I missed Mass today. I didn’t mean to, but I did. It’s a long story and it doesn’t matter. I was thinking through how I wanted to start this off and I think that’s a good place. I want to write more about the faith—I feel called to do so in a deep part of myself, because God gave me a way with words and I guess I’ll be damned if I don’t use it—but I’m not particularly qualified to do so, either by pedigree or by, you know, moral standing. Most of the time, I’m honest. Here’s a catalog of facts. I have no higher education in theology. I read a fair amount but not as much as I think I try to make it seem like I do; most people could outpace me in a debate on any given theological topic in a matter of just a few strides. I curse. I shoplift. I don’t know all the words to the Apostles’ Creed (the Nicene is more my jam). I wear jeans to church. I try to pray every single morning and every single night but I don’t always. I like to drink with my friends. I smoke cigarettes. I’m prone to a kind of magical thinking that never leads me anywhere good. I cook, and I always make too much, and therefore not infrequently I am the cause of quite a bit of food waste. I should write more than I do. I could go on. You’ll see.
All of this is to say, I don’t want anyone who reads this to do so in the spirit of deferring to an authority, because I am not; I barely have a handle on myself. And what’s more, my faith these days has been, by and large, merely an act of the will, and not felt in my heart of hearts; this is where I would actually like to start.
Hello. I’m Joan, and I’m a miserable sinner.
When I put my mind to it, I think I’m an excellent communicator. The trouble is that it hardly ever occurs to me to communicate. I spend so much time in my own brain. Years ago, I got a stipend to spend a summer in Manhattan doing an internship for my Bachelor’s Degree. I took a bus to get there, and I hadn’t been seated long when I got a text from my brother, asking me if I wanted Chipotle. I’d been planning my departure for months. It was all I really thought about. I’d secured an apartment; I’d bought a few new items of clothing; I’d learned all about how to tell if you had a bed bug problem. But I’d neglected to tell my twin brother anything about it. It was almost as if the plans I was making were so real and vivid to me that it felt unthinkable that I could have missed that one crucial step; and moreover, that he couldn’t, somehow, peer into my mind and see the plain fact that I was leaving, that I’d be gone for quite some time, and so soon.
Because of this severe gap in my understanding of how and when to communicate, I find myself often feeling completely unknown and quite lonely. It’s not a very attractive way to be but that’s how it is. Someone had me do an Enneagram test the other day and I got whichever one has the basic description, “You’re a navel-gazing tortured piece of shit and you think you’re so cool and different, don’t you, you tortured piece of shit.” The result is that when I fall in love, I fall deeply, so deep I can hardly see to the top anymore, because it’s so startling for me to meet someone and feel, in some mysterious way, entirely visible to them.
I fell in love this year. And okay, that’s actually the starting place of this whole thing. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, because so much of it is private, but I can say that I’ve never seen the whole future burst open, dazzling and sun-shot, with such force before. I’d never been able to so vividly envision someone holding my hand as I bore our child into the world. I wanted to live in sacred quietude with this man and grow old and wise next to one another. And if you think I’m being dramatic, it’s because love is a dramatic fucking thing. Why wouldn’t it be? It moved through me with obliterative force. I didn’t even like his last name, but I wanted it.
And it felt ordained by God Himself. I felt like Heaven had unzipped and was showering us with every sign that this was right, that it was how things were supposed to be.
There’s so much I could tell you, but what I want to tell you is that however fantastical and overblown you think my thinking is, it wasn’t because I was delusional. He learned the language of my heart and spoke it with fluency. “Oh, my God,” he said once, when I asked him something on the phone, “I heard your voice in a dream a few years ago asking me that exact question.” He wrote poems about me—and, like, actually pretty okay poems (I’m a poet; I’m picky). He called me his wife. Once, I read “The Good-Morrow” by John Donne to him and he said, “That poem is about us.” Another time, we were sitting by a fire and I noticed that he was looking at me steadily, and smiling.
“What are you seeing?” I asked him.
“I’m seeing the rest of our life together,” he said.
But—of course you’re waiting for a but—it all fell to shit in this spectacularly anticlimactic way. I don’t even want to get into it. It’s too neurotic a story to tell, and that really is saying something.
But, holy God, I had prayed for it to work. I guess, really, that’s where this starts: with months’ and months’ worth of misguided prayers. Over the course of my time with this man, whose name was and remains Forrest, I heard the phrase that both husband and wife are “party to the marriage,” and something clicked for me: the best unions are ones that, in some ways, mimic the Holy Trinity. Your marriage becomes an embodied member of the relationship in itself, and proceeds from the love between the groom and his bride. And the best marriages are ones that, as the Holy Spirit did on Pentecost, set the tongues of their descendants ablaze to speak the truth about love, and what it is, the sheer force of the truth that we, abject and horrifically weak as we are, can one day have a portion of great glory. I wanted that with him. I could almost see it.
So as you can imagine, it was devastating when he called it off, and so suddenly. The basic gist of the story is that he had been lying to me, though maybe not at a conscious level; I think he really did love me, in his way, but he must have seen his promises—to give me children, to marry me, to convert to Catholicism and develop a relationship with Christ—as subject to change: in other words, not promises. And unfortunately, as I can now see, I must have been guilty of some form of idolatry, because for the last four months or so, my faith has been unsteady and my heart uncertain that it’s in good hands. I find myself praying to God to help me trust Him, but it’s been hard to do as anything more than a mental exercise, because I felt so betrayed by my beloved, and how could I expect anything different from God, when I thought He was urging me on in my relationship. The state of my heart is improving, and I have no plans to quit my mental efforts to cling to Him, but I find myself thinking often of something an old spiritual mentor once said to a priest who acted as her spiritual advisor: “Father, sometimes it feels like even after all this time, losing my faith would be as easy as falling off a log.”
No, this isn’t exactly an uplifting way to begin, but that’s the honest-to-Christ backstory to this blog, or whatever it is. I am building my faith back, but I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not an authority on anything. I’m dumb enough that I let a fickle man damage my sense of the sacred. I want to trust God, but the plain fact is that I don’t; and sometimes, I’m angry with Him. But that’s the start of things, not the end of it, because I still do love Him; I must, because here I am, trying. And that means I have not lost my hope, my fundamental belief that love is going to come down in such splendor that I’ll be lifted to a height from which I’ll be able to gaze down on my own life and see that everyone who has ever hurt me was a person, and I’ll be able to love them from there, and forgive them. So that’s the spirit with which I’m approaching this project. I’m miserable, and stupid, and I missed Mass today, and I can promise next to nothing, except sincerity, and an attempt to render the contents of my heart in such a way that I hope helps you and me both to feel less lonely. Okay, yes.
And I think that’s where I always wanted to start. I love you. I do.