in my paradigm.)

During the years that I was trying my damnedest–and I use the word pointedly– to be a good Christian, I remember when the teaching came down from on high via InterVarsity Press that sin really meant separation from God.  I think that’s the meaning of the word in the Greek.  Fair enough.  But I think Jesus was suggesting that separation from God was separation from oneself, from the divinity within ourselves.  Separated from our little piece of divinity, we can’t be ourselves.   A true modern, I call that anxiety, not sin.  And it’s deadening.

We experience our divinity in a balance of attending to the still small voice inside and allowing ourselves to be influenced by the love of others.  Love.  Not indoctrination, not coercion, not guilt, not obligation, not sentimentality.

Christianity without mysticism is not significantly different from a fraternity, a rotary club or the junior league.  They can all host potlucks –or keggers– and do volunteer work.  Christianity without mysticism doesn’t have enough to do.  It makes us police each other.  At the lowest level we bludgeon each other with anything that sounds like a law or a rule.  A little higher up the enlightenment ladder we get smarmy with our concepts of grace, usually allowing more of it for our own “sins” than we do anyone else’s.  We get self-righteous about social justice.

It’s uncontrollable, the divine spirit.  A holy spirit is implicated in what is sometimes called intuition.  Disparagingly if it’s female intuition.  I believe the holy spirit operates intuitively: you can’t prove its existence, you can’t control it, it doesn’t explain itself, it works creatively like an artist.  If ever the feminine is elevated along side the male in our society, we may find the holy spirit to be much more generally accessible and Christianity might seem less like boot camp.   There might be much less suspicion that someone out there was doing their spirituality “wrong.”  I would love to see everyone cut loose from religions and religious terminologies, free to find our own ways and experience the integration of spirit among us.

My computer crashed last week.  The mother just hopped its board.  It was an awful week enlivened at times by hysteria.  I was going to write about it but it’s still too close.  Here’s a more cheerful topic: abortion.  This is an extension of my last post about the birth control and abortion laws that are eliciting such funny comments on Facebook.  It’s mostly just an old man in Rome who truly has a(mis-guided) problem with birth control. But for some unfathomable reason, the instigators of what is being called the war on women, are trying to undermine both legal abortion and a way to circumvent the need for abortions, that is, birth control.  It suggests how mindless the whole business is.

The birth control/ abortion controversy does not belong anywhere near politics but since it’s there, here’s the way it is being used: One contingency has decided to use their arbitrary stance on abortion to gain votes from people who actually care about the process of pregnancy and birth.  While the so called pro-life movement has become a tool of the political right, it could just as easily have been a tool of the left because it’s consistent with left-ish views on capital punishment and wars.  The pro-choice stance could have easily fit into the political right’s notions of individual freedoms and rights.  But it went the other way and is used quite cynically on both sides.  People who care about the dilemma are being used by people who care about themselves.

The current permutation in the war is a disagreement about when Life actually begins. We used to think life began when we were born. Then it was in the 3rd trimester of a pregnancy.  More recently the case is trying to be made that life begins at conception.  But that’s already passé.  In Delaware a city council passed a resolution to urge Congress to pass laws that grant personhood to eggs and sperms.  Or egg-persons and sperm- persons.  So now life begins at ovulation and ejaculation.  I swear this is not a bit from Saturday Night Live.

Since 1972 abortions have been legal in this country.  Pro-Choice has stood for “A Woman’s Right to Choose!”  Pro-Life has been squirming to come up with new and better ways to make abortion be accepted as murder.  We are given only two choices just like we are given two choices in the Monkey trials: evolution or creation, vote for one.  And like a bunch of monkeys we make a choice about something that is too complex to be reduced to a fundamental choice.  Our minds need to be permeated with the complexity of the dilemma.  That’s not going to happen as long as politicians are running the war.

The officers in the abortion wars really don’t care what happens one way or another.  They are after something else. Power. Attention. The reassurance they have the Truth and therefore aren’t going to hell or they aren’t going to catch it when their father gets home.  Something like that.  Whatever will ease their terror.

Reflective people –and to be fair, there are those in Congress who are—grapple with the complexity of questions about life, birth, birth control, abortions, women as Persons, men as responsible fathers, over-population.  The public fight is too simplistic to be anything but problematic.  It’s followed the route of addiction.  First there was the dependence on one’s chosen belief.  Then the fight between the polar opposites became the problem itself.  This country needs a conversation that goes places the public fight has never gotten close to.

Having said that, I understand why it’s useful to have a legal definition of when life begins.  I believe that governments are structures to address the physical needs of human beings currently walking around on the earth and government needs to give individual consciences room to breathe.  Congress trampling all over the mystery of life with its big clown feet would be comical if it weren’t so frightening.

Life itself is a question that philosophers, poets, theologians, and mystics have been musing over for centuries. Pardon me for pointing this out, but I don’t believe your average politician has the smarts or the humility to join this company.  Reason enough for keeping the question of when life begins out of their jurisdiction.