full steam

Novena-of-gratitude day 2: After my guy friends should really come my grrrl friends, and they'll be here! But today we visited the model train club's annual open days and, well, is there anything cooler than riding a tiny steam train through a lovingly-created landscape of tiny switches and bridges and tunnels? So much geekiness. Made me so happy. 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- Howard Thurman

Choo choo! (Do the tiny trains have tiny steam whistles? Oh yes they do!) This taste of heaven brought to you by the dedicated members of the Dampfmodellclub der Schweiz.

the space between

Ok, my writing attempts are all ending in the junk heap so I'm going to power through to the end of the spiritual exercises with a Pentecost-novena-gratitude-practice.

Day 1: I'm thankful for my guy friends. I crave male energy - not the mansplaining kind, and not the kind that mysteriously can't see or hear me, and not the kind that clearly feels more comfortable with my husband - but rather the kind that was plentiful in my misspent tech youth, the kind that can see me and hear me and may even occasionally think I have something to contribute. Boy is that hard to come by as a Swiss housewife... But not impossible. This week I had coffee with FOUR male friends! Like four separate coffees! I'm not even sure how that happened. But it did. And it was cool.

Matthias, formerly the priest at my parish in Zurich and now in deepest Switzerland, celebrated an Ascension Mass accompanied by three (3!) yodeling groups. And then we had a coffee. :-)

duality

Oof, it's been a while. I think I'm so used to Lenten projects ending at Easter that I lost all steam after that. And I'm currently rather down on the church project in general. And as for the Swiss project, well...

We were in the U.S. for a week during Chris's spring break. The day we flew home, we had some time in the morning to collect American goodies to bring home, and he was on the verge of tears in the ice cream aisle of the supermarket, "why can't WE have a freezer big enough to hold a quart of ice cream?"

Or, you know, more than two reliable flavors?

One can well argue - and I do try, in my head - that having a freezer big enough to hold several quarts of ice cream and access to a supermarket big enough to sell us dozens of flavors - not to mention the car culture that makes it possible - is precisely the sort of indulgent, unhealthy, disasterous-for-the-environment excess that we should be trying to tear ourselves away from. But on a gut level, I'm right there crying in the aisle with him. Things just feel so much easier in the U.S. It's not just the language (though of course that's a big one), it's the feeling of dynamism, the friendly instructions instead of condescending notices...and something about immigrants that I can't quite put my finger on. Here in Switzerland I'm maybe more likely to hear foreign languages when I'm out and about, but the pressure to integrate-or-leave and the social punishment for not doing so is relentless. And the idea that immigrants might contribute something other than labor to Swiss society? Forget it. It's not a melting pot here, it's a forge. 'Cause we've got everything figured out already, weisch?

But of course I'd be crying if I had leave here and move back to the U.S., too. Probably not in the aisles of the grocery store, but definitely on the train whisking me efficiently to the airport.

My self image is currently an amorphous blob. Am I old or young? Fit or slobby? Helpful or useless? Motivated or lazy? Trusting or critical? What is my profession? Where is home? And is there a way out of this soup? I don't know.

I suspect that wasting my wild and precious life scrolling Instagram is not a way out of this soup. So I'm trying to start a practice of picking up a book first thing in the morning, just to read a page or two. I started with The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, which I loved (and will write about sometime, I hope?) and I've now moved on to the 2002 reprint of the 1967 (!) classic (?) The Supper of the Lamb, by Robert Farrar Capon, which leapt off the shelf at Barnes & Noble One Loudon into my carry-on bag for the plane. It's solid and encouraging and makes me laugh. Perhaps in defense of my old, slobby, useless, lazy, critical self:

There are more important things to do than hurry.
     That, of course, has always been true--even when most men had to work so hard that contemplation seemed a luxury. The day after tomorrow, however, it will be truer still. If the prophets of automation and cybernation are right, leisure, not labor, is going to be the normal condition of man. Men will become philosophers, artists, and poets just to stay sane: Contemplation will be the only defense against drowning in our own spare time. Even now, the doctrine of justification by work is difficult to defend. Jobs are shorter and more boring than they used to be. It's hard to believe that five hours a day of button-pushing and paper-shuffling are the heart and soul of human existence. Heaven help us, then, in the bright new day of guaranteed income and the twenty-hour week. The grim old religion of salvation by rushing will go bankrupt altogether, and we shall go straight out of our minds--unless we learn to sit still.
     The habit of contemplation, therefore--the ability to sit down in front of something and care enough to let it speak for itself--cannot be acquired soon enough. Accordingly, I invite you, too, to put your feet up on the stove. If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks us why we are wasting time, we shall tell him we are busy getting the seats of our pants properly shined up for the millennium.

"Tire Fire" by Josh Weilepp, part of the Model Railroad Extravaganza at the Ashburn Library, brought to you by Northern Virgina NTRAK.

And real trains in Switzerland. Sometimes I'm doing my best to be miserable and the sunset looks like this... 

voice

Love, decidedly not the exclusive property of church

Another video I've watched a couple of times recently is this one, in which Carol Gilligan and Terry Real talk about the socialization of kids into the patriarchy. Their theory is that children start whole and end up as unequal halves: by age 7, boys have learned to project invulnerability by suppressing their emotional intelligence; by 11, girls have learned protect the boys' vulnerability by suppressing their own voices. So we have men who don't know what they feel and women who don't say what they know. 

Meanwhile, in spiritually exercising news: in the week before Easter, the writers of the exercises (understandably, given the sheer volume of material during Holy Week) decided to skip both the crucifixion and Easter morning and chose instead Luke 7:36-50 as meditation material.

Jesus is having dinner in the house of a Pharisee and this woman-of-ill-repute comes in, wets his feet with her tears (!), dries them with her hair, and annoints them with oil. His host wonders to himself what kind of a prophet would let a "woman like that" touch him. Jesus reads his mind and teaches him, parable and all: this woman is more grateful than you because she's sinned more. Then he turns to her and says, "your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you, go in peace!" And, scene.

So to summarize: Jesus lets the woman debase herself at his feet without comment, then he has a conversation with the men around the table *about* her, then he dismisses her. She doesn't get a name or a voice or a story, and we don't learn what she made of Jesus's words. 

The intention for the week was "Please allow me to believe that Jesus also says to me: your sins are forgiven!" 

Just, ugh.

What if the woman didn't need Jesus's forgiveness? What if she had been allowed to say what she knew? What if she *did* say what she knew, not in words but in actions: that the men in the room and their entitled judgements and their theological debates were just petty noise, meaningless in the face of what he would suffer? What if she was falling to pieces and anointing him not because he was the Son of God, but simply because he was human, the son of Mary, a friend?

I don't know. Except I *do* know, and I know that I'm tired of the spaces where some people get to speak and others don't, where we studiously avoid the obvious questions in the room, where big emotions are treated as suspect, where rules are more important than people. And ironically maybe the realization that this struggle has been going on for centuries (milennia!) is helping me feel better about being so lost in it. I keep landing on the Glennon Doyle quote-slash-lyric from We Can Do Hard Things: "We've stopped asking directions to places they've never been." There's nothing new under the sun and/but we've never been in this exact place before, so let's see what we can do from here?

journeying

Easter brunch: Chris decorated the lamb cake, Caroline braided the bread, and my friend Belinda contributed the gorgeous eggs. Sadly, one of the chocolate bunnies later fell victim to a dramatic incident involving the morning sun and some left-open blinds.

Happy Easter! We couldn't have ordered better weather this year. The time changed on March 29, so at the beginning of Holy Week the mornings were suddenly noticeably darker, and the weather was cold and dreary. And then over the course of the week things got better and better until on Easter morning the sun was out and the flowers were blooming and the temperature was downright pleasant. I dragged the family to the Protestant church's new monthly English service and we sang my favorite Easter hymn (springeth green! only for some reason we sang 'arising green'! but whatever!) and then we went home and had a yummy brunch (with an actual guest!) and since then things have been sunny and lovely. And I'm feeling surprisingly good, as in physically much less run-down than usual: because of the weather? because I'm avoiding my problems? something else? Unclear, but I do hope this sticks around for a while. 

Meanwhile...I've been occupied by this video, in which Amy McPhie Allebest summarizes this book, in which Maureen Murdock proposes a female counterpart to Joseph Campbell's presumptively-male-privileged "hero's journey." Murdock, a student of both Jung and Campbell, saw in her therapy clients an archetypically feminine "heroine's journey" that differs in important ways from the experience of the hero. Her story goes something like this: 

A girl notices that the masculine is valued by sociedy: men are the winners in the game of life. She therefore distances herself from the feminine and particularly from her mother. As she grows up and becomes an adult, our heroine learns to play the game according to its patriarchal rules. Maybe she pursues a traditionally male profession; maybe takes on a more stereotypically feminine role: in any case, she faces the trials of life and - this is important - she succeeds! At least until she doesn't. Because her success has come at the price of betraying important parts of herself, and deep down that feels like a hollow victory. Eventually, she faces a crisis and finds that she cannot continue as she was. She "meets the goddess" and is inspired to reconnect with her abandoned feminine/creative side, with her mother and her female lineage. At the same time she must challenge and reform the internalized patriarch that has kept her overworked and under-fulfilled for so long. And stop projecting her frustration with the patriarchy onto the real men in her life. If she manages all this, she finds a balance between her own feminine and masculine sides and...it's not clear to me how or whether the newly-enlightened heroine finds her place in society but I guess if she doesn't get burned at the stake, she is able from her newly-integrated state to effect some positive change so that her own daughters and granddaughters don't have to repeat the journey?

Like Allebest, I don't *want* to relate to this story, but if the shoe fits... The part about projecting my frustration with patriarchy onto real men hit particularly hard, because that's been my struggle with feminism all along: every time I've tried to look at the world through a feminist lens I've gotten so frustrated and angry that I can't function. Once in my youth I read some feminist literature and then went to see a stupid movie, and I got so incensed by the fact that my boyfriend was *not* incensed by the portrayal of women in the stupid movie that we had a huge fight and broke up. Poor guy was completely blindsided. These days, the Patriarch and his bros the Capitalist and Catholic Shame still dominate my internal conversation far more than I'd like them to. Have I met the goddess? Maybe. I'm doing a better job of making women friends lately, but I still notice myself seeking male attention and approval any time I can. If this is the journey, I've still got a ways to go.

Meanwhile, in Seattle: my brother spent his Easter afternoon looking at old pictures with my dad, and they decided that my grandmother in her youth looked surprisingly like me. I think it's mostly the hair, but I see what they mean... I never got to know her personally. What would feeling connected to a female lineage be like?

meanwhile, out the window...

Again this year, the grocery store ran a special on travel passes - $55 rather than the usual $75 for a day pass that covers (nearly) all the trains, buses, and boats in Switzerland. And again this year, I asked for and received one for my birthday. I decided to punch it on the day I had to travel down to Chur to receive the news about my assessment. If I knew I had something to look forward to afterwards, I figured, the news wouldn't hit so hard.

The reality was more like: if you're going to be a depressed zombie anyway, you might as well be a depressed zombie while enjoying the beautiful scenery and eating too many chocolate cookies. But, like, life could be a lot worse.

the itinerary

sometime after 0700: leave the house and walk to the Altstetten train station, intending to take the first available train to Zürich HB, have time to grab a coffee and a treat, and continue on the 0807 train to Chur. 

0731: catch the RE12 train to HB, arrival 0737. On the way notice that there is an 0738 train to Chur...is it worth running to see if I can catch it? Probably not, but doesn't hurt to try...it's only a couple platforms over...

0738: after running by the four first-class cars, quite sure the train was going to pull away from the station at any moment...made it! IC3 to Chur, arrival 0852

...but my appointment isn't until 10. Install myself in the Manor Restaurant with an Ovomaltine and a croissant. Try to breathe.

0958 and 30 seconds: approach the theology school in Chur. 

one hour and 15 minutes later: emerge from the theology school in Chur, not feeling particularly adventurous. But it's so pretty here...

Chur: the view from the bus station over the train station. A gorgeous day to go adventuring.

1155: RE7 to Disentis/Mustér, arrival 1309 followed by a bit of loitering around Disentis, where there's a cloister with a boarding school and also a random carillon and also a crystal museum with some very selective hours.

Disentis: illustrated by, or at least in the style of, Alois Carigiet

1415: R45 to Andermatt, arrival 1621. Up into the mountains, which are white and icy. Nearly every station has a ski lift next to it. At one point a squad of Swiss Army Rangers tramps on, still in ski boots, each carrying a regulation backpack and ice axe. 

my pictures out the train window aren't great but the views were predictably stunning

1629: R44 to Göschenen, arrival 1644. A short ride down a steep hill with a glimpse of the Teufelsbrücke.

1646: Bus 401 to Flüelen / Hauptplatz, arrival 1750. The bus winds its way down through sun and shadow, letting me off by the always-stunning Urnersee. 

hydropower! at what I believe is the Kraftwerk Amsteg

the Urnersee

Flüelen

1709: S2 to Brunnen, arrival 1720. The plan had been to take this train all the way to Zug, and from there back to Altstetten, but...I wasn't ready to give up, I guess. I thought I might walk to the lake again in Brunnen because the ten minutes in Flüelen hadn't given me nearly enough water time. But the sun was getting low...and then the public transport app made me an offer I couldn't refuse: a route back to Zürich with no fewer than four (4) transfers. What's a day pass for, if not this?

1726: Bus 502 to Schwyz / Zentrum / Zone A, arrival 1742

The Mythen ("the myths"), looming large over Schwyz

1745: Bus 507 from Schwyz / Zentrum / Zone D to Sattel / Krone, nominal arrival 1759. But the bus was a few minutes late. Would I make the connection? YES - the brilliant bus driver let people off at an unscheduled stop near the station so we wouldn't miss the train.

waiting on the platform at Sattel, where it was getting cold, though you can still see some sun on the hills back there

1805: S31 from Sattel to Biberbrugg, arrival 1820. Biberbrugg is only one stop away from Einsiedeln. Its train station, at least, has all of the trail signs but none of the stunning scenery.

Wegweiserweiser - trail signs that point to other trail signs. So meta. So Swiss.

Life lesson: the path is never straight.

1833: S13 to Wädenswil, arrival 1850. 

Hello, Lake Zurich! And soon farewell, day pass.

1900: S25 to Zürich HB, arrival 1917.

And then my dear husband met me for a quick dinner and we went to see "The Testament of Ann Lee," which in as much as it involves a female religious leader was topical, but halfway through the movie he started feeling ill and when we got home he spent 36 hours passed out in bed with a stomach flu so...that could have ended better. But even so, three cheers for random Swiss adventuring. When Dan's grandfather retired he bought a year-long pass and spent all his free time riding the trains just because he could. Goals!

results

moving on... If you too would rather just sit and zone out by the Limmat rather than dealing with my problems, you can do that at eaudiospheres.ch!

Sorry to leave you hanging for a week. Our final score is 2/3, possibly 2.5/3 if we're interpreting generously. Could definitely be worse.

• Kid 1: Driving test successful! Driver's license now in hand.
• Kid 2: Passed, and by a wide margin, which is...something of a miracle? Berufsmaturitätsschule here we come! 
• Me: Well...

It's not a red light, they said, but it's not a green light: it's an orange light. (I hadn't realized that we call the middle traffic light 'orange' and not 'yellow' here, which just goes to show that I should really work on my own driving project. But I digress.) The orange light means that I can't move forward with applying for the program I wanted to start in the fall because although I *probably* possess the competencies required to work in the church, there is some question about my ability to perform under stress and in social situations. Maybe I'm autistic - and that would be okay, but they'd need more information about what provisions would need to be in place to compensate for my deficits. Or maybe I'm not autistic - "an assessment that doesn't yield a diagnosis would also be a diagnosis," he said - and that would be okay too, then we'd know that I'm just kinda weird and we all need to learn to live with it. I mean...in any case I am kinda weird and we all need to learn to live with it. But my word on this isn't good enough, they need an expert to evaluate me and give them additional information. 

On the one hand, fine. FINE. My iffy performance in the interviews points to my own internal struggle about exactly these things, and goodness knows I'd love to get some more clarity around them. Maybe even help or therapy, although please have mercy, I'm 52 years old, do they really think I haven't tried already?

On the other hand, AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH. This is all nominally about working in the church, but the first year of the program is all classes anyway. So it feels like they could easily enough have given me a conditional green light: "go ahead and start, but if you don't get some additional psychological assessments done in the next X months you won't be allowed continue." But they didn't do that. Maybe they didn't think of it. Maybe, as we learned in our favorite video, "'maybe' is Swiss for NO," and the orange light is in fact just red. 

But in another something-of-a-miracle, I've made a new friend who is a psychologist and willing to help me figure out what to do next that will have a chance of both fulfilling their requests and helping me personally move forward even if this isn't my path. I can't tell you what a relief it is to have an expert on my side in this.

So stay tuned.

In the next post: drowning my sorrows in public transport. 

courage and inevitability

more spring!

This coming week is a big one. 

• On Tuesday, kid 1 is taking her driving test for the second time and might get her license. She isn't optimistic because she failed last time, but she's legit a decent driver, so fingers crossed!! 
• On Thursday, kid 2 finds out whether he passed the test that determines whether he'll be able to go to [the equivalent of] high school one day a week alongside his apprenticeship next year. The practice tests...did not go so well...but maybe?? 
• On Friday, I have the appointment in Chur to find out whether I passed the psychological assessment and am now *allowed* to apply for the program I [thought I] was interested in. Eye roll. Stomach turn.

Who knows where we'll be next Saturday?

Meanwhile, in this week's gospel reading, Jesus heals a man born blind and the Pharisees are rather concerned that God might be working outside of the approved channels and so they interview the man, and then his parents, and then the man again, and the reading goes on and on and if I were a Pharisee I would surely be avoiding just going and talking to Jesus too - because at some level I know that to face the thing directly would mean something would have to give, and cognitive dissonance sucks. But the formerly-blind man himself eventually gets frustrated and lays it all out for them:

"This is what is so amazing, that you 'do not know where he is from,' yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does His will, He listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.” (John 9:30-33)

"...Then they threw him out," of course.

Have I ever told you about my novel? I sincerely doubt that I will ever write it, but if I did (or maybe someone else has already?), it would be about a mild-mannered academic in the future who, although religion is quite dead at this point, has studied cultural anthropology and randomly gets mixed up with some scientists who think they've cracked time travel, and meanwhile Earth is barreling toward certain environmental collapse and it slowly dawns on everyone that the only hope for the future is for this dude to travel back in time and play Jesus, armed with miracle-performing antibiotics and the certainty that if humanity does not find nonviolent ways forward it will be doomed. Does he do it? Knowing that this might have been tried already, and obviously didn't work, and also that he will likely die a violent and painful death three thousand years before his own birth? My novel would end with our hero sitting in the time travel pod, ready to launch; it wouldn't say whether he presses the Start button.

I'm not sure what my point is here. I guess this moment feels a bit like that: I'm heading towards certain doom and I have to do it anyway. Maybe because the only way out is through. On the plus side, apparently I have a backup plan if this church thing doesn't work out: I'll become a famous author. Ha.

Bunny, hop

Spring!

My mentor at GAO liked to draw a target on the whiteboard and label the concentric circles "could," "should," and "must" - the goal of our mid-project "message development" meetings being to acknowledge that although the analysts had undoubtedly unearthed reams of interesting information, the report that we wrote for Congress had to have a hard focus on only the clearest, most relevant investigative findings. We wouldn't be able to include everything we could say, not even everything we should say. What must we say?

This is on my mind as it's Friday again, and the to-do list I wrote on Monday (which every week I honestly believe contains the things I'm going to accomplish on Monday!) has been whittled down must by must and finally I can spend some time writing. At least until a should intervenes...

Anyway. I'm doing somewhat better. Last weekend I (1) led a service at church and (2) washed the bedroom and living room windows, inside and out, which hadn't been done in...ahem...several years. The jury is maybe out on which of those things brought more clarity into my life. 

People genuinely seemed to like the service, even though it was a bit of a comedy of errors, so there's that for my positive list. 

Outside - and now more visible through the clean windows - there's rabbit drama. Bunny Susi, who apparently suffers from a chronic parasitic infection, has now for the second time lost reliable use of her back legs and is spending her days collapsed in a heap, or occasionally attempting to hop around, falling over, and then spinning in circles. It's...pitiful and painful to watch. Is our bunnies-on-the-balcony phase coming to an end? 

Maybe. But not so fast. When we acquired bunnies Susi and Lino six years ago, the vet gave us a solemn speech about how rabbits are prey: they ensure their own survival by looking healthy and spry, so a visibly sick rabbit can be assumed to be a rabbit on death's door, and we should not expect that a vet will be able to save it. Not too long after that, Lino proved her right. Susi, though, did not get this memo. She's been in poor shape many times, and we take her to the vet, and the vet gives us the speech again and then does one or both of the grand total of two (2) things she can do for rabbits, and no one expects Susi to make it. Then Susi miraculously bounces back, again. She might yet make it to the ripe old age of 7.

This coming week's gospel is John's story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, which honestly I've never quite understood. Jesus tells her she's had five husbands; she runs off to tell everyone that he is the Messiah! Huh?

I made the mistake of watching this exact clip from The Chosen. It's everything you'd want: Jesus with his big kind eyes starts telling the Samaritan woman the story of her own life through a lens of deep compassion, and she is terrified at first but then moved to tears by this man who sees into her very soul...

Good, good, all good. But also. The talk is about the source of life, the spring that never runs dry. And maybe this isn't something the Samaritan woman needs to get from Jesus; maybe it's something she already has. She's had five husbands, for goodness' sake, and the man she is living with now is not her husband. She's been through all that, and still she's mustered the energy to walk through the midday heat to the well. 

Maybe Jesus isn't psychic, maybe he just has the time to listen and wonder aloud at how far she's made it against crushing odds. 

Maybe he thing he gives her isn't magic, but a new story about herself, not as a failure and a sinner but as a person intimately connected to the very Source of Life. Maybe a new story is magic?

 

Maybe if she and Susi can keep trying, so can I.

the low

(h/t Scott Erikson, whose book I should probably read?)

(part of) St. Christopher in the Staatskirche St. Nikolaus, Wil. He's a real giant in this one!

I'm struggling.

I have an appointment to talk with the dean of the theology school in Chur about the results of the psychological assessment on March 20. It's a small relief to have a date, but I don't expect good things. Who would want a minister who can't talk to people? 

And if this isn't my next step, what is? 

For being the substitute sacristan in February for six Sunday masses, two Ash Wednesday services, and a funeral I will be paid precisely SFr. 666. Just sayin'.

My spiritual advisor said that maybe this would be a good time to think about other ways I could make money.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that last year's self-improvement project of 30 minutes of daily exercise was far more fruitful than this year's project of 30 minutes of daily prayer.

So.

For Lent I've decided to try to find things to like about myself every day. Which is absolutely as self-centered as it sounds but also...I can easily tell you ten things I fucked up in the last hour, but coming up with one thing I did right in the whole day is remarkably hard. So here's hoping for some improved self talk.

On Wednesday, my only son and I took a field trip to the city of Wil in Canton St. Gallen (population 25,000) to see a big St. Christopher mural. He - my son, not the painting - was in a dismal mood because he's spent his school break trying to learn algebra and the grammar of the passive voice in German and also because teenage hormones can just be sucky. But on the train and I convinced him to lean against me and take a nap, and he woke up feeling much more chipper. I'm quite a decent cuddler.

On Thursday...um...well I finished my sacristan stint without messing up anything too badly, and then I went out to lunch with a friend, so there is at least one person who can stand spending a couple hours of social time with me.

Friday was pizza night. My pizza skillz have evolved over the years from throwing a frozen one in the oven to assembling pre-rolled dough and pre-shredded cheese to making the dough from scratch and hand-stretching it. 3/3 family members approve of my pizzas.

Today I went to various second-hand and eco-friendly clothing stores to look for a long black skirt or dress for my skirt-and-dress-allergic daughter who might nevertheless be required to wear one for an upcoming orchestra concert. I think this counts as helping someone?

And I wrote this post. Go me.