November 8, 2009
Sunday

In the beginning there was a question. In the end, the question gets answered. . . . I am in love with hope.
                    — Mitch Albom, b. 1958
                        American author

Since I left the classroom, more than ten years now, (and for one academic year — my sabbatical year — before that), I have attended a Thursday morning women’s study group called Faith with Friends. Led by our woman pastor, we meet September to May in a classroom in our church building to discuss matters of faith and a host of other things. We always have some focus (currently it’s a study of the creedal statements we use in our liturgy), but the discussion always ranges widely, touching on parenting, social norms. community issues, personal matters. We pray for each other and for those we love, naming especially those who have a current special need. We never gossip, there is always food, and on the happiest of days there are babies or toddlers or preschoolers present. My Thursday morning study group is so important to me that I miss it only for the most compelling of reasons, such as being in Wyoming or Georgia for a writing residency, or the hospital with a broken leg.

The study of the creeds that we have undertaken this season has been a source of some concern for me. Compared to the beliefs of many of the women I sit around the table with, my stance seems Deist at best, heretical at worst. I believe in a God who cannot be adequately described with the only tools we have — human language and human cognition. I don’t believe in magic or miracles, although there are things I can’t explain, such as the mother of Lynn’s best friend suddenly appearing in the crowd at the Phoenix airport as Lynn sat stranded and uncertain while I lay in a Baltimore hotel room praying for her and wishing I did believe in miracles. The mother had been assigned to the same rescheduled flight, and they became comfort and company for each other. My friends, most of them, believe in a God who intervenes, who makes cancerous tumors spontaneously shrink and stops runaway buses harmlessly at the roadway’s edge. Not always, of course, and one can only wonder why a God who can intervene doesn’t, doesn’t stay the hand of the Fort Hood shooter or scoop three young women out of a pond in North Dakota.

So over the last six weeks or so I’ve been taking a hard look at who I am and what I believe and how I am living what faith I have. I have felt estranged from my church family, not because of anything they did, but because of some cloud of doubt and self-loathing that has beset me. Perhaps I’ve actually felt estranged from myself. I have pondered ways that I might get back to where I once belonged.

Pastor Cathy, the woman who leads our Thursday morning group, gave the sermon this morning. Lynn was with me, having popped in yesterday for a random, and all too rare, overnight visit. She has some cosmic questions of her own, about life, and love, and how best to live and move and have her being in this world. She thinks I might have some answers.

Cathy told an anecdote from Mitch Albom’s latest book, Have a Little Faith, and ended her meditation on Mark 12:38-44 (in which Jesus condemns the pompous scribes and exalts the widow who disregards her poverty and gives of what little she has) with the passage I have used as an epigraph.

I have not read any of the work of Mitch Albom, and am not likely to soon, since the book Cathy described is nonfiction, and I am all about fiction this year. But I did listen carefully, and tried to take to heart the idea that even those of us with the wobbliest and most uncertain of faiths can find the answers to our questions and the solutions to our problems.

Because I do have questions. It’s another November, and time for another biopsy. Last year, I didn’t report my experience until it was all over. Disclosure always carries risks, and why stir up emotions if there is, indeed, nothing to get stirred up about? Much better to go through everything, think of clever ways to tell the story, and be able to report a happy ending.

This year it’s a little different. The problem is in a different area, and its solution will surely require an intervention more complicated than “OK for now, come back in six months for another study.” As my doctor said, this is not a notice to put my affairs in order (although that can’t hurt and it might help), but it might be wise to tell the people you care about, and who care about you and perhaps depend on you (like Lynn, who couldn’t remember yesterday where I keep the paper towels). I’ve told some of those people already. But why not tell the world? Who knows what kind of benevolent energy I can access by doing so?

The diagnostic procedure is scheduled for Monday, November 16. And my next mammogram, to investigate that other pesky problem, is set for the next day, so there might be lots of news! Unlike the mammogram results, information about this new concern will not be available for three or four weeks (I didn’t ask why).

I can’t endure a month of uncertainty. I was rattled enough last year with only ten days between recommendation and results. I’ve made a plan for moving through these next weeks with hope, and with joy. I have books to read, and essays and a novel to write, and gallivants to undertake, like the one to New Jersey in January that I have to believe I will be able to accomplish rather than be held captive by tedious treatments and recoveries.

I am in love with hope and have more than a little faith.

*********

The NaBlos of the Past

2008: Something Inside Him — My first visit to an art museum came my second year in college, when my art appreciation class took a weekend trip to New York. I was shocked at a photograph in an exhibit at the Guggenheim of what appeared to be two teenage boys that was nevertheless labeled “Two Young Women.” When I went on much the same trip my senior year I was a little more sophisticated, and by then had actually become acquainted with young women who preferred to look like, and sometimes pass for, teenage boys, and was not so easily shocked.

2007: Dress for Success — Among the pieces [I’m taking to Wyoming] is a mock turtleneck in a soft and drapey turquoise silk and cotton. It fits close to the body and yet when I have it on I don’t feel schlubby, I don’t think I look, as my grandmother and mother said of unfortunate get-ups, like “a sack tied in the middle.” I was wearing it the day last November that I walked a landscape from my youth and felt a certain energy come into me. When I have it on . . .  I feel like I can do anything.

2006: I did not post anything on this day in 2006.

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