Why I Go to Church

I think about this a lot, what with one thing and another (from anti-ERA and Prop 8 campaigns to Professor Bott’s recent comments in the Washington Post).  Many years ago, when I was complaining about the Church to my sister Tena, she said, “Well, do you want to go or not?  Stay in it if you want to stay, leave if you want to leave.  You get to choose – nobody’s making you do anything.  What do you want?”  This question struck me with considerable impact at the time.

Below is a list of my reasons for continued Church involvement as I perceive them right now.  The list is not prioritized in any way – the priority of each changes over time.

• My family/ancestral heritage is Mormon.  I want to honor that heritage.
• My mom and dad and siblings are active.  I want our relationships to be uncontaminated by worry about my faithfulness to the Church.
• My husband is active.  Of course he supports me in whatever I decide, but he is happier when I decide to be active in the Church.
• My community is mostly Mormon.  I know the culture.  I’m comfortable (mostly) in it.
• A majority of my psychotherapy patients are Mormon.  It gives us common ground right off the bat.  ‘Course it also gets in the way with some.
• Church is where people talk about Jesus, service, loving others – things I believe in.  It is a place where people try to do good and be good.  This is actually quite huge.
• Part of participation in the ordinances and sacraments of the Church is the promise to continue serving and participating in the future.  I take these promises seriously.
• I’ve had specific spiritual experiences that lead me to believe that participating is a positive thing for me to do.
• I often enjoy Church activity in a mild get-to-know-your-neighbors kind of way.
• I’ve had very direct and joyous experiences with deity.  Not sure it had much to do with Church, but still.  Seems like the same territory.

Now the list of things that make me question my decision to be active in the Church.

• I don’t like or trust Joseph Smith – never have.  He has always felt slippery and unreliable to me.  If the founder is not trustworthy, can what he produced be worth adhering to and upholding?  It’s odd – although Brigham Young was even worse, I cut him a lot more slack.  We as a Church are not in danger of worshiping Brigham Young, but we come awfully close with Joseph.
• Sitting in Church has often been, throughout the years, excruciatingly boring.
• The Church is structurally sexist.  In some ways this is “well, duh, we live in a sexist world, why would the Church be any different?” but also “it’s the Church, dammit, supposedly run by God, it should be better than the world.”
• Related to this – the Church is hierarchical and non-responsive to people at the bottom of the hierarchy, which as a woman I am.  So I don’t like that.
• My experience as a psychotherapist with gay Mormon patients is that the Church’s stance on gay issues has been and still is directly and sometimes mortally harmful to LGBTQ people.  The Prop 8 controversy brought me closest to just throwing up my hands and quitting.
• Oh gosh, the right-wing politics of Utah Mormons.  But that is a function of where we live and I can’t really blame it on the Church.

I’ve always wanted to commit whole-heartedly to Church with the fervent, undivided loyalty that others in my family seem to have.  It is tiring to have a divided consciousness, always holding back, always saying “yes but…”  Still, in general, right now, it’s worth it to stay in.  I’m not all in, the “support and sustain” temple interview question always gives me a pang, and I suppose a hard-line bishop could decide against allowing me a temple recommend on the basis of my reservations.  I hope that doesn’t happen though.  I enjoy attending the temple with John, going to family weddings, etc.

I recognize that for others, the balance might tip against activity.  Someday it might even happen for me.  That’s OK.  The Church is an instrument for us to use and a place for us to be as we work out our individual and family salvation – but it is not an end in itself.

So Glad to be Home

I’m crazy busy and coming back to family life was like jumping into a bracing ocean, but I am so happy to be home.  It was a great break for me to be in London.  After cancer and surgery I just kept going and going, and could feel myself out of balance like a top that’s off its spin and beginning to wobble.  I didn’t see or feel any way forward except to keep doing the same, only harder.  Sooner or later I think I would have crashed.

But the six-month break in England gave me time to stabilize, get my bearings, and return with joy to my life that I love.

And I do love my life!  I have the life that I imagined in my 20s, doing the work that I planned and prepared for, involved with my children, best friends with my husband, creating the home that I want for the people I love.

I don’t even regret (much) not working more on my stories.  The stories are still there, and maybe I just needed not to worry about anything for awhile.  I really didn’t–I had a fun, active, six-month vacation.  How many people get that, ever in their lives?  Now I’m so happy to be back.  I love my work, I love my home, I love the people in my life.  I kiss you all!

Canterbury

We went with the students to Canterbury, and I wrote a vertical poem.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Low Church in Canterbury

Upward god
god of spires
know I you?

One bespoke
me, ago–
loved me, laughed–

was he you
god of heights
vaults and towers?

Lowly here
bounded by
gravity

still I seek
an embrace–
long bereft

ask I now
know thou me
god that soars?

It has slant-rhyme and an odd meter, but there you go.  Also, because I’ve already used up half my WordPress cloud memory space with photos, I’m going to start uploading most pictures to Facebook from now on, the way Betsy does.

Light in the Darkness

London is a dark city now, close to the winter solstice, despite the bright Christmas decorations.  The light comes slowly in the morning, a faint grey dawn, and darkness closes in again in the early afternoon.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Last night we went to the Advent Procession at St. Paul’s.  It was dark (of course) when we left the Centre, and the wind blew through the City’s canyons over and through the Occupy people and their tents huddled at the base of the cathedral.

From the programme:

This service is part of the long tradition in the English Church of vivid Advent services, whose purpose is to help us as we prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, and for his coming in glory.  Much of the service is drawn from ancient sources.  Some of the images have been used from the beginnings of Israel, through the period of the New Testament and early Church, through the Middle Ages to the present day.  Every age has found in them a new richness through which God’s continuous mercy, revealed most dramatically in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, can be seen.

During this service, the Procession moves from West to East, from the direction of darkness towards the brightness of sunrise.  As it does so, it expresses symbolically our desire to turn away from the darkness in which we are separated from God, and draw closer to the Light, which is God.  The candlelight in the procession is a reminder of the light of the presence of the incarnate God in our human nature, God with us.

Now, for some poetry from the Advent service.  First, George Herbert (1593-1633), sung by the Cathedral Choir:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

Here it is sung by the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge:

Here is a (spoken) poem by Rowan Williams, current Archbishop of Canterbury:

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Happy Advent!  In the darkness we await the return of the light.

Venice – I’m in love

We had a very wet visit to Venice.  The rain drizzled down as we left the Marco Polo airport and rode a boring bus across the causeway to an ordinary-looking terminal/parking lot.  First we had an argument about whether to drag our bags across town to our hotel or take a water taxi (vaporetti), but that was settled by the inconvenient fact of a water taxi strike, so we headed out on foot with bags and umbrellas – inadvertently perpendicular to the way we were supposed to go – and exiting the terminal/parking lot, found — Venice!

I can’t even describe it, so lovely and like nothing else in the world – I fell in star-struck love with it, with her, whatever, I have a crush on a city.  I love every detail, from brightly plastered houses to ancient churches and courtyards and little shops and running all through it instead of streets and horrid auto traffic the canals, arched over by little stepped bridges and narrow paved walkways between.  No cars.  None.

We were soon very very lost in the dark and the rain, looping south toward the Accademia rather than directly across to Rialto Bridge and San Marco and our hotel.  But eventually we gave Chris the map and he rescued us several times by reading the tiny print of the map in the dim light from a church door or under the awning of a restaurant, and John stopped people to ask where we were and I stood waiting, and trudged after them with my wool shawl dripping water from the fringes and grinning – tired, hungry, soaked, blissed out of my mind with delight.

Our hotel, the Lux, half a hundred yards behind the Doge’s Palace, was identified by a little hanging sign with an arrow pointing into a tiny cut like a mini alley.  It was five floors high and two rooms wide.  We opened the door to a narrow mirrored staircase of shabby opulence.  The night clerk called to us from above and we climbed the carpeted stairs to a landing where he sat in a sort of alcove behind a desk.  Chris’ room was one flight above that, and ours two flights beyond – the stairs becoming narrower and more steep as we ascended.

We took our dinner at the recommendation of the night clerk in the restaurant downstairs and around the corner.  “Ghetto,” said Chris of the 3-course set tourists’ menu, but he has pretty high standards (when we’re paying).  They offered complimentary peach wine which I was a little sad to decline.  We went out again in just a slight drizzle and wandered northeast away from our hotel, and then bought gelato and walked along the waterfront.

In the morning after breakfast we went down the alley to the wharf, awash in the tide.  I had wondered the night before what was stacked all across Piazza San Marco and the adjacent footways.  Not tables nor construction lumber, but platforms for walking across the flooded areas when the tide comes in.

We were first in at the Doge’s Palace.*  We saw an exhibit on the connections between Venice and Egypt.  We saw all the incredible paintings.  We walked on the platforms into the Basilica of St. Mark to look at the gilt walls and ceilings.  Chris took the camera and climbed the Campanile, and John and I sat in the square with our feet in the water (almost).  The bell tolled 12 noon while he was up there – he said at the first boom he thought there had been an explosion in the square below.**

We decided to take the vaporetti back along the Grand Canal to P. Roma, and then visit the two churches Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and Scuola Grande di San Rocco, with their paintings by Titian, Bellini, and Tintoretto.  We had a few hours, which became fewer and fewer as we tried to figure out how to get to our ship.  Eventually we found it, on foot and just under the wire, and we were off on our cruise!

It was painful saying goodbye to Venice.  I will be back.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

*Angel With a Sword (C.J. Cherryh) is Venice, except it’s made of stone and plaster, not wood.  But the history (disregarding the spaceships and aliens of course) is Venice.  Read it.

**Nine Tailors (Dorothy Sayers) – death by bell.  I was a little worried about Chris when I heard it ring from below.

Bari and St. Nicholas

After we left Venice late Tuesday, we traveled for a long time south to our first port of call, docking after noon in Bari, in the Puglia region of southern Italy.  Our internet info said that Bari is a boring industrial town – except for the little medieval area, Citta Vecchia, a warren of lanes and alleys – directly off the docks.

So that’s where we went.  We walked 15 minutes to the church of St. Nicholas (yes, Santa Claus) through immaculately swept and tidy tiny lanes 8 feet wide, traversed by pedestrians and motorbikes only.  People were living their lives – laundry, cooking, eating – right at street level, along with the little shops, lace or sheer fabric curtains drawn across doorways or pulled aside to living rooms and dining tables.

I hardly dared look into the doorways, it seemed so intrusive into their lives.  I am not really a good travel photographer because it feels so awkward to take pictures of people and their places.

The church of San Nicola reminded me of the southwestern or Mexican missions, built of white stone.  The courtyard and the interior were swept and bare.  The ceiling only was ornate.  St. Nicholas’ tomb in the crypt below (holding his relics, stolen from Asia Minor by Bari sailors centuries ago) was cheerful and cosy.  It had a little lit peep-window into the casket, with an archaic-looking painting of the saint on his deathbed visible through an iron grate and a clean linen cloth laid inside.  I’m not sure what or where his relics actually are.  It is a place that is obviously loved and cared for.

The three of us sat inside for awhile, and then Chris and I sat on the front steps waiting for John.  A couple came with two small children, one shrieking in protest at going inside.  Although I don’t speak Italian, their argument was obvious: you don’t want to go in to see St. Nicholas?

We walked on, planning to visit the castle, but were informed at the entrance that it was closed.  We decided to find the art gallery in the Citta Nuova that Peter had recommended to us, but when Chris went ahead to scope it out, the address was only a cafe.  We walked back into the old city to visit the Cathedral.  A funeral was beginning, with many Carabinieri all in fancy uniform.  In the end we got cold and went back to the ship before dark and our undocking time.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Corfu and the Aegean Dolphins

When I was a teenager I liked the romantic suspense novels of Mary Stewart (now better known for her Merlin stories, beginning with “The Crystal Cave”).  One of my favorites, which I had reread in the year before we came to the UK this time, is called “This Rough Magic.”  It takes place in the mid-60s on the Greek island of Corfu, near the Albanian coast.  Part of the plot involves the idea that Corfu may have been the inspiration for the deserted island where Prospero is marooned with his daughter Miranda.  A central part of the plot is a dolphin.  It is a lovely story, and I never imagined that I would visit there myself.  But there we were.

Greece is an hour earlier than Italy, and I got up especially early in hopes that I could see us dock.  Too late!  We were already stationary.  But I did watch another cruiser come in (see the Cruising post for photo).  Sunrise was lovely over the island.

We bought shuttle tickets from the new port to the old port on the north edge of town.  The Campiello, or old Venetian part of town, was like Bari, like Venice – a crazy-quilt pattern of narrow walkways, steps, and passages, negotiated only by pedestrians and motorbikes, hung with laundry, window boxes on balconies, people calling and talking to each other.  A child waved at me from a window and I waved back, and then her mother waved and smiled.  Small shops and cafes, not yet open, were on the street level.

We were first people in the Museum of Asian Art at the Palati tou Agiou Michail & tou Georgiou, or the Palace of St. Michael and St. George, at the north end of the Spianada.  Things in Greece seem to open at 8:30, close at 2, and then open again at 5 or so.  The Palace’s Asian art is a beautiful and wide-ranging collection, but it took me a minute or two to focus on Asia instead of on Greece.  Just as we had finished and were ready to come down the broad stairs, a herd of noisy Greek schoolchildren like a flash flood surged in, surged through, and surged out again, leaving us stunned in their wake.

We walked down the Spianada to the Palaio Frourio, or Old Fortress.  John and Chris climbed up as high as they could, almost to the lighthouse, while I waited below.  We saw the small collection of Byzantine art in one of the buildings on the promontory.  Here we saw what looked like large prickly pear cacti growing on the cliff side.

We walked across to the Liston, a lovely arcade full of people having their morning coffee, and into the Venetian district again, hoping to find the Church of St. Spyridon (Spyridon being the possible original of Prospero, according to Mary Stewart’s book).

The sun shone through red and yellow stained glass, spotting the ornate interior.  The actual mummified saint is himself in a coffin in the church.  On his saint’s day his body is carried reverently through the streets of town in a glass case, followed by a parade of marching bands.  People – obviously townspeople – walk in through one set of doors, genuflect to the saint, pick up a candle, deposit a coin, light the candle, and place it in a sort of oven with a chimney to carry their prayer to heaven, and then walk out the doors on the opposite side.  It was all very matter-of-fact and cosy.  During the 20 minutes or so that we sat watching, probably a hundred people came through.  More – it was as busy as the neighborhood market.  As we left, the priest in his Greek Orthodox vestments stood in the doorway of the church chatting with a shopkeeper across the way.  John talked with him briefly, and when he asked, told him we were from Utah.  Though friendly, the priest was clearly unfamiliar with the name.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

After about an hour at sea, going south in the Aegean before heading around the heel of Italy toward Malta, John and I were sitting alone on the port deck aft.  I heard a splash, and another, above the throb of the engines, and when I looked over the railing and down, saw dolphins! skipping and leaping, struggling valiantly to keep up, slicing through the water, racing the giant ship in pure competitive joy.

“Oh my gosh, dophins, John, I can’t believe it, look at them jump,” I kept saying in a whisper.  I gripped my camera but couldn’t stop looking at them long enough to take a picture, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway.  I wanted to shout to everyone to come look, but no one was near, and the beautiful silver mammals were falling behind.  John told the 3-4 Italian teenage boys around the corner near the hot tub.  “Bellisimo!” they shouted, and ran to the stern.

Within two minutes the dolphins were gone.

This video is not mine (and our dolphins leapt and cavorted more than these), but they could even be the same family:

Here are more videos of dolphins.  It was the most magical experience of the cruise.