This I Believe, by Katy Michel

Call To Worship

Welcome to this place of love and listening. Welcome to this community of acceptance. May we each offer empathy to each other and ourselves.

Reading

Give me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Langston Hughes

If you are irritated by every rub,\
how will your mirror be polished?

Rumi, Mathnawi I, 2980

When I think about the universe and my relationship in it, I include buildings and the electricity coursing through them, rude people, smiling people, sticks, twigs, babies, asphalt, the wind that passes between clouds and the rNA that passes between DNA and ribosomes, the particles that pass between the particles that make up those ribosomes, the energy mysteriously harvested by molecules with long names inside of my body, and the conversation between a wall street analyst and his gardener. How could I eliminate any of them, any of that?. How could I have the right to say that they are not part of the universe. They are all part of the universe, and there's more, and how could the divine embody anything less than everything. Whether the divine has consciousness or not, and what the nature of that consciousness is, is a mystery to me. I watch the veins of the universe work, from my very tiny, particular vantage point, and I make my guesses. And indeed, my beliefs may directly or slantly conflict with others, but all these beliefs are contained in the same universe. They all came from something, somewhere, maybe in our brains the result of billions of causes and effects or from a Creator. Sometimes, it makes more sense to me to say everything is true, even the parts that are tough for me to accept, than to say the things that I don't accept, don't exist, or shouldn't exist in the way that fairies shouldn't exist for some people, or dinosaurs for other people.

When faced with the massive world, how do I choose process it? Some people hide from the world, some people explain little bits of it, some people bake cookies. I learn and tell stories. I learned this from an early age. I was surrounded by stories. My parents played lots of music when I was a child, and songs tell stories. Often fragmented stories, and personally I liked the stories with rockin guitar licks and a good beats, still stories. They transported me into memories, or something I almost knew. Even when I was three. My parents also read me stories. All these awesome people doing all these awesome things like digging basements and chugging up mountains and running away and building snowmen. And Mom liked showing me movies. When I was in elementary school, we would sneak downstairs after Dad went to bed, or before he came home. We would watch Henry V, or Out of Africa, or Backdraft. I would try to listen as perfectly as I could, immerse myself in the story so that the dark living room fell away and what was on the TV was what was living. All these stories, that were so different, yet related my to my own life, were divine. They connected me to something that was part of me, but bigger than me. So I tried to listen as perfectly as I could.

A dear atheist friend of mine likes to quote Marx. Religion is the opiate of the masses. This is a small truth. Anything that takes you out of yourself can be a drug. My childhood was peculiar, uncomfortably so, and painful. When I concentrated on other stories, I could relate, or I could also just forget my own. Ignore my voice, and my situation, both of which were distasteful to me. The divine can be a place to hide. We can hide from people who make us uncomfortable. We can hide from parts of life that are depressing. But that's not honoring the story. That's abusing it. There's a difference between perfect listening and self negation. I believe that perfect listening is momentary, intense observation of another's story. Self-negation is not momentary. And for me, that is where my spiritual crisis comes, my troubled relationship with the divine.

I've been suicidal twice. Once when I was twelve and once when I was twenty. Both were points of transition in my life where the past had to catch up with me, , and where my future lay before me in a practical sort of way. I found it very depressing. Depression is the perfect inability to tell the story of what is going on inside of you. The most important symptom, I found, was my complete inability to make jokes. I could laugh at other people's. But I couldn't form my own. Nothing struck me as intrinsically funny. My thinking became circular. A lone little duck making laps around a tiny pond. I would look at people, trees, clouds, the sky, cars passing. These would enter me, and become colored by my state, and then rot in me. I felt shame in what I was feeling. Shame that I could take the wonderful gift that life is, and make it ugly inside of myself, not to mention the threat of hurting people who love me, however complexly. And this shame made me want to keep my story to myself all the more. And hate myself more.

Clearly I didn't off myself. Instead, I learned two very important lessons. When I was twelve, I learned that I have faith in the world. No matter what my experiences had been prior, I couldn't in all honesty discount that something might shake things up later. The stories that I had learned and loved, they were inspired by something. Something that was more than my life had been. And I would just have to affect what change I could in my life, and wait to gain greater control over my situation and travels. When I was twenty, I learned self-trust. As the depression began, I knew that if I denied and suppressed these intense, passionately depressed feelings, they wouldn't go way. They'd be invisibly malignant, and maybe get worse. So I allowed myself to journey to the edge of my own reason. I trusted myself that I would make the right choice at the end. I reasoned that, as a society, we want to make pain go away rather than endure it. We've got drugs and therapists and self-help books and mantras, and these are all good things. I went to a therapist at this time. George was great. But we're addicted active fix-it things. To simply be present, for another, for oneself. That's something as a society we don't talk about as much. I learned to be present for myself, bear witness to my own pain, accept myself even as I hated myself. And when I sit next to a person in pain, I know that my duty is to listen to them, to bear witness to their story. Some people in pain do ridiculous things. From outside their reality, I can look at them and think, "What the hoo-haw are you doing?" Or I can venture forth into their reality, and remind myself that I know what it's like to be a broken record of crazy. I'm not a saint. I can't always help. Sometimes I don't even want to. But I can still bear witness. Tell the story. I don't always do this well. But I sure try.

As I bear witness to the people I meet, I see the world as an essentially good place. This is proven in billions of tiny ways. I can walk to the corner bakery and usually no one tries to run me over on the way there. I can buy a croissant, and know it is not laced with LSD and rat poison. I can wait for the bus, and no one will shove me in front of it. Instead, we live our lives in a web of deeds done in good faith, and small generosities. Where we fear ferocities, we instead receive diligent actions that fit together to make the world work.

I work in theatre, because when I see a play, or work on a play, I become witness to, and part of something living, that is larger than myself. In a theatre, audience and artists come together from all walks of life as a community to experience what is universal, and to me this is divine. And each person participating in this act of communion, sees and interprets a slightly different version. But we understand, ultimately, in concert. When I direct plays, I try to listen perfectly. I don't succeed, but it's a good goal. I listen to my actors and artists. I observe and listen to strangers on the street, the stories of history and psychology, the lives of people I know. I do this, and the people I work with do this, and we put it on the sacred stage, and everything becomes more than our individual selves. And I can't think of anything to do with my time that makes more sense to my heart.

I started becoming a pagan when I was introduced to the religion at 14, and "finished" so to speak in the middle of college, which means I went from Catholic to Catholic Wiccan, to Pagan. Paganism is a large framework of stories. Stories are honored in paganism. All kinds of stories. They don't even have to be real. They just have to feel true, and I like that. Paganism expresses the way I worship nature, as a creation but also as a concrete manifestation of the divine. We are all part of the world and of the universe. The universe, which passes understanding, holds all that we imagine, all that we create, and all that we didn't create and never intended. In tsunamis and hurricanes it is cruel. In the life giving sun, the air we couldn't live without, the soil that sustains us and that we become, in these I see the divine, in all troublesomeness and terror and beauty. I see cycles and balances, births and deaths, men and women, the rising and falling of cities and knowledge. As a pagan, I have the freedom to directly worship these, to worship what I can see as well as what I can't. I honor the energy that flows between us, that we each affect. I see the divine has many faces, all kinds of faces.

In college, I would take walks around the north quad, or down the street to Coe Lake, a water-filled quarry with a Gazebo and a long dock with a bench at the end of it. I would do this anywhere between midnight and 5 AM. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. My parents made a regular habit of asking me not to do that for safety's sake, but the quiet of those nights reached far beyond expectation. Beyond responsibility. Beyond identity. I could stand in the middle of a wind filled night, watch the electric nightlights we set out against the darkness. The car headlights playing leapfrog in window reflections. Streetlamps burnishing brick buildings to a dull orange. The reflections of the lights of homes streaking the lake water. It was a safety beyond statistical certainty. That hour when I wasn't anyone in particular, and everything that I wanted to be, I could be. An hour of pure existence, of observation, of invention. An hour when I could permit myself to feel every single emotion in my heart.

We are so afraid of fear in our culture. So afraid to feel sad, or pain. We run from the feeling, run from the feeling of running from that feeling. Sadness, pain. These are worthy emotions. Worthy of their own times and seasons. Not mutually exclusive with hope and happiness. You can feel all of them, at the same time. Some are dialed up, some down. I view each soul as a body of water, with personalities floating in them. Some are deep in the water and rise to the surface, peek out, float ontop, sink back down. We are cycles. The girl I was at three and four is not gone, she is transformed, she is substituted with other qualities obscured or polished with time, but never vanquished. She's still in the water of my soul. The woman I am today is not the woman I'll be 30 years form now, fifty years from now, but the woman I am now will never vanish, just sink below, rise from time to time and will have her floating moment again. We are not composed of atoms like solar systems, endless spinning. The clean Bohr model is insufficient in so many ways. We are moments of probability, strings folding in and out of dimensions, clouds of water and electricity and time. We meet, we love, we always meet we always love and we are not exempt from being each other. Because life is large. It is larger than all of us, and it holds so many things.

Final Blessing

Life is large. Go in peace.