Set All The Beacons Blazing

Have you ever thought about those conversations that have changed your life? In other words, once the piece of information slotted itself into place in your brain, you couldn't look at the world the same way. Here are mine that I was thinking about this morning . . . three of my most recent, and so precious that I am grateful for the people who were in my life to have those conversations with me.

Conversation #1
I'm sitting in a car in Camps Bay, South Africa talking to my high school friend Tracy last summer. I have spent the past twenty years in America, living life on the family fast track. Marriage, children (within about twenty seconds of each other, if the timing of Julia's birth is anything to go by), degrees, homes, business, career, pets, soccer teams etc., etc., etc. I have returned, alone, to my homeland, which I left in 1984 as a college freshman. The teenage ties I had before I left Cape Town and which had suffered the inevitable severance have been resurrected through cheap long distance phone calls, Internet, email and Facebook.

In the early 80s, Tracy and I played netball and waterpolo together. We wore the school uniforms and, even at seventeen, kept our hair up high in pigtails. In 2009, she is a physical therapist with her own practice; I am an attorney. We are both wives to American husbands, and mothers to children. We're in our early forties, but her face is the same, her staccato speech delivery the same, her hunger for a good life still the same. I recognize her--her laugh, her grin, her accentuated hand movements--from decades ago and she is as familiar to me as the Westerford maroon plaid dress with notched collar.

We're sitting in her car after an evening at the beach, I think, talking about choices, about her experiences in Texas, and mine in Utah; about raising kids, about what guidelines she lives by; about how she deals with a cross-cultural marriage and the assumptions that each culture brings to the marriage. The conversation veers to children, about how to raise them, about the kind of discipline, about what standards are appropriate. I am eager to talk to somebody from the outside. Somebody who knew me before, when I was still young and eager and naive and cocksure about life. She's talking about disciplining her son, who is, from my meetings with him, a delightful, well-mannered, talented high school senior. "You know, Tess," she says, "sometimes, I see him do things, and I'll say: 'Uh-huh, no . . . we are not those kinds of people. We do not do those kinds of things.' It's important for me to a good person, to do good things, to help, to be kind. I want my children to be those kinds of people as well."

The words seem quite mundane now that I write them out in full conversation. But, when I heard Tracy say, "We are not those kinds of people," the light bulb flickered on in my brain. There was no language about what kind of "people" she should or shouldn't be. I felt no sense that she was aligning herself with an imposed notion of goodness or of appropriate behavior. Neither was she waiting for the memo from the Vatican City to tell her what kind of person she should be. Rather, Tracy was speaking about what she was choosing to be, about the life she was choosing to create for herself and for her family. I sat there in the front seat of her car and thought to myself, "I will choose for myself the kind of people I will be."

In the past eighteen months, I have asked myself this question quite often: What kind of person do I want to be? I have come to some realizations.

• I choose to pray, not because I should, but because I want to be the kind of person who knows how to speak to deity and to hear its voice. I also want to be the kind of person who teachers her children how to listen to and recognize God's voice.
  
• I pay tithing not because I want open heavenly windows but because I want to be the kind of person who contributes to the organization to which she belongs. I want to pay my dues.
  
• I attend church every week and teach in its organizations because I want to be part of a faith community, and I want to be a person willing and able to work beside and love those I would not have chosen for my own company.
  
• I take my children to church, not because I should, but because I want to be the kind of parent who shows their children that personal comfort is not always as significant as service for the greater community. I also take my children to church because I want them to know that there, in this place, there is time set aside to know their God and a redeemer.
  
• I am married, not because being married is the only way to salvation, but because I love this man, and together we make great children and find great places to eat, and he makes me laugh and think. I stay married to him because, even though there are times I have consciously chosen to walk back through the door, I want to be the kind of person who, after forty years, smiles across the table at the same man I promised to love four decades before.
• I tell the truth not because my soul will burn in hell if I don't but because a truthful way is a peaceful way. I would like to be known as an honest person.

These are my choosings. I see them as such now--actions chosen by me. Not shoulds, not musts, but my choosings. Perhaps the outside of me doesn't look much different than I did before, but the inside feels so much more genuine.

Conversation #2
(Written with permission of my husband, who's flinching a little at the kitchen counter).

I've long maintained that it would do our community a whole lot of good if we had a version of the village pub. You know, a place where you can go at the end of a day, or in the middle when it's five o'clock somewhere, to find your mates and have a chat. After a beer or two, or a shandy if you're an Englishwoman from the novels I've read, conversation starts to flow. I imagine it's the kind of conversation where you tell stories about yourself that make others laugh, and they reciprocate in turn. You share your troubles, your everydays, your regulars, your normals, your ups, whatever comes to mind. (Perhaps the scrapbooking allnighters that go on out there approximate the village pub, but I've never attended and don't know a curling iron from a die cut). So, I long for a village pub. You see, I want to know about married sex.

I know one couple that schedule Tuesday and Thursday, and alternate Saturdays for sex. That way he gets taken care of and she doesn't have to be bothered by him on the other days. They say no feelings get hurt that way. But what about, if on Friday, they go out, and she's looking striking and she makes funny conversation, and her hair's just been colored with low lights around her face, and their hands brush under the table, and they share the Great Chocolate Wall of China at P.F. Changs. What if, after all that, they go home and because it's Friday night, there's nothing going on. I'm telling you, he's not going to feel taken care of. And she'll feel just fine with Roast Almond Fudge out of the carton and the Secret Lives of Women on WE.

You see, it's hard, when you've only had one real sex partner i.e., all the way, to know what exactly is normal, average, regular, married sex. What's normal? Factor in a little history of sexual abuse, and there's a whole lot of "normals" for me and Kevin to get to. How often and how long? And where do you go to find out? The scrapbooking allnighter doesn't work because that's from a woman's perspective. From all accounts and personal experience, the male perspective is different. How exactly does that conversation start, in Utah, in the most LDS town in the known universe? Do you ask the church elders who visit once a month, "So, Brother Bullock, I know you're 93 and your wife died seven years ago, but what do you think is normal for married sex?" Might hasten his longed-for demise.

So, about eighteen months ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. The kind of friend that knew me when my knees were the widest part of my legs, and I wore pigtails, brown lace-ups, and longed for a Walkman. He's married, with six kids. But, more importantly, lives a continent and a complete culture away.

"So, how do you get your team to attack through the wings without making the center redundant?" He replies.
"So, can I ask you something else?"
"Go ahead"
"If you had your way, how often would you make love?"
"Aah, go on . . . ."
"No really . . . how often?"
"Every day."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Huh!"

You mean wanting everyday is normal. Everyday isn't perverted, oversexed, or insatiable. Everyday is just male, just different from me. Oh!

Now that was a thing I never before had supposed. And just knowing that changed everything for us.

Conversation #3
About three weeks ago, I sat again in a car talking to a friend--a twenty-something version of me (except I was never a concert pianist). Just graduated from law school, mother of two small girls, wife of a student, dealing with all those issues that go with being female, intelligent, in your early twenties, and LDS. We'd been walking through the foothills talking about polygamy and guilt, and veiling your face, and polygamy and guilt, and in-law issues, and polygamy and guilt, and eating issues, and polygamy and guilt.

Her: I don't want to live in polygamy in order to receive the highest degree of exaltation.
Me: You don't have to. Do you really think the God you worship and know will make you live in a situation that turns your stomach? Has he ever forced you to do anything? Why would he start then?

Her: I don't know whether I believe it all.
Me: You don't have to. Just believe what you feel to believe. Let the rest lie until you need it or want to know. There's nothing that says you have to believe it all, lock, stock and barrel, right now.

Her: I don't want to live in polygamy.
Me: You're not now . . . and now is all there is.

Her: I just don't know. There are so many holes in things. So many ideas I wish we had . . . like a heavenly mother.
Me: Where is it written that the theology contained in the four books available for public consumption is all there is? Borrow ideas. Start with the Virgin Mary. Feel to connect with Mother Earth. You want a heavenly mother . . . go find her. If she's all the mother she is supposed to be, she'll make herself known to you. Why, I wonder (and this is where time slowed for me, like I was Cameron Diaz in Charlies Angels doing her roundhouse kick.), do we wait to be fed what it is we individually need to know? If the general theology doesn't yet have it, it doesn't mean it's unavailable, or out of print. Perhaps this is where we get to know, just for ourselves, our personal mysteries of heaven.

As I drove away, I felt as if I had swallowed a pearl.

_____________________________

Those are some of my crucial conversations. What are yours?


Title: David Gray, from "Flesh"

Standing Outside the Fire

Question: Does God really prompt to inaction?

By this I don’t mean those warning voices that stop eight-year olds from hopping onto wild stallions, or a mother of nine from driving her minivan onto a canyon road where an avalanche will overtake her the minute she turns up the south fork. By inaction, I the state I find myself in when I fail to act, even though I had been fully meaning to until filled by a cloud of negative energy that I interpret to mean God does not want me to go that particular way. Mostly, it is the inaction that follows the uneasy, unsettling feeling that seems to come over me (sometimes accompanied by a desire to repeatedly throw up if the activity contemplated is my first, unassisted jury trial) when the moment of reckoning draws nigh, that moment when I have to walk through the airport doors, or step out onto the college field and play third base, or say “yes.”

When I was seventeen, I spent a year in Australia as an exchange student with Rotary International. Ever since I was in eighth grade, and had seen my first exchange student (an American boy named Tim with wavy, golden hair just a little longer than the regulation South African school cut) at my high school, I had wanted to participate in the program. After a series of interviews, weekend selection camps, and waiting, waiting, waiting, I found out I was selected for the year long program. I was to leave in January 1984, about five weeks after writing my final state exams to matriculate from Westerford High School. The night before I left, I couldn’t sleep. Fear and anxiety filled the bedroom, pushing against my years of dreaming and hoping. The photos at the airport show me smiling, but my eyes are as round as half-dollars. I spent the first three nights in Dubbo, Australia, sobbing myself very quietly to sleep (I shared a room with my host sister). It was my first time away from home and I was realizing I wouldn’t see my family for a year. I experienced aching, aching night time loneliness, a deep ache that I had never felt before. But, it didn’t kill me. And when the sun came up, things were better and continued to improve, until, upon leaving a year later, I cried for three days solid on my return to South Africa. In between those book-ended six days of sobbing . . . so much more than I had ever imagined.

A few mornings ago, I pulled into my sister’s driveway a few mornings ago to pick up Adam’s backpack before school. She lives on a street I used to live on, before I traded a jacuzzi tub, easy glide kitchen drawers, and water pressure for fifty-year old maple trees, irrigation canals, and deer that eat my roses to twigs. In the driveway of another home, I see him. He’s cleaning the ice off the windshield. I do a double-take. I thought he was in Hawaii, starting his first year of university. I shout out the window, “I thought you were in Hawaii . . . Are you home for fall break?” After all, he was in shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops. Perhaps he was just refusing to temperature adjust in honor of the islands. “No,” he replies, “I never went.” “Why?” I ask. “Well, I already graduated with my associates when I graduated from high school.” “So, what are you doing now?” I ask. “Nothing,” he replies. I drove away.

A young man lies in his childhood bed in his parent’s basement. He’s about 22, recently returned from his missionary service. He still lives at home. His friends, who are going to Vegas, about six hours away, invite him along for the ride. They suggest they can drop him off in St. George so that he can meet up with one of his missionary companions. His mother does not want him to go. She cannot explain her rationale other than to say she doesn’t feel good about him going down all that way, driving on those dangerous roads. He’s a naturally obedient, compliant soul but he wants to go. At the same time, he’s afraid of his mother’s words. He lies in bed thinking. He imagines the worst that can happen to him if he goes. Perhaps he will die a fiery death on I-15 between Parowan and Paragonah. What’s the worst that will happen to him if he stays? He would never go anywhere. He would stay right where he was–in the bed he grew up in, his parents’ basement. Safe.

She speaks over the pulpit about the Spirit and how it works. She mentions the regulars. It’s a still, small voice. It’s a feeling. It’s a flood of impressions. It’s a thought that doesn’t leave. Then she gets to, it’s a warning voice. “For example,” she says, “I remember driving a road with my friends. We were going to take a certain route, but when we got to the turn off, we felt we shouldn’t. So, we went a different way. I don’t know what would have happened if we went that way. But we just felt like that was a way we shouldn’t go.” I read another account of a warning voice that seems similar: two people walking a country road with which they were familiar at night. Suddenly, they both had an impression that they should go no farther in that direction. They retraced their steps and took another way home. The next day, they wondered why they had felt constrained to stop. They went back, this time in daylight, and found that, within a few feet of where they had stopped, a bridge had washed out.

I wanted that woman who spoke to us that Sunday to finish her story: “So, we went back to that intersection the next morning, and saw that . . . there was police crime tape stretched across the road; there was a sinkhole that had just opened up; there was a tree that had fallen across the path; there was an ax murderer at the door with the three Nephites/guardian angels standing behind him (oh, wait, that’s a different story).” I didn’t want her to finish that story with a witness of the unknown and the unknowable, “I don’t know what danger we missed by not going that way but I’m sure we did miss something bad and I’m sure we were blessed for listening to that feeling.”

This conundrum, of witnessing about the unknowable, reminds me of a logical fallacy: Arguing from Ignorance. The proof goes something like this: It cannot be proven that God does not exist. Therefore he does exist. Arguments from ignorance infer that a proposition is true from the fact that it is not known to be false. In other words, “I don’t know what danger we missed by not going that way but I’m sure we did miss something and I’m sure we were blessed for listening to that feeling.” Or, “Please don’t go. I don’t feel good about you driving that road. So many things could happen.” Because it cannot be proven that harm will fall, it feels as if by not moving, harm is averted.

I know there are times when a warning voice operates to constrain certain actions. But there are more times, more often than not, when in our desire to live unruffled, peaceful, even sedate lives, we run from the anxiety that growth and experience and agency require. When we feel the upswelling of anxiety and distress that accompanies a step into the unknown, whether it’s college or a road trip or a new paint color, we choose to interpret that mix of emotions as a sign that we should not be pursuing that course of action. Of course, when the anxiety-producing choice is gone because we’ve taken it out of the picture, then we feel just fine. All our emotions are under control; the hormones levels are back to normal; the adrenalin rush has subsided. This relatively peaceful, stable state, we interpret then as a sign that we made the right choice and that God approves of our inaction. It could also be just the cessation of the flow of adrenalin and the feelings of anxiety about facing the unknown and the new. But that would make our decision so much more mundane, not as blessed. Far better to think that God’s in play and calling the shots.

This thought process brings to mind another logical fallacy I learned about in Philosophy 305–Affirming the Consequent. This logical fallacy is set up like this: The first two premises are 1) If A then B; 2) B; and the conclusion drawn is 3) Therefore A. In words, it looks something like this: If Kevin wanted to really bug me, he would wear his sandals with his Sunday socks. Kevin’s wearing his sandals with his Sunday socks. Therefore, Kevin really wanted to bug me. So, I see Kevin walk out of the bedroom with those sexy, black Costco gold toe socks on and his brown sandals. Because of my logical errors firing in my brain, I think, “I know he’s just doing that to bug me.”Realistically, there could be a myriad of reasons why he’s wearing that particularly unappealing combination: He was too tired to take off his socks. It’s comfortable. He couldn’t find a pair of clean white socks. The sandals were the closest shoes to hand when he took off his wingtips. He didn’t even think about it. All of those are good candidates to explain his behavior. Any one of these reasons is probably more accurate than my inference of him wanting to bug me royally judging by the puzzled expression on his face when he hears me fire off, “You are so not getting some tonight.” (Churching until early evening and black Sunday socks and sandals on the same day is more than any woman should have to bear.)

About twenty years ago on a warm July morning, I sat next to my mother. I was dressed in white, the white hastily chosen between graduate seminars on a hot June day. It was about fifteen minutes before I married Kevin. After the rush of the morning (I was late arriving), it was the first time I had sat to contemplate. In the quiet, I was filled with the overwhelming sense of what I was doing. Feelings of uncertainty, of the unknown, of the horror of making a mistake filled me. To be honest, you could say I was filled with dread. I looked over at this man I was to bind myself to and wondered, “How on earth can I possibly be doing this? What am I thinking?” I leaned over to my mother and said, “Oh, Mom, I don’t know. Should I do this?” I suppose I was looking for some steadfast, immoveable reassurance that getting married to this man in this place was absolutely, without doubt the right thing to do. But I didn’t get that from my mother. She whispered back, “Oh, it’s not so bad. Give it try.” I took a deep breathe . . . and did just that.

Because I said “yes” in the face of fear and anxiety, I am utterly changed in ways I could not have imagined. Imagine if I had felt that dread, and, interpreting it as God’s sign that I should not get married, had done the Julia Roberts and run down Temple Hill, past the cemetery, onto Highway 89, and headed for Ephraim. Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it. How could a theology that proposes agency as its ultimate mode support a God that prompts to inactivity and approves of the static? It cannot. When we assign the blame to God for our own inability to act and to push through the anxiety attached to the unknown, it's akin to taking God's name in vain.

Incidentally, that young man who lay in his childhood bedroom went to St. George. He didn’t die in a crash on I-15. He’s still alive. In fact, today is his 45th birthday. He’s traveled I-15 hundreds of times since then (he’s even left the country) and has learned that the first time, for anything, is always, as it should be, tinged with fear and colored by faith.

Title: Garth Brooks, "Outside the Fire."

Are We Human, Or Are We Dancer?

I ran across, courtesy of my vulture-reading husband, a construct recently that has the capacity to change the way I encounter life. (By accusing Kevin of being a vulture, I mean that he doesn't have the grandiose literary nose that I profess to. He doesn't look at the cover, and then at the publisher, and then at the date, and then smell the pages and read a few paragraphs to hear the author's voice before starting to read a book. If he's interested in the idea, he'll buy the book, give the author a long rein, and glean what he can. Just like a vulture, flying high above the veld to descend onto whatever train wreck of a carcass lies rotting under the baobab tree. Even if the stench reaches the stratus cloud levels, the meat can still be quite tasty if you can hold your breath long enough.)

Here's the idea, taken from Robert Fritz's book Creating: along with a myriad of other responses to our present, there are two responses that can determine how we process our daily living. The performer approaches life as if it is a performance. She plays a role in front of an audience. Because she is role playing, she has lines to learn and to deliver, and a precise set of blocked out actions to follow. When things don't go according to plan, the performance is a failure. Ergo, she is a failure. On the other hand, the learner approaches life's activities as opportunities to learn. When things don't go as planned, she stops, looks around, figures out what worked and what didn't and goes on. Mistakes are accecpted as an inevitable part of learning. They are not greeted with dismay, shame or embarrassment. Even horrible mistakes don't reflect on her inherent worth. They are indications that that particular approach is not going to work--at all.

They also indicate she is nowhere near to mastering the skill she’s practicing, whether that skill is public speaking, being married, raising a particular child, teaching, litigating a trial, or being a good neighbor and friend. According to Malcolm Gladwell, who cites other studies inOutliers, about 10,000 hours of practice is the tipping point to mastering a particular skill, whether it is the violin, tennis, bass guitar or computer programming. Taking that as a guide, think about how many hours you’ve spent at a particular endeavor. Then consider how many more hours you still have to invest to become a master coach, master wife, master husband, master parent, or master gardener.

I coach a soccer team of ten and eleven year old boys, including my son Adam. We've dominated every team this season, except yesterday. Yesterday, we lost 3-2. The average winning margin in previous games has been about 8-0. The team we lost to lost 8-1 to a team we beat 4-3. (Probably didn't help that the one linesman who negated two of our goals for offsides was the older brother of one of the opposing team's players! And that the final goal against us was a penalty kick on a flop. But, no sour grapes in this story. And in the next life, no 13-year old center refs who show up 20 minutes late because their mom was at parent-teacher conference and couldn't give them a ride.) So, essentially, you have a team of young boys who are great soccer players, and who over the course of the season, have been able to move away from the passing attack we started out the season with to individualistic runs down the wing (at a pretty good speed) and shots on goal into the top corner. This approach works when you have an undisciplined, slower team to play against. But yesterday's team had speed, and two players who could control the ball. So, we lost, even though we controlled the ball 70 percent of the time.

Now, for a performer coach, such as me, the loss could be devastating. It would mean that the performance went horribly wrong. The unbeaten record is gone. If the whole purpose is to give a good performance, and good is measured by winning, then we failed yesterday. (I will admit that the performer coach in me woke up at two this morning and couldn't sleep because I was playing the key moments of the game through my mind, and castigating myself for not preparing the team better. So I read the latest Sandra Brown novel (high brow literary taste!) to conclusion, and fell back to sleep at 5. 30.)

But to a learner coach, whose purpose is to teach soccer to these boys, that lost game is actually a really great teaching tool. The season hasn't really afforded us opportunities to learn that if you don't play fundamentally sound soccer, with a passing game that moves forward, backwards and sideways using the center as a fulcrum, then you have a one dimensional attack. They haven't, until yesterday, been on the learning end that a lone attacker who will not or cannot pass the ball to his support is easily contained in a double team. We learned all that yesterday. Sometimes, you can't learn those very important soccer lessons and still win. My job next training session is to communicate this to the boys, and to return to the horrible possession drill that they hate to play but which makes them so good at moving off the ball and looking for the pass. If my approach to the next few training sessions is to reinforce what they still need to master, then we're really learning how to play and coach soccer.

True confession: I think I am a performer lover, or at least have been in the past. Somehow in my brain, I had it wired that only people with perfect bodies could make perfect love. Making love was a performance—a well crafted, soft music playing (sometimes soaring orchestras with string sections), genteel kind of experience which leaves you glowing and stroking each other's faces. But making love well is also a noisy, sticky, messy enterprise. I can't think of how many times my brain had slowed down enough to stop thinking about what I would serve for dinner the next Sunday or what tiles would look better in the downstairs bathroom to register that what Kevin was doing down the left side there was really quite enjoyable. Just as I would be about to surrender myself to the sheer physicality of us, I would hear my stomach flap against his. And that noise would ruin everything. My love bubble would crumple.

You see, in my making love performance, you don't have stomachs flapping against each other scripted in. That's just not a part of the performance, of the ideal session. And if they did flap and flop, then it wouldn't be something to laugh at together. It would be an embarrassment. It would be me getting it wrong again. There's no fluids either, in performance love, or yeast infections, or flatulence, or leg cramps that tie you up like a hog. And because those events feature in my lovemaking, obviously, we must not be very good lovers, by performance standards. (Kevin's thinking we just need to hit 10,000 hours!)

If I were a learner lover, I would be willing to tell Kevin where and when and how and how quickly without feeling embarrassed (performance lovers know exactly when and where without having to articulate, I suppose). I would be able to laugh out loud, even scream if I wanted to (but not because that's what they do in the movies). I would be intent on learning how to make love as well as our two bodies and souls could, bodily fluids, noises and fat included. There would be no script and no standard of measurement except how we both felt at the end of it. And I would be utterly free to say, "I don't bend that way. Let's see if you do."

How about performance religiosity? I just returned from a walk with a friend of mine. She's worried that she cannot stand and unequivocally state that she believes that all the doctrines and the practices of her church are true. Because she cannot do that, she feels that she is apostate, and that she might as well give up now. Applying this performance/learner worldview to her dilemma, I question which script it is that establishes that we must know everything absolutely. Where is it stated that in order to be a faithful member of a religious community you have to have an unwavering knowledge, even belief, that all of its doctrines are correct? I don't know. Perhaps some of us act as if we do know. Our language is unequivocally without doubt. Our examples we use are capable of only one interpretation. The moments of inspiration deliver messages with complete clarity. When faced with such absolute certainty, I can't help but think, "Me thinks thou dost protest too much." But that might be me self-reflecting my own insecurities. Nevertheless, in every faith community, there is an ideal. Living up to the ideal can lead, if we are not honest with ourselves, to us becoming performers delivering lines and moving through scripted events right on cue. Some of those lines concern what we do and do not know to be true.

The idea that one must know and know absolutely in order to be a faithful member seems to me to be part of performance faith. It's part of that script we think we must live out in order to fit. When we fail to feel the part, we feel there can be no place for us in this particular passion play. But, the whole notion of knowing absolutely as part of religious faith is a contradiction of the very term, faith. In order to have faith, I choose to believe in the face of doubt. I am moved by the letters of Mother Teresa, published after her death, in which it is revealed that she experienced periods of great religious doubt, even darkness. She wrote to a confidant, "Jesus has a very special love for you. . . . [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand." If I am learning to be faithful, I let doubt live alongside the things I do know. In Mother Teresa's case, she lived with the darkness beside the light for forty years. If I am to learn how to be faithful, the moments in which I feel to have no faith and all doubt are absolutely necessary. How else can I learn that faith is choice, and that I want to be faithful? I can't flee because I find myself in a place that is uncomfortable to me. I can't squish the doubt like an unwanted bug. The things I don't know I put gently on a shelf, and, maybe later, I'll take them out to look at them again when I have the inclination or need to really know. I have 10,000 hours of learning to be faithful before I can expect any kind of mastery from myself. I can be patient.

As a learner of faith, I am figuring out how to be faithful. In the learning, there is a risk that I will be faithless as I try to figure out what faith is and how I need to be faithful (not my neighbor's faithful, not the PTA president's faithful, not the skinny blonde who stays size 2 when nine months pregnant faithful; just my faithful). Learning faith requires a willingness to be wrong, to make mistakes, and to ask difficult questions for which there might not be institutional answers, but which answers can come personally. Learning faith requires me to recognize that acquiring this attribute/skill won't always be comfortable and that I will feel out of sorts, discombobulated, and stretched—just like trying to get back in shape after four children and fifteen years off. Part of learning to have faith means learning that it's okay not to know.

I recognize it's easier to become a learner when you live with learners and have raised learners. It's easier to try something a little different when there's no cosmic significance attached to your efforts, blown though they may be. When you live with learners, your entire life becomes your laboratory. The next step becomes something interesting, the outcome a little unknown. When you live with performers and perform yourself, the next step can become undercut with anxiety. The desired outcome is so specific and predetermined that anything but the bull's-eye can often seem like a failure. How often do we manage to hit the bull's-eye? Not too often. Thus, the lives of performers are colored by a nagging sense of failure, of not being good enough. Speaking from experience, it's rather an exhausting way to live.

Title: from "Human" by The Killers.

A Man of Constant (Useless) Sorrow

About a month ago, Kevin and I were walking along the railroad trail that runs through the center of Bermuda. The air was thick, and the trees overhead made a tunnel through which we walked. Every twenty minutes or so, we ran across another remnant of the British colonialism that I was so familiar with as a child. A stone marker, into which is perfectly etched the mileage from a certain point, perhaps Flatt's Village or Simonstown, and the initials of the political body to which the particular stretch of railroad belonged: B.N.R.R. (Bermuda National Rail Road), or, from memory, C.C.C. (Cape City Council) or S.A.R. (South African Railways).

Our topic of conversation, sprinkled liberally with my Tourette-like observations about our surroundings (hens with chickens, orange-gabled houses, hibiscus hedges, parish workers clearing vegetation with machetes, the cost of real estate), dwelt on guilt and remorse, and what the difference is between the two. Kevin started off the conversation as he always does: "So, I was reading today about these ideas. I want to run them by you . . . ." He went on to explain Wayne Dyer's concept of erroneous zones: that we have in us emotional areas in which we spend time that doesn't do us any good. By good, he means, cannot do anything to affect the present for good. To illustrate, Dyer uses the example of telling somebody that you're tired, or that you're not feeling well. He asks, what good does it do to tell somebody that you're tired? What can they do about it? How does it make you feel any better about your present state? Does it make you less tired? No. So, Dyer says, complaining about your tiredness to a poor soul who can do nothing about it except listen to you grumble, is actually abusing that soul. Now, if there is something they can do, like watch the kids while you close your eyes for ten minutes, then that's useful conversation because it positively affects the present. But, just to kvetch about the general state of tiredness with no hope of improvement, well, what's the point? The complaining just keeps you bathed in self-pity, and essentially immobilizes you in your tiredness.

So, Kevin says as we round the golf course, and come upon a field of zucchini hidden behind vines and stone walls, one of the areas in which we are fundamentally flawed is guilt. According to Dyer, guilt is the most useless of behaviors, and by far the greatest waste of emotional energy. We spend time in the feeling, worrying about what has happened in the past, contaminating the present with guilt, which does nothing to make the present or the future any better.

As Kevin spoke, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps we confuse legal and spiritual constructs of guilt. And that in the confusion, we prevent ourselves from moving forward and up and out of the guilty state.

Guilt, as a legal construct, is a pronouncement of a particular condition in which you are measured against the law using the rules of evidence. You either are, or are not, guilty of, for example, manslaughter. In other words, if you're found guilty, there is enough evidence, taking whatever evidence has been admitted into consideration, to find that it is significantly more than likely (criminal burden of proof) that you, even though you didn't mean to or plan to, you killed the old lady crossing against the light but within the crosswalk. You might be found guilty even if you haven't' actually done the act with which you have been charged. It's the judge or jury who gets to decide after looking at all the evidence (or the color of your skin in certain places) whether there is a likelihood that you did what they say you did.

There is always a punishment attached to being found guilty. This punishment can be a fine, an act (orange overalls in which to pick up trash), or detention for a time frame. Rationales surrounding punishment vary. Some say that the reason to sentence people to time is to punish them; others believe that it is to rehabilitate the offenders. That the time spent in prison will turn the offender from one who would steal to one who would work. Another reason to sentence people to prison is as a deterrent factor. Some think that knowing that a particular punishment is attached to a particular crime will act as a deterrent—supposedly the logic behind the three strikes and you're out approach taken to petty drug crime in the late eighties and nineties i.e., you will not distribute heroin, or buy it, if you know that you will face an enhanced jail sentence of at least ten years if you are caught this time. Being found guilty doesn't have to translate immediately into punishment. Sometimes, for example, when you get a traffic ticket and the city in which you have been caught (Provo, Sandy, American Fork, but not Pleasant Grove or Heber, speaking from experience) has a traffic school, you enter a plea in abeyance, which means that you are confessing your guilt but that the penalty attached to the crime will be suspended if you complete the conditions upon which the plea is based. If you don't complete traffic school, within the time allowed, the legal guilt resurrects itself and, having been found guilty, you are subject to punishment.

While legal guilt and punishments attached are familiar to us, problems arise when we transfer legal principles of guilt to the conditions of our emotional and spiritual lives. Guilt, generally, is emotional or psychological state in which we recognize that we have violated a moral standard, or, in the opposite, we not done something which we should have. In the face of our actions or inactions, we feel responsible for the position in which we find ourselves. As an emotion, guilt is useful. That sweeping sense of distance that fills you when you realize how far you are from what you thought you were. Some describe it as an oily sensation. I sense it as a chasm that opens up and pushes the present me away from what I imagined myself to be. Those moments, painful as they are, are crucial. For me, anyway, they are times I see myself clearly. I see what I am and what I want to be, and the two can only be seen at the same time by using my peripheral vision. This feeling of distance then is the by-product of guilt and it should propel me from the moment it came into view to creating a different present and future, and a different me. This, I think, is guilt put to good use.

There are other times, when guilt becomes a behavior, and a perfectly useless one at that. Guilt as a behavior is a constant return, again and again, to the site of the crime. By returning, we confuse the emotional and legal constructs of guilt and condemn ourselves to serving time in guilt that is absolutely unnecessary. Note: there is no jury or judge pronouncing guilt externally; it's our internal dog, off its leash, that returns again and again to its own vomit.

To illustrate this principle, I am reminded of a long conversation I had with a friend of mine a few weeks ago. We were speaking about the newly married issues we all face or faced: physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, in-laws, career choices, how much is enough? She had had a long running (even before she got married) sense that her mother-in-law disapproved of her every choice, including perhaps the choice of her son. This sense of disapproval was so strong that she couldn't be in the same room with her mother-in-law when opinions were being expressed, in particular opinions about whether women should go to graduate school, should work while raising children, should move away from their hometowns, should run while nursing etc, etc. My friend felt like all these comments were aimed particularly at her. From an outsider listening in, I could see a very well-meaning, essentially sweet, interested woman in her mid to late fifties offering running commentary based on her own experience to fill the verbal space between her and her young daughter-in-law. But the daughter-in-law, caught in her idea that her mother-in-law disapproved of her every breath, interpreted the conversation as a diatribe against her every action. I told her, "Just ignore her. Let her talk. She doesn't mean any harm. She doesn't intend any offense. Talk to her about it. Does she know you feel this way? " I repeated this over and over again. Her response was interesting: "I could never talk to her. I feel so guilty, so guilty that things are like this between us." Every time I suggested an action that she could take to improve the situation, like a discussion, or a letter, or a phone call, or an interest in the mother-in-law, my friend cried, "I could never. I just feel so bad that things are like this. I feel so guilty." I was lying on the couch by this time, my head sunk into one of the pillows. After about the fifth exclamation of guilt, I raised my head and almost-shouted, "Well stop! Stop feeling guilty. Do something about it."

I do the same thing with my house. I work from home. In my "I want to be a princess" brain, I would love to have a beautifully clean, neat home, where even the fitted sheets are perfectly folded in squares and stored in colour coordinated, cedar lined linen closets. I would love to have the beds made every day—by housekeeping. When I walk by my son's bedroom to see the duvet crumpled at the foot of his bed, I feel guilty. Guilty as in, "Oh jeez, when will I be able to pull my act together and either make his bed or raise kids that will make their own beds?" Does my brain acknowledge that 90 seconds of effort would produce the result that I desire? If I just stopped on my walk past his bedroom and pulled up sheets, straightened the duvet, it would make every subsequent walk past that bedroom today pleasant. . . . (I just went and did it; 73 seconds). So, what is it about feeling guilty about not having children who make their beds that I enjoy more than a made bed? What is it that causes me to live with my finger pushing on the yellow center of my soul's bruise, to feel the deep pain, in preference for moving on and making the bed?

First, guilt is an easy, effortless state to be in. Far easier to sit in guilty than to move on, out and forward. But, our souls are not part of a penal system that hands out time to offenders. There is no statute that says that daughters-in-law who walk out of the room on their in-laws have to spend 18 months feelings guilty, and then another 18 on probation. We can commit to change, to be a different creature right there. Second, perhaps, strangely, perversely, we enjoy guilt, and the feelings we get when we condemn ourselves to our guilty state. By being willing to feel guilty for long periods of time, by returning again and again to that guilty feeling, we fool ourselves into thinking that we are sensitive, caring, moral people. It feels good to feel guilty, in a way. We congratulate ourselves on being sensitive enough to realize that we have done wrong, and then we rejoice in the feeling. Well, rejoice is probably too strong of a word. It's more like the feeling you get when you've worked out really hard and your quads and glutes are sore, so sore that you can't even squat to go to the toilet. In that half-second where you are poised above the bowl, the feeling of pain, of muscles tearing as you sit down, actually feels good. At least, I feel good. I am reminded through the muscle pain that I have earned that pain, that the lunges across the gym with the weighted bar on my shoulders were worthwhile. But, my body is not designed to stay in that state. I should push through the pain, get the quads moving again, step up jauntily into my car even though the very movement causes me to grimace. Then, soon, in a few days, I'll be able to walk again, without grimacing, without pain. My legs will be stronger, and I will be able to launch myself and my bike off the curve going up the canyon with a power that will surprise me.

However, and I don't know how to explain this, other than by this metaphor of muscles and pain, if I don't move through the pain, if I don't approximate my normal, everyday actions through muscle that is rebuilding itself into a stronger version of what I used to be, I retard my muscle rebuild and cripple myself in the process. If I refuse to move against pain, emotional or physical, I will hobble through life. Similarly, this guilt state that we sentence ourselves to cripples our here and now and alters our future. It's a counterfeit for the remorse that should swell up, and serve as a catalyst for personal change and momentum. So, my personal commitment is, whenever I hear the language of guilt coming out of my own mouth, I am going to stop myself and look carefully at the distance I feel between where I want to be and where I am, and step across the divide. I will keep moving.

Title: "A Man of Constant Sorrow," from Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

Oh No, Not You Again!

So help me understand this mentality, if you happen to possess it.    

I am reading along in a library book—this has happened to me twice in the last month. The first book was The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste, a fascinating book on what we have done in the past and what is now done to handle the millions of tons of human waste produced everyday across the globe. In the opening chapter, the author, Rose George, is trying to explain her rationale for using the word "shit" for what will be the hero/villain/protagonist of this entire book. She goes through various options, and then settles on "shit" as the term of art for the book, explaining that in most cultures and contexts, particularly those that deal with the substance on a daily basis, the term is not pejorative. Some kind, well-meaning, but, I am inclined to think, egotistical soul had crossed out the word "shit" and asked in the margin, "What about poo?" Roll my eyes in frustration. As if the author is going to answer back, as if the author needs to treat the readers as if they're five-year olds and use code words—poo, peepee, tinkle and willy.

This gentle reader was probably the same one (alarmingly, we must have similar reading preferences) who used permanent marker to erase the first occurrence of f*** that was appropriately used in a scene out of the Battle of Salerno in The Summer Guest. The problem was that that particular passage had more than one such term. Following chapters had a few more. The remaining bombs were left untouched. I wonder at the logical jumble that finds it acceptable to black out one word, but draws the line at erasing every trace of the offense. Is it to let future readers know that at least one of the educated in this university town has a refined sense of language? Or is it to publically register your anonymous disapproval so that everybody knows that somebody disapproved but will persevere in the name of art? Or did you just never get the etiquette lesson on how to treat property that is not yours? Hint: Leave no trace—of your dinner, of your suntan lotion, and definitely, no trace of your opinions.

I don't get it. I know we're supposed to roam across the face of the earth doing good of our own free will and choice, but, in what mentality does the definition of good include defacing something that doesn't belong to you because you happen to disapprove. You would no more think to come into my front garden and rip out the daylilies because they trigger your son's asthma than you could contemplate throwing a brick through the library window. But, somehow, in the privacy of your own bathroom, you think that it is helping the world to black out the word "shit." Would you have the courage to take your trusty pen to the expletive while standing at the desk under the eye of the librarian? Or is it only in private acts of moral rectitude that you excel? Which acts take place in places where you have self-appointed yourself the warden of the jail, monitoring and guarding against any evil influence that might possibly filter through.

I think you—the person who reads library books with a Sharpie in hand—also sit in the carpool lane in your Dodge Caravan/Subaru Forester/late model Crown Victoria/hybrid and put the cruise control at 60 miles per hour. Never mind the speed limit is 65. Never mind that the far right lane, the one with the semi's loaded with sheep and triple containers filled with canola oil, has an average speed of 75, and there is nobody, I repeat nobody, in the middle two lanes. At first, I used to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that perhaps in Montana or Washington or Wyoming, or Pleasant Grove, there has never been a carpool lane. And so, bless your rural little hearts, you think if you have more than one person in your car you have to ride in the car pool. I couldn't fathom that somebody would, of their own free will and obstinate choice, park their fannies (might as well be park when they're going 15 mph slower than the flow of traffic) in the car pool lane. But then, considering this is the land of "I can tote my gun wherever I want to even into church" and "don't tell me I have to wear a helmet," you aforementioned slowriders don't have the cultural DNA to meekly slide into the carpool lane simply because you're carrying passengers.

It has to be some other motivation that causes you to speed up to get into the HOV lane and then slow down, kick back, and crack out the knitting. Is it a power kick? What do you think when you look in the rearview mirror and behind you, stacked up like data packets waiting for transmission over dial up, is a long line of cars stretching back to just past the last access point? Is it a rush of righteous pleasure that you are acting like the moral governor of every car with the misfortune to be on the road the same time you are? Do you congratulate yourself that you are setting an example for the rest of us? Do you quietly purse your lips as we go by you in the middle lanes and pray, if not for our souls, at least for our insurance rates when we get pulled over? Or are you confident that by holding down the speed, you have won one for the good guys by completely eliminating any possibility that any person travelling within your influence on I-15 could possibly get a speeding ticket?

Kaye Gibbons' Ruby, whom I mentioned in the last post, had parents, who shared the same mentality as the self-appointed censor who dogs my reading list and blocks my flow of traffic : They brook no possibility that their children (or anybody else's for that matter) could possibly be exposed to the uglier side of life:

Growing up, I had absolutely no idea anything bad could happen in a life because nothing bad had happened in mine, no catastrophes. My grandmother died but mama and daddy helped me through it, and I'd spent so much time with her, watching her get weaker and weaker that I felt like dying was the next step for her, something that should naturally happen next.

But worse than my ignorance of any bad coming into a life was the fact that I didn't have the imagination, the pure imagination to see that hard things or ugly things might happen farther down the road. I was just whistling along. I can't remember making decision on my own. I might've made a mistake, and that was something my parents were real careful about. . . My parents protected me from bad choices by making choices for me. . . . My mama was the kind of woman who believed girls in girls clothes are less apt to get trouble than girls dressed like boys. I remember begging her for some pants to play outside in, and when she finally made me some she sewed eyelet around the cuffs, just a touch of girl on those pants. And my daddy and brothers were just as bad. If I had a tough piece of meat on my plate, the minute one of them saw me struggling they'd lean over, take my knife and fork from me and cut the meat up for me. I never rebelled against it, snatched my knife back and said, "I'll cut my own meat up, thank you." All the women in my family were calm women. They wouldn't have said a word. It was just the way things were.

    Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman, page 27-28.

We have a painting of a nude hanging on an interior wall leading to our living room. I think she's beautiful, particularly because she was painted in Czechoslovakia, before the curtain fell. She's an impression of a nude, backed with bright reds and blues. By this I mean, although she is obviously sitting quite primly on her stool, she has no facial features and her breasts are missing their nipples. (Or should I call them nip-nips, or pepperonis?) Still, she's definitely a nude. Every time we have the local youth group over for a meeting, or a party, Kevin takes her down and puts her behind the chair in the office. I was hurt at first. If they are going to descend en masse into my living room, the least I can do for them is to expose them to good, Cold War art. But, he insisted—which is not a posture he often assumes with me. So, down she came. Afterwards, I would rescue her from behind the chair and apologize to her as I put her back up: "I'm sorry. They just wouldn't appreciate you. I think you're lovely."

So, why can we take her down and put her up on a whim, but I bristle at you with your pen in hand hovering over a library book that I might check out after you? Because she's mine, and it's my house, and the parents of some of those boys and girls might, actually would, find it highly inappropriate for their children to be exposed to the female form at all. In order not to offend, Kevin takes her down and I put her back up when they've gone, accompanied by whispered apologies and the loving buffing of her frame. (Once Kevin forgot, and the left side of the room had a disproportionately large number of fourteen- and fifteen-year old boys with a good vantage point. (I hope they know there's parts missing!)).

But, the carpool lane is not yours. The walls of the local elementary school are not yours, and neither is the artwork. The library book is not yours. You probably didn't even contribute to pay for it, because, according to a combination of John Adams/Revelations/The Second Amendment/and Glen Beck, there's a misunderstood subsubclause in the Tax Code that definitively shows that you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government, let alone measly county and city officials. But, I digress. Back to business: The author is not imposing her views on you; neither are you being forced to read her work, nor I to check it out after you. Leave the words alone. Let them stand. They were chosen by someone else, who thought them proper and appropriate. Let their best efforts stand. If you wish to rise up in public protest on the steps of the library, by all means, proceed. Despite my philosophical misalignment with your cause, I'll help you make the signs and even get the permit for your protest from City Hall. That's your First Amendment right to gather in public to effect change. But secret warfare, under cover of anonymity, destroying property and ideas and possible choices that are not yours, merely because you disapprove, well, at best, that's just misguided cowardice. And at worst, it feels like an egotistical, self-centered, overreaching need to control.

 

Title: Australian Crawl, "Oh No, Not You Again."

 

Back in the Saddle

"Cowboy up, cupcake!"

--Colton, in The Legend of Colton F. Bryant, by Alexandra Fuller

It was day five of the Tour de France when I noticed a "movement" that has stayed with me for a few weeks. I'm not an avid cyclist but I watch sports, any sports, when I work out at the gym, and when I'm relaxing at home, and when I write (right now it's Inter Milan versus AC Milan, Inter up 1-0 in the 27^th minute). But that particular day, and for those past two weeks, it's been the Tour de France.

The peloton in the Tour is the main body of riders in a bicycle road race that, belying the massive amounts of raw power required to move those bikes up mountains and over cobblestones and alongside the Mediterranean, snakes its way through the France in a remarkably smooth, elegant mass. When the camera does a bird's eye view of the peloton, the mass of riders looks like quail moving through grass, or sparrows heading south, or the wind blowing across the face of the ocean. Over 160 riders, even 180 if there hasn't been a break away, packed together, drafting four inches to the left of the back wheel of the rider in front of him, driving their legs at an average of 90 rpm. The riders at the front of the peloton do the work, breaking the air for those behind them. As their energy depletes, they peel off to the side, and rejoin the peloton in the middle to the back to recuperate. In a well-developed peloton, riders in the middle expend up to 40 percent less energy than those who ride in the front. Interestingly, and fittingly, in the peloton, the front rider and the very last one receive the same time.

Nevertheless, it's better to be at the front of the peloton than in the middle or the back. If you watched the Tour de France, you'll have noticed the white and yellow jerseys of Columbia-HTC, with their star sprinter Mark Cavendish, streamlined together at the peaked front of the peloton, together with the turquoise Astana and orange and blue of Rabobank. In the sprint for the finish, if there has not been a breakaway and the peloton is leading the race, each team operates on the principle that the seven riders other than their version of Mark Cavendish will drive themselves to exhaustion, breaking air at the front, with Mark tucked in behind their back wheel. As the lead riders feels himself giving way to the burn in his quads that signifies oxygen depletion, he pulls to the side and another sacrificial ram takes his place, pistons pumping as they drive the last kilometers to the finish line. As they hurtle to the finish line, at a particular moment whose announcement I have yet to notice, the ram pulls to the side and opens up the road for Mark Cavendish, whose blocky thighs are turning his pedals at a mindboggling rate. Without a backward glance or a wave of the hand in gratitude, Mark powers past those who have worked to pull him along for the finish line. If he does as he is supposed to, all glory to the team, and perhaps the green jersey, winner of the most points, for him. It's a thrilling sight, to see all that power and determination moving at the speed of will and mind toward that finish line. I'm grinning just remembering those final sprints.

There's safety in the peloton. More people to do the same amount of work. At times in each stage, there's bound to be some brave soul who breaks away; some cyclist who thinks that he will be able to get a jump on the peloton. A few riders will break with him. But the peloton remains unphased. Unless they misjudge the ability and skill of the rider, it is rare for the peloton to react to a breakaway, particularly if it happens in the early kilometers of a stage. Wisdom dictates that the mass of the peloton, working together, will reel in any small group of riders, particularly a lone rider, with nobody to draft off who has to do all the work himself.

But, I'm not writing this to open up a discussion about the benefits of staying in the middle of the road, about the dangers of breaking from the pack etcetera, etcetera. I'm writing this because I saw, in the fifth stage, and again in one of the later stages, a brilliantly matter-of-fact rendition of rescue. Rescue has been on my mind lately, ever since a pioneer trek reenactment in Wyoming in June. I've been thinking about rescue, about how we rescue, about what people do when they are being rescued, about the timing of the rescue and when events are put into play, sometimes long before the need ever arises. Watching the Tour de France this summer, I believe I've found the way I would like to be rescued.

During the fifth day, Robbie Gesink, a "protected" rider on the Roba team went down hard in a crash. Who knows how it was caused . . . a cobblestone, a rider in front who changed tempo and Robbie couldn't react in time. I saw him tumble off the side of the road. The peloton didn't stop. The flock of bikes flung themselves past him. He got gingerly to his feet, testing his wrist. The road was empty of racers. Those who saw him fall rode right by without breaking rhythm. If it hadn't been packed with spectators on both sides, there would have been no way to tell there had ever been a race passing through moments before. He got back on his bike. He flexed his hand, twisting his wrist (which would turn out to be fractured). Suddenly, like guardian eagles, there were two Roba riders, in their familiar orange and blue. The riders didn't stop, didn't put their feet on the ground, didn't sit down to commiserate with Gesink. They turned to face the direction in which the peloton was pulling, slowed slightly to let Gesink slip in behind them, and raced to catch up to the main body that was cycling away at the rate of 30 miles per hour.

The commentator, Phil Liggett (who makes watching the race worth it just to hear him), purred, "Oh, here comes the team. They'll be back in the peloton in no time. Just you watch them work together to get Robby back." Sure enough, within five minutes, they were back in the main body. Besides, the fractured wrist, you couldn't tell there'd been a crash. "Ah . . . there you go. Well done, boys," Phil Liggett purred again in his British burr. "Nicely back, Robby. Nicely back."

In one of the later stages, another team's rider bent his front wheel on the wet cobblestones. Within seconds, a support car had glided in beside him, an industrious man hopping out with replacement in hand, the second man at the wheel sat with a radio to his lips. Into the camera view glided his three team mates, they looked down, he looked up, the wheel was tightened, and off they went, the fallen rider tucked in behind those who had turned back to bring him nicely back to the peloton. Perhaps it was his mistake that caused the wheel to buckle; maybe he took the turn too sharply, pulled the brake at the wrong time. But, in the exchange of wheel and the return of his team to pick him up, there seemed to be no recriminations, no discussions about what happened, about what he should have done instead. All I saw was a swooping movement, a gathering up of the fallen rider, and off they went, up in the saddle, thighs pumping, calves taut, off to catch the peloton.

I like that there's not much on the spot discussion. I appreciate that when the rescue is carried out, the rescued is expected to contribute to his own return. Even with fractured wrist, Robby Gesink rode off behind his team. Yes, one could say that there is a sense of the British prep school, jolly-hockey sticks, stiff upper lip about this way of rescue. That I'm just yearning for days gone by when I wore green, peter pan collars and white ankle socks and played netball during little break. But it's more than that. It's the real life fact that the world/peloton does not stop in the face of error. The forward movement goes on, and the rescued must speed up to catch up, which speeding up and catching up they are perfectly capable of doing. This manner of rescue seems to recognize that mistakes are inevitable, that mistakes and error (especially one-offs) are not indications of an inherent weakness that dooms one to a life of failure. As Ruby, the protected daughter in Kaye Gibbons's A Virtuous Woman, realizes after a disastrous first marriage, "It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad, they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on."

So, I am coming to think that when I fall or one of my wheels happens to catch on the cobblestones in my life and I end up face forward in the gutter, I want the Roba team to rescue me. I want the rescue eagles to swoop down, to hesitate in my vicinity, and to look at me, with my fractured wrist, as if they have every expectation that apart from that one fall and the small detail of the ulna, I am capable of tucking in behind them, just four inches off their rear wheel, and cycling toward the peloton. And I want to be treated that way—capable, with strength and power, with the ability to move forward under my own power. I don't want the sideways glances, or the murmurs, or the hushed voices. I don't want Jim Rome with his hysterical play-by-play which will inevitably veer off into speculation about what's going to happen now, what will be the impact of this fall, what are the statistics of riders who fall getting back to the front, and how much did the last minute change of coach/tire/bike shoe contribute to the crash. I just want Phil Liggett—who continues to see me as a professional rider, part of a team, who happened to fall on a turn—to watch our effort and skill and say, "Nicely back, Tessa, nicely back."

Our Cleanest Dirty Shirt

I love old buildings—always have. I try to sense who lived in there, to breathe in their lives lived hundreds of years ago. I try to hear the echoes of conversations trapped beneath layers of paint and linoleum. When I was a child, dungeons held a particular fascination for me. I thought I could almost hear the scream and could quite certainly see the desperate scratches on the damp, stone walls. (Realize this is the child who turned into the woman who is afraid to list two unwanted-for-the-past-three-years-cockatiels on craigslist because she's afraid she'll hurt their feelings.) But now, its churches and homesteads.

Driving south out of Bear Lake, you see a farmhouse to your left. The land looks like it hasn't been farmed in years. But the house is still there flanked by its now towering cottonwoods. The house is your typical Rocky mountain wooden homestead—double story; center door; two windows on each side, top and bottom. The paint's gone and the wood shines almost silver. All around is just a field; not even a dust road marks the way to the home. I always wonder who lived there, what they dreamed about, what fields they planted, where their flower garden was, where they buried their household pets.

There's another house like that if you're going south on Highway 89, between Ephraim and Manti, on the right side of the road. Sturdy red brick with white around the windows and cracking gingerbread on the roof and porch. Another center door with matching windows. And again, towering trees that somebody planted even though they knew they'd be dead before the trees reached maturity. I wonder about the dreams that planted the trees and built the red brick house with a view of a distant temple. I wonder when the energy abated and somebody broke some of the window panes, filling the holes with cardboard and putting plastic over the rest—which was probably just before the parked the 1964 Ford pickup on the front lawn and never drove it again.

I tend to construct rosy pictures of people gone by. They were all loving, all kind, all faithful and honest. They would never have put plastic over their windows or parked their cars on their front lawns and forgotten to take them, and the tractors, and the lawnmower to the dump. They would never have moved out of the silver-hued beauty into into a double-wide on a lot in town opposite the 7-11 and picked up a job at the IFA. They would have stayed in their austerely beautiful wooden home planted securely between the cottonwoods, fronted by stalwart hollyhocks, and tried to make farmer's living in a valley that seems to grow nothing but raspberries for three short weeks of the year. For how could any other kinds of hands have given shape to such beauty except those hands that valued beauty? Surely the lives that gave form to that red-bricked beauty and the silvery sentinel were lives of superlative honor and duty befitting those who settled these high mountain valleys.

My mother read Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith when I was about fourteen. Then we couldn't say the name Joseph Smith in her presence for the next fourteen years without hearing her sharp intake of breath. Kent Crookston described his experience after reading a journal which depicted Joseph Smith in a negative light. A voice whispered to him, "So, . . . you feel to reprove the actions of the prophet, do you? You are upset, here in the darkness, because someone wrote something in their journal suggesting that Joseph Smith was not perfect . . . Imperfection disappoints you . . .What do you suppose you would have done, had you been in charge in Nauvoo in those grim days? How would you have dealt with the apostasy, with the enmity, with the slander, with unending threats on your life? You expected perfection. You know better than that. Only Jesus was perfect. What imperfection would you have chosen for Joseph? Go ahead. You choose. What imperfection would you accept? . . . Shame on you."

I'm not sure which sin my mother would have let Joseph have? Which one would have been good enough for the founder of a church. Maybe a little idleness, maybe a tad forgetfulness, maybe a timidity that didn't offend, or an overabundance of vision that caused him to forget to close the head gate or feed the chickens? Sometimes I think we allow no sin at all, not in our prophets, not in our neighbors, and definitely not in their household pets who leave yellow circles on our front lawns. I suppose one doesn't really want a goldseeker/failed banker/polygamist/visions in a top hat as the one who restarted your faith. We want some knight in shining armor who always consulted with his wife before he did anything, who could not only win at stick pulling but also at business, who was educated at the finest eastern schools and accepted in the highest circles. Well, we got Joseph.

Some people have issues with him. When they come face to face with the real Joseph, not the public relations version, they falter. His quirks don't really bother me. Perhaps quirks is too placid of a word. Flaws might be better. Does it bother me that years after I heard the story that poor Joseph was hauled out of his home on a cold winter's night and stripped to the waist by a mad and evil mob, it comes to light that perhaps the reason the mob was so angry was something to do with a young daughter? Not really. Actually, it makes the behavior of the mob more understandable. Helps me to know that most people are not suddenly filled with uncontrollable emotions for no good reason. Does it make his prophetic nature less certain, less convincing. Not at all. A little more heroic actually. Failed banks, salamanders, top hats included, I think you've got to be some kind of something to be able to go into a grove of trees and come out of it saying you saw God and Jesus Christ, two separate, physical beings, and stick to that for the rest of your glorious, trouble-filled days.

Does it matter to me that it might really have been Brigham Young who ordered the hit on the company of wagons passing through Mountain Meadows, and that events were organized so that John Lee took the fall? No. It makes more sense than believing that the Indians suddenly became voracious and fell upon the wagon train, preserving only the children whom they later took to the white settlements—in exchange for what? Home-baked bread and a jar of honey? I think you need to have the nerves of a champion and other body parts of steel to come into a bleak, apparently unsettled land, and colonize it with people from a dozen different countries, with no common language or culture, and keep it from fracturing apart at the seams. If you make a few (or a lot) of autocratic, hindsight-foolish and very costly decisions, that's the risk of leadership in any culture.

I don't need my leaders heroic. I don't even need them halfway perfect. I think I prefer them to have a flaw in plain sight, like the mythic "purposeful mistake" in the Amish quilt, lest the viewer think the creation is perfect. Why is it that only Old Testament prophets are allowed to have flaws? They're doing funky things, left, right and center, like sleeping with their daughters-in-law, and dancing in drunken nakedness, and spying on bathing women. Perhaps the purpose of the Old Testament is to prepare us for the prophets in our midst. We started with young prophets, filled with vision and strength and energy, and perhaps not as much experience or wisdom as those who now come to the helm after forty years of acclimating within a clearly established organization. Young prophets, who are still learning, aren't so easy to package. Their stories don't fit quite so neatly. Yet, we want easy stories to tell, ones you can recreate with a cup of hot water, like a cup of noodles—predictable, reliable and the same every time, if a little unsatisfying.

I understand about wanting things to be new and clean, wanting things to be pleasant, kind of like life scented with Salt City Candle passion fruit. (I don't even like to wear new clothes after they've been washed. They just feel different.) But, we do ourselves a disservice when the stories we tell are sanitized, official, one-dimensional, without a not-easy-to-fix-flaw, or an ambiguity that remains unexplained.

First, telling the naked truth is so much easier on the soul. Can you imagine the communal angst that went rippling through St. George, Santa Clara, Cedar City, and Paragonah as the communities took it upon themselves to stick to the official story of a massacre? Every time they looked at the face of their wagon-train child the upswell of memory must have choked them. To live having to keep a cover on part of your life, because the real story cannot be told, takes its toll.

Second (I've thought about this for a while, weighing on one hand the need to be able to extract a moral, or illustrate a principle, by using the lives of those who have gone before), we run the risk of creating caricatures out of real, thoughtful and thoughtless, episodic lives. For example, take Thomas Marsh. All one has to do is mention his name and you think about cream. His life can be reduced down to, either, his failure to control his wife or his failure to listen to his leaders, all over a cup of cream. The way I've always heard it, if he had only been able to do one of those two things, he would never have become one of stock figures from our church history whose life is reduced to one of its most unfortunate, public incidences. Yet, there are other parts of Thomas Marsh's life that we hardly hear about.

Dissatisfied with the story as told during a Sunday School lesson a few weeks ago, I went searching for more of the story. I cried actually as I read Thomas Marsh's own take on the story of the cup of cream (but then I also cry reading the Reader's Digest, so take that for what it's worth). Telling stories as we are prone to do, we never meet the man who came to Brigham Young asking whether Brigham could be reconciled to him, and whether there could be reconciliation between himself and his former Church. During that meeting, March reflected for a moment, and said, "I am reconciled the Church, but I want to know whether the Church can be reconciled to me." We don't see the size of the heart in Brigham, and thus the size of the heart that is required of us, when he stood at the pulpit of the Tabernacle and said to the congregation, "He is here, . . . and I want him to say what he may wish to . . . Brethren and sisters, I now introduce to you Brother Thomas B. Marsh. When the Quorum of the Twelve was first organized, he was appointed to be their President." We miss seeing the depth of Thomas's soul when we omit his own words, spoken twenty years later,

I do not know that I can make all this vast congregation hear and understand me. My voice was never very strong, but it has been very much weakened of late years by the afflicting rod of Jehovah. He loved me too much to let me go without whipping. I have seen the hand of the Lord in the chastisement which I have received. I have seen and known that it has proved he loved me; for if he had not cared anything about me, he would not have taken me by the arm and given me such a shaking.

If there is any among this people who should ever apostatize and do as I have done, prepare your backs for a good whipping, if you are such as the Lord loves. But if you will take my advice, you will stand by the authorities; but if you go away and the Lord loves you as much as he did me, he will whip you back again. I can say, in reference to the Quorum of the Twelve, to which I belonged, that I did not consider myself a whit behind any of them, and I suppose that others had the same opinion; but, let no one feel too secure; for, before you think of it, your steps will slide. You will not think nor feel for a moment as you did before you lost the Spirit of Christ, for when they apostatize, they are left to grovel in the dark.

There, in his own words, is the story of Thomas Marsh. His comments raise more questions than easy answers. Questions about a God who whips back into the fold, about when does one begin to slip, about the gradual diminution of light that one doesn't sense when going the wrong way, about thinking you're standing tall when really you're upside down on your head with your dress around your shoulders and your knickers on display for the whole world (but, of course, you can't see them because your skirt's over your eyes), about the pull a wife has on her husband and the gentleness with which that should be used, about the magnanimity we extend to the returning, about the fact that Brigham had no other choice than what he did because it was not his church, the ark did not need to be steadied, and all are welcome unto God.

In the reduction of his life to a convenient illustration of a principle, we not only do Thomas Marsh wrong, we also do ourselves wrong. We create an expectation that life is neatly packaged, that there are never any dissonant actions, that the moral is always clear, and that the person is either good or bad. We fail to recognize there are moments of weakness, sometimes years of weakness and fluctuation, in all of us. We are all, even God's anointed, at certain points in our lives, both versions of the King David: the cherubic youth filled with earnest desire and the married king filled with other kinds.

I play early morning tennis three mornings a week in what I call "the fancy skirt club." Four friends, the public tennis courts of the neighborhood park, a little bit of tennis, lots of therapy and a great excuse to buy cute tennis skirts. We keep two scores, one for actual shots, and one for idea points, as in, "Oh, that was a great idea . . . Too bad the frame got in the way." This morning the topic of conversation was an unfortunate religious education teacher at a local high school who found his picture on the front page of the paper after allegations of engaging in a sexual relationship with one of his 16-year old students. In terms of creativity, their exploits ran like an impressive high school prom night: mines in Eureka, hot springs near Delta, box cars up Provo Canyon! "Box cars," Cheryl shudders, "what on earth? Just think of the spiders." (Middle-aged, long married sex apparently has higher standards.) The ladies wondered at what point his entire life became a lie. Whether his marriage, his children, the lessons he taught, the experiences he shared with people were all a lie? Because, if he could do this, he obviously didn't believe a word of what he professed. And what about the effect of this on the teenagers he taught? What if they left the fold because of their disappointment in this man?

I wasn't so sure about the idea that nobody who truly believed could act as he did. After all, a lot of doctors smoke. I could see a man who, used to being found in the right way, ignored signposts because he was sure of the goodness of his own heart. I could see a man who fervently believed; who was mostly, if not all, good and who repeatedly made ridiculously stupid and dangerous decisions to ignore those repeated, soft warnings that must have preceded such foolishness. I shouted over the net, "Personally, I think this is an important thing to happen to the community. It requires us to sort through complicated issues of leaders, fallibility, falling from grace, separating the message from the flawed messenger, the power that teenage girls possess in their young bodies, the pride of righteousness that blinds us to our ability to fall. I'm just sorry for those involved that they offered themselves up a sacrifice, that it had to play out on the front pages." They just looked at me, sort of like the sun was in their eyes, but it could also have been interpreted to mean, "You're a crock."

"And," I would have continued, if I hadn't been intent on running down a crosscourt return and earning idea points for the shot that sailed into the tramlines of the neighboring court, "as for those sixteen year olds, you're never too young to come to terms with the fact that God uses whom he has, the willing, in whatever form we come. Look around, we're all he's got to work with."

Which leads me to my very own, personal third reason for wanting the whole truth and nothing less: When I learn that some members of the handcart companies who valiantly crossed the plains barefoot, in snow and freezing winds, on four ounces of flour and the wing of a prayer, later turned to accuse the men who volunteered to guard their possessions left at Devil's Gate of theft, I breathe a sort of sigh of relief. You see, in the space between the valiant crossing of the plains and the desperate, petty accusations; in the space between the colonies and the massacre; in between the brim of a hat and a pulpit in Kirtland, Ohio, I can find room on the pew of believers for me and my flawed discipleship.

Title: Crooked Fingers, "Sunday Morning Coming Down."