Favourites for a Life

I’ve started to listen to music for fifteen or twenty minutes each night just before shutting down.  Until now I’ve usually listened to music  doing something else – sewing, cooking, exercising – unless I was attending a concert.  It always seemed like a waste of time to just sit there.  But I’m finding now that I can get carried so much more deeply into where ever it is that music uniquely takes me if I just listen. 

I probably could not have done this when I was younger, however much I may have valued the idea in theory, and however much they may have tried to teach us meditation in the convent.  I was too driven, too organized, too concerned to be getting somewhere.  Now I don’t need to be as important as I used to, and that leaves more time for living. 

I think that making music is a wonderful thing to do with one’s life.  No doubt because of my own eye surgery, I am also thinking how wonderful it is to be an ophthalmologist and to give other people the gift of sight.  Great teachers, too, are on my Favourites for a Life list, and cooks.  I used to think cooking was a pretty drab occupation, but now I think it is noble.  It is close to loving, because food, like love, is something that every one of us needs every single day. 

Gordon Brown and conviction politics

Within several years after leaving the convent, I drifted into a state of disbelief.  Not outright aetheism, which looked too much like a reverse version of Catholicism to me, but a kind of amorphous secular agnosticism, a feeling that we simply can’t know anything beyond what we can see and figure out for ourselves.  My best self remains today suffocated by institutionalized religion of any persuasion, but I recognize now that although I may have completely discarded any allegience to doctrine, the influence of my earliest socialization, for better and for worst, is not so easily displaced.

And so it is with particular personal interest that I look at Gordon Brown, the new prime minister, in Britain.  He is what he calls a conviction politician.  He is greatly influenced by the values he learned from his father, a vicar in the church where he grew up in Scotland, and whom he deeply reveres.  Brown does not have the kind of personality – or at least public persona – to which I am attracted.  He has a commitment to eliminate global poverty, to increase equal opportunity, and make education available to all who seek it.  Yet he impresses me as authoritarian, sanctimonious, and essentially unable to listen.

I am wondering therefore how I feel about conviction politics.  Some of my own best and strongest convictions stem from my childhood.  But they have sometimes given me a sense that I am morally superior, a view which I am sad to say even I can no longer sustain with integrity.  And I rile against Gordon Brown preaching his personal convictions to a nation that may not share them. 

The question I’m wrestling with is whether it is possible for whole societies to espouse those values that we need to live together without some substrata of religious belief.  Of course, there will always be individuals who are non-believers.  But can whole societies survive without something that social scientists would call religion?  Values on which we agree but which may not be “provable” in some scientific sense?  I know many parents who themselves are no longer committed Christians but who are raising their children as Christians because they know of no other way to inculcate those values they think are essential for their children and for society.

Why did I ever become a nun?

In retrospect, I have found it a good deal easier to explain to people why I left the convent than why I went into it.  That’s partly because people are usually delighted that I left, but somewhere between appalled and baffled that I ever decided to become a nun in the first place.

I spent some years after leaving the convent trying to understand myself why I went in.  One of the reasons it’s such a difficult question is because the full answer is multi-faceted. 

Was it the influence of my father whom I adored?  yes.  Was it the kind of Catholic world in which I spent my childhood?  yes.  Was it growing up in a rural community in Ohio instead of in a city like New York?  yes.  Was it the narrow options I thought were available for intelligent, independent women in the 1950’s and 60’s?   yes.  Was it the belief that imbued the civil rights movement and John Kennedy’s Peace Corp that we could build a better world?  yes.  Was it Pope John Paul who made so many of us believe that the Roman Catholic Church was changing?  yes.  All of the above.

I will try to convey in future posts just how dynamic each of these influences were, how they could make a life in a missionary order of American Catholic sisters sound like one of the most exciting things one could possibly do with one’s entire life.  And of course, ultimately not only why I changed my mind, but which ideas and values and beliefs I had then have been discarded, and which I think are still pretty fundamental to the way I live today.

Chinese curse

My sister DP pointed out to me that the culture that has given us that most wonderful of all curses, “May you have an interesting life,” has also bequeathed us another pearl.  The two Chinese characters that make up the written word for “crisis” are “danger” and “opportunity.”

As Dylan Thomas once said

Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, is reported once to have stopped talking saying “Somebody’s boring me.  I think it’s me.”

Enough said for today.  I strongly doubt my capacity to make my conversations with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs into meaningful or entertaining news.  My only consolation is that I’m still able to get my head around the numbers, qualifications, restrictions, and caveats that seem to be endemic to tax collecting everywhere in the world.   Not quite sure how I will survive when I’m too old for this caper though. 

In case you should you ever need to know, the HMCR is the U.K.’s version of the tax collecting service called the IRS in the U.S.  Apart from the fact that all the rules are different, they’re exactly the same.

Young-old and old-old

Two things reminded me today what a big difference there is between young-old and old-old.  Being young-old feels about the same way young feels with different options.  Or at least it does to me.  I’m still asking what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, as if it stretches before me beyond an unlimited horizon.  Apart from an occasional unaccumstomed muscle twinge punctuated by crises like cataract surgery, I feel as if I’m doing quite well.  I feel really quite competent at getting old.

Last night Peter woke up choking, and both of us were frightened for several minutes before he managed to breathe freely again.  All of a sudden, the septre of a completely different future stood starkly before me.  Then several hours ago I got an email from a couple, good friends of ours, who are still together and living independent lives.  But pain and illness are beginning to seriously intrude.  Even the doctor asks whether it’s cancer or just a normal sore throat.  Life as we know it is not going to go on forever.

So today I worked in the garden before the rain started, watched the news wondering how long Brown will survive as the new prime minister in Britain, and got a few computer jobs done in between games of Free Cell.  The best part of the day was a long conversation with my sister DP.  She is my littlest sister, which makes it a surprise that I listen to her so often as a source of sensible wisdom.  We have agreed we are both “bio-chemical optimists,”  for which we are both grateful.  But both of us have had life-changing experiences loving and trying to understand relatives, friends, or significant others who cannot be described as bio-chemically inclined optimists.

Describing that challenge is for another post.

Something adolescence and old age have in common

I was about eight years old when one day on the drive to school my father said it was worth remembering that Aristotle had written that happiness wasn’t something you could get at directly.  Rather it was something that happened when you were concentrating on achieving something else.  Exposed to this kind of casual conversation from a young age, you can see how I became such a serious person.   Along with a potent mix of intellectual Catholicism, this kind of thinking has formed the foundation of most of my values and big choices in life.  I haven’t been a believer for many years, but the old habits die hard.

It is now, though, getting in the way.  Instead of getting on with life, I remain tempted to spend hours worrying about questions like whether a sense of meaningless and lonliness are an inevitable part of growing old.  I went to bed last night and woke up this morning composing my little philosophical treatise on it. 

But before I actually got started, I sat down with my husband to read the Sunday papers.  Having concentrated on the Great Issues currently facing the world, I came away quite refreshed and energized.  Quite obviously, the elusive answers to the meaning of life, like happiness, disappear if I start looking for it.  So I will spare you – and more importantly myself – the treatise.

I said earlier that for me getting old is a lot like adolescence.  It’s a fantastic time to learn so much.  It’s a whole new perspective.   

Taxes: SuDoku is more fun

The idea of taxes seems to have been thought up about 6,000 years ago by the Sumerians who lived in what was called Mesopotamia and is now called Iraq.  They thought up a lot of things, like a coherent musical scale, writing, and even mortgages for which I am grateful.  But I do wish the idea of taxation had died out with stone tools.  Unfortunately, it is alive and well, and with computerization, seems to have taken on a global vibrancy of its own.

I have compiled my own tax return for the last 40 years.  I try very hard not to pay more than I absolutely have to, but I don’t try to cheat.  That is not a result of virtue so much as sheer terror.  I do not have the psychic fortitude to sit in front of a tax official and knowingly try to lie my way through.

I’m an American who lives in England, and so must file returns each year in both countries.  I have just discovered, to my horror, that for possibly the last five years I have been misinterpreting UK tax law.  I’ve spent hours today going through my accounts.  If I do owe any taxes in the end, the result will not be devastating, but even a few hundred pounds will be painful.  Not to say embarrassing.

I’m trying to put a brave face on it and telling myself that this kind of thing is good exercise for my brain.  I’m thinking though that I’d rather play Su Doku.

I-Rack, I-Ran, and Me-2

For the fourth time, someone has sent me a U-tube video of Steve Jobs demonstrating his new I-Rack.  It’s a sardonic swipe at Bush & Co, and possibly since I agree with thrust, I think it’s quite funny.

I sure hope, though, that U-tube isn’t a substitute for political action.  Only pressure on our elected officials is going to change their course of action, and only people’s votes are going to get those gangsters out of office. 

It’s beginning to worry me a little that U-tube might be the level of political discourse that is actually influencing people’s political convictions.  What I hope instead is that people are outraged by the disastrous and deceitful neo-conservative conduct of U.S. foreign policy for more substantive reasons than a successful U-tube video.   In other words, I hope that the video and others like it are a manifestation of deeper understanding and analysis, not a substitute for it.

Do you think it is?

The convent I left

I was a nun for nine years, so it will take a few more postings to describe my life there.   I do want to correct the impression that the convent I was in was the traditional, closed, stuffy uptight place so many people think convents are.  Orders of nuns and the rules under which they live are varied, and there was much about Maryknoll, even fifty years ago, that was a breath of fresh air. 

Part of the problem then was the often unbridgeable disconnect between the young sisters and the older nuns in charge.  Many of the young nuns came to Maryknoll with educational levels years beyond those of the older nuns.  And the world was changing faster than almost anybody in authority could cope with.  In universities and schools, in politics, in churches and families, traditions were in upheaval.  If the Maryknoll superiors sometimes tripped up, so did thousands of professors, presidents, politicians and parents.  The Maryknoll superiors were trying, but often they could not understand what was happening, and even when they understood, they rarely knew how to communicate with us.  Nor often were we listening, because we thought we had more to tell them than they had to tell us.

After Princess Diana died, the Queen, who had been socialized by the Second World War where people kept a stoic facade in public and mourned in private, was stunned by the response of hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in anguished mourning.  To her, this display of emotion no doubt looked self-indulgent and vulgar.  It is extraordinary to me how quickly she grasped that society had changed.  For several days she remained holed up in Scotland, looking as if she would never budge from a self-satisfied puritanism.  But I doubt very much self-satisfied is what she felt.  Looking at the subjects in her kingdom in a totally new way is closer to what I think now.

Many of the nuns in positions of authority at Maryknoll were like that, though the learning curve was less apparent at the time, and lasted for years.  Actually, it probably never stopped, because it was an order that engaged with the world, rich and poor, Christian and non-Christian, and continues to struggle to understand.  Today, hundreds of nuns and ex-nuns remain friends, and return to the center Motherhouse in Ossining New York regularly.

But what was it like?  We usually rose with a bell at 5:30 am, had an hour of silent meditation before saying the Office in the chapel together and attending Mass.  Then we gathered for breakfast before beginning our assigned work for the day.  All of this was done in silence, and even during meals, we listened to reading, sometimes religious, sometime educational or inspirational.  Work was sometimes manual, sometimes study, and was punctuated with periods of prayer.  Music was an important part of the liturgy, and choir practice a significant part of the weekly schedule.  In the evening we had an hour of “recreation” when we talked and played games.  The discipline of the routine suited me well, but I chaffed against the constant oversight of authority.    

No, I didn’t belong there, even under the most modern of rules, and am very glad events did not construe to keep me there any longer.  But it wasn’t the way most people think of convents, and there is a lot about my experiences there that stood me in good stead when I returned to what we used to call “the real world.”