Blog break

We are off in search of some sun after a soggy English summer, from where we hope to return in time for Halloween.  Ten years ago pumpkins were almost unheard of in English supermarkets.  Today pumpkins, pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, baked pumpkin, pumpkins boiled or smashed, and grinning jack-o-lanterns are as routine as they are in America.

Buddha on wet feathers

For a long time I have thought the Buddhist teaching that moving toward greater and truer consciousness might indeed be our highest goal in life.  I might, however, have been a little askew in my pursuit.

This morning Peter, who inevitably is up before I am, woke me with the urgent announcement that there was a problem (“disaster” might have been the actual word he used) spreading all over the floor of the utility room and kitchen.  Before I was even out of bed, I knew what happened.  Last night I’d set the laundry to run over night to wash a feather-stuffed pillow.  I can now tell you from personal observation that a wet feather can get into any space big enough to accommodate even the smallest amount of water.  Not only can it get into such a space.  It will.  In fact, feathers may possess a mysterious glue activated by water which insures they stick to whatever surface they encounter.

What I thought about, as I mopped up more feathers than could possibly have been in the original pillow, was human consciousness.  Or at least my human consciousness.  It seems to operate in concentric circles:  the closer in time and space an event is to me, the more energy I invest in it.  So today, the feathers, my sister’s accident in which she totalled her car last Friday, and the tragedy unfolding in Iraq each occupied just about an equal amount of my psychic energy.

Surely something is wrong here with my priorities.  Dorothy says this is the way our consciousness works, and that the important thing is to have the right orientation to what is nearest to oneself, and that it will spread out to things that are further away.

In that spirit, I can say that, although I spent several hours sponging up water across about ten square meters and several more on my back pulling wet feathers from the nooks, crannies, outlets and hoses of the washing machine, it did not ruin my day. 

I am not so advanced as to be able to say it was quite the very best possible day I’ve ever had.   But I do know it could have been worse.  I even got the washing machine working again.

Depression and autism

As a developmental psychologist, how we learn to understand space and numbers has fascinated me for years.  This might seem obvious – most of us just do it – but the step-by-step process by which we come to understand what seems to be these innate concepts is both intricate and fascinating.  Most of my research was concerned with the way normal children and adolescents develop these concepts, although it inevitably had implications for students who were having problems in arithmetic, geometry, and more advanced mathematics along with reading and writing.

Since retiring from the university, I have developed another fascination.  One is with depression, the other with autism.  We are coming to understand these two afflictions in a way that has never before been possible through scientific study, and at the same time, I have personally come to understand better how dramatically they have influenced my own life even though I myself am neither a depressive nor autistic.

Yesterday I stumbled on a recent study reporting that activity levels of clinically depressed and normal people are different.  In fact, they are so different that it might be possible to use the differences as a diagnostic tool to identify people who are truly depressed as opposed to those who are exhausted, in mourning, or suffering from minor or temporary depression.

The researcher found two things.  First, people suffering from major depression have lower activity levels than normal people.  But the more surprising finding is that the periodic rest periods we all take during the day are different.  Seriously depressed people take both longer rest periods more often than healthy people, and shorter rest periods less frequently than healthy people.  In other words, a depressed person living with a non-depressed partner is going to “sit around” or generally feel more tired than the partner.  On the other hand, the non-depressed partner is going to stop more often for short rest breaks.

All of this points, as does much other research, to the likelihood that some kind of bio-chemical foundation is implicated in serious clinical depression.  Anti-depressant medication is based on this possibility, but the full mystery of depression has not yet been unlocked. 

The researchers who found the striking difference in rest periods have found a similar pattern of electrical activity when nerve cells are isolated in a Petri dish.  The similarity suggests an intriguing possibility.

“Thank you for your interest”

It sounds like a recorded telephone announcement:  “Thank you for your interest.”  But I mean it.

I know from looking at the pages that get hit in this blog that a lot of people are logging on to read about my life in the convent.  Unfortunately, I’m not a story teller, and I’m not writing this blog with the hope that it might turn into a bestseller.  I’m writing it to think about living.  So my forays into the past are in search of a better light on what I’m doing now.  I’m saying this because I am in danger of trying to keep you interested – to keep my blog numbers up, as it were.  But I can’t do it.

I find concentrating solely on the past is kind of suffocating.  This doesn’t make sense, because I believe the present can change the past, and the past certainly helps shape the present.  The family reunion last week was an example of this.  My mother died fifty years ago, and yet it was evident that the effects of her life are still vibrant.  It’s not because we talk about her much.  We don’t.  I in particular don’t talk about her a lot, because I don’t like to spend too much time in the past, and besides, at the time she died I was in a stage of teenage rebellion in which I found her annoying and needy and sentimental.  I don’t think that anymore,  In fact, I think she was an exceptionally brave, loving, and selfless woman.  On the other hand,  I don’t have a long list of syrupy memories about her either.

 Mostly what I write is sort of boring to everybody but myself.  And yet, it matters to me that you – my unknown reader – are there occasionally.  And I want to say thank you.  You’ll never know, but your interest helps me see things more clearly, live a marginally better life, to choose the less selfish road more often than I would if you weren’t there.

So thank you for your interest.  We don’t know each other, but I am glad you are there.

Hope: Of the fabulous and crummy

At his birthday roast last week, my brother Bob read us a quote from William Sloane Coffin. 

“There are many people who go around and see nothing but beauty and are remarkably insensitive to the immediate needs surrounding them.  There are others who get so obsessed with the humiliated that they forget the sun rose today.  To keep life in some kind of balance, you’ve got to see the beauty and you’ve got to see the oppressed, and you’ve got to keep the tension alive between them.  

“What a fabulous world this is:  and what an unbelievably crummy world this is.  When life has that kind of tension in it, it will sing like a violin string.”

William Sloane Coffin, (1925-2006), Christian chaplain at Yale University, and internationally-renowned peace activist.

Right now, I’m seeing more of the crummy than the fabulous, which I suspect could turn me into quite an complaining hopeless curmudgeon.  I think I’d rather be a violin-string.  I’m going on a hunt for the fabulous. 

20-minute panic with a happy ending

Yesterday I was following Peter home through rush hour traffic after picking up the car we’d dropped off for its annual service in the morning.  I was right behind him, which wasn’t strictly necessary because we both knew how to get home, which was also where we were both going.  So I wasn’t perturbed when at the last double round-about leaving Cambridge, a car got between me and Peter.  As I moved onto the main highway out of Cambridge, I was surprised at how many more cars were now between us, but again, I wasn’t worried that he was not in sight.  He has more acceleration than I do, and usually drives somewhat more confidently (not to say aggressively).

But it was with absolute shock that I arrived home to an empty garage.  Peter’s car wasn’t there, and neither was he.  I picked up the phone and checked the last caller.  It was hours before.  I phoned his mobile, which was turned off.  Not unusual, because our cell phones don’t work at home, and we usually turn them on when we are travelling only if we want to phone someone or are expecting a specific call.  Where was he?

After the round-about when I’d lost sight of him, there is only one way to get home.  I remembered the ambulance I’d pulled over to let pass.  No, that was before I lost sight of Peter’s car.  By this time, I’d opened all the curtains in the house, and rushed to the window every time I heard a car, and my heart rate was probably about 100 bpm.  “Be rational,” I said to myself in near hysteria.  “Think of the plain ordinary alternatives before you decide he’s had a heart attack.”

Okay, I said, maybe he stopped to help someone.  But if he did, I would have passed his car.  If something went wrong with the car and he pulled over, I also would have seen the car.  Or maybe he felt too ill to drive and pulled into the by-pass behind the trees.  I doubt he went onto a grocery store, because dinner was already prepared and we didn’t need anything.  Ah, I thought, maybe  he was low on gas.  He could have pulled into the gas station on the main road and I wouldn’t have seen his car.  I decided I would wait another ten minutes before I left a note on the refrigerator, and got back in the car to look for him. 

Five minutes later he showed up.  At the fated round-about he saw a traffic jam, and thinking I was right behind him, took a different route home.  It was an unusually agitated 20 minutes before that though. 

The next time I’m not going to even think about following him.  Though come to think of it, that still wouldn’t solve the problem if I arrived home to an empty house and he hadn’t arrived an hour later.  Risk is endemic, I guess.

A Protestant solution to Maryknoll

During the last weeks, I have heard many stories from the Maryknollers who were in the convent during the same turbulent time I was also there.  One which delighted and surprised me more than most came from someone in our group.  At the age of 17, contemplating her future in the Midwest, Karen learned about the Maryknoll Sisters.  They spent their lives working among the poor in foreign lands, learning the language and participating in their culture -  a kind of life-time  dedication to the Peace Corps.  This sounded exactly like the kind of life she wanted to lead.

So she came home one day and told her family:  I’ve found my life’s career:  I want to be a Maryknoll Sister.  That’s fine, her father told her, but you have just one small problem:  we’re not Catholics.  Well, then, said Karen, I’ll become one.  So she went to the local Catholic church, took instructions,  was baptized as a Roman Catholic and was almost immediately accepted by the Maryknoll Sisters.  Maryknoll actually has a rule that new converts must wait at least two years after converting before entering, but somehow no one asked, and Karen entered Maryknoll at Valley Park, Missouri in 1958.

Only someone who has lived in a completely different culture than the one in which they were raised can begin to appreciate the magnitude of change this must have involved.  It was shock enough for those of us raised as Catholic girls in the 1950’s to be faced with the monastic practices of even modern convent life.  But Karen came from a family with a single sibling;  all the other Catholic entrants came from families of six to twelve. She had not said the family rosary almost every evening of her life, received Holy Communion in a white dress at the age of six, worried about going to hell for eating meat on Friday, or learned to distinguish the fine minutiae between sins that were venial (which earned time in purgatory before making it to heaven), and mortal (which sent one irredeemably and permanently to hell if one didn’t manage to get it wiped off ones soul by going to confession before death).

The culture of Catholicism is deeply ingrained and mostly unconscious and inevitably outlasts belief or religious practice.  It’s the impulse to bow ones head on speaking the name of Jesus even if one no longer accepts his unique divinity.  It’s the automatic response of genuflecting on entering a Catholic church.  I heard it in my voice when I phoned the local priest recently to inquire the times of Sunday Mass so our guests could attend.  “Thank you, Father,” I said after I had been given the information.  And I heard in my own voice the years of acculturation.  Only a woman who had learned to say “Father,” to priests since she could walk and talk could say it with quite that inflection.

When we were nuns together, I always enjoyed Karen’s slightly iconclastic attitudes suggesting just a shade of not taking it all with the profound seriousness to which the rest of us had been born and bred.  I had no idea then where it had risen from.  Now that I do, I remember it with even greater delight, and her fortitude with even greater admiration.

Confession: A cooperative venture

During the family reunion last weekend, my sister Bernadette told the story of how she had given a paper she’d written to our younger sister Mary to submit for a course requirement in college.  Upon reading the paper, Mary’s professor called her in and accused her of plagiarism.  Mary vehemently denied it, but the professor was adamant.  “A twenty-year old is simply incapable of writing a paper of this maturity.  I am certain this work cannot be yours.”  Mary was so affronted at the implied criticism of Bernadette that she replied in fury “You are wrong.  My sister wrote this paper last year, and she was twenty.”

I just learned today that this cooperative approach began many years earlier.  Mary, age six, was preparing for her First Confession.  For those of you not schooled in the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Penance, confession generally involves going into a darkened alcove, where a priest sits at the other side of the screen.  The penitent then confesses his or her sins and asks for forgiveness, whereupon the priest suggests a suitable penance, such as saying several Hail Mary’s, and gives the person absolution.

Mary, though, was short of a list of sins, so Bernadette gave her a suitable selection to present.  Dorothy developed a different strategy to deal with a dearth of required sins.  She committed them.  She omitted brushing her teeth at night in order to confess disobeying her parents, or did not turn her light out at night until several minutes after the deadline for reading, which again produced another suitable sin. 

The interesting thing about this mechanism was that, although it was necessary to have proper sins to confess, apparently they had to be legitimate sins.  Lying about them would be wrong.  As Dorothy said “I always told the truth.”

Summer in the City 1967

An ex-Maryknoller has just sent me the most marvellous photo* from 1967.   We had finally been assigned to something besides work at the Motherhouse, and thought we knew how the world went round.  During the summer, we lived in apartments in mostly Black areas of the Bronx in New York and Paterson, New Jersey, going out into the streets and homes of the people who lived there. 

We bustled around the community thinking we were making a contribution.  I remember playing the guitar surrounded by children on the street, and knocking on doors where we were made welcome with amazing warmth.  In the fashion of untrained social workers, we visited the school, and tried to help some of the problem children.  In return, one family threw a surprise birthday party for me, while others invited us in to share a family game putting a jigsaw puzzle together. We attended the local Protestant church services where I was invited to play the piano.  I declined.  When I saw the talent of the man who did play, I knew I had been saved an excruciating embarrassment.

In truth, we gained more than we ever gave from the wisdom and strength and tolerance of the people we thought we were helping.  Looking at the photograph now, I shudder at what I see – seven young, vibrant, attractive, smiling, innocent women who wanted to make the world a better place, and thought we had all the answers about how to accomplish this momentous feat.  We are piled in or around a sports car with a man my friend remembers as being “obsessed with nuns and drugs.”  I don’t recall the drugs, but his fascination with nuns should have sparked warning lights.  It didn’t.  We thought people were drawn to us because we were moral beacons.

How we avoided being raped I do not know.  Well, perhaps I do.  There was a respect for our innocence.  I remember saying quite simply to a young Black man that he could not “have his way” with me because I was a nun, and he accepted it.  One evening, two of us went unaccompanied to the apartment of two young Black men who had invited us over to “talk.”  And that’s what we did. 

Still, I can see now why some of the older nuns were horrified by our forays into the world.  The gap between the generations was almost total.  What the older nuns knew we would not listen to, and what we understood about the world they had left behind years before,  they could not hear.  And we all thought we knew best.

*Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Trip to the past

I’m back in England after quite an extraordinary double visit to my past.  In New York, we had a reunion of about 25 of the 64 women who entered the Maryknoll sisters when I did, and the following week, we had a family reunion celebrating my brother Bob’s 60th birthday.  We don’t routinely have family reunions to celebrate birthdays, but decided this was a chance to gather for something less traumatic than a funeral, or even wedding.

More on both of the above in days to come.  Right now I am recovering from high-powered jet lag.  Travel these days seems to be in gridlock.  The Amtrak train between the Adirondacks and New York City was an hour late.  Then the American flight between NYC and Chicago kept us on the tarmac for three hours.  The trip home from Chicago lasted a full 25 hours, culminating with an over-heated bus to Cambridge from which we were all dislodged with our multiple bags and bundles. 

I met some extraordinarily interesting people on the way, though, which helps to compensate for the ghastly cough and cold I am now trying to dispense with.