Sunday, My I-Don’t-Have-To-Run Day

At my house, Kari and I try our best to take turns sleeping in on the weekend. It usually works out better for her as she can sleep on a bed of nails in the hot summer sun while being serenaded by the Mighty Sounds of Maryland. Me, I wake up when I hear the cat jump into the sink. (I race out to the kitchen in an attempt to get that miserable beast into the garbage disposal, but she’s still, at 16, just a little too quick.) So if I can’t sleep in, I at least relish quiet times. I mean, I love my family, but I think that a few chance moments of quiet and calm isn’t much to ask for. Isn’t it?

(Yes, I hear the crickets too.)

The past few weeks my quiet time has been on Sunday. I get up to walk the dog, Kari gets up to deal with the cat (again, in a different way than I might, but it is her cat), and we climb back in bed for five minutes until Josie stirs and comes in to join us.

Then, at 6:30 or so, Josie gets antsy for breakfast so the girls get up – and that includes all the pets, as I’m the only male in the house – and I get to lay abed for a little while.

The last few months, the routine for the human girls has changed. Kari and Josie have started going to church. Kari found a Unitarian Universalist church in Bethesda, which has a great Sunday school for Josie. Josie is very excited to go to what she calls “her class”, which is held during the first service, so it’s convenient for Kari. It’s better than simply dumping Josie in a nursery, as Josie is actually doing churchy projects while Kari gets to meet people she finds both nice and genuine. There are worse reasons for joining a church than the Sunday school – it was how I ended up a Lutheran, Missouri Synod growing up instead of a Methodist. The Lutheran church had a better Sunday school. I’m still recovering.

Leaving aside Kari’s struggle with the theology of Unitarianism, which she is attending to by talking with the ministry, it is a place that has thrown open the arms of welcome wide to both my wife and my daughter. There is no question they would do the same with me.

But it’s not the theology of Unitarianism that I struggle with – it’s the struggle with theology and religion in general.

You see, God and I have not been on close speaking terms ever since Cathleen got sick. I always felt like suffering unto Him the little children and all that meant that God would look out for children, look out for my child. What that ended up meaning is that He looked out for her as she crawled through the gates of heaven.

If you’ve never experienced something like having a desperately, critically sick child – and I hope with all the fervent I can muster that you never, ever do – you go through some of the same stages that someone dying does. I stayed stuck on anger. When people said to me, “I’m praying for Cathleen,” or “I lit a candle for her,” or “I have a friend who is praying for her at Lourdes,” or “The spirits of my family are dancing for her” – all of which I heard – I couldn’t be grateful or gracious. My reaction was more along these lines: when my wife’s grandmother said “We are praying for her so hard,” in my exhausted, fraught, and already mournful state, I responded, “If that makes you feel better, then great. It’s not doing shit for Cathleen.”

I know that there is the whole business, too, of asking God for things, and that sometimes He says no. Well, my response to that was that anyone who says no to something like that is a prick, and I had no time for that. I had to work to get my daughter well.

She didn’t get well.

Since then, I have not been able to remotely participate in a church setting. In the 3 ½ years since Cathleen died, I have been in a church three times: once for her funeral, once for Josie’s baptism (the same church, incidentally, and I had a panic attack while I was in there), and a couple weeks ago when I worked on a show at a church in Washington. Inevitably, though, Kari and I had a discussion of raising and exposing Josie to a church. I told Kari that she would have to do that without me because I couldn’t help teach something I couldn’t feel. With no faith, I’d simply be a hypocrite.

As it turns out, Josie has really taken to the church. She loves the activities and the people that she meets, and Kari is starting to feel very comfortable. The theology isn’t bothering her as much ever since a wise friend said to her, “It’s all God.”

I love my quiet time on Sunday, but I love my family more. But I can’t take the next step. I haven’t been able to join them.

Now, I have no problem with any religion. I have a problem with God (and, to be honest, a huge problem with some of His and His son’s followers who pervert his message for their own agenda). I understand those who tell me that God is bigger than one man’s petty beef, and I am a firm believer in a heaven, since I can’t imagine going the rest of eternity and never seeing Cathleen again. But being in houses of God makes me feel uncomfortable, like I’m listening to a language I once could speak but now barely understand.

But I also appreciate that there may be a mystery that I can’t see at work.

Last week, as Kari and Josie were coming home, Kari told me that Josie told her that she wanted Daddy AND Mommy to go to church. And when I asked Josie “Do you want Daddy to come to church with you?”, her little face lit up as she nodded.

But what might seal the deal is that on Feb. 14 – Cathleen’s birthday – Kate Braestrup is going to be speaking at the church. She’s a Unitarian chaplain to Maine game wardens who has written profoundly about grief and loss.

I may go, I may not. But if I do, I am wondering whom I am giving the bigger chance to: that particular church, God, or me. If I go, I will probably know. And I will then understand who deserves that chance.

But then, what will be quieter on Sunday: my external world or my internal world?