I've accumulated a whole cluster of messy feelings lately...perhaps part of being an intuitive creature, my soul feels like a high-scoring game of Katamari, collecting all of the many random things it passes through on its way from here to there. I'm a prisoner to the everyday grind: I need a jolt. The excess will fall off and I will climb gingerly over it and out, surprisingly nimble and small.
Or perhaps, like barnacles and boats, I must name the stowaways, sit down in the midst of them, and pry them loose with a knife and the assiduous application of effort.
*Last week, I went to the Alpha House, part of the Interfaith Hospitality Network of Washtenaw county. Objectives: cook dinner, serve dinner, clean up dinner, occupy chidren after dinner. I became frustrated and a little aggressive when my fellow workers (fellow ministers of the Gospel of Christ, to my thinking) sat down to eat dinner as a unit unto themselves, completely segregated from the Alpha House residents we had come to serve. I and another leader intentionally broke this trend. It was deeply uncomfortable, but, I believe, correct. After cleaning up the remains of dinner, I went downstairs where the rest of the group were playing with the children. As I walked through the door, exhausted and a little disgruntled, a 13-month-old girl toddled up to me immediately, and raised her arms, asking to be picked up. Stunned, I obliged.
I was instantly filled with incoherent, emotionally unfocused thoughts. All of the children there were utterly needy for love and attention, but also utterly unashamed to ask. I always find the experience of serving others to be deeply polarizing to my own soul. On one hand, there is something so right about the humility and faith of children who know and freely acknowledge their need. On the other, it is desperately sad that, although children are often shy with strangers, these children want to be loved and held so much that they are willing to run to any empty-handed stranger. I'm not saying that this is indicative of any specific kind of future: just that their type of receptiveness arises out of deep, tragically unfulfilled need.
*I also attended my first ever therapy session this past week. I was intent upon speaking only about my performance anxiety (as related only to my Jazz Theory class), but was pressed to speak also about wider issues fueling insecurity and sadness. My emotional response was (and is) disproportionate and irrational. To the same extent that I became vulnerable I became defensively angry. This, of course, speaks volumes. I just don't want to hear it.
Even as I write so impassively about it, I am fighting the desperate urge to turn on the TV and return to comfortable oblivion. The defects rooted deeply inside me are especially troublesome this week.
*The weather has been spectacular for February, and the thaw has been timely. I must connect with God through nature more than I realized: seeing the moon and the stars clearly in the night sky in the midst of an insistent, but warm, breeze helped me experience and understand God's nearness and existence in a way that has been sorely lacking since the snow began to fall.
*Every aspect of my life, interior and exterior, is about producing, synthesizing and creating. Is this how I am made or simply what I am being made to do? My spiritual life is indivisible from my job and my extracurriculars. Attempting to do full-time vocational ministry while also a full-time student means that everything I do is double-dipping. I cannot (despite untold attempts) sit down to read scripture without instinctively trying to fashion it into a brick that I can use to build liturgies or messages or songs. I am a collector by nature. Strengths Finder called this trait "Input." And yet I live in a constant state of output. This is deeply destabilizing to my soul. And I mean deeply.
*PrayUM's 40 Days of Prayer are ending in about a week. I'm tired. In forty days or fewer I've moved into a greater dependence on God, but also a greater deficit of personal ability to engage with these ministries authentically from an emotional standpoint. I feel like a spiritual mother: aggressively charged with protecting and sustaining this child, but to an extent that sometimes the emotions take a backseat, and my job is just to exist with a constant degree of insistence, imperturbably weathering the frustrations until the breakthrough comes on its own. I am very tired. Not the "I want to stop doing this" kind, but the "I wish it were easier" kind. I know that my sacrifice of passion now paves the way for many passionate people in the future. But my compulsive, Nehemiah-esque, gap-filling tendencies are sources of such exhaustion.
*Today, I started Monvee. Not because I necessarily chose to (in the interest of full disclosure, I was, and still am, rather wary of it), but because I am on the church staff, and we are about to do a full-scale implementation of Monvee curriculum over the next several months. I suppose it was alright to take their assessment and see what they had to say about me, both positive and negative. But, I'll admit, I sort of flipped out when it came time for the recommendations. I realized how thoroughly uncomfortable I am addressing my wounds and flaws (though I have no problem casually admitting, and therefore minimizing, them). I have no desire whatsoever to churn the waters of my soul. I know full well what will arise. It is horrendously ugly, soaked through with bile, disfigured, perverse, macabre. And then, beneath that, it is pitiful, self-indulgent, shameful, wounded, and tiny.
The last time I indulged my feelings I spent 4 months lying on the couch watching Grey's Anatomy for up to six hours at a time, and gained more weight than I care to admit. I suppress my feelings because that is how I survive. As regards my flaws, we live and let live. To my new therapist and to Monvee, this stuff only JUST settled. I really can't stir it all up again.
*I dropped my voice lesson this week. Indeterminately icky feelings about that. Voice lessons are good for me, and I grew a lot as a vocalist over the last year. But I dread going each week. So I dropped. It's February. If I can stay in college, and also avoid turning into a spiraling black hole of despair, I've done quite well.
Anyway....Katamari.
As Julian of Norwich said, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
And as Nathan Clair added, "Yes. But they shall pass through a major cluster on their way to wellness."
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