a consecrated life

Three small candles light the picture of the icons sitting on the altar. I’m not sure if they’re saints or apostles, but each one has a delicate halo surrounding their head, painted with gold leaf. The room is quiet, and cold, drafts creeping in from the windows whose glass must be at least a hundred years old.

My eyes fall almost shut but not quite, and I sit in quiet contemplation with the others. It has been years since I’ve come to a church so regularly—every week on Monday to discuss chapters in a book on Palestinian Christian theology. I’ve been enjoying it immensely, and the question inevitably started tugging at the edges of my mind. Do I belong here?

It was this year that I realized with a certain truth that I was not really a Christian—not out of any dislike of the beliefs or ministry, but simply because I could not rightly say that Jesus Christ was my “personal lord and savoir.” I appreciate his many teachings, and attempt to follow many of them, but I do not feel as if he is my primary spiritual teacher, and I also generally shrink away from the idea of having to commit to adhering to one spiritual path. Maybe it’s because I’m an Aquarius, maybe it’s because I’m a product of the modern American era where untold amounts of information is available to us, we have limited cultural continuity, and we’re constantly fed the story that “we can have it all.”

I can have my Christianity and eat it too, sprinkle in a little Buddhism (but not so much that I would have to give up eating meat), and maybe add a dash of some pagan witchcraft (but not so much that I start wearing pentacle jewelry and have an altar to Hecate). For years I’ve been a member of the “spiritual but not religious” club, and it’s mostly worked out fine for me. But in the last few years I had been feeling a revived sense of seeking. But what was I looking for? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Raised in a Southern Baptist and then a string of non-denominational churches I eventually joined (but was not formally baptized into) an Episcopalian congregation from the ages of 19-22. Christianity has been a constant (if slightly inconsistent) presence in my life, and completely non-traumatizing, thank goodness. I appreciated my Episcopalian congregation the most for its ministry of service work—rather than fundraising to send groups of teenagers to Guatemala to build churches and get second degree sunburns, they focused on clothing and feeding their local community. They hosted monthly dinners, kept the doors open for people to shelter from the cold if needed, and ran a small thrift store where anyone could come in after hours to take what they needed. They also partnered with the local Methodist church to send school children home with food at the end of each day, in a county where 1 in 5 kids was food insecure, and without their help, likely to go to bed hungry.

Recently I was reading Michelle Febos’ The Dry Season, which was not only a powerful memoir but a font of fascinating historical information about religious laywomen, Christian mystics, and their practices. She led me to Laura Swan’s Beguines: A Forgotten Medieval Women’s Movement and Joan Chittister’s A Monastery of the Heart. The former is a historical account of beguine women in Medieval Europe and the latter a meditation on Benedictine rules for modern life. I learned that beguines were those seeking to live life in direct accordance with Jesus’ teachings, called the vita apostolica. They were committed to creating lives that reflected the gospel of Jesus—feeding the hungry, tending to the sick, holding vigil for the dying.

As I kept returning to this church every Monday night I reflected on the nature of my spiritual life the last couple of years, and it pained me to realize that I had become spiritually lazy—the discipline I had previously cultivated in study, prayer, and service had taken a backburner to the throes of daily life and work. I was running a business, managing freelance work, working on a book-length project, traveling to see family, maintain my own social circle as well as tending to my body and my home. I felt I had a full plate, and while spirituality was always present to a certain degree in my life (I still prayed and meditated and read tarot and tried to be a “good” person, whatever that meant) it lacked a certain rigor.

I was raised to be service-oriented. My mother taught me that we had a responsibility to care for those who were less fortunate than ourselves, and acts of service are some of my earliest formative memories. The church was often the easiest way to materialize this belief, and there are pictures of me at seven years old packing boxes that would get sent to various children for Christmas. We were also the recipients of these same acts of service, as there were years that our Christmas was filled with presents only because a church volunteer dropped them off on our porch, for our mother to find and unpack for us later.

I’ve carried this with me my whole life, and no matter where I have found myself in the world I’ve turned inward and asked how I could be a helper there. It’s taken many shapes over the years: volunteering at an animal shelter, doing food rescue for a food distribution program, tutoring elementary school children in rural schools. I didn’t do it because I thought it made me a better person; rather, it was so deeply ingrained in me my life felt incomplete without it. You have your job, you have your hobbies, and then you have your volunteer work. It was just how things were done.

And yet, when I looked back on the few two years of my life I noticed it was suspiciously absent. Yes, I would still do acts of kindness whenever I saw an opportunity, but there was a void where I previously dedicated time each week to serve others in a concerted effort. I had tried to tell myself that running the press was filling that void—was it not community oriented? Did it not offer paid work and creative opportunities for sex workers? It does, and I’m immensely proud of the integrity with which we strive to run our press. But at the end of the day, it is a business, not a mutual aid group or a charity. It’s aim is to create and distribute art—a beautiful and noble goal—but one that is simply different than a service-oriented organization.

It occurred to me in writing this, looking out at the last yellowed leaves hanging onto the maple tree out back, the crows cawing at each other as they fought over the cat food I put out for the strays. Service had not been a significant part of my life since I had stepped down and subsequently exited our local chapter of the sex worker’s outreach project, which later on disbanded.

Leftist organizing is notoriously filled with conflict, and often falls into a familiar pattern of overwork, burn out, and new bands of people who repeat the process if the group doesn’t fall apart due to infighting. Our group was not immune to these issues—at the peak of our productivity we were managing a large mutual aid fund and weekly outreach program—myself and a few others were regularly putting in at least 50 but sometimes upwards of 80 hours a week of labor.

We had bold ideas of growth and expansion, but never enough manpower to back it up. Different leaders stepped down and new ones stepped up, until I was the only one who had been the role continuously since the beginning. I was able to ignore my growing exhaustion for a while and keep slogging along until I fell in love, for the first time, and quite unexpectedly. Suddenly my attention felt divided, and this group that had been the center of my life for two years was now competing for attention with this new and wondrous thing in my life. I didn’t know how to balance them, and let my duties fall to the wayside. I was lovingly called in by my collaborators, who asked me to seriously reflect on what my capacity was. I did, and lightened by workload piece by piece (not always perfectly) until I could see clearly that it was time for me to step down.

The transition out of leadership turned out to be a sticking point of conflict that ultimately led to me leaving the group altogether, and not necessarily being welcome back. It’s fascinating to reflect on it through the passage of time—how small these rifts can seem years later, even though at the moment they occurred they were gut-wrenching and all-consuming. To see your own flaws and mistakes, and how you might have done things differently had you the chance. The grief I felt over the loss of that community stayed with me longer than I ever thought it did. I felt adrift for years—wondering if the group could be re-created, if a new group could be started, if I should step back from organizing permanently, if if if.

A notification popped up on my computer the next day that I was approaching the end of my Saturn return. What did you learn the last three years? Pay close attention, as another one won’t come around for almost another thirty years. The last three years were one long skinny branch—trying new things, trying to find myself, trying to speak up, trying to take a break, trying to figure out what I really wanted. And now they were coming to a close; I not only survived the curse of the 27 club but made it all the way through the other side. A Saturn return doesn’t always feel tumultuous when you’re in it, but when you’re approaching the end you realize all that you were meant to learn.

It was earlier this year I finally put to rest the idea that maybe our old group could be started. And it’s only now that I’m realizing the grief over its loss was creating a huge emotional block around reinvesting myself in community work; that I was holding onto the pain of leaving, telling myself I needed a break and justifying my lack of action with the idea of self-care. I worked so hard for so long, I would tell myself, it’s okay that I’m not doing anything now. But the now became endless, and then suddenly years passed and now I sit, missing a piece of myself that I walked away from.

In Joan Chittister’s A Monastery of the Heart, she ruminates on Benedictine orders in a modern context. “Prayer lightens the load,” she writes, “It gives fresh direction and new energy. It fixes the eye of the soul on the real ends of life, when the real goals of time seem unattainable.”

I sat with this one Monday in the church, trying, and failing, to get comfortable on the meditation cushion. Lately my prayer had felt routine, rather than connective. I felt like I was going through the motions, but lacked the essential quality to give me “fresh connection and new energy.” I was becoming rapidly more aware of the stagnate spiritual energy collecting the in the corners of my life.

Something was certainly missing. I gazed at the candles illuminating the icons, and was filled with that feeling in your chest when you knew something is about to change for good but you aren’t sure what. I didn’t think I was a Christian, but clearly that wasn’t stopping me from coming to church every week, or from being inspired by the ministry of Jesus. In times of hardship, we reach out to the familiar. Christianity was familiar to me; I knew how to connect with it. It spoke a language I could understand as I tried to unravel the little knot of personal struggle I had in my hands. I thought of the beguines, and their unflagging devotion to care and compassion for the poor and disenfranchised of society.

The attitude I had of being spiritual but not religious suddenly felt completely unmoored, directionless, and I wanted to change it. I wanted to be religious, to have a commitment to service and a responsibility to the world and all its creatures. I wanted to have a duty to take care of the world around me, a vision that was shared by my community. I just didn’t necessarily want to be in a religion. Each one lacked something I was looking for but couldn’t articulate - I was like Goldilocks and the three religions, looking for the one that felt just right. Or maybe leftist organizing had simply scared me away from group work more than I thought.

In her memoir, Febos writes “you’re either walking towards God or walking away from God,” quoting (I think) a piece of recovery literature. And that was what drove the truth home for me. At some point I had stopped walking towards god. Not to say I became evil or cruel, but simply so caught up in the other details of my life that I forgot that there was a path in front of me I could be walking on. And it happens all the time—is it not the cornerstone of faith, to lose our way and then come back? Sometimes we have to be reminded of the divine presence, and that reminder comes in many forms. A reading group in a church, perhaps, or the way the light shines through the trees on a crisp autumn morning, or the soft hands of a mother washing her baby in the sink.

It felt like such a grand revelation when it happened, when it reality it’s one of the simplest truths of human existence. We get lost so we can find our way again.

The jury is out for me on any question of religion—maybe in five years I’ll be writing here fully committed to one path of faith, but for right now all I know is I want to build a consecrated life for myself, one where its understood that god is love and that to love god is to love yourself and the world around you, to attempt to transform it into something more beautiful, with just a little bit less suffering. To be committed to this work, to not let it fall to the wayside amidst the many distractions that exist in our modern lives.

I can think of no better way to close this out than with another passage from The Monastery of the Heart, one that felt particularly poignant to me that the time of writing:

“There is temptation in religious life to play religious, but what is more growthful, is to ask ourselves regularly about all the little ways we are tempted to cut the corners of the spiritual life.” and that “benedictine spirituality, after all, is life lived to the hilt. It is a life of concentration on life’s ordinary dimensions. It is an attempt to do the ordinary things of life extraordinarily well.”