Religion: Not sure where I'll end up, but having a good time getting there

Yesterday, my daughter and I had an adventure.  Now, by standards of like Ponce de Leon, this was not very adventurous, but sometimes I feel like Kimmy Schmidt in the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and everything seems like an adventure to me.  This one was a spiritual adventure.

At my request, we bundled up and took ourselves to a different church than our usual, went on to Strange Donuts (oddly, also religiously instructive), and ended out back at the church we've been going to for the past 13 year.  This is the short story of how it happened, what happened, and what might happen in the future.

But first, maybe we should go to the far past.  All my life, I've had an active relationship with God.  As I grew up, that relationship definitely went through several metamorphoses  In my childhood, it was "God The Father" with a scientific twist.  I didn't want to disappoint God and I wanted God to understand that I didn't want to be good just to get into heaven, but that I really, really wanted to do God's will.   But, I also thought frequently, "Where did God come from?"  "How could something ALWAYS be there?"  I couldn't suss it out to make sense.  In the college years, it was a kind of Arts and Sciences relationship with God (God, how can I pray to you when there really isn't a 'being' such as God.  And what about religion as an instrument of oppression, patriarchy, etc.  And what about the Holocaust?!  And yet, in my gut, I believe in You...so I guess I will just be mixed up and avoid church).  Then, in my late twenties and early thirties - my early years as a social worker- I saw so much human suffering and the most vulnerable people every day - I knew I needed a spiritual community and something that sustained me spiritually, so I began attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation, which, religiously stems from Judeo-Christian roots, but in practicality, it's a spiritual home for people who range from Buddhist, to Jewish, to secular humanist, to Christian, to pantheist.  And since then, my relationship with God has been been daily in both mundane ways (Have you ever seen Fiddler on the Roof?  I talk to God pretty much like an invisible friend at times i.e., God, do you think you could make my life lessons a little less jarring?  Would that be so troublesome?) and also in mysterious ways that are beyond my ability with words.  It's become unimportant to me whether the word God is what's used to name God.  I use the word God, but I know a lot of people feel uncomfortable with that.  Many of those same people experience deep in them something like I do: a knowing that there is something more.  I call it God.  I see it and feel it as Love, and I know it as Mystery and a Goodness Beyond Words.  

So, that's the backstory.  The current story is this:  two things are converging.  As my marriage was ending, I felt increasing curious about how Christian theology might fill out the meaning of my experiences of my marriage and the end of my marriage.  So, I met a couple times with a Methodist minister I know.  Also, I grew up Methodist, so the familiarity and frame of reference appealed to me.  Not only that - I've been compelled, as so many of us have, by  news, politics, intersection of religion with currents events, and I've been wondering how to be a part of the solution, even a small part, in this miasma of vitriol, anger and  hate.  The solution, for me is compelled by what I consider to be not only my civic conviction, but spiritual beliefs.

So, that led me (and my daughter) to the rock and roll Methodist Church yesterday.  She looked at me early in the service, as the band was rockin' out and said, "we're more uptight than this."  But twice during the service, she whispered, "I really like this, do you?"  I did.  The message, pivoted on a quote from the Sermon on the Mount, but it broke down the Bible verse into interpretation and emphasis - it gave choices, and emphasized both/and thinking (rather than either/or thinking). 

Afterward, of course, my daughter didn't want to go to a second church service in one morning.  What 11 year old kid does?  But, I wanted to go directly to our 'home' church and see how that felt.  So I bribed her with Strange Donuts and off we flew.  The man at the donut counter asked us what we were doing and when I told him, I also asked if he grew up with a religion.  "Catholic," he said.  "But I don't go anymore.  It's interesting that I'm studying at a Jesuit school."  We laughed and talked for a few minutes about Catholicism.   And as my daughter and I walked out into the wind and cold, she said "That's weird that we had such a deep conversation in the donut shop."  I said "Stick with me, kid."  Because truthfully, I have weird, deep conversations with people in passing all the time.

And then we entered our familiar, old church.  The sanctuary where we've spent holidays, watched baptisms (Unitarian style), taken part in Youth Talent Shows, and Christmas Pageants.  Not to mention all the 'old' faces - the people we've seen age, the children I've seen grow, the characters I've come to have so much affection for.   This is the weird part to me - not deep conversations, but to find myself contemplating a religious crossroads, to wonder if I'll take a step toward a further metamorphosis in my relationship with God?  Or will it be a different iteration of my relationship with the church?  

Walking and talking and laughing and learning with my daughter, I felt and feel joyous and grateful.  We are together in a country where we can choose our religion, where we can disagree and talk and wonder with people we know well and those we've just met.  We can change our minds!  We can walk down the street with the wind whipping the hair in our faces and practically skip with the energy of it.   

And, I don't know what will happen next.  And, I treasure both the freedom and responsibility of that.  

this week in grief therapy...bargaining

I think a lot of people, at some point, have encountered information about the 5 Stages of Grief, outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in the her 1970-something book, On Death and Dying: 1) Shock/Denial, 2) Bargaining, 3) Anger, 4) Depression, 5) Acceptance.  There are other theories of grief and many of them are excellent resources, but hers seems to be the one that is most commonly dispersed in funeral homes, through hospices, in the self-help section of the book store.  I admire her work so much - she was one of the pioneers of the hospice movement in the U.S.

Anyway, it is commonly thought that there is some kind of order to these and that a grieving person should proceed through one after the other and end up in the place of healing and wholeness - acceptance.  But anyone who's ever endured a great loss knows that even if these are the stages, they don't go in any order and you can move in and out and through these stages sometimes in one day and you might end out at the end of that day in shock and denial.  This is no failure.  It just is.

This week, I've been thinking about the bargaining stage of grief, in part because of an exercise I am working on for myself - a grief timeline.  If you are in a self-reflective phase, for whatever reason, you might get something out of this too.  Just create a timeline, like you did in grade school, and hashmark your line with a date/year and small notation like, "June 1979, pet fish died." Anything that you want can count as a loss - car accident, loss of job, moving, being diagnosed with asthma.  It can be big or small and there's no 'right' thing to include on your timeline.  Sometimes it's helpful to see patterns or gain a big picture understanding of where grief has fallen in your life.

When I was working on mine, and I got to my high school years, I reflected on the way I grieved the breakup with a high school boyfriend (a lot of tears and U2 songs being played over and over on my "boombox".  Damn the rewind button.)  A large part of my grieving was what I now consider "BARGAINING" in the stages of grief and all of it awesomely high school style - "Maybe if I wear this outfit to the party, he'll realize he likes me again",  "maybe if I flirt with this other guy at the party, he'll realize he likes me again", "maybe if I ignore him totally, he'll realize he likes me again".  I held an unconscious belief that something I did would have control over his actions and reactions.  It's not even humiliating to think of it now (though maybe it should be),  because I see how we all bargain in grief even when the stakes are much higher.

I've worked with so many people over the years who bargain even long after the person they loved so deeply has died.  "Maybe I should have insisted he go to the doctor sooner", "maybe I should have stayed home that day instead of going to work", "Maybe I should have pushed her harder to try that one experimental chemo."

Bargaining is futile and so human.  I think people who normally feel a great degree of control in their lives are more susceptible to bargaining because the cold, hard fact that something so important is out of our control seems nearly unthinkable. I also see bargaining as being related to feelings of guilt and responsibilit, i.e.,  if only I could do something different, if only I had done something other than I had, if I am better, more, different, I could have or will prevent this loss.  It's a terrible place to be.

About a year ago I went to a grief training in St. Louis, given by David Kessler, who co-wrote Elizabeth Kubler Ross's last book with her, On Grief and Grieving.  He said, that if we had any control over the life of the person who died, they would still be with us. I just want to repeat that - "If we had any control over the life of the person we love who died, they would still be with us."

It is difficult in this life to discern when we have control over something and when we don't.  It is difficult to know whether the thing we think we want would ensure a good outcome for all.  How much difference does one decision make?  Would the experimental chemo have cured mom's cancer?  Would she have gotten 3 more good months, or 3 more months more sick than ever?  

An expression that gets used a lot these days is, "It is what it is."  I think that's a mantra of letting go.  But in a wise and gentle way, one of my young clients had something else to say about how she is, at times, able to let go of her bargaining and second guessing and at times of the pain of her grief.  She said, "When I go to a dark place, there are a lot of questions.  There are only questions.  I have to look for solace.  I look for that in my friends and family who are living.  And I find it."

Like I said, bargaining is natural and more natural to some of us control freaks than others, but if you are stuck in that painful place right now, I encourage you to reach out to someone who cares about you and let your connection to them be a light out of the cold and dark.