Our Lady of Sorrows

I think I might be able to quit therapy, which is good, because my shrink is taking a job at the VA.

I've had this weird feeling the past two weeks or so that I've finally identified as contentment with occasional bursts of silly happiness. I'm not sure why this has happened. Perhaps 22 years of yoga, zen and therapy have finally produced results.

God, I hope so.

Do you want to know something funny? When you're happy and you go to see your shrink, all you do is sit on the couch and talk about his kids. Then you pay him $135 and feel stupid. I was going to keep going to therapy until I got married--but now I'm rethinking that goal.

Hmmmmm.

Lilly's back from Florida--cautious hooray. She got off the plane looking brittle and too thin. We drove into a little chichi neighborhood in the city and had lunch at this strange little place. There were all these cute, expensive cafes which I would have been perfectly happy in, but Lilly picked this odd little place with a bit POW flag--the one with the bent head, a shadow on the white background. We got Oranginas. Lilly got an egg salad sandwich. I ordered a Reuben. I always get a Reuben. I'm on the hunt for the perfect Reuben. So far, that would have to be at Lou's in Hanover, New Hampshire. So we sat there, me eating my reuben approximation (it was a good sandwich, but not a reuben). I had made her change into something decent at the airport--she arrived in leggings and an old t-shirt. I mean, honestly, what was her father thinking? Lilly is 5'9". She is a 34D and has long red hair. She is 15. The t-shirt barely covered her butt. No pants or skirt. Just leggings--not the thick ones. The tights. Cheap. Joy's (her stepmother) hand-me downs. Joy had also sent her home with a huge suitcase filled with old clothes. The clothes she's been able to buy with the money that should be Nick and Lilly's child support probably. Oh well, guess we'll take what coin we can get. Hmmmm.......I'm sounding bitter. But, christ, some financial support over the years would have sure made our lives better. Maybe I'm not ready to quit therapy after all.

At lunch, Lilly says, "Mom, can I talk to you about something and can you just listen and not get snarky? I mean, don't say anything funny. Just listen."

I nodded mutely.

Then she tells me about her summer. Rob and Joy have recently been saved (yet again. I wasn't snarky to Lilly but I get to be snarky here, 'k?) and they have joined a very fundamentalist, pentecostal church. The kind where people shake and start speaking in tongues and fall on the ground. And they put Lilly under a lot of pressure and bashed her anglicanism (our gay bishop). Lilly has two stepbrothers--they are Joy's children from two previous marriages. She has a third son from another marriage but that child was raised by his father. The oldest, Derek, was graduating from college. It was a big deal. It had taken him 7 years. The youngest, Kyle, a champion long distance runner, and perfect student took this opportunity to have a crisis of faith at this event, necessitating intervention by the pastor and a special meeting at the church where there was a lot of praying over him--even at Derek's graduation party. Kyle has pulled a lot of this kind of thing over the years.

I suggest to Lilly that this is sort of interesting--"It made the weekend about Kyle, didn't it?"

Lilly gets mad. "It wasn't like that! You don't know!" She adores Kyle. Adores him. "I guess, it just made me question my faith, and wonder if maybe they're right. I mean, it's confusing, the preacher says these horrible things--like all muslims are going to hell--but then he says things I agree with. And I don't know. I feel all pure when I pray, but then I start thinking about things, and I don't feel pure any more. I want to feel pure."

So dangerous. That drive for purity. The other side of purity is fascism. Yucky muddy reason, messing up those feel-good irrational mental states.

And here am I, on a cushion every morning trying to stop my thoughts.

I don't fuck with faith, though. My parents did it to me and I hated them for it. But I can deliver religious experiences, too. Gentler ones.

I drove her to the shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows. We sat in cool darkness of the little german chapel--it smells German--I don't know what I mean by this--and lit candles for each person in our family. We sat and looked at the tiles, "Mit danken Maria" inscribed through the years, the agnus dei in painted script behind the altar, the little child's shoe on the altar to Mary, always in the same place. Now there's a hat--a soldier's hat. Lilly started crying.

"You have been raised in a tradition of sensitivity. " I started--at a loss for words. "It's hard sometimes to be able to defend it, when people seem so adamant and certain. I guess you have to ask yourself, are they being as respectful to my traditions as I am being to theirs? And if they aren't--then it's not the real thing. They aren't being kind or good to you. They're working out their own agendas."

"But they're so sure."

"No one is sure. Was Jesus sure at Gethsemane? Even on the cross, Jesus was not sure. No one human is sure. We don't know. Because we're humans. We do our best. You just do your best. You may never know the whole story. Certainty is usually only experienced by stupid or delusional people. I mean, sometimes you'll get a flash--I don't mean that kind of thing. But doubt is just part of it. It means you're thinking. It means you're experiencing things as they are, and that's almost never comfortable. She is Our Lady of Sorrows. Grace and sorrow are not mutually exclusive"

Then it started to rain, and we drove home, taking the river road.

I used to have dreams in Miami of driving black top country roads through fields in high summer, on and on over the rolling fields of green. I told a priest friend about these dreams and he told me I was really dreaming about Mary.

That's my 1/2 hour.