Spiritual Boob Jobs

Got your attention with the title, eh? You'll have to read the whole thing to figure out where it fits in :) .

Zoinks, I don't even know where to start. Ever have two very different themes running around in your head for weeks, or months or years even, and you can't make sense of either of them? Then one day, for better or for worse, they collide and begin to fuse in ways that give each the power to interpret and make sense of the other. I've had twin obsessions with grief and adulthood for a while, and somehow being here now has heightened my awareness of both. Studying human development, on the brink of turning 30, emerging from "emerging adulthood," feeling vulnerable and lonely in a new city, reading the news, reading the bible, trying to reconcile it all and make sense of any of it. And every once in a while, along the way, something punctuates the chaotic mess and illuminates, just for a moment, the point of collision. Today, it was an article on adolescence by Frederick Buechner, in which he writes:

"... the word adolescent derives from the latin verb adolescere, which is made up of ad, meaning toward, and alescere, meaning to grow. The word designates humans who are in the process of growing up.... I am sixty-four years old. I have fathered children. I have written books. I have letters after my name... but to call me an adult or grownup is an oversimplification at best.... Let me put forth an alternate etymology.... Let me suggest with total innacuracy that the word adolescent is made up of ad, meaning toward, and dolor, meaning pain. Thus adolescent becomes a term which designates human beings... trying to come to terms with pain, to figure out how to deal with pain, not just how to survive pain but how to turn it to some human and creative use in their own encounters with it."

This post is mostly just a purging beginning. There is nothing succinct about it. I want to start processing this stuff and in the absence of humans to do it with at this particular moment, I need to get it all out so I can start picking and choosing and finding the connections. So I'm throwing it all out there and I'd love to know what hits home, so that I can focus in on some of it.

I'm turning 30, in nine months. This fact does not bother me. In fact, I think I am the only person who actually rounds up already. I don't look 30. I don't feel 30. I don't act 30. Yet I find myself constantly trying to convince people that I am. You'd think I could just let it go and start being glad I don't look my age, since it will probably come in handy to finally look 30 when I'm 45. But for some reason I get hung up on wanting to assert that I've lived long enough to have lost my idealism (as if anyone could spend five minutes with me and not figure that out). Perhaps that is why I hang on to my cynicism, why it's hard to shake. It marks me as someone acquainted with grief.

I just finished reading last week's issue of the LA Weekly. The articles were diverse and typical: the Catholic church's obsession with virgins and whores; a profile of the activist father of the first Mexican soldier to die in Iraq; a review of a book of short stories by the author of Found Magazine, who writes about items found from lives left behind as he rummages through the wreckage of New Orleans. It is full of the reality of life. But surrounding the articles, the ads: Botox. Breast augmentation. Colon hydrotherapy. "Massage" with hot asian girls. Are we in denial about the reality of life, or are we so well-acquainted with grief and loneliness, and so ill-equipped to deal with our own - and others' - that we seek relief in places we'll never find it: fitting in, looking the part, intimacy-free sex, and, um, what exactly is colon hydrotherapy for? A quote from the book review struck me: "Rather, [the author's] worldview is distinctly old-fashioned. It recalls Fitzgerald and Kerouac, writers for whom sadness wasn't the product of historical accident, but simply a condition of American life." When did an understanding of sadness as inherent in the human condition become "old fashioned"? When did we get so far from our grief that we have only two options for dealing with it - to be shocked by it or to insist that it doesn't exist?

I recently trained as a hospice volunteer. During my interview, I was asked why I was interested in working with hospice patients and their families. I actually hadn't really thought through the answer before, so it mostly came out as a jumbled string of experiences and interests and training that led me to this point (the coordinator, in fact, mentioned it was the longest answer anyone had ever given to that question). In hindsight, I think I did it for the same reason I came back to school to be a therapist - to be there as people integrate their grief. There is reality in grief, and meaning. People are not defined by their grief and loss - there are still groceries to be bought, and work to do, and conversations to have, about love and politics and football teams - but it's part of us; a part we can't cover over with fake boobs and clean assholes. The funny thing seems to be that if there's nowhere to deal with grief, it does become us. It becomes the undercurrent, the pirate radio station in our head. I don't just mean "big grief" -- death and divorce, trauma and tragedy. There is plenty of that to go around in the world, but there is also the little grief, that's not so little: transition, loneliness, fear of hope, loss of idealism, and the realization that it doesn't go away when one "grows up."

I think that as Christians we're supposed to live lifestyles of integrated grief. I don't really know what that means but I want to think about it. Maybe grief is like a prosthesis: at first, it is painful and obvious, but slowly it becomes part of you and you learn to live as fully as possible in the world again. Some days you may be limping more than others, some day you may wake up and realize that even though it hasn't gone away, you stop noticing it every second of the day. Maybe if we're lucky we have days where we take it for granted, and we might discover there are even some things we can do with it that we couldn't do before, like roast marshmallows on our toes. But we can't get there by pretending we still have all our limbs... and I'm irritated today with the Christians who have spiritual boob jobs, saying, in essence, don't pay attention to those scars over there, take a look at these instead! Aren't they fabulous?

I recognize I'm probably being a little intense about all of this. It's just hard not to be right now. I tire easily of surface conversation, and when I am denied a chance to tune in to pirate radio as background noise, I usually find it stuck on volume 11. So that is why Grief and Growing Up (with capital letters) are a big part of what's on my mind these days when I write. I miss my church in Berkeley, which sometimes felt like a combat-zone war hospital, where those of us who were currently free of shrapnel did our best to help keep the recently wounded from losing too much blood. But then we'd go get beer and talk about other stuff. I'm looking forward to having a few friends here that I'm sharing life with, so that it's not a case of going from small talk (with new people) to cathartic release (with old friends who know me). I'm looking forward to having depth and whimsy overlap again, and feeling a little more balanced. In the meantime, I'm starting to figure out what I want to do with my degree and that's not all bad.