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Last weekend, I drove down to Virginia. My baby sister was graduating (or, walking. She finished her degree last December and is now a Registered Nurse. Woohoo!) from Liberty University in Lynchburg. That’s right. Falwell’s school. Or, as the student’s apparently call him “Jerry.”

Before I talk about the weekend’s events, I have to brag on the girl. The BSN my sister just earned from this school is one of the hardest you can get through. Their students usually have a 98% rate for passing boards, and judging from the middle-of-the-night calls I’d field it was no picnic getting through. Not to mention she did the whole thing in two and a half years (not four) while training horses on the side. Oh, and all the while a few of the faculty who didn’t like her dabbling in four-legged pursuits were trying to get her kicked out. Lots of drama for another story. But my little tow-headed sister blazed past them all and is free with a near-perfect GPA! (Near-perfect, because her Bible professor only allowed credit for service at his church. What is wrong with these people?!?) I sure couldn’t have done it.

The whole weekend was a study in fundamentalist politics. Falwell is famous for his … ahem … vocal authority on what God thinks and how God feels. The baccalaureate service held the evening before graduation turned out to be a fundamentalist political rally. The speaker, who worked for the Reagan administration, gave a regular stump speech, pausing at the end of every sentence for rousing cheers and applause. It took every ounce of self-control I could muster not to storm out of the sanctuary. God’s house indeed. I will hold myself to a single example, since this is already turning out long. He talked about the evils of abortion in America – no surprise there. And went on to shout about how the Republican party was going to “set place at the table” for the millions impoverished children that would be born if Roe vs. Wade were repealed.

Whose table would that be, Sir?

I was stunned when my sister leaned over and told me that John McCain was going to give the commencement address the next day. Her friend Jared shook his head in disgust. My dad intoned that McCain is a Rhino. My blank look caused him to explain … between wild applause about a secular government’s right and duty to define marriage in Christian terms … Republican In Name Only. Wagging heads all around.

Now, I don’t know much about politics or politicians. Every time I learn something new about the government I was born under, I go into fits of hysteria or depression: both states I try to avoid residing in. Growing up far away from the media and milieu has a lot to do with my blissful ignorance. The first time I heard John McCain interviewed on NPR, I thought I was listening to a democrat. So why on earth would a fundie school give him a platform? Especially after the choice words the two men publicly exchanged last year, including McCain’s assertion that these “agents of intolerance” are “corrupting influences” in American politics, and accusing Falwell (and Robertson) of “the evil influence that they exercise over the Republican Party.”

Wait!! He retracted? Falwell is throwing him a dinner? A presidential bid, anyone?

I have never been to a political event (well, a smattering of protests.) I am not one for stump speeches and rallies. I turn off the radio when anyone in Washington starts talking, and skim the transcripts later if I must. I’ll admit I was a little bit excited to see a real live politician give a speech during a cease-fire of sorts (although I think there were just a handful of people in the standing-room-only stadium who weren’t fuming about it – protesters and all.)

On the whole, I was sorely disappointed. McCain’s speech was carefully crafted (and is being delivered to an equally pissed-off audience at Columbia this weekend.) He came off as a puppet – uncomfortable, parroting through his teleprompter with strange pauses and oddly placed sincerity. (As a side note, how sad that after spending five years as a POW – two in solitary – McCain is forced to turn it into a neat-cornered parable for dubious political ends by his speech writers.) Of course, if I had just been handed an honorary doctorate by a recent nemesis, I would have been a little stiff as well. Not only did Liberty pass out honorary doctorates like candy last weekend, but giving McCain one seconds before his speech (did he see it coming?) seems to take that “heaping coals” edict a little too far. Insidious, I think, was the word I used later.

The message was relevant and timely: that disagreement and dissent in American politics are needed, and that it is the responsibility of true patriots to maintain open dialogue about their differences with one another. I have a feeling it fell (and will fall again) on deaf ears. Those who live in the far reaches of their side of the political battle lines have selective hearing when being asked to listen.

I feel bad for the Liberty and Columbia kids who are graduating this weekend. Instead of sitting through speeches that encourage them, and that address issues they care about at barely-adults who have barely a lick of real-world experience yet, they are being subjected to political rallying by superiors who are supposed to have their best interests at heart. But I guess ultimately, it’s as good a platform as any. McCain and Falwell got the buzz they wanted. And the students mostly slept through it anyway. I sat through my commencement speech four years ago, and I can’t remember a word that was said.

Web Extras:
Jon Stewart Grills McCain on speaking at Liberty
Test your Knowledge of Fundamentalist Rhetoric of All Kilts

Life seems to be a lot about choosing between paths, with the frustration and insecurity of being unable to see past the bend. I have read several articles (and heard several rants) about my generation’s inability to choose, in particular. Time magazine even ran a cover last year, lambasting us for our collective ambivalent ways. Of all of my friends, only one has chosen a ‘real’ career (and she has her doctorate and a position on next year’s faculty at our College in hand.) The rest of us are working barely-over minimum wage jobs (or several of them) trying to figure out our next move.

A month ago today, I started a graduate program in education, hoping to make a choice of my own. I talked a good game to the Admissions folks at Drexel about how every job I’ve ever held has been about teaching and education – albeit informal – that those bits of the job were the most challenging and the most palatable, and about how I spent last year in a school every day with special needs kids, that those hours in the classroom made me want one of my own. In fact, I’ve spent a long time trying to convince myself of the same thing. But it’s not working.

This week last year, I got on a plane to go down for a 3 week long job interview (can you sleep on rocks, can you build a fire without matches or flint, can you de-escalate a raging client, can you find a way out of a canyon, can you navigate without a compass, can you splint a broken leg, do you know the cultural differences between AA and NA, can you recognize dehydration, do you know your drug slang, can you effectively confront a lie) for Wilderness Quest a wilderness therapy company that operates out of southeastern Utah. I got the job, and worked there for about a month before realizing that my future with Peter was more important than my future in the desert. There were also specific things during that time that I came to understand about myself (mostly) and about the wilderness therapy industry that made for a jagged fit. These realizations were painful, but needed.

Since then, Pragmatism has become the operating force behind career related decisions. I want a job that has insurance. I want a job that will allow us to travel. I want a job that will let me be home when my kids get home. I want a job that makes some kind of positive difference in people’s lives. I want to go into a field that will allow me to get a job no matter what off the wall place we decide to move next. There didn’t seem to be alot of wiggle room. There aren’t that many jobs in the real world that offer that kind of flexibility, much less that I’m already half-trained to do. So I convinced myself that I should join the rank and file, after a several-year meander through more exotic pay-stubs.

To those with real jobs, real careers, this will probably sound like a whine. But I have met and heard of so many people making a good go of it off the highway. Jess met a lawyer couple several years ago who quit, bought an RV and are now clam-happy migrant river guides across the western US. My boss in Seward runs boats in lower 48 in the winter (although now he is moving North to manage the Landing’s kayaking gig full time.) A couple in Austin quit the mainstream, bought some land in the hill country, and now run zip-line tours out of their back yard.

So now I’m spending the better part of my week working through online classes on Assessment Strategies, Classroom Management and Teaching to State Standards. I’m taking mind-numbing prerequisite courses at the community college. I’m remembering with some trepidation what an accomplished procrastinator I am. And my heart (can you tell?) isn’t in it. On some level I know that this is what I need to do. This is the choice I have to make for everything that will come after. But at the surface, I can only remember that my pack and brand-new +15 bag are gathering dust in the closet, I haven’t been in a kayak in almost two years, and the longest I’ve been outside since leaving Utah is a hair’s breadth short of 24 hours. A big part of me still wants to make a life of those things, not just a hobby. But I’m slowly losing faith that it’s possible, and the asphalt and cement that covers most of the earth here isn’t helping.

I have recently talked to several friends that are stuck in limbo, trying to figure out what it is they want to do. It usually involves this choice: going after their heart, or going after security. No wonder we’re stuck at Kinkos and Starbucks and Borders, dragging our feet to the fork in the trail.

I wasn’t ever one of those girls who sat around dreaming up my lavish, impossibly perfect wedding down to the baby’s breath filler. The most romantic, wedding-focused mind game I ever played was designing a perfect day of kayaking and horseback riding in the mountains that might culminate in a ring. But I’d always get stuck in the details of racing at a dead gallop over a meadow, scaring up a moose or some caribou and forget the intended end of the daydream in the first place. I never fawned over my mother’s wedding album, or pawed through costume trunks to make myself into a bride for an afternoon. I was far too busy building tree-houses and piloting my dad’s sawhorses into F-16 fighter jets.

Last weekend, it occurred to me that I could count down the weeks to The Big Day on my hands. I sat there staring at my spread fingers. Somehow, having this tangible calendar of sorts made the whole thing a little more real. But honestly, none of this process has felt like I thought – even in my lack of forethought – it would be. Despite the omission of this fantasy from my childhood, I still had unexamined expectations of what the build up to getting married would be like. The pile of largely useless wedding planning books and magazines I have unintentionally accumulated since is no less realistic. I am not floating on a happy cloud of flower-choosing bliss. I did not hear angels singing when, exhausted, I chose a dress largely based on being sick of pulling the 20 lb monstrosities on. If asked, I would have denied that I expected to be in a state of blissful bubbly anticipation. But I think, deep down in that secret effusive girly place, I did.

Two weeks ago I was in a panic about ordering wedding invitations. There are entire twenty page chapters in most of the ‘planners’ going over how and what and where this should take place. Photos of gleaming bride models in the thick of things with their gleaming stationer models, hashing out exactly which shade of blush should go with the intricate hand calligraphy side designs. I had spent a total of an hour browsing the internet before Christmas, but had subsequently lost the scrap where I’d recorded the website and top picks. Peter and I sat down at my computer and googled “buy wedding invitations online,” then clicked the first search result. Less than an hour later, after a few frantic calls about wording to my parents (who were at a Spurs game in San Antonio – my mom had to leave the stadium twice so I could hear her over the buzzers and screaming) the invitations were ordered. Two days later, I came home to a box on my porch. And there they were. This monumental thing, the Wedding Invitation, held with such awe in my mind, was sitting there in a cardboard box, dented at the corners, in the murk of my stoop (the porch light is one of the many malfunctioning staples that remind me daily how little I am paying on rent.) It was very unspecial. Like ordering bulk dishsoap from a shady e-bay dealer.

But the sweet, monumental moments are there, too. Unexpected. Quieter. I was still reeling from the letdown of invitations-by-internet when Peter and I opened the box together. He pulled out the little shrink-wrapped pile amid the envelopes and reply cards. And there, in a pretty script, with a pearl border much more elegant in person than on a computer screen, were the names of our parents, and then our names and then the date, that intangible number that we have been holding in our minds for months. And he put one arm around me, and ran his finger over the raised letters of our names, and I had another tangible, count-in-on-your-fingers moment that takes my breath away the way the back of my mind imagined it would. A moment when I remember that I get to build a life with my best friend for as long as our hearts keep pumping, and I can count down to it on my hands.

(penned mid-august)

I think I need to back up to the beginning on this one. At least, the beginning of The Drift (as I have decided after very little thought to call it.) Somewhere during my tenure at Emmaus, I decided that the god the Christians believed in was not a god that I wanted to believe in, or for that matter to be associated with. Alternatively, I no longer believed that the Christian version of god I had grown up with (belated as I may have come to this) was the sort of god that might be true. I tried for a few desperate months to stop believing in god at all, in Houston (an easy enough place to dwell with that dark thought,) but to no avail. For whatever reason – at this juncture whether because it’s true or because I’ve been so well indoctrinated is quite beside the point – I could not stop believing in god altogether.

The interim time in Warrenville attending Rez, although a balm through friendships and the blessing of mundane physical labor, did not stop my mounting desire to distance myself from the Christian church in general. Although I wanted to disbelieve altogether, the familiarity of friends, of liturgy, of the rhythms of church seasons, and simply the habit and comfort of the subculture I foundmyself immersed in was something I needed around me to heal and grow in other ways (to whit: making good girlfriends, losing much fear and cynicism around marriage, working through some unfortunate choices I’d made with boys, raising a puppy.)For all the brilliant sermons and inspiring guitar riffs, Rez did nothing to further convince me of the authenticity of the Christian viewpoint. Attending a Bible Study geared to bring some girls into the Fold drove me from it at a run. By May I was restless both spiritually and psychologically. I could no longer stand selling The DaVinci Code (please, people, get it OFF the best seller list) day after day. I could no longer keep singing my way through the liturgy.

So I found myself running off to Alaska, hoping for distance and some kind of solid ground to stand on. It was here that The Drift began it’s transition from a vague, half-hearted meander to something more purposeful and less Drift-like. The conclusion I came to in the summer, wandering in the Chugach with the now quite large hound, was that God does, in fact, exist. Although it was a great relief at the time to come to some solid conclusion, this conclusion did not get me very far: So we are accepting that a god exists – we are even going so far as to assume monotheism at this point? Excellent! What is the nature of that God? How does God interact with humans, or does it even do so? Why are humans conscious in a way no other animal is? Is it soul, mind or something else? Is consciousness eternal or finite?What is our responsibility as conscious beings? How are we to live? Who or what are we to live for? How are we to interact with this creator-being, and respond to it? What are we to chalk up to Its doing and will, and what are we to blame on ourselves, on others, on falling barometric pressure? And none of this even begins to touch on the quandary that Jesus and the claims of the Gospel present. Without the framework of Christianity to fall back on, there isn’t much ready direction for a skeptical non-philosopher such as myself. And so I found myself falling back on my old framework when I came to gaps I hadn’t time (or brains) to work out yet.

And here’s the rub: I can’t disbelieve the old paradigm, while simultaneously falling on it for support. I believe this is called cognitive dissonance. I cannot (by way of example) disbelieve in hell, and simultaneously believe I am condemning myself to such a fate by my disbelief. Yet I do.

This year, I spent vigil perched on an outcroping of rock a hundred feet above a frozen alpine lake in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska. A fitting location, given all that this last year has entailed. I was accused of running away, when I came north. After months of backpacking and kayaking, living in tents and shacks, reading myriads of text, scribbling notes on scraps of paper between rainstorms, wrestling pitifully with something I used to call prayer, my response emerged from the haze. Some things should well be run from, as quickly as one can gather the courage. And in running from, one must needs be running to something else. And this to is what I have been trying to discover more clearly in the days and months since.

So I found myself crouched on a rock above a frozen lake, mountains and trees and rivers empty of human-kind stretching out in every direction, a snowstorm gathering in the peaks above. I thought about redemption a little, and about hope. And in the echoes of “he is risen” on the wind, like ghosts of a former life, I began to realize that I must somehow find a way to believe in one, so that I can have a chance of finding the other; that if I do not, my little soul will not have the will to keep going.

I think this tiny thread is all I can handle right now – the tapestry I used to rely on has been thoroughly unraveled. It was enough for me to glimpse at hope, at the possibility that it may be a solid thing to hold to, or stand on. Maybe these are the baby steps I should have taken at the beginning of things. Baby steps that will show me the to I must find to keep walking.

Risen, indeed.