Fear of being fast

Against all odds I made it out for a run after work today, running at dusk the route I usually run at dawn. Eager to get home for the evening, I pushed a little harder than usual, zipping along the well-lit streets that I jog when the sun isn’t out. As I turned along the harbor I marveled at the deep navy blue sky and water, both the unreal color you see in paintings, not in real life. I was having a nice run, was feeling good, and started to really push myself. I don’t run to be fast, so that was an unusual thing for me. I’ve always been slow, and I have enough things in my life that I work hard at that it has never occurred to me to work hard at getting faster.

This evening, inspired by warmer temperatures than I expected and a strong desire to get home, I ran much faster than usual. For once I felt my recalcitrant little body shift from a canter to a gallop, and I was amazed. Yet as soon as I did that I became hyper-vigilant, watching each crack in the sidewalk, checking over my shoulder. My heart was racing, and not from exertion. I was afraid.

My reaction to my fear was not surprise - I’ve always been one to ease on the brakes while cycling downhill, not convinced I’d remember the exhilaration of speed while I was having my chin stitched up. As I thought more about it, though, I was mildly baffled. Longtime readers have been regaled with stories of the wages of my recklessness. What made today different from other days that I ran carelessly until I fell?

Caution can be thrown to the wind, not so with fear. There can be something deeply frightening about an accomplishment - we fear we’ll be punished for success, or we won’t know what to do with what we’ve learned. I remember one of the first times I really opened up my voice and let it out the big sound I had inside. I had two thoughts. 1. “Well, I guess I’m not a soubrette” and 2. “What the heck am I going to do with this voice?”

Doing something you didn’t think you could do changes the landscape of your life. The parameters you thought were there prove imaginary, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to set new ones. We lament that our boundaries limit us, but how many of us are secretly comforted by the security of those boundaries? For me, at least, freedom is terrifying. If I had fallen down today, it would have been another funny story about something I’m bad at. It would have fit the narrative of my life. I’m still willing myself to accept the uneasiness that results when things go well.

Try, try again

My immediate family has never had a birthday present ritual. If someone sees something they like want to give someone, they buy it, and maybe give it to them on their birthday, or maybe give it to them whenever, or maybe they just buy the person a burrito the next time they see them. Because my birthday is always around Thanksgiving, I usually see my parents in the week before my birthday, and we take that as an excuse to eat cake. On my 25th birthday my mother brought out an Entertainment Book, dropped it on the kitchen table with a clatter and announced "Happy Birthday...your brother had to sell these for school".

Still, two nights ago my mother slipped into another room after dinner and returned with a familiar looking box from a local jewelry store. She handed it to me and laughed "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." When I opened it I wasn't surprised to find a gold chain with a single, small pearl.

When my apartment was broken into a few years ago all that was taken was jewelry, because that was all that I had. There were only one or two things that I truly lamented losing, and one was the little Add-a-pearl necklace I'd had since I was a girl. Most of my cousins also have them, and as birthdays and holidays passed we'd get another pearl here and there and have them added to our necklaces. Mine only had thirteen or so pearls on it (or maybe seventeen? For whatever reason I'm certain it was a prime number), and since I'd reached adulthood and passed the age of getting little gold boxes on my birthday, it seemed destined to stay at that number of pearls.

It wasn't until I realized that it was gone that I started to cry. My grandmother had been dead two decades, and I knew that the loss of this sign of her love didn't mean she loved me any less. The other wonderful women in my family, my aunts and my mother, were all still in my life - in fact, no one in my mother's large family had died since my grandmother's passing twenty years prior. Still, I was raised among sacramental people, treasuring signs and objects, and the loss of that particular object was devastating.

Not only was I raised to be sacramental, I was raised on Roman time, so it's no surprise that it took 2+ years to replace the necklace. I couldn't help but think of my mother's admonition to 'try, try again' as I heard the readings for the First Sunday of Advent (and not just because they mention a house being broken into).

Most of us are probably familiar with that quote attributed to Mother Teresa to the effect of "some jerk on the beach might knock down your sand castle - build one anyway". I worry that people are tempted to take the suggestion that "we know not the day or the hour" as an excuse to do nothing, because who knows when Christ will return and transform it all?

It's true, we don't know what's coming. I try to believe in the liberation of uncertainty. If I really don't know what's coming - when the Lord will return to us, when the bottom will fall out, when my stuff will be stolen - I am free to just build. For all we know someone could yank my necklace off my neck tomorrow - that didn't stop my mother from giving me a tangible sign of her love and our memories.  My apartment could burn down tomorrow - that didn't stop me from cleaning up this afternoon. The people I love, everything I love, could be taken from me in a heartbeat - that does not stop me from loving with my whole heart every minute of the day.

We can't predict when destruction and sorrow will come for us, but we can't predict when redemption will knock on our door either. So we 'try, try again', building and rebuilding. When the unexpected comes all I can hope is that I am caught doing that which creates the world as it should be. Until we can enjoy the world as it should be, we keep trying, doing our part to increase beauty and love, clothing ourselves in the armor of light.

The Power and the Glory

There is a type of Christian spirituality that is heavily focused on the strength and majesty of the second person of the Trinity. It has spawned movies and music and mega churches, and on occasion results in an unfortunate idea that the followers of Christ are as exalted as Christ himself.


Even when this spirituality doesn’t lead to that rare but icky Christian triumphalism, I still don’t get it. It’s not that I don’t believe that Our God Reigns, Is An Awesome God, Praise Him etc, but that it just doesn’t do anything for me spiritually. So I was excited tonight that cycle C gave us the Lukan Gospel for Christ the King.

For whatever reason, I’m more comfortable with a God who deals in ambiguity, who came to glory by way of the cross. We worship a God who turns our expectations upsidedown, whose coming into the world not only saves us but confounds us. Maybe it’s because I’m one of those obnoxiously “complicated” people that I take comfort in the complicated story of Jesus and paradoxical existence of Christ. Our Awesome God wasn’t a Superman Jesus wearing the disguise of one who suffers until the time came for him to change into the King. He was always the King, ruling through service and reigning through love. We await his return when he will teach us the truth about power and glory.

Stage moms

I really need new headshots.

I keep putting off getting new ones until the magic day when my hair is trimmed, I've gotten enough sleep, my skin has stopped being weird, and I have the right outfit to wear.

On the train into NYC today, across from me were two girls. They boarded somewhere on the shoreline with their mothers, and took out binders that had their headshots slid into the clear pockets on the outside. My first emotional reaction was the familiar self-disgust I feel when someone who should have fewer survival resources than I do accomplishes a simple task that I have yet to master (yes, I feel that way a lot. A LOT.) They were teenagers, though, and were being pretty cute about agonizing about their 16-bar cuts, so I smiled to myself while I tried not to eavesdrop too obviously.

The mother of one of them was little more vocal and a little more vulgar, and she proceeded to harangue her daughter for her choice of 16-bars, criticize everyone the four women knew, and conclude by saying "your hair looks like sh*t" to her daughter as they exited the train. Charming.

I'm pretty sure my mom never told me my hair looked like sh*t. In fact, I'm pretty sure my mom never gave a sh*t what my hair looked like. I had the opposite of a stage mom. She and the rest of my family were always my biggest fans and continue to be, but they never bought into the myth that any sort of recognition or even success really matter. They made sure I knew how to tell a joke, do a crossword, push in my chair, enjoy a book. They never got me headshots.

In some ways, I paid for it. Whenever I was trying to really pass in music circles during high school or college there was a lot I didn't know. I missed out on some training I can't make up for (for instance, I'm sure both of the tweens across from me on the train are better dancers than I will ever be).

Still, I'll take it. Being perfect, being a star, is overrated. There are things I've lost and things I've gained because I didn't have an artsy upbringing. But what I have is better than what I can imagine.

Light through the leaves

Not long ago, over the phone my mother lamented with a laugh that the tree that split in a recent batch of storms had changed the way the light shines on her face through the window at sunrise. Half the leaves that once rose tall now touch the grass, and she knows that they'll never get around to cutting the tree down.

Where I sleep it's never really dark and I'm always hearing something, so the morning is never a surprise. There's always a part of me awake. Where she is, the morning light is red through leaves that burst against the sky's pure blue, and the yellow of the trees on the way into town matches the stripe down the center of the road.

When she told me all this I knew that the next time I was home she'd suggest I lie down on her spot on the bed to observe the red shadows of the tree at dawn.

Retroactive indignance

A dear friend who works in politics once admitted he occasionally tells people he is a social security actuary in order to avoid the ridiculous political comments people make when he reveals his true line of work. I have considered doing the same thing at times, because when I tell people I teach Church History - or even that I am committed to the Church - I get negative responses ranging from disbelief to horror, from an implied “But you seemed so normal!” to a sputtering “But- but- but - WHAT ABOUT THE CRUSADES??”


Uh, they were bad?

Seriously, I get the Crusades question a lot, almost as often as I get invasive lines of questioning about my take on sexual ethics, a field in which I have no academic background, no professional purview, and which is the topic of another post entirely. Either way there are a lot of assumptions made right off the bat, and as often as not a visible disapproval of my line of work This disapproval frequently manifests as a list of wrongs committed throughout history. Clearly, my interlocutors would have handled things differently.

Of course they would have, because they were born in the 20th century in America, they’re mostly middle-class, mostly well-educated, swimming in the postmodern current like all the rest of us. So I find their retroactive indignance alternately annoying and amusing. It’s almost childlike the way they imagine time-travel, that they could plop themselves down in the driver’s seat 1000 years ago.

There’s always a context. There’s always a culture. There’s always a why. Even our famed “religious wars” (which I frequently remind my students, had little to do with doctrine and a lot to do with “stuff”) was partially prompted by the fact that there were bored knights running all over the empire getting in fights, and Pope Urban thought to himself “I have a way to get them all far away from here…”

We laugh at the 19th century Popes clinging to temporal power (because to our 21st century minds that’s not what a Pope is ‘supposed to do’), but you can’t understand that without understanding the rest of the story. Pius IX acted the way he did because Constantine moved the capital of the Empire in the 300s…because Leo the Great met Attila the Hun in the 400s…because Pepin the Short foresaw a prudent alliance in the 700s… With our 21st century minds sometimes we just don’t get it, and it’s ok to admit that.

I’m not advocating a retroactive indifference either - we should look at history with a critical eye, with dismay or admiration or even horror. But to be smug about decisions made centuries ago is silly. For how will history judge our own era of ‘tolerance’ and ‘prosperity’ and ‘peace’? When in the year 2500 someone judges our social sins of action and inaction will they interpret it in light of our world, or will they immediately condemn us?

There is so much progress still to be made in our world, and I admire those prophetic voices who insist the change must come immediately and without delay. But in my heart I’m not convinced we can change the outcomes without changing the context. When I think of the issues that distress me the most - particularly issues of gender, both in and out of the Church - the great sadness for me is not that I can’t have my way. I mourn that the world is not with me in my desire. I don’t just want the outcome, I want the world to be ready for it, I want the world to want it too.

We will get there, but it takes time. If the study of history has taught me anything it’s that it takes a long time to turn around a big boat. When I started studying Popes I never thought it would make me more patient, but there you have it.

The stranger in the mirror

With some reluctance I spent this holiday going down and back to New York for an audition, splitting the trip between the car and a train and a night at my parents’ house. This morning I got into the city with enough time to warm up, and I hustled uptown to the practice room I’d reserved in order to wake up my voice (my audition was before noon) and get myself settled a bit.


I tend to use warm-up rooms as dressing rooms as well, running some scales while I’m layering on more mascara, and sometimes even perching on a piano bench to hoist on some hose. The room I was in today was a little dark, so it is possible I put on way too much makeup, but there was a nice mirror taking up one entire wall that I used to make sure I was presentable.

After sprucing up and warming up, I started running my arias. I took advantage of the mirror, which I don’t always have in my practice spaces, to examine posture, tension, gestures, and the like. I stood across from myself in an expensive dress, fashionable sweater, cute heels, with my hair all fluffy and my face coated in paint. Even as I was singing I heard a voice speak in my ear so clearly that I was surprised not to see my own self saying it in the mirror. It was my own voice in my mind’s ear, and it was looking in the mirror and saying “Who is that?”

My reflection was everything it is supposed to be: pretty, chic, pulled together. I was more than presentable, and yet I’d never felt like more of an imposter in my whole life? I’m wild and spastic and out of touch. I wake up with unimaginably large hair. My clothes are covered with spills and full of tears. I don’t cut an impressive figure. Who was I trying to fool?

Which one of those is the myth? The sloppy spaz who always dressed and acted like a tomboy? The polished performer who has finally figured out how to use eye-makeup? Are neither of them myths? Can I be both?

I’ve written before how easy it is to feel out of place when trying to pass in professional music circles, and what a challenge it is to stay authentic while being your own brand. My guess is this is a challenge for everyone, not just singers or artists - how do we mature without losing who we were?

Is it somehow inauthentic to grow up? How much of a façade can I put up before I lose myself? Why does success make me feel like I am betraying someone?

There’s a photo I keep on my fridge because it reminds me of who I am - silly and wild and intense and honest, with a little food on my face. I need to remember that’s who I always am.

Because of Prayer

For someone as Church-y as I am, I came somewhat late to prayer, or at least to talking about it. In college I was too cool for prayer: you could be contemplative or you could be active, and I knew what side I was on. I didn't have any of the incense-laden moments one might describe as prayer, and I saw that sort of talk as the purview of athletes pointing to the sky after a homerun on the one hand, and of the simperingly pious kids who judged ones spirituality on how many hours they'd spent in Eucharistic adoration that week on the other. Plus, I wasn't convinced I knew how to pray, and despite all appearances I really do try not to talk about things I don't know anything about.

That's why it was so shocking to me a few weeks ago when this thought popped into my head, the kind of thought that if I heard anyone say it out loud I'd either roll my eyes or throw up a little: If I have succeeded in anything in life, it is because of prayer.

I still don't know anything about prayer. I know that I am only able to perform because I am used to seeking out what is real. I know God best when I am dealing honestly with reality. So when I'm put in front of people to sing or act or speak, and I am expected to give them something real, I can fall back on the habit of searching for truth rather than for the easier fiction.

I know that I am only able to minister because I have experienced love in my life, then examined it and called it by name. When I am called on to be a loving presence, I am well served by this diligence in learning love. Prayer involves listening and paying attention, and when I fail at loving well I can use those habits to seek out and seal up the cracks in the armor of light. When I don't give myself time for silence and stillness I fail more often than not, often in spectacular, hideous ways that make me feel like someone I don't know. I need to check in often with that which is most real if I have any hope of staying real myself.

I don't know anything about prayer. I'm scared to write about it but I can't stay silent. If I have succeeded at anything in life, it is because of prayer. That doesn't mean I write my request on a slip of paper and God answers me with a magic trick. I think it means that I am willing to keep searching and to accept how high the stakes are. It means I listen and I pay attention. It means I give care to remembering who I am so that I can live fully as a one Created rather than as a caricature. I think it means I have re-tooled my definition of success to include all those things that build up God's Reign. When I am successful it is because I have allowed myself to collaborate with Creation, entering into the Goodness for which we were made, assenting to the Beauty we can only glimpse when we open ourselves to the glory we've named God in the rush we've named prayer.

My voice is who I am?

This cold and rainy evening I was in the art museum at my alma mater, talking to current students about careers in the arts. There is nothing like being asked “how did you get to where you are?” over and over to get me thinking about that question: How did I get here? And being there with fellow alums - a few of whom I knew as an undergrad - had me thinking the whole way home about how different things were when I was a big musical fish in the wonderful humanistic pond of Boston College.


I have vague recollections of a time before my voice was a commodity. I hadn’t invested a ton of money in it, it wasn’t making me very much money, and I was still getting to know it. People told me my voice was beautiful and I believed them, and it was true. I enjoyed my beautiful voice and used it as often as I could.

If that romantically Edenic memory sounds ridiculous, there’s a reason for that. My relationship with my voice in late adolescence was not pure or innocent. Burdened with deep insecurity, part of me believed that people would only admire or want to be around me if they knew I could sing, and I saw that as the only way of drawing people to me. At the same time, though, I could see through the illusion that there is anything virtuous about having a gift I never asked for, and felt shamed for using a false virtue in hope of attracting people.

I still try to take time to just enjoy my voice, even though using my voice is work for me now. It’s a source of income and a big investment. I have been told a million things about it, and often spent more time picking it apart than celebrating it. I listen to my recordings so many times that I have no idea what they sound like anymore. In order to improve (and to appropriately market myself) I need to think about the things my voice doesn’t do well, and sometimes it causes more anxiety than joy.

At the same time that I have this preoccupation, I feel paradoxically free because I know that it is not what makes me who I am. My voice does not make me holy or lovable. It is an unexplainable blessing that I can never earn but that I do my best to serve. I don’t need to have people hear me or know that I have this particular skill because I know that at the most fundamental level it’s nothing special.

When I was an undergrad there was so much I didn’t know, for better and for worse. Because everyone’s journey is different, it doesn’t make much sense to share all of that at a career night. What I was able to share was that I wake up every day and do what I love. That I’ve never had a thing planned for my future and have just made the best decisions I can, day by day. That you need to work your tail off to make it, and you had better find other things that can give you joy because a career is never going to love you back.

My voice is who I am, and at the same time it’s not, and I can live with that.

A cold and broken hallelujah

Every year my mother takes great delight in ‘changing the clocks’, because rather than fuss with the hands on the clocks in the great room she actually switches the clocks, pulling out the winter clocks and stuffing the summer ones away. With the time change coming even later than usual this year, I have spent the last few mornings stumbling around trying to get out of the house in the dark, going so far as to walk directly into a door late last week.

Leaving my late afternoon class a few days ago the teacher commented that starting soon the sun would be going down closer to the beginning of class than the end. I looked out the windows of the new class building as dusk fell at dismissal time and thought “for someone who gets sad in the fall, I’m doing OK. The sun is setting and my mood is all right”.

Then I got in the car and put on Rufus Wainright and that all changed.

The first time I remember having an emotional response to the autumn was while I was still in elementary school. I felt nostalgic and a little melancholy and very confused about why these feelings had seemed to come from nowhere. Even now, away from the town where I spent the autumns of my youth, the smell - rare in the city - of burning leaves takes me back to that revelatory afternoon on the swingset, a little amazed that the seasons could affect me so powerfully, and a little, well, sad.

Every year I think maybe this is the year I can write about seasonal depression, and despite always writing a bit that springs from it, I can never quite write about it. For a while it was because I was embarrassed and ashamed, but that’s not really it any more. Now when I try to write about it I become totally stuck, because I just don’t understand it.

Can I live with that mystery? I have no idea why, at this time of year, every goodbye and disappointment I’ve ever had becomes wrapped up in each sunset. I don’t know why the way the falling leaves match the stripe of yellow down the center of the road makes my eyes well up through all of October. Maybe this is just when I mark the passage of time - New Year’s never really did it for me, but I can mark the time by each somber, sensitive fall.

Tonight’s sunset, marking the bridge between the commemorations of All Saints and All Souls, really threw me, even though I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other people talking about nothing that had anything to do with sadness or darkness. Without my knowledge or will thoughts crept in of those who are on the other side whose closeness we celebrate these days. There’s a reason so many cultures remember their dead this time of year. I beg the forgiveness of my Southern Hemisphere/Equatorial friends, on whom some of the fall-in-New-England imagery might be lost.

The evenings get dark and I do too. Even though I can’t explain the darkness, I fear a part of me has started to take comfort in the yearly ritual of staring out the window at sunset, brooding, or as Hopkins writes in verses that could have been written for me “grieving over Goldengrove unleaving”. Despite the heartache there’s something oddly beautiful about being pushed and pulled by nature, year after year. I didn’t always know what I know now: that this will pass, and that April will see us all alive again. Despite Eliot’s claim that April is the cruelest month, I know the cruelest is October, mixing memory and desire even as our dull roots grow duller, well aware of the long sleep that is coming next.

I have spent some stretches in very dark places, and my spirituality has been shaped by that. Life is hard; it’s a blessing anyway. We are confronted with incomprehensible suffering; God exists anyway. Sadness can stretch us across herself like we’re prisoners on a rack; we worship anyway. In our cold and broken halleluiah faith breaks forth, quietly resolute, sometimes too weak to even be a sign of determination, just there, in a silent confidence that defies the present pain.




Spring and Fall: to a Young Child
--G. M. Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.