Ghost parents tend to march into our consciousnesses when capitalism reminds us we’re supposed to be buying them things. My friends whose mothers have passed dread mothers’ day. I dread fathers’ day. I dread it not only because my own father died almost 25 years ago, but because it’s a reminder that social expectations of what a father is supposed to be would mainly have failed in his case. Often I think this is generational; having been born in 1938, my parents don’t come from the school of parenting where children are hugged and squeezed and told they are loved. My father had trouble expressing emotions other than anger and resentment and occasional bouts of sentimentality, but that too is probably a coincidence of timing. By the time I was born, he was fairly deep into the alcoholism that would play a significant role in his death at 52. There were whole cascades of other health issues and a bad car accident involved as well, but booze was a key. Booze killed his father as well. Booze points a finger at some of the men in my family and says, “sorry, buddy, but you’re mine.”

He wasn’t cruel, just frustrated, a lot of the time. He wanted to write, and couldn’t (or didn’t, I don’t know). He found being home with his five kids difficult, and the fact that four of us were girls didn’t help. My father was old school Irish American macho: the favored only child born late in a marriage, probably he had grown up rather spoiled, and could get away with things, and we kind of ruined that. Often he’d just pick up and leave us, but I see from adulthood this was to keep him from losing it further. He worked very hard and resented it, and we never had enough money, which lead to fights between he and my mother, fights that seemed from my childhood vantage to be epic and circular, always coming back to the same things. I have been living with the guy I share a home with for 16 years total, so I do understand that happens in marriages: things go in circles. In my parents’ case, the circles got ugly, but instead of divorce he would just go, and come back, and go again.

He wasn’t a bad father, but he wasn’t the loving, supportive father, the effusive father who cries on the sidelines at sports events (because, as passionate as he was about baseball and hockey, he was no athlete, and excepting my younger sister, neither were any of us). He came to my cello recitals and theatre things, and when I began writing he read the little things I published in high school, but never said anything about any of them. He was present, which is more than many parents of kids I knew, but it was a different presence; in Berkeley, where I went to high school, the other parents swooped in with hugs and kisses and extravagant praise, and there was my silent father, off to the side, arms crossed, with a lot of grey in his beard. One of my friends spotted him in the back at my high school graduation, puffing on his pipe, and said “your dad is such a character.” That’s not really what a teenage girl wants to hear. She wants her dad to be awesome, fun to hang out with, entertaining. Instead, I had an oddity.

He used to talk at me a lot, rather than with me, but the things he talked at me about turned out to be the biggest pieces of the person I am. Shakespeare, Catholicism, poetry, classic films, growing up poor in Oakland, his fascination with Samurai films. I still recall the Christian Brother who spoke at his funeral talking about Leo and the Samurai films. He talked at me, and like any child and later teenager, I pretended not to be listening, but I listened. All the time. I recall nights when his friends would come over and they would talk and talk and drink and talk and drink and the room would be a fug of cigars and some music playing, Miles Davis or Bach, and I would lie down on the sheepskin rug on the floor and fall asleep and they would keep talking. And they talked about books and art and philosophy. Like a small, girl shaped sponge, I absorbed it all.

He gave me fathers, though. My godfather, his oldest friend, who calls me sometimes from New York, a night owl, a guy who’d swoop in during my childhood wearing a dashiki, bearing gifts from all over the world. I recall a box of candied dates from his time in Syria (he worked for the UN) and a Joan of Arc medallion from Paris that I lost in college when the chain snapped. And there were the other friends of my fathers’, one of whom sent me Thomas Merton’s Sign of Jonas when I had two toes in Catholicism and helped me turn back, even though the Church hurt him badly. And another friend who drove this ancient VW Beetle even though he was rich. And the Christian Brother who told me that years after my father died the Brothers would sometimes meet and have a “Leo Club” where they’d drink and talk about my dad. And all of the fathers I have in books and art and film and music. He seemed lonely to me, a lot of the time. But, as it turned out, he was loved. One of his coworkers told me that people loved him because he could tell stories. I suppose I inherited plenty of that.

My father showed love. He didn’t tell it. He insisted all of us go to college, and private high schools, even though paying the bills was a struggle. He insisted on educating his daughters even though he complained about women a lot. He was there when we did things even if he didn’t say much. A month or so before he died, when he was sick and frail,  he called me on the phone, and talked to me for an hour about Shakespeare in a moment when I was ready to drop out of college. And a few days later I got a postcard from him, with just these lines from Hamlet written on the back:

If ever thou didst hold me in thy heart,

absent thee from felicity a while

and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

to tell my story

Hamlet tells Horatio this, Horatio the Stoic, Horatio the student, Horatio who holds the story and will unfold it to Fortinbras and whoever else will listen. So I am my father’s Horatio, and I am a stoic, and a student, and I tell stories. And like my father I often show love rather than telling it and wonder, sometimes, if people see and understand that. Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. From some angles, it looks like love. From others, it looks like a means for an inwardly fragile person to survive. And from others, it looks like both.

A few weeks ago, I went to hear the great theologian Sandra Schneiders IHM speak. The topic was women’s vocations, and as soon as she turned to the topic of women who aren’t drawn to being women religious, I started scribbling notes like mad. These are a few things I paraphrased:

*Vocation expands to fit the available space.
*Vocation is otherness: one can only be called from the outside.
*Discernment is a process of coming to a good decision about what I am called to do here and now.
*Discernment is also an assessment of attractions, abilities, and opportunities in relationship to what needs to be done.
*Charisms are not chosen but given.

Three years ago, when I was on a retreat where I was hot, miserable, lonely and restless, I sat in the courtyard late at night and wrote in my notebook “I want to be called to something.” All around me were priests, women religious, devout Catholics who happily sat for hours doing rosaries, and there I was: sweaty, cranky and unable to pray for more than 60 seconds at a shot. Three years later, the last remains sadly true. And still, I puzzle over this idea of vocation.

This summer, a friend of mine will be ordained to the priesthood. He’ll be one of those good priests: patient, tolerant, open minded, even feminist (yes, feminist male Catholics exist…). Another friend just returned from a vocation retreat at a monastery. And another has been put forth as a postulant to the priesthood. As she put it, “This Jesus thing is being turned up to 11.”

The truth is, I am seething with envy. Here are three people who have found that thing: the calling. And years after taking a risk and finding my religion again, I have yet to feel it. Watching men and women say the Mass, I prefer being in a pew, participating but not running the show. No part of me wants to hand out communion, read the Gospels, teach children, or wash the linens: pretty much the only roles married women are allowed to do in my particular religion. And then I wonder if this is a form of self sabotage, choosing a religion where I am confined to a passive position. Were I to vault over to another religion, it’s not unlikely that someone would have suggested by now, hey, maybe you want to be a priest? At a recent talk, I heard an Episcopalian woman say, “well, if you can sing, and articulate yourself, and you’re a woman in this church, someone’s going to ask you if you’re interested in ordination.”

The thing is, I’m not. Up and down, inside and out, consciously and unconsciously, the answer is no (and if you’re asking, of course I think women should be ordained). But this is the other thing. Last week I went to a talk by Simone Campbell of the Nuns on the Bus, and she said something like this: “If women could just work past the resentment and anger we feel at the institutional church, we might realize that we’re all baptized into the priesthood.” And then I remembered something else.

This past January, I was in spiritual direction with a young seminarian, trying to work out the complexity of issues I deal with whenever someone who’s read my book writes me to say “I want to find my religion again, can you help?” This doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough for me to grapple with whether I really can help anyone, with anything, ever. And the seminarian said, “Do you remember what you were baptized as?” And I said, well, my parents named be blah blah… and he stopped me and said, “Listen: you were baptized as priest, prophet and king. Well, queen. We’ve kind of forgotten this idea that the priesthood isn’t just one guy.”

That’s something I also heard echoed in the writing of Dan Horan, a Franciscan. “If the assembly doesn’t gather, there is no Mass. And, if there is no Mass, there is no church.” So just showing up? That’s vocation. Because showing up is hard. And doing it week after week? Hard. And actually listening to the readings when you just got an iPhone, finally? Hard.

This week, a friend whose dissertation I’d nudged along (he’s not a student at my University, and as a nontenured lecturer I am actually not allowed to read or give feedback on dissertations because only tenured people can do that, apparently: which is another issue…) wrote me with good news. Not only had be passed, but his committee thought it was good enough to be a book. And it struck me that I’ve had a vocation all along. I didn’t take vows, or make a promise to God. But I made a commitment, many years ago, to put a writing life above a financially successful life. And I make the commitment, over and over, to help people with their writing because I believe writing is a gift we’re given by others. Sometimes, I help a student who says in her reflection “I still hate writing after this class.” Often, it’s a different student who is only struggling to get a passing grade. But sometimes it’s an older person who wants to get down a family story for her grand kids, or a talented creative writer, or a grad student who’s hit the wall and just needs a push to break through.

It’s not a vocation religion, for all its reliance on the written word, likes to formally recognize. One doesn’t get to be a saint because one can write (just ask this poor guy). But it’s something some of us can do, and if the trickle of messages I get from readers is any indication, it’s important. Really important. Maybe, in its own way, just as important as ordination… only in a very different form. A new form? A different form? A problematic form? A form. A form of life.

On the last day of office hours, a student asked me an interesting question: “Have you ever been happy with something you’ve written?” Because I had only 30 minutes of office hours left, and five students showed up looking for help with essays in that 30 minutes, I likely gave him a terrible answer. Let me try and amend that now (although I do wonder if this student will read this; I suspect my senior students are far too busy figuring out what the heck they’ll do with their lives post Berkeley).

What I said was something like “well, when my most recent essay was published, I was happy with it.” This was true, for several reasons. This particular essay went through a rather torturous route to publication: written for one magazine, rejected, re-written according to editor’s comments, rejected again (with a form letter), re-submitted elsewhere, accepted enthusiastically. So there was a lot of hurt involved, much of which was assuaged when people (including Andrew Sullivan) liked the essay.

But, reading it again post publication, I can see problems. There’s some sloppy grammar, some issues with structure, some problems with the central idea being clear or unclear. Every writer has a nit picking side, and when you teach writing, your nit picker becomes pickier and pickier with every student’s essay you mark up. The same is true for all of my books. I don’t go back and re-read them except when I’m preparing for an event, and the sensation is always mixed between, “huh, that’s pretty good” and “Jesus, how did that sentence survive editing?”

I think the idea of being happy with what we write is akin to knowing when an essay/book/story/poem is finished. What drives my work is impulse. When I’m obsessed with an idea, a person, or a thing, that obsession will not end until I’ve written about it. But unless I’m on deadline, when do I know I’m done? My mentor teacher in grad school knew the poet Robert Duncan, and one night at a party, she asked him how long it had taken him to write “My Mother Would be a Falconress.” Duncan only took a moment to tell her that single poem was one he’d worked on for thirty years.

If process is driven by obsession and we’re not talking about deadline driven writing, I suppose the end comes when the obsession wanes. Writing is like having a heavy crush. Getting to know the person who’s the object of the crush relives some of the obsession, exacerbates other parts of it. But if your luck leads you to be with them in the way you imagined, oftentimes that’s the end of the crush. When I am writing I can feel the impulse pulling and pushing me through to the image, the word, the phrase that says “you’re done.” And then, I’m done. Am I happy? Not usually, no. Exhausted, perhaps, and usually facing a messy, neglected house, but more than being happy, the end goal is to be satisfied. It’s not romantic to think “this thing I’ve written is okay,” but that is miles from the scathing self critique so many of us exercise as if it’s just something writers are supposed to do.

Re-reading that Duncan poem reminded me that like Duncan’s falconress, writing is always tethered by something: everyday responsibilities, self expectation, even the weather outside. Writing always has to circle back to where it began, when ironically, it often begins simply out of the desire to wheel and roam, and occasionally, to attack. None of those are synonyms for happiness. But they are synonyms for the search. That, I’m afraid, never ends. Yet that is why we keep writing.

180. That’s how much I weigh at the moment. At 5′ 11″, that puts me at a 25.1 BMI, tipping by .1 into the “overweight” category. I wear a size 12, mostly. Size Large.  My thighs are big. My ass is wide. There are rolls on my stomach, and my arms jiggle a bit.

I’ve never been on a diet.

It started innocuously, this train of thought. A friend of a friend posted something, as people you don’t really know do, on Facebook. “One of my life goals is to have my thighs not touch,” she wrote. I’ve read her stuff; she’s a good writer. It’s easy to tell she’s crazy smart, but the moment I read that, a sense of crushing disappointment washed over me. “Oh Jesus, not another one.”

Not another one what? Not another woman who makes thinness a life goal. Not another person who equates thinness with success, with self satisfaction, with “winning.” I wonder if she reads the number 180 and thinks I’m grotesque, disgusting, the epitome of everything wrong with society. It snaps back at me, this judgement, and projects onto my image of myself, and all the years I’ve placed intellect above body crumble away, and I know, I just know in my corpulent gut, that she probably thinks I’m fat.

Except: I don’t know her. Nor does she know me.

A week later, a friend reveals she’s on a diet. Then another friend. One has to lose the weight because of a medical condition. The other, I don’t know why. She always looks whip slim to me. A third friend and I go out for hot chocolate; this friend is a dancer, and I tell her the story of the woman who doesn’t want her thighs to touch, and my friend says, “but my thighs touch all the way to the knee.”

My mother talks a lot about her weight. It’s been a litany, my entire life, that my mother thinks she’s overweight. She’s never looked overweight to me; she looks like my mother. But I remember the food scales on the counter, the restrictive diets, the new wardrobes when the weight was lost. She just looked normal to me.

Perhaps I’m the one with the problem. Because everyone’s body, to me, pretty much looks normal. Except for the occasional glimpse of a girl at the gym who is so thin something is obviously wrong with her health, I don’t look much at other people’s bodies. Faces interest me. Clothes interest me. Walks. Hand gestures. Personality. How much of that is twisted by our self conceptions, the notion that whatever shape of body we’re born with is what people will judge about us: not our brains, not our compassion, not how well we can paint, or swim, or write.

Two or three times a week I go to the gym, and I detest it. It is boring, and it hurts, and… it’s boring as shit. It’s part of my therapy for my anxiety disorder: exercise helps keep it in check. I put on some podcast, some interview with someone smart, and run miles on an elliptical because of my bad knee. When people look at me, I look away, quickly. Or, if it’s That Time of the Month, I give them the Oakland stare: “What the fuck are you looking at?” Months ago I stopped walking into the weight room because it’s lined with mirrors, and while they’re ostensibly there for us to stare at ourselves, we really stare at one another. The men do it too: they pump up their upper halves so that their arms bulge away from their bodies while their legs are slim. And they stare at one another’s arms. The women stare at one another’s asses. I try to stare at the floor.

I’ve been going to the gym for five years. I have yet to lose a single pound.

When women meet one another after some time apart, the first thing we always say: “Did you lose weight?” My answer is always “no.” Because I haven’t. What if we said, instead: “Your face looks great.” “I like your earrings.” “Did you read that essay in the LARB?” What if we said, instead: “Your body is normal.” “Your body is yours.” “Your body is just one thing about you.”

Your body is just one thing about you. Just one thing.

My latest essay, “Searching for Bach” is up at Killing the Buddha, and it got some love from Andrew Sullivan at the Dish.

Two more essays of mine are forthcoming in America and Commonweal magazines.

Back in January, I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Hooks SJ for a podcast interview about Radical Reinvention, which is now up at The Jesuit Post. You should totally follow those guys on Facebook and Twitter.

Radical Reinvention is part of Nick Ripatrazone’s book-length examination of Catholic writing after Vatican II, The Fine Delight (and wow, what a lineup of writers to be included amongst!). Nick’s book can be ordered through that link to his publishers, and is just recently available. You can read a preview at The Millions.

Although most of my work of late seems to be focused on faith and feminism, I’m still a scholar of indie culture (hey, according to some very misguided ad people, Jesus was the original hipster), and that’s lately manifested in a chapter on zines in Ken Parille’s anthology of critical essays on the work of the great Daniel Clowes. Out in July, and you can peep a preview here.

It’s now officially official and internet official that I’m going to be the Writer in Residence in Creative Nonfiction in the St Mary’s College MFA program in the spring of 2014. WIRICN?

And, because this is more horn tooting than my modest by nature self can stand, one last thing. Sometime this summer, I’ll be saying more about something that is huge, exciting, and still in the works: I’m going to be editing a new magazine of women writing about faith.

Off to go do something humble now, like groveling.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha!  He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in. (Robert Service)

Struggling, of late, with the question of what it means to “fit in” to the literary “establishment.” This year, due to expense and my panel being passed over, I’m not at AWP, the year’s biggest gathering of writers and writing teachers, which agonizingly chooses to meet on the East Coast year after year, thus putting it out of reach for many West Coast writers (in 2014, it will be in Seattle, still not easy on the budget but a lot better than New York, Boston, or DC, AWP’s favored citties). AWP is hard for introverts anyway, as it places a high priority on one’s ability to schmooze, and being about as good a schmoozer as I am a dancer, I find AWP rather terrifying. The last time I went, I spent most of my time manning a table at the book fair and mumbling at people while I stared at the rug.

It’s been tough as well seeing how many times the same writers seem to win every single grant, prize, etcetera, and the combined queasy feelings of jealousy and resentment, combined with a kind of literary class rage (“Well, they went to such and such a super prestigious grad school, so of course they win everything, and I went to this relatively obscure school, so I’ll never win everything, and by the way, I grew up lower middle class: can you tell?”) means there’s a lot of bitterness swirling around in Oakestown at the moment.The VIDA count just arrived, and women are still woefully underrepresented in mainstream literary magazines. The annual literary prizes have all been handed out, and they mostly went to people from the same grad programs, all of whom seem to know one another, and hire one another for plum jobs, and they all go to Breadloaf together and hold hands and dance around in a circle while chanting “we are the chosen ones!” Or something. I have no idea what people do at Breadloaf, actually. Sometimes it feels like literary success is so far away as to by a mythological land, like Narnia.

My dude is a working musician. He plays gigs 3 or 4 nights a week, often for little or no money, but he keeps doing it because it’s his vocation. It is hard work. A few weeks ago, I stayed until the end of one of his gigs (usually I have to leave early to be up for work), and as we hauled drums out of a basement club and into the car, he said, “this is the part of my life you never see.” And yet, it’s a big part. It’s not the glamorous part of being onstage, or being adulated by groupies (he has them; I used to be one), or going on tour. It’s the shitty part of having a sore back the next day, or having to work a day job to pay bills.

From the outside, the lives of successful writers look like the good part of a musician’s life. The conferences. The grants. The fellowships to writing retreats in beautiful countries. The tenure. The big time publishers. The ridiculous bios listing off every single fellowship, grant, publication and residency. It looks amazing, right? And then you might read something one of these glamorous established people wrote and think… it’s not that great. Is that jealously talking, or are you right? Does the establishment occasionally reward mediocrity? Of course. Does that it also reward genius? On occasion.

Most of us will always be on the outside looking in. We’ll be in the audience at an AWP panel wondering why such and such got chosen when we didn’t. We’ll read the list of award winning books year after year and puzzle as to how they were chosen before we learn some author’s professor was on the selection committee. We’ll seethe and burn with resentment and every minute we spend doing that we will not be writing. That’s the saddest part of all.

I hate to admit this, but I had a horrible pity party the other day when I found out someone I know had lined up an interview for an amazing job, and another person I know had been nominated for a prestigious prize, and meanwhile, I was spending four weekends in a row grading essays. And I just started sobbing. It’s not fair, I whined. I work hard (true). And I write good books (also true). And very few people read them (also true). And some people get all the prizes and jobs (also true). And my dude heard this and held my hand and said, “you just need to do your own thing. Just do your own thing. And eventually people will catch up with it.”

He was right. While people are drinking and schmoozing their way through AWP, I’m out here in Oakland, putting together a project that a lot of people are excited about. And planning a book. And finishing two essays. It’s the equivalent of my dude schlepping drums up and down stairs at 2am, night after night, week after week. It’s the work. The work is what matters. If the establishment doesn’t give a fuck about the work, start your own establishment, one less concerned with credentials and who knows who. Instead of agonizing about not fitting in, do something that open people’s perspectives about what fitting in means.

That being said, yes, I’ll be at AWP next year. For God’s sake, someone please ask me to be on a panel.

*image from Daniel Nester’s hilarious AWP Bingo Card. The 2013 edition is here. Note the square that says WRONG ASS KISSED.

Halfway through the Conspiracy of Beards show I was at on Friday night, my friend, who works for NASA, informed me that a meteorite had just been spotted over San Francisco. The show was in the basement of a store in the Mission, and my only thought was that if San Francisco were destroyed by a meteorite, we might not even know, and the guys in the Beards could have gone on singing forever while the city caved in above us.

That’s pretty much a metaphor for the last month of my life. Work work work work work. Teaching is a life giver and often a life eater. I’ve been devoured. Some other things have happened: I’m done with an essay I’ve been working on since December, I’m reading four books at the same time (including my second attempt at what Henry James called “the loose, baggy monster“, which I’ve decided to try and finish before the end of Lent… and I’m on page 12). Next month I’ll head off to New York to read at the College of Saint Rose and catch up with friends and family. I’ve been devoured, but I’m still here. And somewhere way, way in the background, simmering away, is the foundation for what I hope will be my next book. When I’ll have time to work on it is unclear. But, at the very least, the ideas are there. That’s a consolation.

I did an interview for the CBC (Canadian NPR) show DNTO, which aired on January 4th. You can listen to the podcast here. I come in at about 33 minutes.

My essay on Evangelicals, faith, shame, and naked emotion in Berkeley appeared this week at one of my favorite websites, Killing the Buddha (“For people made anxious by churches, for people embarrassed to be caught in the spirituality section of a bookstore and for people both hostile and drawn to talk of God.”)

Next Tuesday the 22nd I’ll be driving through (or being driven through — I have a phobia of freeway driving, really) the Caldecott Tunnel to speak at my alma mater, Saint Mary’s College. SMC has a January Term Speaker Series, and they were kind enough to ask me to come expound on faith in faithless times. More info about the talk here.

Food poisoning hit me on Christmas eve eve (someone told me once that December 23rd should be called “Little Christmas”, and I’m not sure if I buy that, but I do like it). Eight hours of violent vomiting and other unspeakable things later, I was a mumbling husk, barely able to walk from one room to another, feverish, aching, purged of the rot but with nothing much left.

It’s an interesting way to end the year.

I’ve been sick on and off since October: one cold riding in after another, ensuing drips and coughs and headaches. It’s demoralizing, never really feeling well for that long of a duration, and it’s put me into a rather foul, gloomy frame of mind even though it’s also been a rather lovely holiday here in Oakland. Just enough rain, just cold enough for layers, family and friends being kind about my bleary state on Christmas. It’s odd too that I began the year sick and in pain; I had back to back major dental surgeries in January, and spent the first weeks of the semester teaching with my cheek sewn to my gums, occasionally stopping class to go spit out blood and fraying bits of surgical stitch.

On top of the seemingly endless cycle of viruses and toxic takeout, the writing life has been pretty unpleasant of late. A number of short pieces I wrote on spec this year (spec is when you pitch an idea to a magazine and they give you permission to go forward with writing, but without guarantee that they’ll actually publish it — and in these tightass times in publishing this is becoming the norm) came back with curt and even rude rejection notices. An editor made fun of my work on a social media platform. Book sales have been — as far as I can tell — sluggish. My editor quit just before the book came out.  I did not make one single year end best of list, possibly because no newspapers managed to review my book. I’ve had nasty hate emails and trolls on Twitter and Facebook, people who want me to go to hell for the things I’m writing (well, the ones getting published anyway).

And, you know, for all of that, I’m glad I did it. For every reading I did on tour where three people showed up, one of those people had gone out of her way to drive to meet me, to talk, to communicate. For every hateful email I’ve received, five more told me I’d done something important — reached them, given them hope, made them think. For every blogger who compared me to Satan another blogger became a real friend, someone I could sit and eat a meal with. For every time something I wrote got a nasty rejection, someone else told me I could write, and write well. For every comment calling my work sloppy and messy, another one said something kind. When I complained and cried about not getting reviewed, getting turned down by Litquake, someone else I know getting a coveted review, someone else I know getting a job I wanted, whatever the petty gripes and bitchings of the writing life were, someone straightened me out, told me to shut up, reminded me to be grateful.

I’ve been in a lot of groups of people this year, talking about faith, talking about the irrationality of believing in the unseen. It’s terrifying. It changes the direction your life is going so fast its worse than whiplash. And once you find other people who’ve been through the same thing, the unseen becomes seen in them. To every person who wrote me, or came to a reading, or reviewed the book (oh you precious few… thank you), or took me out of the house to remind me there’s a whole bunch of ungodly beautiful shit in the world: God or whatever your preferred term or no God at all and that’s fine bless you.

Two years ago, in the cold first days of the new year, I was in Assisi, sitting in the tomb of Saint Francis. You get a handful of times in your life, if you’re lucky, when you are positively aware that you are loved, even if that love is invisible to everyone outside of yourself. Assisi gave me that. So did you. So did this sickly, difficult, bizarre, terrifying, joyful, life-changing year.

“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” William James

Two strange things in the last couple of days. Yesterday I went into a studio in the city* to record a sequence for the CBC show DNTO. A producer contacted me out of nowhere because they’re doing an episode on reinvention. “You’ve probably never heard of this program,” she said. It was true. But having been raised by a Canadaphile (at one point my parents were even considering immigrating to Canada, but they were turned down for being potential subversives), I know the CBC pretty well. Recording went fine, and then I walked up to the train and turned onto 6th street South of Market. 6th street is kind of like skid row. It’s where homeless people congregate. You see fights on the street, discarded needles, broken bottles, vomit. And I just kept walking on 6th street instead of turning. After spending an hour talking to a radio producer about faith and compassion, it’s bullshit to avoid human pain. But that’s what we usually do. We avoid 6th street and East Oakland and People’s Park because that’s looking at pain. We avoid sick people and talking about the guns that massacred children because that’s pain. But the last few years of my life have taught me that if you’re going to practice compassion you have to look at pain to see the potential for transforming pain into something else.

The day before I did something stupid and waded into a conversation about Christians on Facebook. Normally I skirt around getting into debates on social media; they never go anywhere, and there are so many trolls and angry people who find the safety of distance gives them permission to finger point and blanket paint people they’d never have a conversation with in real time. And I said something innocuous like “not all Christians are Mike Huckabee.” And that caused someone to flip out. In rapid succession this person blamed Christians for pretty much everything wrong in society and then pointed the finger at me in particular. Because as a Catholic, I am apparently the same thing as an NRA member, a fascist, and a pornographer. Because, as a Catholic, I apparently think everyone who is not a Catholic is going to hell.

I don’t have kids, but I am an aunt to five nieces and one nephew. Two of the nieces and one nephew are Jewish. The other two nieces aren’t Catholic. I live with and love a guy who’s agnostic. My mother and most of my siblings are no longer practicing Christians. My oldest friend is an atheist. In fact, all but four or five of my close friends are nonbelievers and the ones who do believe break every single rule in the book. And if I spent one minute of any day of my life thinking those people were going to hell I would prefer that God sent me there instead if I even believed in a version of hell where people were eternally punished (I don’t). Let me say this clearly in spite of my sleep deprivation: I don’t think ANYONE  is going to hell. The God I believe in doesn’t think ANYONE belongs in hell except maybe Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Jim Jones… you get the idea. If you want to understand how I understand hell you should watch this Stephen Colbert clip because this is pretty much it.

This is what I’m trying to day: I understand why people hate Christians, especially right now when so many of us are saying really, really stupid shit in the media. But there are thousands, maybe millions of us who just want to walk down 6th street, look people in the eye, feed them, talk to them, bandage their feet. There are thousands, maybe millions of us who marry nonbelievers, give birth to nonbelievers, teach nonbelievers, feed nonbelievers, love nonbelievers. And would we do that if we hated those people, if we wanted them to scream and burn and hurt?

This is Sister Jeannine Gramick. She has continued to fight for marriage equality in spite of being censured by the Vatican.

This is Sister Joan Chittister (nice”wanted” poster, right?). She has been a lifelong advocate for human rights, and has repeatedly questioned the church stances on birth control and abortion to the point that the Vatican threatened her with excommunication.

This is Sister Simpone Campbell, who has spent most of her life working with people in poverty. You may have heard about this bus tour she’s been on. She and thousands of other sisters were called heretics for lobbying in support of health care reform.

This is Dorothy Day. She was a writer, an anarchist, and a revolutionary. She’s also soon to be a saint.

None of these women think you’re going to hell. Neither do I.