Being a "Not Much of Anything"

My wife and I got married in a lovely Congregational/UCC church. We weren't originally planning to get married in a church, since I don't belong to one and we couldn't get married in hers (Roman Catholic, two girls, you know the drill). But we happened upon this great church that was willing to let us get married there, and it felt right, somehow.

In our conversations with the pastor (she wanted to make sure we weren't totally cuckoo before marrying us, I guess) my wife explained our spiritual backgrounds thus: "I'm Catholic, and Tamara isn't much of anything." I voiced my objections to her phrasing, though for someone coming from a strongly Catholic background, I can understand that's what it looks like.

In the intervening years, I have explored Christianity and gained a new appreciation for it, but have decided that it doesn't completely "fit" me, at least not as it has been presented/explained to me. I attended the church we were married in for a couple of years to check it out, and got to the point where I felt it was time to fish or cut bait, i.e. get baptized and join the church, or look elsewhere for spiritual community.

I pondered my position in the community for several months, and realized that I didn't fit there, for a few different reasons. First, I still felt marginalized in that community as a childless adult, and as a queer person.

Second, I could never wrap my mind about the idea of "believing in" the Trinity. What does it mean to believe in something that seems so abstract? It's very confusing for me, having been raised by pragmatists. I couldn't truthfully say, "I believe in God; I believe in Jesus Christ; I believe in the Holy Spirit," and have it mean the same thing as, "I believe that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius" (at sea level, of course). Maybe it doesn't have to mean the same thing, but I haven't been able to work that one out for myself either.

Third, it bothered me that there were some topics that never seemed to get discussed. For example, it seems inconceivable to me that a liberal spiritual community can go years without discussing sexuality. I'm not talking about the civil rights of GLBT people; they covered that pretty well. I'm talking about actual sex and sexual relationships and what they have to do with God, or spirituality. Sex is an important part of my life, and I think it's weird not to talk about it in a space where we are supposed to be talking about The Important Things In Life.

So I guess I'm back to being a "Not Much of Anything." Apparently, I am in good company. Recently, I read an article about Robert Putnam of Harvard's Kennedy School, who has been studying religious "nones" for the last several years, and I am planning on delving into some of his articles. I've just added All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly to my reading list. All of you "nones" out there, is there anything else I should be reading?

I promise I will get back to writing about lipstick one of these days....

Belongings

When I get off of the subway at the end of the line, the conductor (or an automated facsimile thereof) admonishes me, "Don't forget your belongings." I find this reminder interesting. Are people more likely to forget their belongings when they get off at the last stop? It's possible; I suppose I fall into a kind of stupor knowing that I don't need to worry about missing my stop, so maybe I am more prone to absent-mindedness in this situation than if I actually had to pay attention to where I was getting off.

But that's not really what the automated conductor facsimile is talking about, is it? No. "Don't forget your belongings" is a nice euphemism for "pick up your crap!" The voice is telling me to pick up the newspaper, coffee cup, etc., that I have brought onto the train with me. (I probably don't even think of these things as belongings. They don't belong to me. They were just a temporary means of holding my beverage, or filling my time.) Again, I point out the inconsistency: Are people more likely to leave their trash when getting off at the last stop? Alternately, is the anti-littering message somehow more effective at a terminus? Does the fact that the train is stopped there for more than a second make it more likely that a passenger will look around and realize that she did leave some trash behind, or even take a moment to pick up something left by another careless subway rider?

Regardless of whether the reminder works or not, it got me thinking about the word "belongings." Over the last year, I have been trying to "declutter" my life, with varying degrees of success. I have learned that the inverse of the old saying is also true: My treasure is someone else's trash. It even goes beyond that: over time, something that was once my treasure becomes my own trash, like the exciting new lipstick I have decided I don't like the color of, but it's practically unused, so I feel guilty throwing it away, and it's now adding to the clutter on my dresser. (I thought a lipstick example was only appropriate, given the theme of the blog.)

Even if my desk has three projects-in-progress cluttering its surface, or baskets of clean laundry litter the bedroom because I can't fit them all in my closet, I have become more careful about the belongings I acquire, and have started to think about whether they are better than something I already have, whether they are worth the X hours of work that I spent making the money I will exchange for them, and how likely I am to see them as junk in a month, or a year, or a decade, much the way the coffee cup or the newspaper becomes, a half hour after I acquire it, something I no longer think of as belonging to me.