I attended Fr. Wizeman‘s funeral Mass on Thursday the 22nd. He was the associate pastor at my parish, a kind, quiet, and scholarly man. He died at a young age and in a lot of pain. When I knelt before his body to pray at the wake, it was the closest I had ever been to a corpse. His fingers looked beautiful, wrapped by his rosary, and I remembered my mother saying, after she finally summoned the courage to look at her mother at her visitation, that her fingernails were still the same. I went up with her, and I looked too, and nothing else about my grandmother was still the same.

I could not bring myself to look at my sister Rachael, who died so young, but turned my back on the open casket and stood there with her mother, Barbara, holding her hand and thanking people for coming. I remember how surreal it was, to realize, when I made it down to Georgia, still as shocked as anyone that Rachael could actually be gone (it is still hard to believe, more than two years later), and feeling, more than anything, incredible heart-pain sympathy for Barbara, who had lost her only child, and for Rachael’s and my father, who was in no condition to process his loss and instead was running around Savannah trying to borrow a Tracy Chapman CD to play at the service, that *I* was one of the people people were there for, that I, who had so many regrets, who had not seen her in so long, was in a very real sense one of the closest people to her in the world, I was her family, I was the bereaved.

I found out over the phone, a voicemail from my grandparents, while walking in Washington Square. I walked to the NYU library and sank down to the floor in the stacks, and called my mother to tell her. Then I went to Mass. I had been Catholic for only a month and was in the habit of going to daily Mass at St. Joseph’s in the Village after school. I was crying, in my usual pew, and one of the priests came up to me and asked if I was alright. I said I had just found out that my sister had died. I said that she was only 30, that she was engaged. I could not believe that I was saying these things and that they were true. The priest, a sensitive young Dominican, asked me her name, and offered that very Mass for the repose of her soul. Then I had to tell a lot more people. I had to say it, over and over: my sister just died. I had to look at that look people get on their faces when you tell them something like that. I had to excuse myself from work and school to travel to Georgia. I had ballet tickets with Leigh that night, and I didn’t know what else to do since I wasn’t leaving until the next day, so I went to the ballet, it was the Kirov, who I hadn’t seen when I was in St. Petersburg because they were on tour, and I remember that Leigh cried when I told her what had happened, and I, the bereaved, didn’t know what to say to comfort her, my friend, who felt so sorry for my loss. I did not think about it at the time, but Rachael had loved the ballet.

Gloria, my new landlady in Brooklyn, lost her husband only two months ago, and cried several times during her interview with me. She kept sort-of-apologizing for not being more businesslike, but not really apologizing, because you can’t, and I knew that, and everyone knows it. What can be said? What can one say to the grieving? I ran right into my friend Eléna Rivera outside Corpus Christi at Fr. Wizeman’s wake, and she was crying, and I hadn’t seen her since I left New York over a year ago. “Oh, Eléna!” I said. I was wearing sunglasses, and I’m not sure she even recognized me at first, but I already had my arms around her when I said “It’s Kat. I’m back. I’m here.” What else can you say?

When we do something for the first time, and it already feels familiar, are we remembering the future? (The very first Mass I ever attended, as exotic as it should have been, felt familiar to me.)

I am, as of August 1, an NYU employee for the third time. I was hired in 2001, in 2004, and now, in 2010.

The other night, one week after Fr. Wizeman’s funeral, I was kicked out of a public park in New York City by a police officer, who said it was closed after 11 pm, though the posted sign said 1 am. The flashlight in my face reminded me of being 18, hitchhiking, sleeping in parks, in the woods alongside Interstates, under overpasses. Always the flashlight in the face and the wanting to see some ID. They’d often ask-tell me, so young-looking, so young, that I wasn’t going to show up on a missing-persons list, now was I? And I, so innocent and incapable of lying to the police, said, well actually, I might. But they ran my ID and I never showed up. I was, in fact, a missing person, and, because of this, I have absolutely no faith that the system works at all. The cops always seemed surprisingly reassured when my runaway accomplice, then 23, claimed he was going to marry me.

We trespassed and panhandled so often that these encounters with the police became commonplace, not even scary for me, a girl who had been gravely terrified of cops as a child. We never actually got in trouble for anything, we never got “taken in,” the worst thing that ever happened was a sheriff from some Southern state giving us a lift out of his county. And that was how I learned what it really means to be privileged, that if you are a pretty, well-spoken, white girl who comes from an impressive college (even if you only stayed there for 6 months), you can get away with anything.

After I became a found person again, I got to look through the police reports concerning my disappearance. The most shocking thing I found, in this file that was all about me, was to see that a stranger, someone who had never spoken one word to me in my life, an “authority,” had described my family, in print, as dysfunctional.

Do you think there is a special room in hell for people who make out after funerals? I asked, half-joking.
You mean, for those who go on living? he said. No.
It was exactly the same response I had given myself, in my head, the split second after I asked the question.

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the pitfalls of happiness. I had just graduated from NYU, and left the job I’d had for many years, and packed up and moved across the country from New York to Portland, OR. I was in a new romantic relationship with someone I had already known for 8 years, and it seemed like our passionate (if unlikely) reunion was somehow destined by God, and I was so excited about the future, and so happy. It was July, I was falling in love, and I had a million things I wanted to do, and I was confident I could do them all. I woke up every day smiling and ready.

I recognize this pattern of life as the July syndrome, because I’m in it again now. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, it is as if my life is going well on almost every front. In a matter of two weeks in New York, I gained enough momentum to find a job for the next year, find an amazing housing situation in Brooklyn, take the GRE (which I’d been talking about doing since LAST July), reconnect with practically all of my New York friends, meet several awesome new people, cut my hair, open up new romantic possibilities, etc. This was after yet another long, difficult winter in which I was sure that my life was a complete disaster, that I was never going to get it together again, would be miserable forever, had ruined all my chances…

It is easy to say that the only lesson here is that my mood/energy is profoundly influenced by light levels, that I should really invest in a good lightbox before winter comes again, or move somewhere with a climate more like the one in which I grew up (bright and hot almost all year). But Mitsu reminds me not to overreact when things seem to be going well.

Last year, I barely even made it until the end of the summer before things “all fell apart.” My relationship crumbled, which in retrospect was largely inevitable, but was certainly exacerbated by the completely unrealistic hopes I placed on it after I decided it was “going well.” I got overconfident in myself and my beliefs, and said some things that caused a great deal of damage to some of my most cherished friendships. Life in Portland turned out not to be as fantastic as I had hoped, once I realized how difficult it truly was to find work there (a problem which had seemed easy to overcome in the midst of the July syndrome). By October, I was so depressed I barely left my room for months, got none of the things done that I had planned to do that Fall, and, because nothing was happening in my life, I took that as confirmation that I was doomed. Then I came out to PA to help my mother, who broke her ankle, and the nature of the situation combined with my own sureness that everyone was disappointed in me and no one wanted to hear from me ensured that I became very isolated, and again, because nothing seemed to be happening, I was sure that my life was an unfixable disaster.

That idea seems completely ridiculous now. In the brightness of July it is obvious that all it takes for things to “happen” in my life is for me to go out there and live it — to talk to people, make contact, do things. “Good fortune” seems to be an ordinary biproduct of living fully, and the world seems to be magical, full of coincidences and beauty and love. But how can I feel that without getting attached to an idea that it will last forever, that it ought to last forever, that it is indicative of some sort of personal charm that belongs to me rather than just being a reflection of the way that things really are, which also includes the darkness of winter, and suffering, and loss?

Mitsu says the only thing I can do is to try to stay grounded, be careful, to pay attention to the ways in which the seeds of future sadness and problems are being planted now, even as I feel happy and excited about the future. These days when things seem to be going well are the time to be more vigilant, not less.

I’ve been asked about my Catholicism a few times lately. There’s some material concerning my conversion in the archives of this site from 2007 if you’re interested, but the short version is that someone gave me St. Augustine’s Confessions to read right at the moment when I was trying to find the words to describe this incredible, world-changing experience I had recently had. I was shocked that he understood how my entire life seemed to have been transformed. I thought about words like “grace” and “conversion” for the first time in a very long time, and in a different, much more personal way than I ever I had before. Then I got into Thomas Merton, which is how I wound up at Corpus Christi, the church where he converted when he was the same age I was when I first read his books.

To say that everyone in my life was utterly shocked when I decided to enter the Church would be an understatement. Even people who had some understanding of the shift I had experienced and could appreciate to some extent how I felt about the Cross and the liturgy and the saints just did not see why any of that meant I had to actually join the Catholic Church with all the baggage that entails (the pedophilia scandal; the AIDS epidemic; the idea that there is One True Church, and that the Kingdom of Heaven and the sacraments are open to some people but not others). Simone Weil, with whom I identified even more strongly than Merton, was profoundly drawn to the Church and to the Eucharist, but could not bring herself to be baptized until she was on her deathbed, because she could not accept the fullness of the Church’s teachings. (It’s worth noting that the position she, rightly, had the strongest opposition to, anathema sit, was revised in Vatican II.)

But despite my own “issues,” and a lot of waffling until almost the last minute, in the end I felt quite strongly compelled to go through with it, baptism and confirmation and all. And I didn’t just become Catholic, I became the kind of Catholic who learns Latin and Gregorian chant and joins the parish council and takes the subway an hour to daily Mass and is celibate for 3 years and alienates all her girlfriends by railing against artificial birth control and carries a breviary around all the time to pray the Office, etc, etc, etc. I remember getting up at 7 to walk to Mass at the little church down the street from the conference hotel in the mornings before the first sessions at VSS (one of the vision meetings where I presented my work every summer), and how mystified my scientific colleagues were when they got wind of this. None of them had any idea I actually did the same thing back in New York, too.

Since then, I have “chilled out” considerably. After I moved away from my parish here in NY (which is very, very special to me and always will be) and a few months went by out in liturgical-slob land (which covers practically the entire Church in the US, I have discovered), I was doing well to make it to Mass on Sundays, let alone weekdays.

I still maintain that Natural Family Planning, and its secular cousin the Fertility Awareness Method of birth control (which should not be confused with the old Rhythm Method, which is total bunk), is one of the most amazing and empowering things I have ever learned about in my entire life. I’m never, ever taking the Pill again.

I guess one might even say in the past year, in some respects, I have “lapsed.” And there were, of course, issues I had with some Church dogma before I ever entered. I’ll probably always have those issues, but, though some conservatives would not, I still consider myself to be a practicing, devout Catholic Christian. I often say I’m a Catholic Buddhist, and I’m very interested in inter-religious dialogue.

Balthazar asked me if I had managed to reconcile my faith with my sexuality. I am not really sure about this. I did avoid sex for quite a while after I got involved in the Church, even before I officially converted. That ended. I seem to vacillate between two extremes. When I am in my more sexual mode, I am incredibly and quite unconventionally so. I’ve been drawn to the world of BDSM and sexual power exchange for a long time, and I often feel like I am on the brink coming up with a grand synthesis that links my spiritual and sexual orientations toward submission/surrender/suffering-as-liberation.

The English word “passion” (as in desire) comes from the Latin verb patrior, pati, passus sum: to suffer/endure/submit. When I think of Christ I think, always, of the Passion. That image, of the Savior, dying, in terrible pain, asking why God has forsaken him, and yet accepting it and reaching out toward others with saving compassion, is very close to me. My favorite Church holiday is Good Friday.

Last night I went to see a burlesque performance. One of the performers was also my friend’s literary agent. I really enjoyed it. Some people said that this particular show overall was a little more raunchy/dark and less cheeky/flirty than a lot of burlesque, which was probably due in part to the venue (a tiny bar known for its industrial music, $1-2 beer, and having a stripper pole). I felt like a couple of the performers could have done the exact same act in a mainstream strip club and it would have fit right in. The biggest differences were the audience, which was at least half female (the girls were clearly just as into it as the guys) and very supportive/unsleazy, and the fact that the dancers were not taking their clothes off for money. In fact, I found out, they didn’t get paid at all, except in tips that they collected by passing a hat.