The Grab-Bag & The New Normal

Raider likes to make fun of my handwriting on grocery lists, and sometimes it irks me. And then I come upon something I can't for the life of me read, and I have to admit he's not just imagining things. For instance, in the "For my blog" section of my notebook, I find something that looks for all the world like, "hairy ban gars nee dry a hamcat."

 

I'm sure it's actually about someone or something needing a haircut. But that rings no bells at all.

I'm in the mood to write something that will make people say, "Oh, ha ha Su Penn you are so very funny." But the chickens in my brain are not laying funny eggs at the moment.

I'll take a moment to explain that image. When I was at the Festival of Faith & Writing, somebody asked a panel of writers the classic question about where they get their ideas. One woman--I don't remember which one, a poet. Anyway, she said that she thinks of it like she has a chicken in her brain, pecking around and laying eggs. And every now and then the chicken lays a good one.

My own image is more like I have a big sack in my brain, and sometimes things fall in there, and sometimes I toss things in there. And every now and then, when I root around in the sack, there's something worth pulling out and showing people. Or a couple of the things in there have combined in a new way, and that's worth showing people. Or something in the sack starts to feel heavy, and I have to unload it because I'm tired of carrying it. Or every now and then, something in the sack comes to life and demands my attention.

But I like the chicken image, too.

I actually had a sack-related issue come up at the Gathering the other week. On Wednesday night, I found myself thinking that I was having a really good gathering, but that somehow it just hadn't tipped over into being one of the truly great ones. I decided that the problem was probably that I wasn't getting enough worship. Because I was working at the info desk, I wasn't doing a morning workshop, and my experience is that even if the workshop doesn't include a lot of worship per se, it often feels quite worshipful nonetheless. I had also missed two out of three afternoons of FLGBTQC worship, one from working and one, IIRC, from going to the beach.

So I decided that the solution was to make sure to get to worship on Thursday and Friday.

Accordingly, on Thursday I herded the kids to FLGBTQC childcare and planted my butt in a comfy chair in the beautiful room we had been assigned for afternoon worship. All around me, people were settling into the silence. They seemed peaceful and centered. Few fidgeted. Eventually some vocal ministry was offered. It seemed to speak to people; there were nods and the occasional quiet tear.

None of it reached me. I couldn't center at all. I was restless and fidgety. I wished I had my crocheting to help settle my mind. I didn't feel like I was in worship at all.

Eventually, I decided to peek into my Vocal Ministry Grab Bag--it's right next to the Writing Grab Bag, very handy. And there was nothing in there. Nothing at all.

It's not that I expected to find something I could offer as ministry. You can't open up the grab bag from such an unsettled place as I was and expect to find a little avatar of God holding up a shiny apple and saying, "Give them this!" But I did expect to find something I could think about, meditate on, use to center.

Nothing.

Now, you have to understand that my bags always having something in them: dust, some mice, a peach pit, a faded photograph, a half-remembered Bible verse, a story somebody told me one time. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's generating ideas, and borrowing ideas, and stealing notions, and having thoughts that I want to hold onto in case they're ever useful. The Vocal Ministry grab bag is very like the Writing grab bag--there are odds and ends in there, bits and pieces that are not much in and of themselves. But some of them are seeds that grow, or broken pieces waiting for their other half, or gems that just need the cruft knocked off. Sure, plenty of what's in there is chaff ("What if God is like a Big Mac, and Quakerism is like the sesame seeds on the bun?"), but if you toss enough stuff in there, and let it ferment, and stir it around a bit from time to time, some of it becomes something worthwhile.

You might also know that, prior to leaving my Quaker meeting last November, I had spent more than a year seriously considering, along with friends and elders and clearness committees and prayerful prayer and the whole shebang, the possibility that I had a leading to preach.

So, I've tended to carry around a pretty full Bag of Holding. Sometimes I have pulled something out of there prematurely, I admit it. Sometimes a good story I thought would connect to something deeper turned out to be just a good story; sometimes a fragment I thought had found its mate hadn't. Sometimes it's hard to know for sure what is junk and what is a jewel.

But the bag has never been empty.

Until Thursday, July 5, 2012, at about 5:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, when I decided to root around in the bag. And there was absolutely nothing in it.

I was stunned. I was confused. I was disoriented.

Section 48 of "Song of Myself" can fairly be described as my statement of faith. I won't quote the whole thing to you, though you can find it here, but the last three lines say everything about my experience of God's universal presence and abundance and generous voice:

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

When my bag turned out to be empty in worship, I knew that I had been wrong about this. That other letters had not punctually come for ever and ever.

God, I thought to myself, has stopped speaking to me.

I needed, right then, an hour or so alone in a quiet and cool place to let the feelings I was having, the despair I felt, wash over me and subside a little. But, of course, I had no hour, no quiet, no cool. With a friend's help, I fetched the younger kids from child care. I took them to the cafeteria for dinner. I tried to hold it together, the way moms do, to keep the emotions at bay until I could have some time and solitude. But, I couldn't. So I handed the kids over to their older brother and his friends, sat down in the quiet dining section, carefully set my glasses on the table, put my hands over my face, and wept.

Eventually, I got up and washed my face. I accepted some expressions of concern, a couple of hugs, a protestation of love. I joined my kids for dinner. I hung out at the rocky stream with them for a little while. I dropped them at their Junior Gathering groups. And I headed over to the student union for my evening work shift at the Information Table.

I was happy to see that my co-worker was my friend Sue, whom I don't get to see often enough. She asked how I was and I acknowledged that I'd been better. She asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I said, "I don't know. I hardly see you, I'm not sure that's how I want to spend this short time with you."

Sue said, "Would you rather I be able to tell people, Hey, I saw Su Penn for the first time in two years, and we made twenty minutes of nice small talk?"

She had a point. I sang like a canary.

She asked me, "Is that how you know that God is speaking to you? By offering vocal ministry? Because I hardly ever offer vocal ministry." And we went on to talk about other ways of experiencing God. And, later in the evening, I got to talk a little more about it with my friend Shani.

I felt a little better. Not a lot. Still pretty unsure. I was curious to see what happened in Friday's meeting for worship. Which is that I fell asleep and woke feeling rested and refreshed. Not the best worship I'd ever had, but certainly not the worst. Entirely inconclusive on the question of whether God was still dropping odds and ends into my bag.

I shouldn't really be surprised by this change. Right now in my life, I shouldn't be surprised by any change. Last fall was a singularity in my life, there's a Before and an After and you can't predict the After from what happened Before. Two things mark this singularity: the beginning of my treatment for chronic headaches with my new neurologist, and laying down my membership in my monthly meeting.

The headache thing is surprisingly far-reaching. Not only have my headaches improved dramatically and my sensitivity to fragrances and chemicals declined, but my mood has improved. One of the medications I take for my chronic daily headache is Effexor. It's an anti-depressant. Taking it solved the problems I was having with severe mood swings before my periods. It has also caused me to be in a good mood for longer than I have ever been in a good mood before. I think I've talked about this before. Cheerfulness is apparrently, for me, a side effect of my headache meds.

The last couple of visits with my neurologist, I've expressed concern that the Effexor was flattening my emotional reactions, that my mood was too good. My main reason for thinking this is that there are many times when I would normally expect myself to cry, but I don't cry. My neurologist, taking me at my word, has been tweaking my meds.

My therapist, when I saw her for my monthly check-in, was more skeptical. "Can you cry at all?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Just last week I read a book about two terminally ill teenagers who fall in love, and cried like a baby at the end."

"Hmmm," she said.

The upshot is that it's entirely possible that what I'm experiencing is perfectly normal. My therapist isn't so sure I need my meds tweaked. She thinks I might just need time to get used to my New Normal. I've been through this before, the first time I had effective treatment for my anxiety. I had to learn the names for all kinds of new emotions I was having instead of panic and fear. I had to learn to live without the constant heightened drama that comes from always being on the edge of freaking out.

Leaving my Friends meeting changed a lot, too. For one thing, it freed all the energy I had been devoting to trying to fix that relationship; like any breakup, once I finally made the split I realized how much the relationship had been holding me back, how much of a drag on my time and energy it had become.

I realized as time passed that it had created a huge blind spot as well, that I had been trying to solve all of my problems within the context of Quakerism. But it turned out that some of the solutions weren't to be found there. I wondered if I was led to preach, but in February I found myself, quite unexpectedly, on stage storytelling for the first time in a decade. I had been having a kind of midlife crisis about wanting an actual job, a profession, say, that had a name people recognized and that perhaps I could even be paid for. After seriously considering seminary, once I laid down my membership I quickly found my way to an idea that had been in my Grab Bag for several years: Speech Language Pathology.

I don't know why I assumed, then, that my relationship to vocal ministry wouldn't change, that things would keep dropping into that bag. At least now, since my talks with Sue and Shani, since letting my emotions simmer down a bit, I don't think the empty bag is necessarily a tragedy. It may simply represent, like the storytelling and the speech pathology degree, that a new conduit has opened up between me and God. Just because I don't know, right now, what that conduit is, just because I don't, right now, recognize what it is that God might be saying to me, doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean God has stopped speaking. Perhaps, sometime, we'll get back in touch. Perhaps, if we're no longer passionate lovers, we can be friends.

 

Another typical page in one of my notebooks. You can see that I am not the only person who writes in them. The rule for the kids is, "You can write or draw on any blank page." I like the little surprises that turn up for me from time to time. Sometimes it's math problems, sometimes it's robots.

 

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