That's me in the corner....

When a guy checks you out online (and he's not a 74 year old named Fred) and he's good looking, even in a kind of scholarly way, well, it's my duty to return the favor. It's a pretty low-commitment way of revealing mild interest -- and opens the door to a potential conversation.

So today I did. I liked his profile -- he seemed smart, well-informed, had a sensitive side, and didn't appear to take himself too seriously.

I wrote him, commenting on something he had said in his profile (why has subtle flirting gone the way of Regency romance?). He wrote me back.

And then it came up, as it often does with intelligent men. That religion thang.

I looked at your profile, he told me, and I thought you were cute (he might be the first guy who ever called this Amazon cute) -- but you seemed a little too religious for me. Your subsequent emails seemed to contradict this impression, so perhaps we can continue to talk. Tell me one thing I haven't learned from your profile.

Of course, I told him about the bondage parties. (Not my bondage parties, silly). And the threesomes (yours, not mine). And my alternative lifestyle friend, of whom I still am fond.


But I couldn't help sighing. Again, someone who probably considers himself enlightened dismisses (or is tempted to dismiss) a woman who is upfront about the fact that she, indeed, believes something.

I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sticking point in California, where Christianity competes with New Age philosophies and Eastern religions. Or in the South, which is still a stronghold of conservative Christianity.

I'm not a big fan of Christians who moan about being persecuted here in the United
States. And I understand that the association of evangelical Christianity with politics under George Bush probably made a lot of liberal people angry.

It just made me recall, as though I need to, that anti-religious prejudice is alive and well among the intelligentsia.

I keep hoping that I'll meet a guy who is open enough to believe that you can have faith and think for yourself.

But apparently in liberal America, as we can see in churches that continually attempt to make faith palatable by making it reasonable, you can only have one at a time.

My writing pal hasn't given up on me, though. And I haven't thrown him to the wolves, either.

But I've already used my best bondage story. Anybody willing to loan me another?

This is your mind. This is your mind online...

Do you ever worry that perhaps your child is being rewired by all the time he or she spends glued to the computer, on the cell, or playing games on their Ipod?

Do you ever stop, in between texting and reading and talking, to think about the effect all of this stimuli could be having on you?

Well, pop on over to Philly Moms and state your case, whatever that might be, on the heated debate over whether electronica can indeed reshape the neurons in our brains.

Don't get distracted and forget now!

Forgiveness in E Flat

I've had occasion this week to ponder what it means to forgive.

Not I've suffered terribly -- one wasted evening does not a drama make. Just a few blog posts.

And perhaps I'm a bit less willing to reach out, a bit more suspicious with other guys for now -- expecting that they will turn on me. So the hurt is real. But to be fair, I can't lay the weight of that disillusionment on one man.

Yet it makes sense to move on -- wish the guy well and hope that we both learned something. I think I was saved some pain.

But what of the boys who left my son in tears tonight at the Little League playoffs, blaming him for missing some catches in the outfield in a game marred with poor pitching, errors, and some really juvenile fielding?

That's going to take a little longer.

I know people who thrive on a sense that they have been wronged. Endless slights...daggers between the shoulders, and a world bent on hurting them.

They can make lists, itemize, ritualize...and make life hellish for friend and bystander.

We forgive, in part, so we can move onwards.

Free ourselves by letting go of our anger against the other who has wronged us.

Start afresh.

We forgive, it seems to me, to unchain us to show compassion, and concern, and even love, with a deeper freedom.

A freedom which perhaps we all crave, whether we confess it, or no. Yearn for that inner unleashing, but still sometimes choose to wear the manacles around our hands, our feet, our souls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Casu1yaobY

Have you had to practice forgiveness recently?

How deep was the wound?

Do you truly feel like you have put the injury behind you?

When you stand...and when you fold

What causes you to feel shame?

Or, to put it more directly, is it ever appropriate to feel shame -- as opposed to remorse?

I don't feel shame a lot anymore. But when I do, I recognize the historic roots of that shame.

I have paid a price for walking a different road than many of those with whom I would ordinarily find commonality. I wear the mantle of the outsider, as a convert, a liturgical bridgebuilder, a journalist.

And in this I'm not that different from immigrants, and those who transition from one economic class to another, or folks who, for one reason or another, have been compelled to step outside the bounds of the conventions that generally make it easier for us to move in and out of friendships and romances.

For some reason, even when I was younger, my insecurity would focus on my looks -- the guys at PTS who only wanted to date blonds, the fellow Anglican who told me he liked "All American girls." And it's true, that in a seminary full of WASP Presbyterians, I stood out.

Call me a late bloomer, but in my thirties, I began to appreciate that it was OK to look a wee bit, well, exotic.

Thank goodness for the assurance that is one of the better things about getting older.

But, as we all know, it's what inside that counts -- counts more and more as we age.

And on that score, I have a feeling that perhaps a little more remorse might be in order.

When I shoot from the lip. When I lapse into my drama queen routine. When I don't see the consequences...

Remorse can prompt change. As a friend reminded me yesterday, with a bracing "Are you kidding?" shame can mess with your mind. It is a dead end street, a boulevard of broken dreams.

But remorse...the ability to feel what someone else felt, to walk with them a few steps, to see that inadvertantly or not you have damaged him or her...well, that may be the beginning of healing -- for both parties. For a community. Even for our despoiled earth.


Can you tell the difference?

The humili-date

Have you ever had an after-date headache? One that settles into the back of your neck, and wends it way around your teeth?



I've had one since last night. And even trying not to think about the dinner, which I am avoiding by means of reading and ice cream and running, doesn't seem to take the pain away.



I have learned, in the course of more than a few years of dating in the interstices of raising children, not to let my guard down.



That is because, in general, I haven't talked to a lot of guys who have encouraged me to want to be that open with them. I've found, sadly, that wry is the best mode of analysis for the ongoing thrum of emails, telephone conversations, and now and then meetings.



But over the past few weeks, I found that there was a chink in my worldlywise armor. When I checked his profile out after he looked at mine, I liked what I saw. He lived a state over from me. He was also a writer -- and he makes his kid his first priority, as I do.



The two hitches? He was a good deal younger -- and he lives more than two hours from Glenmoore. Two issues that I kept bringing up.



Our telephone conversations went well -- he told me that he was comparing the other women he met to me. Flattering. Kind of sweet. Although I didn't talk about him to my friends, I allowed myself, well...to wonder. Be uncynical.



I won't even describe what happened last night, when we finally met up on neutral territory. Let's just say that it was one of the more profoundly humiliating moments of my dating career -- and a moment for him, when he figured out that he doesn't want to date significantly older women who live more than a few hours away.

Only the way he did it reminded me of the rhyme my kids would hurl at one another: "U-g-l-y, you ain't got no alibi, you ugly!" And, I'm ashamed to say, it hurt. It doesn't matter what the truth is when revulsion is looking out in someone else's eyes.


I thought that I could avoid such scenarios by being scrupulously honest in the way I present myself online. Recent pictures. My real age. The family complexities that keep me where I am, and happy most of the time.



But apparently even those measures aren't enough to stave off the humili-date. And the headache. And the brick to the castle walls that I add -- to protect myself, just a wee bit better, the next time.

And not unhappy, today, to be solitary - except for the headache, the pain and the memory.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRk4_G2XXp4

From scratch

I'm not a "from scratch" kind of person.

I have friends who find creation relaxing -- and many of them are really quite good at it.

Some knit blankets for older folks and babies.

Some needlepoint, their suburban homes decorated with exquisite tapestries.

Others come home from draining days at the office and enter happily into the alchemy of the kitchen, transforming yeast and flour into bread, carrots and broth into soup, their dining rooms fragrant with cumin and ginger and garlic.

Give me a container garden, and the odds are pretty good I won't kill it. My sauteed pak choy, however, was greeted by my son with the announcement that he had terrible stomach pains.

And I can't recall ever actually using anything that I needled.

But now that our house is a wink and a nod away from being sold, we may have to start from scratch.

I hadn't thought about working with an architect to build a sustainable home until a couple of days ago.

But we haven't found the house that we want at this point -- and the young couple who is probably buying our home want to settle in August.

I have to be honest. It's a scary prospect, starting from scratch.

It means temporary housing, probably an apartment, so that the children can attend the same schools. Packing, unpacking and then doing it once more. More stress. Contractors.

And yet the possibility to be a part of constructing a home that won't have a negative effect on our environment is tremendously appealing. A home that has our fingerprints on it. A home that reflects our ideals.

Maybe, as we gather our belongings and get ready to be gypsies again, the close to perfect house will present itself...but in the meantime....I'm excited.

And scared.Did I mention scared?

One great lie

This past weekend I spent part of Saturday swimming in the past -- a past more than ninety years gone. Wrestling with the right tone for a Memorial Day homily, I took a time capsule back to read the World War I poets.

Start out with Rupert Brooke's "The Great Lover" -- and you may end up in some pretty sad places. Wilfrid Owen, maybe the finest of the British World War I poets, dead seven days before the war ended. The gorgeous poet Brooke died earlier, of an infected mosquito bite, in 1915. And then there was Siegfried Sassoon, who survived to write about the horrors of war, as did his fellow countryman Robert Graves.

But let's not even talk of poets. Let's try to remember a whole generation of young men and many women lost in England, France -- and Germany. Hatred sowed in the Balkans and bitter fruits in places like Italy.

As a teen who read the writing of novelists like R.F. Delderfield, and saw the BBC adaption of the life of the anti-war activist Vera Brittain (adapted from her book "Testament of Youth"), I became intrigued and horrified by the context in which War War I took place.

But it doesn't have to be that war -- choose your war.


It seems a bit traitrous to say that, in this nation in which so many glorify the patriotism of the hand-folded over the shirt, the pledge recited as it has been since childhood, that I am anti-war.

That dooesn't mean I'm a total pacifist.

In my judgment, which does not need to be yours, there have been, with the recent exception of World War II, very few where the potential for evil on the other side outweighed the terrible cost in terms of human lives.

Even now, in Iraq, families are torn asunder because a citizen with an incendiary device decides to blow themselves up and take as many innocent lives with them as possible.

And yet we continue, those of us who have never experienced it, to exalt it -- the brother and sisterhood of the trenches. Patriotism is cheap unless and until one is truly ready and able to serve -- not to send others.

But do we give the same honor to our veterans once they are back with wounds that show -- and wounds the naked eye can't see? Do we give them counseling and access to medicine and the good care they need to readjust to civilian life?

When we talk about the ecstasy of combat, it might be well to recall the words with which Owen ends one of his most famous poems, titled Dulce and Et Decorum Est:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest1 To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

It is no honor to our veterans to tell ourselves that terrible untruth.

Let us tell the truth about how awful war can be -- and then weigh whether the fighting is worth the agony.