I am not an atheist. Every time I have to tell someone that I feel like its some weird version of coming out. If you’re reading this and knew me when I was twelve, this is not at all surprising. If you’ve met me in New York, maybe it is. In a world where most of my friends, and pretty much everyone I’ve ever dated – and everyone who currently sends me messages on OkCupid, is an atheist, people always seem surprised. That is, if I even tell them.
On a technical level I am a member of the United Church of Christ. I was confirmed when I was 14. My grandfather the Reverend Dr. Kenneth Ackerman Friou Senior baptized me as a baby in the same church I attended until leaving for college. Legend has it that when he put the water on my forehead I looked up at him and smiled. I attended Sunday school through the sixth grade when I played Mary in the annual Christmas Pageant and went on to confirmation in the seventh and eight grade and youth group in high school. Two of my nieces have been baptized wearing my baptismal gown and one of them is my god daughter.
So, why write this blog? My history with religion is more complicated than the last paragraph, and my identity as a person of faith is more complicated now than just not being an atheist. And my identity as an artist, well that probably complicates it all even more. Emily and I have spent many conversations discussion how weird it is not to be atheists in our business and how we sometimes feel like its some dirty secret. And yet, we both know that our work is influenced by what we do or do not believe.
I have been to church exactly twice this year. Once on Easter, and once tonight. I think I wept through the entire service. I walked in a few minutes late, rushing from work. And I got there just as the minister was explaining the labrynth they had laid out on the floor of Judson Church (more on Judson and it’s appeal in a later entry). I wish I had caught the whole explanation, but her words about being on a journey and sometimes feeling like you have no sense of where you are, and feeling lost, hit home. For whatever I do or do not believe these days (also something we’ll get to later) a beautiful church, with candle lights, and music, and people talking about the spiritual part of life, have a tendency to get me. I think I just spend so much of my day being a tough New Yorker, or in college, a stressed out perfectionist, that if I find a good service like this one, it does exactly what it’s supposed to, what the UCC calls “creating a space for grace.” I think we all need that, wherever we find it, yoga, meditation, etc. So tonight, all of the sudden I just felt like I was standing there naked.
In the seven years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve probably attended service on Ash Wednesday more than any other. I don’t know how it started. I also started giving something up for Lent. This may seem strange given that I am significantly less religious now than when I moved here, but there is something in the ritual of it that has taken on meaning to me as an adult. I am into the idea of giving up something I love, and then coming back to it again in 40 days. A fast of sorts. I also at one point heard someone suggest that there are three parts. You give something up, you take something on, and you add time for meditation into your day. So I am giving up refined sugar (this is the craziest Lenten idea I’ve ever had, we’ll see how it goes!), I am attempting to volunteer once a week, and then, the meditation part. As part of the meditation part, I’m also going to keep this blog.
So what does Lent mean to me? Bear with me, this may be a bit long. About five years ago, wow, this is harder to write than I thought….I got a phone call from my mom that my grandmother was in congestive heart failure. We always assumed that if she passed away I probably wouldn’t go home for the funeral. She had been sick with Parkinson’s for a very long time and I had mostly mourned the Grandmother I knew already. But I found myself distinctly more upset than I anticipated. Maybe it was because the only other person I’d really know who died was my Grandfather, and that was a good twenty years prior.
I ended up getting on the first plane the next morning, praying I would get there in time. I arrived in Wisconsin at 10am and she was indeed still alive. Over the next few days she seemed to inch closer to death. None of us could believe she was even still alive. She hadn’t had a blood pressure in days, and it was unclear if she even knew we were there. After about four days, a bunch of us went out for dinner and when we came back we were all sitting in her room. I was across from the foot of the bed, the only one facing her. I noticed the expression on her face changing. Something just shifted. So I got up and walked across the room and sat down on the edge of her bed and picked up her hand. After a few minutes it became apparent that it was actually a pretty major shift. I remember my mom trying to prop her up a bit more to ease the breathing and make her more comfortable. And I remember realizing that this really was it. A few seconds later mom said something to the effect of “If you guys want to be here, I think this is the time.” And everyone in the room came and held on to her. That cliché laying on of hands. Her breathing became more labored, and then it was like someone reached in and tore her soul from her body. She took the biggest inhale, but there was no exhale. And suddenly it was like I could feel her dancing, like something was free of the body. And then she was everywhere. It was like there were a hundred grandma’s in the room, one with each of us.
The stillness was so profound. It was like she was alive, and then not. And I just sat there. I think I sat there for half an hour. And I mean I guess it was sad, but mostly it was relieving. And it felt like there was this great freedom. I felt so warm, and cared for, like she was watching. And slowly the million grandma’s in the room fell away. I looked down at our hands entwined, realizing hers had become cold and stiff and noticed that the ring I had on my hand was actually her ring, that my mother had given me only a week before.
So. Coming back to Lent. The funeral was weird. It was January, and after having been there for her death, the funeral meant little. She was covered in makeup and the priest hardly knew her. I was very surprised they didn’t do the “Ashes to Ashes” passage. I mean, if you can’t count on that in a funeral, what can you count on?
And then I went home to New York, back to my life. I still didn’t really feel sad. But I started having these dreams. I called them the “dead grandma dreams.” I know that’s kind of a terrible way to put it, but suddenly there was dead grandma and alive grandma and it became a good way of distinguishing them. For weeks, my grandmother would show up in my dreams every night. I don’t remember much about the dreams now, except that she was there. I wasn’t sleeping super well.
Then Ash Wednesday came. For some reason I decided to go to church. I even went to an Episcopal I think. I don’t even know anything about the Episcopals. They do communion and everything and I drank out of the big cup and spilled the wine and stained my sweater, it was a real to do. But then they read the passage.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
I started to cry. I went home that night and had the first big cry since my grandmother had died. I never dreamed of her again.
Coincidentally, just before the time she died, I had made a weird sort of peace with death. This is not to say I will never be really upset about it. But I was temping at the time and had too much time on my hands. I started looking up natural burials. I had no interest in ever being put in a cement box and didn’t know if I wanted to be cremated. But the former scientist wannabe in me, was really into the idea of becoming dirt. That makes it sound really lame, I know. But really, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I knew that whatever happened to me, I really wanted my body to decompose. I wanted to become a part of the dirt and the grass and the flowers and the stars and whatever else I could become that makes up our universe. I realized I didn’t need the idea of heaven to make it okay to die. In fact I wasn’t even sure I believed in a stereotypical heaven, or heaven at all. So there I was, with my grandmother dying, not knowing if I believed in heaven. It made it weird to hear people talk about her meeting Jesus. But it also made it really okay to me that she was dying. I knew that she would become part of our earth. To dust she would return.
It was Lent that year when I started thinking about what the minister talked about tonight. That it is a ritualistic brush with death. A time to think about, and make peace with our mortality. Did you know you’re actually not supposed to say Hallelujah during Lent? That is a celebration of life, and we have seven weeks to go before we can do that and I can eat cookies again.
So tonight, I found myself weeping again. Something about Lent is very cathartic. It’s about admitting your weaknesses. Not in a bad way, but in an oh my god I’ve been carrying around the burden of this for how long? Kind of way. Lent is the time you get to cry for your grandmother’s death when you didn’t even know you were sad. It’s the time you get to be lost when you think you have all your shit together. And for me this year, it’s also apparently, oh my god do I even believe in God? Or is that just the outside pressure talking?
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