againsttheglass.com

My son’s psychiatrist is going out of business (I guess you have to say “closing her practice”) because she can get paid only 37% of the time from the insurance companies. She is a developmental pediatrician AND a child psychiatrist so charges health insurance as a primary care physician. I like that mental health treatment can be considered a component of primary care. Alas, the health insurance companies are getting wind that cognitive and behavioral struggles can actually be claimed as an organic, medical issue, and will have none of that. So, the only competent physician in this area in Charlottesville is being put out of business. She has to refer us to someone in Richmond, so bad is the local consciousness about children’s brain issues. But, no fear! The kids she WON’T treat will grow up and be forced into involuntary treatment by our spiffy new laws! Problem solved.

My own health insurance paid for Blake’s sessions with the doctor, but, although there was a prescription for speech and language therapy, and a full evaluation, will not pay for the speech and language therapy. Anyone who has a child struggling with a different brain knows that learning issues like speech and language can frequently exhibit as part of, or in conjunction with, the underlying condition. School psychologists LOVE to parse the chicken and egg on this one, and talk about childhood traumas as a “cause,” as though that’s a way to help “cure” the problem. Zen philosopher Alan Watts said that humans are the only species that bother trying to find out why. To my mind, in matters of psychology and personal narrative, the why can be a barrier — the genius of the why is in the sciences, and that’s where it belongs.

Color me simplistic, but, how about we forget about psychological “why” and treat the whole child’s whole brain: anxiety, executive functioning, speech and language. I must be crazy! It will never work. We need months of talk therapy to find out which psychological trauma specifically caused it. And, we need to get reimbursed for only 50% of the cost of that by our behavioral health (I LOVE that term!) insurance.

In my son’s case, a very low dose of methylphenidate is helping with the impulse control and executive functioning. He is no doubt happier, calmer and better equipped at school. But his anxiety issues are still present, and exacerbated situationally as well as cyclically. Since language processing and retrieval is difficult for him, this heightens anxiety at a charged moment when you’re trying to calm him down: he can’t tell you well what’s happening, so he explodes. The only thing you can do is restrain him from hurting himself, talk calmly, bring him down to the moment (What color is the ceiling? Where are we?) and wait for it to subside. After the mayhem, he manages to squeeze out amazing things like “I was angry and I apologize.” A kid that makes a statement like that is not a kid with issues of maturity, discipline or intelligence. He just has trouble retrieving what to say when the feelings take hold.

Thanks to an amazing teacher at his school (not his teacher, unfortunately), we are using Social Stories to help with the situational anxiety. But, overall, his difficulty with language heightens the anxiety and makes the mood swings worse. To me, that’s a sign that something’s going on in the brain (part of the body, no?) and therefore a medical issue. But, to the insurance company, his language struggles are a “developmental” issue. In order to be considered a medical issue, and therefore reimbursed, our son would have had to have been part of an early intervention program. So, here’s the deal with that.

Since he was born prematurely, we were entitled to an early intervention screening. In addition, in the NICU, he was tested for brain bleed, Apgar, the whole nine and nothing was wrong (or, as they like to say, “remarkable”). I took him for our one complimentary early intervention screening when he was 3 months old. He was right on target, no worries. Therefore, if we wanted treatment for anything that arose, they could provide it, but at a cost.

Here’s the flaw with that: many of the more subtle brain issues that affect learning and behavior don’t manifest until the child is in an environment that demands those skills. We saw at 3 years old that his language was suffering and that there were issues with his mood. His pediatrician said it was fine. His psychotherapist said that his speech was fine, but that he was traumatized by a failed adoption we experienced when Blake just turned 3, and that being adopted was traumatic. The treatment for the former was paid for by our health insurance. The treatment for the latter, over a period of a year and a half, was paid, only 50% worth, by our behavioral health insurance. In neither case was the money well spent.

So, Blake is in school this year, and his language struggles (determined to be normal) are enhancing his anxiety to the point where he runs out of the classroom and acts aggressively at moments when he feels pressured. The school psychologist says that its attachment disorder from being adopted (he’s been with us since he was 10 hours old). I think psychologists in general consider adoption to be a disorder, or a treasure-trove for unlimited sessions of painful and futile inquiry. At any rate, that was a useful diagnosis. I’ll get right on that.

We finally were referred to the person who can help him. This amazing pediatrician/psychiatrist/NEW YORKER (!) who pinpointed his language difficulties in 5 minutes. We felt so validated we could hardly speak. He got the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment plan he needs. But, it won’t be paid for because THERE WAS NO RECORD OF AN EARLY INTERVENTION PROBLEM.

Now, I could have asked Blake at 3 months old to conjugate verbs and exhibit proper syntax for the purpose of the evaluation, but, I was negligent in that regard. Now, since there is NO apparent neurological problem afoot (according to the records), it’s a developmental issue, not a medical issue.

My friends who fight these issues for their autistic son every day say that this is the medical insurance’s way of kicking back to the school system. But, the school language person can’t get him to speak with her, so says she can’t evaluate. I find that kind of ironic: not speaking seems to be a speech and language issue, no? But, I’m being far too intelligent. I sent her a video from home, showing how he constructs sentences. She thanked me and said that “What I saw was pretty good.” Oops! I guess we’re not getting treatment there either.

So, here’s the deal: If our son had a stroke, or fell on his head, and exhibited the same speech and language struggles, he could get the same treatment. However, if he simply has a problem that our diagnostic tools are not yet sophisticated enough to pinpoint on an MRI, then, well, it’s “developmental”. The bottom line is that we can’t afford $135 twice per week for treatment. We are going to argue this one out until we are blue in the face (I’m a shade of purple at the moment). We will GET him what he needs. But what about all those other kids out there who don’t have a smart, obnoxious mother from NYC, a father in a neuroscience PhD program, whose school systems are even worse than ours, whose parents may have the same issues that have gone untreated (like Blake’s birthmother, whom we offered to get treatment for, but she declined). Will they wind up in involuntary commitment when they slug someone out of panic because they never got the tools they needed to go through life with their brain as it is?

Ask Governor Kaine.

I am a day late in the May 1 Blogging Against Disablism event. Life intervened on my schedule, and I’ve been working on this post for a few days. Although this is tardy, I offer it as my contribution.

A little over a year ago, a student named Cho Seung-Hui went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. It was an unbelievable tragedy: 32 people shot, with the 33rd being the shooter himself. Parents lost children, families lost parents, friends lost friends, and the nation lost trust in the safety of colleges and universities. What ensued as a result was a national dialog, and an expanded legislative menu, dedicated to issues of liability, accountability, and enforcement.

As with so many public tragedies on this scale, we lack the will as a people to swim further up the food chain of an event to get to its origins. We like dealing with preventing horrific results, and that rarely pays off in solutions that drip with compassion. When you have a group of grieving parents, students, and a nation, the need for urgent action overcomes the need for deeper understanding. This is particularly true in the realm of political leadership, appointed and elected. Public money generally goes towards demonstrable solutions that guarantee re-election and a continual flow of local pork, not necessarily deeper problem-solving about why our society is like a petri dish for violence and tragedy. As one of my favorite Disney heroes, Shrek, would say, “Grab your torches and pitchforks!” We like doing that a lot.

Torches and pitchforks firmly in hand, we can march together, simultaneously feeling like we’re solving the problem while conveniently disowning our part in perpetuating it. We disown those whose brains are structured differently because the results of their disability demonstrates so clearly that they are not like us, less than human, having to be “dealt with” rather than understood. They can’t be understood, which we chalk up to the inhumanness of their behavior.

I remember the days following the shooting, feeling like I was in a surreal place. “We are all Hokies!” Why, in my own struggles, did I feel like, “We and those like me are all Cho.” Who, by the way, was a Hokie, however ambivalently so.

As a person suffering with major depressive disorder, and loving folks in my immediate family who are bipolar, alcoholic, and living with the Cho diagnosis of “selective mutism,” I do not have the luxury of disowning the humanity of those to whom my fellow citizens conveniently refer as other. I can’t apply that narrative because I know too much about the humanity that inhabits those of us whose brains were hard-wired on, shall we say, the alternate specifications. And the minute that a disowned object becomes subject, narrative goes away. You are confronted with only one thing: the bare, beautiful, horrible reality of the human mind in its infinite potential for choice, informed as much by simple chemistry as by what we call (in our theologically-generated narratives), conscience. You arrive at the unavoidable compassion that arises from stepping inside of the experience of the conflicted, and you cannot escape your responsibility in shaping a world that makes room for them, too.

We make room, in institutions like prisons and psychiatric facilities. We physically separate from this population so as to not be confronted, day by day, with humans who think differently on the alternate specs. We like to kill them sometimes. We like to demonize their parents, as though the 19th century notion of the sins of the parent visiting the child were still a metaphysical supernatural truth (but now we have Freud to give that old take a more modern narrative — phew!).

Then, we pass legistlation like Virginia’s brand spankin’ new involuntary commitment laws, which Alison Hymes has bravely railed against daily — a windmill-tilter if there ever was one, and one of my heroes. Able-minded folks have trouble listening because to open up this dialog is to open up their responsibility in building a world that prevents tragedy through compassionate health care and housing (more economical and efficient, by the way) than punishment for those with the alternate spec who need an alternately-appointed environment in which to thrive.

I was doing architectural planning and building code consulting in NYC in the 1980s when the disability act came to fruition in the codes. Folks lined up at the Department of Buildings the day before to secure an appointment for plan approvals prior to the onset of the law. Folks didn’t like the extra expense involved in grab bars, wheelchair ramps, and larger bathrooms. I remember working on a project for a bar/restaurant on the upper west side that didn’t make it in under the wire, so they had to provide a wheelchair accessible area to enable the hiring of a disabled bartender. The restaurant owner, not the nicest of men, was, shall we say, colorfully dismayed in a NYC kind of way.

Being kind, and open to the possibility of sharing the world with those needing accommodations that on the surface we read as “unfair,” is more work than punishment, but much less flashy than a shiny new prison and gleamingly extreme legislation. I remember even in a Unitarian Universalist church I was met by a supposed bleeding-heart liberal person with “I’m sorry, but these people are NOT going to be cured just by loving them!”

I could parse that many ways, but for now, I’ll focus on the word “cured.” We like to “cure” because it eliminates the problem. But, compassion does not imply cure. It implies living with a condition in dignity and cooperation, in community, getting treatment openly and without shame. It means the same coverage for preventive psychotherapy as for medical treatment. Here are a few alternate versions of recent events that could have been prevented by such a world:

1) A brilliant academic living on the alternate spec rises to the top of his field, to the level of President of a university. He does not fear reaching out for help under tremendous stress because, like a diabetic or someone with heart disease, his spec requires alternate treatment. He openly negotiates a contract allowing for time at AA meetings, psychotherapy, money for medications, and flexibilty in workstyle that suits his temperament. As a result, he is able to fend off crisis episodes, keep functioning brilliantly, bringing insight to the job that someone else, who may not be on the alternate spec, cannot. (the real story here>)

2) A young man on the alternate spec includes this information openly on his university application. All of his teachers, advisors, and deans know about it. His need for accommodation is expressed as openly as the needs of the man in the wheelchair or the woman with the guide dog. It is not hidden under a cloak of shame, so everyone in his environment has the information they need to help him complete his academic career. As a result, he is able to live in a special community on campus with others who are hard-wired more as he is. They even have a public voice on campus, and walk in the sun, instead of the shadows. His professors confer with each other each semester to make sure that they are all on the same page about the student’s progress and accommodations. Rage that could otherwise build up in shame and secrecy instead is prevented. He is loved, and he walks side by side with others like him. (the real story here>)

3) A little boy who is adopted inherits an alternate spec from his birthparents. His adoptive parents are able to let the neighbors and teachers know about this so that they can understand and assist in providing the boy with an openly-welcoming environment in which to grow. They let the boys parents know when he seems to be struggling so that he can be helped. They use the boy’s situation as an opportunity to teach their own kids about how everyone is different, and everyone is deserving of compassion. The boy, as a result, is never shunned, but is aided in his development and embraced for his difference. (the real story here>)

It’s simple economics that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Compassion is, therefore, the most economical way to create a better world. It’s time to grind the torches and pitchforks into plowshares, to lose our insatiable appetites for retribution, and hunger instead for a world of universal justice and love.

When is a disease just a disease, and when is it a character defect? When it comes to alcoholism, it all can seem intertwined. The AA Big Book refers to alcohol as “…cunning, baffling, powerful…”. As with a lot of the writing in the Big Book, it has that anachronistic, cornball ring of the 1930s, and a recognizably bombastic tone. But in my early recovery, it was nonetheless validating. It identified the source of my obsession, and it made me feel like I had a sickness, not a lack of character.

Then you get to the later steps (four thru eight) where you have to reflect on all you’ve done, air them to another person (usually your sponsor), make amends to folks you’ve hurt, analyze your character defects, and ask God to take them away. The genius of these difficult steps is that it allows you to focus on specific tasks without necessarily having to analyze whether or not it’s a “disease” or a lack of character. It removes that analytical piece, and you simply make lists of things, checking them off as you make amends. I like this because it’s non-judgmental, it’s not punitive, but it doesn’t let you wriggle out of responsibility either. It’s a bare-faced look at the damage you’ve done, and what contributes to it. It gives you a clearer way to proceed, and takes you out of that “piece of s%&t at the center of the universe” mindset. All of these things you list simply are what they are. No drama.

Those who do not suffer from alcoholism are still mired in whether it’s a disease (which is seen as wimpy and coddling) or simply a lack of character (which appeals to that American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get it together” attitude). I personally think that these steps showed me that IT’S A DISEASE THAT ENABLES CHARACTER DEFECTS TO FLOURISH. As a result, recovery is very, very difficult because you need to work on recovery from a disease when it is probably at its height of powers. That is no small task, and it’s the main reason why it’s very hard to do this alone. To paraphrase the old saying from the courts, “An alcoholic who tries to recover alone has a fool for a sponsor.” But, being a fool is at the heart of how this disease manifests.

I am currently reeling from the news that our former university President, fired for a DUI a year ago, has apparently relapsed, including a domestic violence complaint. It’s very, very hard to have compassion for a person who seemed to have everything and then pissed it away. Even as a recovering person, I struggle with that. But, the 6th step tells me that my character defects include being judgmental. So my job is to see this as an opportunity to work on that character defect, and to pray that Dr. Frawley one day hits a true bottom, landing into the hands of God, dropping heavy chains of pride and letting others in to help.

Dr. Frawley, we’re all here if you need us. Get to a meeting, drink some bad coffee, help set up chairs and clean up afterwards. Do it every day, more than once if you can. Get a sponsor. Here are links to Maryland meetings:

• West Central Maryland Meetings
• North of DC Meetings

I should empty out my camera phone more often. Get a load of this Easter bunny. Between him and Blake, I don’t know who’s having the more rollicking great time at the Easter Egg hunt this year:

Allison tagged me. Sigh…

As if, after all this blogging, there are five things anyone DOESN’T know about me Seriously, here it is:

5 Things Found In Your Bag

1. Wallet

2. Checkbook

3. Lexapro and Wellbutrin in a pill box

4. Receipts from Lowe’s, Target, and Sally’s

5. Bright Green Hairbrush (so I can find it when I’m digging in my purse around all those receipts)

5 Favorite Things In Your Room

This one makes me laugh and cry at the same time. As a married person, there is no “my room.” Just the least appointed room in the house that my husband and I share. But, here goes, to your horror:

1. Unpacked boxes from our move

2. Piles of laundry spilling from laundry baskets

3. Piles of clothes that spilled on the floor when our closet rod broke, so I went to Lowe’s to get hardware (hence the receipts)

4. Mair Mair, the cat, who never leaves the bedroom

5. Mair Mair’s litter box, which will be leaving the bedroom as soon as I can find another place she’ll actually go to

5 Things You Have Always Wanted To Do

1. Form a sketch comedy group in Charlottesville

2. Have a daughter

3. Settle down

4. Not have a day job

5. Work on my art and music full time

5 Things You Are Currently Into

1. Championing my son’s happiness

2. Staying alive (here, here, Allison!)

3. Writing

4. Trying to find an AA meeting in Charlottesville that’s not loaded with pontificating good ol’ boys (but, I’m not bitter)

5. Trying to become a better person

5 People You Want To Tag

I will tag folks, but hope they will still be my friends anyway. No offense if you’re not into it — I understand:

1. The Fish Wrapper

2. Mixed Veggies

3. Neuronerd

4. John Wills Lloyd

5. Wags Outside

ALTERNATE MEME

If anyone herein tagged would like to post a different meme, how about:

Five Reasons I Would Not be Caught DEAD Watching American Idol

1. I don’t really want to die at this point in time. Hoping that will happen long after American Idol has been cancelled.

2. There’s something Hitlerian about everyone having to watch, then discuss, then watch again, then discuss.

3. Believe that while we are watching, the superdelegates are plotting against us.

4. Would interfere with my channel surfing for round-the-clock reruns of Law & Order and House.

5. Have to wash my hair.

I have not written in a while because I’ve been unable to come up with the words to describe the pain of what happened to me recently. So, I titled this post with a saying from Al-Anon. The ultimate goal of a sober person is to detach with love from those who are “in their disease.” However, as humans, we don’t always drum up the love we need when we are hurt, so how to detach and stay emotionally sober? The Al-Anon wisdom is to detach with an axe. It’s better than nothing, and gives us time to heal while we wait for openness to the love and forgiveness.

The alternative is to stay enmeshed in the hurt, and thus enmeshed with the sick person. I’m being abstract. Let me be more specific.

Without going into chapter and verse as to why, a neighbor one block over decided at one point that her kids were not allowed to play with my son due to his illness. This was after my son had bonded with her son, the only kid on our two blocks that is exactly his age. He had been overjoyed to make a friend that wasn’t older and trying to get rid of him. His mother stopped returning my calls for playdates, stood up my son for playdates twice, and never told me why. I finally got her to call me back, and got the news about why my son was no longer permitted to play with her kids. No apologies, and she had some suggestions for family counselors, just to make her blowing me off, standing up my son, and not apologizing look like sympathy.

It’s always good form for well folks to suggest counseling when they fear someone’s illness. Makes them feel like part of the solution, then they can go watch TV in peace.

It’s hard for a 5-year old to understand why he lost a friend, especially when the reasons really are other people’s fears, not any wrongdoing on his part that he has complete command of, although he works hard every day to live with his illness. His heart was broken, but, like kids do, he internalizes things, and moves on until the next time he has to confront the reality of what happened.

That reality manifests every time he wants to go over to the next block, connected to our backyard by a little bridge I put up across the creek. He wanted, a few weeks ago, to cross the creek and see his friend. He heard him playing on his bike in the street, and he was so lonely. I had to, one more time, explain to him why it wasn’t a good idea. He was crying, and I got my indignation (Read: “IRISH”) up, thinking about his deep, deep pain. I resolved I should go over with him, knock on her door, and try to change her mind.

How do you spell “Big mistake?” I should have read the AA Big Book before I went:

To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.

It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feeling we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look for it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.

This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.

Sigh.

Not everyone responds to my emotions the way I think they will. Keep in mind that I have a mood disorder, and there are days when I manage it better than others. This was not one of those days.

I cried to her “How can you break my kid’s heart?” Apparently, I added a little “color” to the sentence with 4-letter word which I didn’t recall because I was so overcome with the pain my son was feeling. That’s all she needed for the prompt to ask me to leave, even though I was sobbing, not threatening her in any way, clearly a mother in distress over her son’s loneliness. She told me that I was stalking her (?) which I thought was bizarre, and I responded, “I was following up on playdates with my son. He doesn’t have any friends on our block.” “And WHY is THAT?,” she replied, an apparent reference to his illness warding off other children, but that’s not the case. I responded, “Because all the other kids are older, and he was thrilled to have a boy his age to play with.”

Her response, “Cathy, you have to leave now or I will call the police.” I left, sobbing, with Blake playing in the yard next door with her son. He refused to come with me. The alternative was for me to carry him, kicking, screaming, biting, and pulling hair across the woods, over the bridge, and back to our house. He’s getting so big now that I can’t do it, so I decided to walk home, hoping he would follow because he usually does. I would compose myself. If I didn’t see him in a few minutes, I’d drive my car over to get him.

Before those few minutes went by, the police were at my door, me opening it still sobbing. The woman told them I had forced my way into her house and was threatening her. Now, I’m the first person to admit I was crying, and maybe dropped the “f” bomb as in “Why the f-k are you breaking my kids heart?”, but threatening is just not my style. Even when I’m upset, I know that I can’t follow through on a threat, and would not want to. My goal, in these kinds of ill-advised emotional exchanges, is NEVER to hurt. It’s to be HEARD. And my desire to be heard is very strong when I’m having an emotionally bad day. It goes back to my Dad, to his telling me “No one is interested in anything you have to say,” and all the years he demonstrated his belief in that harsh statement. My desire to be HEARD, to be relevant, to be needed, to be an integral, irreplaceable part of something bigger than me is at the base of my emotional and spiritual struggles. It is this character defect, this faulty historical emotional landscape, that pushed my emotions front and center of what should have been solely my son’s pain.

The officer believed me when I explained to him through tears that I had not broken in and threatened. I admitted to being upset, but that I had been invited in, and that I left when asked to to so. He said that I had to go with him to get my son, that he was now trespassing on her property. I walked over, sobbing. He retrieved Blake from her backyard where he and her son were happily playing. I took him home, and have been working on him to understand never to go there again, but it’s hard.

EPILOGUE: Over the last couple of weeks since this happened, I have been in a deep depression. While my emotions have run the gamut, life has gone on. Blake has since made friends with another boy, across the street from her house, and this new boy’s backyard abuts ours. So, Blake can see him if this new friend crosses the bridge to come to our house. Ironically, this boy and his brother have also been “banned” from playing with that other woman’s kids, so, their mother is happy to have them come over here. She and I have gotten to talking a lot. She is a Christian, of a much more conservative variety then I am, but she is not at all judgmental and very, very kind. She and I have prayed together about this and she also was deeply affected by what happened to me. We took our kids to Chuck-E-Cheese together this weekend.

I have been drawn to Matthew 5 about this. You may know them as the Beatitudes. This is not to elevate the importance or value of what I’m doing and to position me as the righteous inheriting the earth (as if), but to focus me on the fact that when you advocate for someone with an illness that is hard to understand, even if you do it far more gracefully than I have, you may make some people unhappy. But, you can’t stay silent out of fear of human revenge:

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

So, it would seem in the service of love, it would be wrong for me to lose my “saltiness.” I’m not sure if Christ meant the “f” bomb, but if he did, I’m all about saltiness

In spite of the healing connections I am making, and the biblical reminders to speak out of love, no matter the cost, I am humbly remaining one day at a time about this new friendship and all other connections related to my son. For this new connection, I’ll try detaching with love, and see how it works. For the other woman’s son, and for her as well, I’m afraid I have only the axe to work with for the time being. It will have to do.

You know why I like blogging? It’s the closest thing I know to mindlessly rattling on while stoned and eating spaghetti at an all-night diner with your philosophy major roommate. It’s word processing pushed to the limit: no eventual paper, no editor, no proofing, no pagination. Truly unfettered blah, blah, blah.

I read last night’s post, and that’s how it reads. It’s so awful to have a life-shifting thought and see how putting it into words makes it sound like drivel. It’s kind of why I never write songs about “big” concepts. I can’t write “big.” I’d rather write a song about asking someone if they are finishing that potato (I did once..I swear) than the meaning of potatoness. And yet, when I’m blogging, I try to get that 5 pounds of s$^t into that 1 pound bag, every time.

I’ve been reading more about the “world-soul” idea and the “Gaia” notion, and they are very close to what I’m talking about. Except, like my post, they sound kind of new-agey, which kind of grosses me out. They appear historically to have come from that Mary Daly kind of “let’s imagine the world before that misogynistic bastard Plato and later monotheistic societies laid all that patriarchal duality on us” mentality. I have this thing about choosing a religious direction based upon an emotional need to re-paint the world differently from your male-dominated ancestors just cause you’re pissed. I mean, I went through the whole “I’m a wiccan” thing about 18 years ago, and it didn’t last long. It felt kinda dumb, to be honest. It’s hard for the modern mind to get behind all that animism and take it seriously. I liked the candles, the wine, and the complaining about our fathers, but I found myself wasting an entire Saturday at the Open Center in Soho doing a women’s drumming circle, feeling like I was gonna jump outta my skin. We got to keep the drum. It was in a white corrugated coardboard box. It was really more like a tamborine, but larger, with smaller cymbals on the side. That damn thing moved with me from the village, to upstate New York, to a women’s residential hotel in mid-town, back to the village, and out to Brooklyn. Every time I packed to move, I’d find it in some closet somewhere, and I’d repack it, hearing those damned little cymbals every time, telling me that I wasted an entire day pretending to be all holistic and stuff.

So, with this kind of mindset, it’s really hard for me to admit that I’m starting to view the more metaphysical aspects of life in a way that seems to align with that of those other women in the drumming circle who actually were having a good time. It’s hard for me to immerse myself in any ideological “thing,” and I think it’s why I get uncomfortable in a church after a while. It feels dishonest to believe only a portion of what you’re supposed to believe, and I feel perpetually like an outsider. So I have to view this notion of the world-soul, if that’s indeed the notion that I’m arriving at, with a very cautious eye.

My religious quests stem from restlessness with what I see as 90% faiths. Does anyone really believe 100% in what their church espouses? If not, is the point to hang around until they wear you down? Is it to share your differences and maybe shift the mindset of the group over time? Is it just so you can have some friends? Is it about religion at all? I think, honestly, it’s mostly about the coffee, snacks, conversation, and shared loneliness.

I wonder what it was like when the early Christians got together because they shared this kind of fresh revelation stemming from the revealed face of God seen so recently Christ. That must have been unbelievable. That kind of movement, based on taking a risk, not on conforming to a norm, or swooning on a temporary faith high during a Christian rock concert, must have been an extraordinary thing to live through.

But, I still distrust “church” as a vessel for faith. I think sometimes we huddle in a church, like orphans in a storm trying to keep protected from other ideologies that might throw a wrench into the works and peel us away one-by-one. However, from reading my post last night, I fear I’ve become one of those flabby, armchair philosophers that thinks she’s seen God when no one else has, and has a laptop handy. Then I think, “When Noel is done with his PhD, I’ll go back to school for Religious Studies.” But, that sounds so ponderous. I’d rather write songs, build some art installations I’ve been planning, and work on some film projects I’ve stuffed away in a trunk. I’m a frustrated artist, waiting for my turn to be the one with a life of the mind, searching through religion for what art alone has always been able to give me: Unity, God, Transcendence.

Even in my baptism last year, which remains a profound experience to me, I still did not have the same connection to the God that I know is inside me that I had on a stage in the Rebar Club in NYC, dressed as a 5-year old, tap dancing and singing one of my darkest songs “I’m the Mommy Now!” Pure irreverence and dark-as-night humor, with an audience right there with me. That’s how MY Gaia-world-soul thing works. I’ll leave the theories, I guess, for now, in the hands of those with the patience to read all their primary sources and defend their dissertations. Right now, I’m thinking more about my stations of the cross miniature golf course — a project in deference to the work of Andres Serrano that’s sure to get me thrown out of Virginia once and for all

Who Made You? God Made You! Why Did He Make You? Because He Loves You.

The above notion was something I had to memorize in case the archbishop were to call on me during my Confirmation ceremony. He never did. And the questions he threw were truly “softball” anyway.

No one in my class seemed to question this statement — 2nd graders generally didn’t question much when a nun was in the front of the room. But I couldn’t help but wonder for years and years how could God love me if I didn’t yet exist to love?

Oddly, this little tidbit from my catechism class in 2nd grade rings truer than ever in my head as I consider strongly the possibility that there is no such thing as an individual human soul.

The elimination of the notion of an individual human soul removes a problem that causes friction between science and religion. It also creates a totality of existence that ties together eastern and western philosophies, that explains pain and suffering, that gives the entire exercise that is life a deeper meaning than ever to me. It makes a discussion of sin possible and much clearer. I lack the confidence that I can express this notion clearly, so bear with me.

In my catechism class, and in Catholic school science class in the 1960s — Ah! The truly “Camelot” days of folk masses and all that post-Vatican II revelry — we were taught that evolution was okay to believe under one condition: At the point where the first human was born, God breathed a soul into him or her.

This is very poetic, and it helped Father Joyce explain to us the heirarchy of corporeal existence. Kind of like the beginning of the old Ben Casey show (if you don’t remember it, you’re too young), Father Joyce would draw a diagram on the chalkboard that started at the bottom working it’s way up. When he was done, it looked something like this:

God
Priests/Nuns
Celibate Persons
Married Persons
Apes
Animals
Plants
Minerals

Of course, this was a pitch to join the priesthood, climb the ladder of Catholic success, and be a hopeless grumpy drunk like Father Joyce, but, you get the picture. Only the three immediately beneath “God” have a soul. The rest are metaphysically s.o.l. Of course, this notion of a soul being breathed into the first human is problematic at the start. Does that mean that a soulless animal gave birth to and raised the first 46-chromosome homo sapien with a soul? How did that work? I’ll bet they had some family issues, huh? Did that person mate with another soulless animal? Is the soul gene recessive or dominant?

Okay, I’m being flip, but you get the point. I liked that my church was being accommodating to science, but when I broke this down, it made no sense whatsoever. The shoehorning of the notion of an individual human soul spontaneously showing up at a point where our frontal lobe was ripe enough, and our thumbs opposing enough, is just darned silly.

This argument about who gets a soul and when does more than create a problem for those of us who believe in evolution and God. It also underscores arguments on all sides regarding abortion, birth control, stem cell research, euthanasia, and other seemingly intractable disputes of our times. Then there are claims that heinous acts are committed by “soulless” people: folks look at Charles Manson and say that his eyes look like he doesn’t have a soul.

Imagine, John-Lennon-style if, just for a moment, the human soul did not exist at all?

Well, a metaphysical problem arises for me in the face of my not having my own custom-fit human soul. The problem is that I know I am of deeper stuff than biology and reason. I know because of my recovery, which was the presence of God in my life loud an clear, existing in a moment, changing everything. I wrote in a post a few years ago that “I got a soul that day.” Interesting that I used that terminology, but, I would use different wording today. Today, I would say that I heard the Godliness within me that day for the first time. I heard God that day because my body ached so badly, my remorse was so great, my sense of hopelessness and death was so present, Cathy ceased to exist. In that moment, only God could be heard. Cathy was dead, in a way. I heard God for the first time because my addictive biology and habitually flawed rationalizations broke down sufficiently to let me hear.

The key here is that my addictive biology and habitually flawed rationalizations were clearly what stood in the way all those years. In other words, the nature of my human life was a corporeal one. But not with a sense of duality (corporeal bad/spiritual good). Rather, biology and thought, at all levels of existence (apologies to Father Joyce) are the stuff of human life.

With that in mind — the health of my body and my thoughts — I know now that my responsibility in this existence is to bring to visible life the love of God that was so beside itself with abundance that the big bang could not help but happen. Imagine containing a love so great that you just had to bust open the gates of existence and create the universe? The seas could not help but form, the flowers cannot help but blossom, and we cannot help but be the messy, wonderful, awful, beautiful people we all are. And through all this, God finally had a glorious mirror to see the wonders of limitless love. That am us.

I’m arguing here to shift the way of thinking about how God lives on this earth. Rather than looking at biology and reason as an obstacle to Godliness, rather than looking at the things of this world as desire and temptation, what if we think of the entire thing as an inevitable and perfect symphony of God’s love? Those of us who are mentally capable would be drawn to help those who are not. We would all feel connected as a single spirit of God, not saving our own soul’s ass from being “left behind,” but no longer leaving behind, in a very real sense, those among us who hunger, who suffer, who cause pain because their biology and reasoning don’t function as ours do.

Connectedness as a single bio-spiritual organism that is God, means we care for the environment. There is no need to argue with how biological life came to be, because at every stage of evolution, God was within every being, even when our knuckles were dragging. We stop projecting our own illusion of individual reality onto a fertilized egg, and a woman can make a choice based on husbanding the realities of human existence. We accept that sometimes folks want to leave this place because the physical pain is simply too much and the biology is failing. We stop projecting evil and moral meaning onto those whose mental illness makes them act in ways we find uncomfortable — instead, we do what we can to make their lives comfortable since they may lack the biological (not spiritual) ability to do so. We choose domain over our reproduction as it is within our control as biological beings. We regard those who do evil as those whose biologies prevent them from hearing God, not as hopelessly soul-dead people going to hell. Without the diabolical projections, we are free and clear of mind work to create a world where maybe their needs can be addressed at an earlier time in their lives, and cycles of addiction, abuse, and pain can be prevented. We stop shutting our eyes to the ugly because even the ugly is of God.

The notion of “self” gives way to the notion of a single point of subjectivity that is God’s. We resort to the spreading of God’s grace and love in the limited time we have, not because we should, but because it is simply inevitable if we let go of our individual soul and embrace instead the substance of God within us all.

And that’s how that catechism question now makes sense to me.

Okay, I’m a little dramatic.

Blake is doing better, and I’m beginning to come out of my self-imposed exile inside myself to blog again. I feel really stupid. The last couple of days, I’ve had the “I’ll have to blog about that tonight” experience, but I didn’t because I said I was closing the blog. That’s completely ridiculous, as if I made a promise on someone’s death bed that “I will never blog again.”

So, now that the apologies are done, as are the premature reports of my demise between my ears, I have to begin trying to shape in words a powerful set of images that I’ve been having about faith, about God, about existence and how mainstream Christianity may be missing the mark big time. I know, it’s not a terribly narrow topic, but I’ve had this image in my head for a while now.

If you ever get a chance to read “Thinking in Pictures” by Temple Grandin, I highly recommend it. Ms. Grandin is autistic, and is a world-renowned expert on the humane slaughter of animals. The book opens up a world within her autistic mind where she talks about her ability to think like a cow. She thinks in pictures, not in words. Her creative thoughts express in language only to communicate, but not to shape, concepts.

That is very, very much the way I think. When I was doing Web design, I had a couple of programmers who worked with me and I’d always have to lead the conversation with chalk. I’m not by any means verbally-challenged, but words do not serve my creative process as well as a picture.

So what the hell does this mean about faith, god, existence, and mainstream Christianity?

If I were a painter, this would be the painting. It would be a landscape, but a scalable one like Google Earth. You could zoom in at any point, and see all forms of life on the surface. Everything is beautiful and horrible and real. Embedded beneath the surface of all of the chemical and biological reality that is what in some Buddhist traditions is called the “phenomenological realm,” is a force that gave rise to it. I call that God.

God would be painted as an amoeba-like single energy that is within and joins every move, every thought, every experience that lives on this earth. Like breath is the votive force for the human voice, but is invisible, so is God.

There is nothing I’ve written so far that is anything new, I know. Pantheists, animists, even some liberal Christians, think this way. But, there’s something profoundly different for me (if not for the world of learned philosophers and theologians) about this realization. The different part is that it renders the need for what we call a human soul meaningless. It has occurred to me in this vision of the known world that the notion of an eternal human soul, saved or damned, is an unnecessary appendage onto the to one spirit that is God. By eliminating the notion that I have a soul, all sorts of new possibilities have opened up for me, and I’m a lot clearer about my faith than I’ve ever been.

I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. I’ll write more about this tomorrow. Good to be back.

The time has come to close up this blog. I began blogging with a desire to reveal what is most personal to me (not dumb personal, like a drunk facebook picture, but emotionally genuine personal). As with my songwriting, I have always tried to focus my blog on revealing that which others have pain acknowledging. The hope is to contribute to healing, which is the greatest gift I can give another person.

At this point, writing about my life necessarily involves writing about the person I care the most in the entire world: my son. Because his struggles are front and center in our lives right now, I have found it hard to bear my heart as I like to do in writing without writing about him. I owe Blake the privacy he deserves in his young life, so am choosing to no longer use this forum out of respect for my son.

Thank you for everyone who has ever read my blog, and who have shared your comments. Please pray for our family, for my son, and for all that lies ahead of us. God bless.