Longing for home

This year I was all jazzed about writing weekly reflections for Advent - pairing them with O Antiphons, even.  But, of course, this did not happen, as life intervened yet again and the days and the hours slipped silently away.  I was, however, invited to write a reflection on a piece of music for Advent for a site called ecclesio.com - you can read it here.  This will be the extent of my spiritual musings for the season.  Off into another direction we go...

I learned a new word this week - hiraeth.  It's a Welsh word that is somewhat difficult to translate, but according to the Facebook Oracle (which is gospel truth), it means, "a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past."  I read this and was suddenly flooded with images in my head - images and feelings and pieces of hopes and dreams that seemed forever broken and lost and impossible to recapture.  Here was the place where those disturbing middle-of-the-night dreams originate.  Here were those nagging thoughts in my brain to which I could never put a name or a face or an idea.  

Hiraeth.

The definition itself has a bizarre, vague clarity to it, describing something that is tangible but only because you can never really put your hands on it.  It's that moment of clarity that lasts for 5 seconds in your head, and then disappears.  It's the swirling, wisps of morning fog that dissipate the moment you walk through them.  It's that elusive lightning bug that always carried the possibility of holding a fragile, wondrous glow in the palm of your hand before it disappears and leaves you with a rather gross-looking bug.

Hiraeth.

What is this home?  Is it a place?  Is it a people?  Is it a state of mind?  Maybe it's that little girl who, years ago, was full of dreams and fantasies about what the future would look like.  Maybe it's that not-so-little girl who, no-so-many years (weeks?) ago accepted that the dreams of that little girl really were fantasies, and that life sometimes is exactly what it looks like.  And sometimes that really isn't very interesting or inspiring at all, but feels gray, dull, and death-like.  Or maybe, just maybe, the home we are really yearning for does not and cannot exist.  It is utopia, complete in its double meaning:  the "not" place, and the "perfect" place.  And that makes us want it even more.

Hiraeth.

It haunts.  And yet, is also inspires a dream of something even more fantastical.  Maybe this home will be filled with the warmth of the people we want to have in our lives, but cannot.  And maybe those people will only haunt its rooms for eternity, in their trail the pleasures and pains of nostalgia.  Whatever this "this" is, it leaves us incomplete, and our homesickness is a disease that, seemingly, will never heal.

Morning Time

Mozart - a great way to start any morning...

I have never been a morning person. In fact, my mother used to call me “Evil-ina” as a child when I reluctantly descended the stairs.  For me, morning was always the time to shrink back underneath the covers and pretend that just a few more minutes of closing your eyes in the darkness would do the trick.  These days, mornings are my favorite – especially days like today when I don’t have to be anywhere. I rather enjoy stumbling around the house in my bathrobe searching for that first, elusive cup of coffee, strains of “The Golden Girls” on the tv in other room as I stare blankly out the window, ignoring the lawn that needs to be cut, reveling in all the changing colors, but not the neighbors leaves on the grass…ah, fall.  

I work from home most Wednesday, although things seem to get scheduled on these days with annoying frequency.  In theory, Wednesdays – at least the mornings – are supposed to be all about me.  It’s not selfish.  It’s survival. 

At this morning’s brain feeding at the time-sucking trough of Ye Facebook Oracle, I came across 2 articles – this one here  about understanding and living with the things we feel like we’ve lost (even though, perhaps, we haven’t lost them yet), and this one here about Millennials and high church.  These articles seemingly have nothing do with each other, but the combination of the two unleashed some powerful stuff.

I had an immediate, irrepressible urge to write.  For me, writing is much like music and the need to get on the instrument - gotta have it, gotta have it now, when the heart says it’s time.  Screw the world and its schedule.  It’s not a need, it’s a NEED.  I opened up my blog interface, was assaulted by that dark page with the red candles on it, and I just couldn't do it.  I clicked the “x” and moved on to Word.

Under the Cassock.  A cassock that has been a suffocating, torturous presence – a reminder of hurt and loss, of unanswered prayers.  A hurt that is deep, because it is mixed with joy and success and music and life changing opportunities.  I can’t integrate these things together in my mind.  These feelings can’t possibly coexist.  I don’t want this cassock anymore.  I don’t believe in it

Or do I?

I have struggled mightily with my beliefs and with my faith.  Do I believe in God?  Yes.  Probably.  Most of the time.  Probably all of the time, but sometimes I don’t want to – not always because of God, but because of all the ‘stuff” that comes with God, even though it really has no place there. “They” – you know, those people - say that “God’s presence is with us through the people around us.”  Really?  Even when those you love and to whom you are closest disappoint you and fail you in massively destructive ways?  What a cruel joke.  Some other “they” will probably say, “Well, Nicole, if your faith was stronger you would accept that this is God’s path for you, and would just bow your head lower and pray for Jesus to take all your pain away.” 

I think “they” are full of it. 

God doesn't promise that to take all our pain away – not in this lifetime.  God promises to be a presence in our lives through EVERY time, difficult and joyful.  And guess what – his presence mostly comes through those people up there who, at times, fail and disappoint us.  See?  Here I am making arguments for God in the midst of doubting him.  Perhaps I was just well indoctrinated as a child.  Or, perhaps faith is a living, breathing, organic being that can never tolerate being static.  <Sigh>  Sometimes the truth is annoying. 

Do I believe in The Church?  No.  Absolutely not.  It’s a dream that will never become a reality.  Too many people posturing, hurting, hiding, making it all about themselves instead of about God.  “But, Nicole,” you may say, “don’t you ‘work’ in a church?  Doesn't your ‘work’ require you to fill a pastoral and educational role that, if you really don’t believe in The Church, would make you a hypocrite?” 

Why yes, yes it does.  Well, in a way.  I work in that little community because I love those people.  Some of us have been through quite a bit together, and some of us are making new, awesome memories as we speak. And throughout all these things, we come and worship together every week, even when we don’t want to be there.  There are times when I cannot wrap my mind around these things coexisting together; times when all that hurt, loss and unanswered prayer seems insurmountable, and the best thing to do is turn your back on it and walk slowly and deliberately towards something else.  But then those NEW things come bouncing along and for just a few minutes, I can forget about the hurt.  And the hurt drifts farther, and farther away.  Don’t get me wrong – it's still there.  Just in a fuzzy, indiscernible shape on the horizon.  Some wise person might say, “Well, duh, Nicole, that is The Church.”  Wish I could see it.

I used to have a lot of interesting conversation with friends and colleagues about faith and church.  I used to enjoy them.  Now they just make my head hurt.  I learned a lot about God as a child – hard to avoid it as a Preacher's Kid, but we tried our best.  I also heard a lot of people talk about their relationships with God.  Most of this talk happened on Sundays mornings in some liturgical or teaching context.  What I never really learned is that doubt is ok.  Doubt about anything, really.  How else can we really learn what is truth to us if we don’t explore every side of that truth?  That would have been a nice little nugget to pack away as a child – ignored at first, like every other seemingly unimportant parental teaching, but then discovered later on like your favorite piece of candy in your pocket when lunch is still an hour away and you skipped breakfast.

I suppose the beauty in all this is that different people see different things, and THAT is the beauty of life, the very life of what is beauty.  I can love it, you can hate it, and yet “it” is still there for someone else to interpret and breathe in.  I think, perhaps, there is a wee bit of The Church in that thought.

A New Year

Counterpoint: The technique of combining two or more melodic lines in such a way that they establish a harmonic relationship while retaining their linear individuality; Use of contrasting elements in a work of art; To set in contrast.

New Year’s is such a metaphor for new life – for change and all that comes with.  It almost seems built into our DNA to think about what we will change in the new year, and how we wish to change ourselves.  How can we make life new?  How can we make ourselves new?  Many of us spend time making lists and promises to ourselves and others about how things will be different or in some cases, promises to keep putting energy into the things that are currently working well.  Maybe it’s the group mentality of it, like the secret pinky promises between the bestest friends of our youth, that make this particular ritual so powerful. 

I wish I could say I’ve been pondering the power of new life, but I’ve actually been thinking a lot about death lately, and find myself being confronted with my own fear of dying alone and not knowing what comes next.  (I am tempted to say, “who knows why,” but we all have our demons and I know mine well.)  But I was lucky this New Year’s Eve to spend the early afternoon with a group of people in their 60’s and older – all vibrant in their own way, but dealing with their own late life issues.  What struck me most that afternoon was the anecdotal stories about friends and acquaintances who were 100 and older and of more than sound mind, if not of whole body.  Now, for the most part, my family is fairly long-lived – especially the women – but I’ve never really thought about living until I was 100.  That’s another 62 years on this earth.  Dude, that’s a long time.  And if centenarians are out there looking forward to their next days with a sense of adventure, it seems silly for 38 year old me to be so concerned with the next 5-10 years, especially since I have absolutely no control over many of the things that weigh on my mind.

The older I get, the more I understand myself.  One would think this would make life a little easier, but it doesn’t.  It only makes me feel older and more alone.  I actually kind of miss the blind recklessness of youthful decisions – going on instinct and just doing things because they feel right or seem like the right thing to do without the weight or knowledge of experience poking its opinion into things.  And many times, those decisions are right.  And when we make mistakes, we chalk it up to youth and inexperience.  Next time we will know better, and hopefully, we move on to make smarter decisions. 

But as I look into the new year, I don’t think it’s that simple.  I don’t know if there are “right” and “wrong” decisions.  There are simply decisions, and they all come with their own set of consequences that have the potential of affecting our lives in a myriad of different ways.  Just because we choose to “do the right thing” does not mean that everything that follows is golden.  There is no path that is true north.  Everything goes crooked every once in a while, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  There can be some interesting things growing on those crooked pathways – things that lead us to a better understand of ourselves, the ones we long, and the world around us. 

So what do I resolve to do this year?  Not sure about that.  There’s nothing more soul crushing than making promises to yourself that you can’t/don’t/won’t keep.  I know better than to wish for health and prosperity – sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just get what you get.  But I think this year it’s worth making an EFFORT – not a PROMISE, because promises just seem too absolute to me anymore – to ponder LIFE and all its forked and crooked pathways.  To ponder the possible adventures ahead – maybe 62 more years of them – and to be hopeful and thankful for the wise souls that we cross on those crooked paths that help us keep our perspective on the scary stuff in our minds that go unspoken.  

Poems of Prayers

Dear God,

I know we don't really talk anymore.  
Correction:  I don't really talk anymore.  
I just haven't had the heart to do it.  
I know you're there.  
And I know that you know that I know that you're there.  
I'm just...tired of the whole thing.  

Someone told me it's ok to say and feel that.  
Someone else told me that it shows a lack of faith.  

I think that second person is wrong.  

Me.


Dear God,

Sometimes I feel that I love you but I don't like you.  
Sometimes you're too hard for me to handle.  

Someone told me it's ok to say and feel that.  
Someone else told me they were praying for my soul because of it. 

I appreciate all the prayer I can get, but I think that second person's motives are a bit misguided.  

Me.


Dear God,

I really don't want to say anything to you right now.  
You know what's going on in here, anyway.  
I appreciate you toughing it out with me, though, and I love you for it.  
But for now, all I'm capable of is throwing some random thoughts in your general direction.  

Someone told me it's ok to say and feel that.  
Someone else told me it wasn't enough and that's why I couldn't hear you like I used to.

I think that second person is wrong.  
I know you're there.
I just choose not to listen.
Maybe I should try to spend a little more time with that second person, anyway.  

Me.

Middle Night Musings

Sometimes I do some of my best thinking at night.  And by "at night" I mean between the hours of 2 am and 6 am.  The middle of the night, really, or Middle Night, as I like to call it.  It has more of a poetic and less pathetic ring to it.  

So here I am in the Middle Night, after being up for 2 or 3 hours.  I spent the time trying to think positive thoughts because I wanted to avoid a repeat of the ginormous black widow spider dream I had the night before.  It's my own personal version of the "chase" dream, being stalked by a big, hard-shelled black arachnid with a red hourglass on its forehead...but I digress.  The Middle Night is also the time I end up wrestling with my biggest demons, for whatever reason.  Perhaps being surrounded by darkness makes the mind, though tired, vivid with imagination.  Or maybe it's the fatigue itself that chases away rational thought.  Whatever it is, it's annoying.  But tonight, for once, my musings were dispassionate and lucid.  

These days I am calling myself a "concert organist", well, because I am.  I do not currently have a faculty position at a college or conservatory (mostly by choice) and I've retreated from the church music world enough that it just doesn't seem  truthful anymore to label myself as a church musician as my primary professional identity.  It's also an unconscious yet conscious way to distance myself from the stress of the past 2 years or so.  But as a musician, I find it difficult to label myself as anything else but a musician.  It's not just a part of who I am, but a guiding force behind my identity.  And not just because of the beauty of music itself, but because of what it represents - life.  Life in all its ups and downs, in all its beauty and ugliness.  Music is an expression of that up and down beauty and ugliness, and music as a process is an expression of the process we call life.  At least, that's how I see it.

But here's my revelation.  For the past year I've been trying, for the life of me, to figure out how a life that was built on all the "right" principles, with the "right" spirit, and with the obligatory blood, sweat, and tears could be so quickly taken - stolen - from underneath you.  It's not as if we weren't all paying attention.  But yet, it happened.  Perhaps it's happened to you at some point, too.  It made me think:

"Well, perhaps you weren't as happy as you thought you were."

"Perhaps it wasn't as good as you thought it was."

And here's the kicker - "Perhaps YOU aren't as good as you thought you were."

Once you start down that road, you begin doubt yourself and everything that makes you what you are.  In essence, you erase yourself out of existence.  And it's not out of self pity.  It's just dispassionate, rational thought, really.  Or so you think.    

Oh, Nicole, this is so depressing, you say.  But hang on, here's the good part.  I think that "extraordinary life", that "mountaintop experience", or whatever you call that thing that you strive for - that shining goal in the distance you raise all your standards in expectation of is actually a very fragile thing.  It's not a solid fortress built on top of an impenetrable mountainside made from years of study and experience.  It's a small, shining, crystalline sphere of hope and imagination floating just above our reach that is as bright as the hottest sun but as fragile as the tiniest, thinnest sliver of ice.  It takes the whole of our very souls to keep it suspended in mid air for that period of time for which it lives.  But it only takes the clench of one or two or three fists to shatter it to pieces.  We could attempt to build an impenetrable wall around it, but that would only shield us from bathing in those beautiful rays.  We could only share with those we think of as "safe" enough to get near it, but then it would lose some if its brilliance.  

I know there is truth in this, but it's a frustrating truth.  Why is something that took so much time and effort to build so freaking fragile?  It doesn't seem to make much sense, but I feel in the depth of my soul that it is true.  The mistake we make - well, the mistake I made - is that I only saw one very fragile crystalline sphere in my future, when in fact there are an infinite number floating around the ether - floating around our imaginations just waiting to be thought into existence.  We just tend to get sidetracked and put on blinders when the one right in front of us starts to form, and then we can't even see the forest of possibilities that still lie around us.  

This, of course, does not lessen the pain watching the first one smash to pieces.  But it does give me a little hope - more than a little hope - that this very brilliant, very virulent, very overwhelming, very fragile sphere of hope and happiness and imagination can be created.  Again.  But different, this time.

Now - back to the spiders...

Are You There God? It's Me, Nicole

I was a big Judy Blume fan growing up as a kid. In fact, I was a big book fan, period. (Still am, but I think now you'd call it a book junkie.)  We used to have Book Fairs at our elementary school - remember those?  They would pass out those small, newspaper circular-like catalogs of delight where I could gleefully plot the direction in which my imagination would be turned. I remember the unbelievable freedom I felt while shopping for those books. Book Fairs were the only instances I can remember as a child where my parents never restricted how much I could buy. The sky was the limit, and I was usually that kid who came home carrying her books in one of the boxes they were shipped in. On Book Fair days we could be picked up by our parents instead of taking the bus home, and I remember waiting with glee in the school cafeteria, staring out the big windows for the familiar car. I spent  the whole ride home wishing my mother would drive faster so I could choose the first book to be read. Once home, I would drop my bookbag full of homework just inside the door (which to my father's annoyance made the most effective doorstop when he tried come in after work) and plop myself and my box on the end of the couch and choose. And then I would read. And read. And read.  Boy, do I miss that kind of excitement.

"Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" was one of the many, many books I read as a child. It was about a young girl who grew up with a Christian mother and a Jewish father and was searching for a single truth for herself.  I actually did not remember that part of it until I Googled it earlier - it was the title itself that popped into my head.  It got stuck there as I pondered my own search to find God "again". Over the past several months I've had a number if conversations with many different people of all ages about faith and belief and just about everything that intersects with those things.  And do you know what the one common denominator is?  Doubt. Doubt about many things. The very existence of God, or the existence of any God, for that matter. The value of faith communities. The transparency of organized religion.  The validity of the doctrines and practices of different denominations. The genuineness of "devout" Christians and Christian leaders. And it seems that underneath that doubt lies the other common denominator- fear.

Now, Nicole, you say, you can't have two common denominators!!!  That may be true, but where you find one you usually find the other. And the truth us, fear and doubt are two very human responses that we are so often told are signs of weakness and lack of true commitment when it comes to faith. And you know what?  That's just crap. We all have our own fears and doubts in life, and in my own life the exploration of these doubts and fears have led to some pretty extraordinary discoveries about God, faith, and myself. The key for me has always been to not allow myself to be paralyzed by doubt and fear, but to find a way to work through them to the other side. And don't get me wrong - it doesn't always work out.  I don't always "work on it", and I often end up wrestling with the same stupid demons over and over again.  I have found myself lying awake at night wondering if God was really up there anyway, and did it really matter if I did the right thing even though no one would ever see only to wake up in the morning wondering what in the world I ate the night before that brought such ridiculous thoughts to my head.  And while I've never really been afraid of death, per se, I know that when I'm pondering these things in the middle of the night I am terrified that when the time does come that I will die alone. And then morning comes and I roll my eyes at myself and move on.  Maybe I should work on my "middle of the night madness" next...

I refuse to believe this makes me less faithful, or even any less strong. It makes me human. I am not perfect, and I never want to be. I want to become the person I was meant to be by living into the potential that has been built into my soul. I know that God put that potential there and gave me the tools to achieve it. I just don't always see it or have the patience to look for it.  But hey, that's my struggle. Being faithful doesn't mean being perfect.  So every once in a while I will stare into the ceiling lit by the occasional light of the moon, notice with disgust the spots I missed with the paintbrush, and say, "Are you there, God? It's me, Nicole."  Hopefully those times are few and far between.  But despite the doubts that may be momentarily running through my head, I can take some assurance in the fact that I still crave to have the conversation and that God is still listening.

Scores That Tell Stories

I've had the Grieg score above for 20 years, probably.  And it looks like it’s been through a war – the front cover is attached with scotch tape and the back cover has been missing for years.  It’s dirty, used and abused, and the funny thing is I haven’t played most of the pieces in it.  I’m sure most people would say, “Nicole, you should take better care of your scores!” 

But when I look at that book, I see stories – I see my life.  I see practicing my mother’s old spinet piano when I was first started taking lessons, reading from the manuscript paper my first teacher used to write musical examples for me.  I see the “Dozen a Day” exercise books with the dancing stick figures at the beginning of every exercise.  I see my sister and me trading spots at the piano, one sister dancing while the other sister played.  I see hurriedly throwing the books into a haphazard pile into my music bag – black with treble clefs on it (wouldn't be caught dead with that now).  I see train rides to Bryn Mawr to the piano lessons which I learned to hate in the end, sitting on the aging orange plasticky seats on the Septa train cars.  I see the beautiful, colonial mansion of the Conservatory where I took those lessons, with its antique furniture and wallpaper waiting for me as I walked through the back parking lots from the station.  I can smell the air in that house; I can hear the creak of the old wood floors. 

I can remember buying every piano score that I own, and I can remember every occasion for buying them.  A flood of images sweep through my mind as I think about rifling through file drawers for slim Heller scores, sliding the smooth, sleek Chopin volumes off the shelf.  They smelled so new, so promising.  In those pages was my future, my imagination brought to life.  Everything I could imagine could become real in those notes, and I remember when I brought every single one of those books into my life.

Except that Grieg.  Perhaps it was a “borrowed” score from my teacher that I never returned.  And she certainly wouldn't want it back when she saw its stained, dog-eared pages.  But that’s what makes it mine.  Including the squashed, dead spider between two of the pages, tracing my glorious relationship with those gross creatures back through the years (I was always too afraid to touch its dead body to scrape it off the page).  Perhaps it seems weird to tell your life story through a pile of books – a pile of work tools, really – but the thought brings a smile.  And as I think about what I want in the new year, what I will grasp as part of my life, I close my eyes and find myself in the aisles of that music store with a thick score in my hands, fanning the pages as the notes run across the page just waiting for me to catch them.  And just that quickly, my imagination encounters the future once more.

And that is a blessing.