A Wildness of the Heart, page 7
Instead, I wonder if the right thing to do is just to focus on being a good friend. I do not know if this is something that I can ignore, per se. That isn’t how limerence works. It is an intrusive thought. It is something that bypasses whatever safeguards one might set up to sidle up next to you, press itself close, and whisper wickedly into your ear: “You need them. Doesn’t matter how, doesn’t matter why, but you need them.”
I don’t know if I can ignore it, but perhaps I can use it as fuel. I can use it as a spark to just continue to be a better friend for her. A better listener, a better support, a better Dee all around. Am I not to practice my emotional literacy? Can I not use this as an opportunity? Transmute limerence into personal growth.
We will see.
14
I feel compelled to state that I do know the reason that I left a path to pastoral. That was something that I talked through with my advisor at Saint John’s, and something that I had been struggling with for a while. I can point to it and name it as the mechanical reason. What I don’t know, necessarily, is the reason why I left there in the way that I did.
I left my MDiv behind because I do not do well in front of a crowd. Simple as that.
Put me in front of a person, and I can have a conversation with them15. Set me loose in a crowd and I am fine. If you set me down in the middle of the 13th Street Plaza in the middle of the dinner rush or in downtown Boise and watched, I suspect that you would see nothing out of the ordinary.
I don’t say this to brag. Rather the opposite, actually, The recognition that I do okay on the street in the middle of a crowd because, after a certain point, I cease being able to see the people around me as real people and the weight of their presence no longer weighs on me, and just how low a number that needs to be before I cannot keep up with individuals is embarrassing. Three people I can manage. Four is a stretch. Staff meetings are difficult.
Drop me on the altar in front of a congregation and expect me to connect not just with the congregation and its constituent parts but also with God and I get lost before I can get started. If I were able to focus on just one of these things, if I were able to look out over the heads of the parishioners and see only cardboard cutouts of ears and snouts, moving in time with the liturgy, I would likely be able to do that — I gave my fair share of speeches. If I were able to participate wholly in the divine rite and wrap myself in the mystery of tradition, I would be more than happy — I have my fair share of rituals.
But that’s not what mass is. Mass is connecting the congregation to God, and that means being the conduit between the two of them, and that I cannot do.
I recognized this early on, before even applying for Saint John’s, and set my mind specifically on powering through this deficiency. I was able to learn so much, could I not learn how to provide communal spiritual interaction?
Alas, some things are intrinsic and immutable. I left because I recognized this fact. And so, it turns out, did my teachers.
I bring this up because work16 asked us all to provide presentations in our weekly staff meetings, something which the cynic in me explains away as “prove that you’re paying attention and doing your job to higher ups and call it a ‘brown-bag lunch’.”
Fine. Whatever. I can write a little speech. I rather liked the practice of writing speeches and homilies in school, and if the style in which I journal is anything to go by, I still very much do.
I don’t mind the writing, I just mind the thin sheen of bureaucracy that colors everything about dealing with my employer, sometimes.
15
I have volunteered for the first of these ‘brown-bag lunch presentations’ and am not shy to admit (at least, to myself and Jeremy) that I did so simply to get it out of the way. I have little desire to participate in team-building exercises in the context of an organization that exists solely to facilitate one-on-one interactions in a professional context.
My thoughts on this whole process are clear, so I shall not complain any further.
I have decided, as it is occupying my mind of late17, to talk about discernment and the reasons that I am where I am now and not wearing vestments. I already even have the example of my client who is going through his own form of secular discernment.
To that end, I have been toying with the balance of life story to academic content, and have decided to lean perhaps 80% of my presentation on individual stories (both mine and that of a few anonymized clients), and then set that within the framework of psychology.
The core idea of what I want to share, I think, is the importance of taking one’s time to make decisions, as well as to understand the unavoidable malleability of those decisions and long-term plans. The things that decide the outcome of long-term decisions may, after all, be long-term problems. You may, for instance, be a stupendously awkward coyote trying to wedge himself into a position of social grace that requires absolute earnestness and humility.
I have been collecting notes about my own process of discernment, as well as examples of discernment in others to pull together into this speech:
The client who is struggling with his choice of what he is majoring in at university.
My parents’ decision to marry (and thus dating as a whole).
Having my dreams interrupted by a sudden recognition of reality.
I think that this is enough to get across the point of taking a long-term decision-making process into account in a therapeutic context18. I don’t have to give an academic lecture or provide any references, of course, just offer some thoughts from what has come up in and before my own practice.
On further consideration, despite my thoughts on the context of this presentation, I think it might actually be fun to write the essay that will underlie my speech. It ought not be all that different from what I am doing here, after all, right? I am providing myself with a forum in which to voice my ideas, explore them to their conclusions, and learn something along the way.
I emailed Jeremy my thoughts on the matter, since he works for the same organization that I do and will doubtless have to give his own brown-bag presentation at some point, and this was his response:
Dee,
Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea. I was about to caution you about the difference in tone between a speech and a journal entry, but given what you have shown me so far of your work, I don’t think that that’s necessarily a worry for you. I think I’ve told you “you think in complete sentences” or some variation on that enough times at this point that it has become almost a cliche :)
One thing that I think I would suggest is that you write this ‘journal essay’ ASAP so that you have enough time to get your thoughts out of the way. You’ve mentioned before how easy it is to get caught up in your own thoughts on something while they evolve in the middle of you trying to share them. Write your presentation, then maybe journal about it some, get all the thoughts out of the way that you can so that you’re not distracting yourself at the front of the room.
Good luck, buddy!
Jeremy
No harm in that, I think. I’ll get those words down and maybe even spend the night before rehearsing them, just to be safe, and then try and make it as fun as possible for myself, and hopefully that will come across to the audience, as well. Might as well try to turn corporate bullshit into something useful for those who have to put up with it.
16
The presentation went over quite well, I think. There were a few questions after. Jeremy said it sounded good and my boss thanked me in a way that was more than just a pro forma thank you. Some part of me wishes that I had offered something less personal, but the rest of me is just glad it’s over and that I don’t have to care about it too much going further.
For posterity (and an admittedly uneasy sense that I ought to attach just about anything to do with this current task of journaling to the journal itself), here’s what I wound up writing:
Before I set about the task of working toward my current career, I was on the path to becoming a Catholic priest. I made it all the way through my BA in religious studies and a year and a half into my MDiv before figuring out that it just wasn’t going to work, and that I would make a terrible priest.
The reasons for this are fairly simple and also not necessarily germane to what I would like to talk about today, which is the process of discernment. Built into the education and administration of running a seminary, even the whole church, is a set of safeguards to help members onto the paths of life that are actually best for them, even if it isn’t what they originally thought. This is set down explicitly in the term “discernment”, which St. John’s University, the seminary that I attended, codified into a system used by the administration.
A cynical way to put it would be a filter to keep the bad priests out, but in reality, it was a way of drawing out a decision that should — or must — take time to commit to. Some decisions are just not meant to be made quickly, whether or not this is because they are bound by time constraints, or simply because they need a lot of thought.
I got started thinking about this in a therapeutic context by a client recently. He was struggling with his decision to pursue the degree program he had chosen at university. Something about it just wasn’t clicking for him, as much as he liked the idea of it. During a session, I brought up discernment as a topic that can be extended beyond its ecclesiastical roots and into just about any decision that requires time to play out.
I described the process of making this decision as an ongoing conversation with yourself as we find out what’s important to us, what it takes to get where we want to be, and what is within our reach.
I’ll note that that last bit is not actually something I said out loud to him. Whether or not he is actually able to pursue his degree to its conclusion is not on me to decide, I don’t know one way or the other, but it stood out to me as something that I had experienced.
You all know that I’m a very awkward person. It takes a lot of energy for me to have a conversation with more than one person and to engage with those that I am talking to in an interesting way that doesn’t leave one or the other — or both — of us frustrated. Can you picture a priest struggling with something like that? I may have had a mind for theology and all that goes into the bookish side of being a priest, but I don’t have it in me at all to do all of the other work, most of it based around social interaction, that goes into the calling.
This is what I mean by discernment. In the context of the church, you take a long time to settle into a path that you will stick to for the rest of your life, whether that’s a pastoral role, as a member of an order, or simply as a parishioner, but the same can hold for just about any other long-running decision-making process.
My advisor at St. John’s told me that one could think of it like dating. The process of discernment is one of figuring out the relationship between yourself and a potential outcome of that decision before committing to what may be a mistake.
That can even be very literal. My parents dated for about two years before they decided to get married. In the context of their social lives and their families, this was an absurdly long period of time, but something about each other just made them want to be extra, extra sure that they were ready to be together forever. It’s not that they were at each other’s throats or constantly frustrated with each other, either. They were some of the most in-love people I’ve ever known. This year would have been their fortieth anniversary, and until the day they died, they were still holding paws and giving each other these little fawning glances.
Where my decision to join the clergy failed, that’s an example of a decision that worked out well in the end. Extremely well.
Neither my client nor I know where it is that he will wind up. That is still a decision that is underway. But ever since having that session with him and making the connection between what I had gone through in the past with discernment and the idea of slower decision-making processes, I have made a conscious effort to keep this in mind when working with all of my clients who are struggling with big changes in their lives.
The discussion afterwards was fine. We talked a little bit about other long-term decisions that therapists had run into — things like divorce, changing careers, and so on — as well as some other personal stories. It only lasted a little bit, but since it was time taken out of our normal shared lunch break, no one was eager to stick around, least of all myself.
Again, corporate nonsense.
I shared a bit of this with Kay and she sent me an eye-roll emoji, followed by
6:03 PM Kay
It’s bullshit like this that has me glad I’m still in academia. Not that libraries are immune or anything, but they’re strange in that you’re either a page or assistant like me or you had at least a masters degree.
6:03 PM Dee
I have a masters.
6:06 PM Kay
Well, fair enough. Still, I think libraries have this ivory tower nonsense going on in ways that places like you work don’t. Reference librarians stick to their subjects, book binders stay in the bindery, book purchasers buy books, assistive tech people deal with assistive tech, etc etc. There’s no real effort to bUiLd a TeAm in the same way as it sounds like is happening with you and every other office drone I know.
6:06 PM Dee
I’d shake my fist at you for calling me an office drone, but you’re not wrong.
6:06 PM Kay
I bet you dress in business casual.
I laughed and typed back:
6:07 PM Dee
Of course I do! Have to look professional after all.
6:07 PM Kay
Do you call it “biz cas”? If you do, I will block you immediately.
6:07 PM Dee
I do not, thank goodness. I call it a button up shirt and slacks like a normal person.
6:08 PM Kay
You are absolutely in no way a normal person.
6:08 PM Kay
What did you wind up talking about anyway?
I sent her the essay and then waited for her to read, feeling anxious, as I always seem to when sharing anything related to religion with Kay. She’s never been anything but kind-but-disinterested when the topic has come up before.
Finally:
6:12 PM Kay
I mean, it sounds like a fluff presentation.
6:12 PM Dee
It was hardly an academic conference.
6:13 PM Kay
Yeah, but it’s not really -about- anything, I guess.
6:14 PM Dee
I guess, yeah. Just a loose compilation of thoughts. I wanted to be the first so I don’t have to worry about any presentations for a while.
6:14 PM Kay
Hahaha! So cynical, Dee! Never knew you had it in you.
6:14 PM Kay
Especially given this apparently pretty earnest speech.
6:15 PM Dee
It was earnest! I am cynical! I contain multitudes.
6:15 PM Kay
Now I’m just picturing you as a priest.
6:16 PM Dee
Black cassock and Roman collar? Or all the vestments for mass?
6:16 PM Kay
Oh, the black one. Total hot priest vibes. You just have to wear that and call everyone “my child” or whatever and the girls will be all over you.
Gears crunched to a halt in my mind. I must have sat there, staring at that message, for several minutes, trying to parse out just how much of it might have been serious.
6:21 PM Kay
Sorry, that was probably pretty insensitive…
I rubbed my paws over my snout before replying:
6:25 PM Dee
No no! Just never really thought about “hot priest” being a thing.
6:25 PM Kay
You’re just not on the right parts of the internet.
The conversation wound down from there, so now I’m writing up my journal and turning Kay’s words over and over in my head. They fit strangely into my image of myself. ‘Hot priest’? ‘Girls all over me’? There isn’t a universe in which either of these things is true. I am no judge of how attractive I am and have never bothered to ask, but the idea of a priest being sexy makes my head ache. They are two completely separate concepts in my mind, a Venn diagram with no overlap.
And having ‘girls all over me’ just sounds unpleasant no matter how I take it. If I can’t deal with more than three or four people in a room at a time, how would I deal with that in some situation that might suggest intimacy? And in the more idiomatic sense, well, I can’t even deal with attraction towards just one girl.
17
It is Pentecost Sunday. It’s still a Solemnity, but after Holy Week and Lent, it lacks anywhere near to the same level of impact, so although the mass differs from a mass during Ordinary Time, it lacks the social impact of the other holidays.
I always find myself using it as the marker of slipping back into Ordinary Time. It works well for me to treat it as a very deliberate point. It is a relaxing of posture, perhaps. A time to switch from the tense contrition of lent and the jubilation of Eastertide into the, well, ordinary ritual and everyday faith.
Another interesting bit of news is that, as of last night, I appear to be taking the week after next off and heading up to Boise to visit Kay.
Like so much of late, the decision to do so seems to have sprung, fully formed, into my mind. Or perhaps our minds, as, when I mentioned the idea of coming up to visit, Kay responded readily and eagerly.19 She mentioned that there is a percussion festival being held at UI that she would like to go to, and that she would welcome a concert buddy.
“Besides,” she said on PostFast. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”
If I were in any other mindset, I think I would have taken this at face value, just as I’m sure I would have taken so many other things from our conversations over the last however long. Then again, if I were in any other mindset, I am not sure I would have suggested a visit.
I’m not, though, and I did, and now I am panicking on Pentecost. Was it some tongue of flame that descended upon me, caused those words to come tumbling out onto the screen, enter key hit far before I’d really allowed myself time to process the request? Was it some inspiration beyond myself, or something within myself? Perhaps my subconscious desires are acting out for me.
