There is a place near where I live called “The Chapel Events Venue.” It looks like a small country church. This led me to wonder what kind of people would hold events there, and what kind of events. I have a strong suspicion that it is primarily used for weddings.

But then this begs the question, why would you want to have your wedding in a fake church? If having a wedding in a church building is important, then why aren’t you a member of a church? Is it that the idea of getting married in church is important? Is it more personal than getting married at the courthouse? It isn’t where you get married that makes the marriage stick, but perhaps it helps you get your head in the right place.

But then why have a fake church wedding? If going to church isn’t important to you then why go through the motions on your wedding day? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m totally for people not feeling compelled to go to church and for many opportunities for people to get married. I don’t understand why it is so hard to get someone to officiate at your wedding if you aren’t part of a religious community. For a civil union it is really just a legal contract. Why can’t an attorney perform the ceremony? Why can’t there be a little kiosk in Wal-Mart or Sears like they have for eyeglasses and haircuts?

This may seem callous and cold. Should it be that easy to get married? Look how hard it is right now and yet the divorce rate is so high. Perhaps making it easier to find a place and an officiant would make it possible for more people to get married. I support the idea of premarital counseling. In Tennessee the fee to get a marriage license is cut dramatically if you can prove you have had six hours of counseling. It isn’t mandatory but there is a definite incentive. Honestly I don’t think six hours is anywhere enough time to get you acclimated to the reality of sharing your life with another person.

Perhaps what we need to make it easier to get married but harder to get divorced. If you go into marriage thinking that it is easy to get out if then you probably won’t work at it when it gets hard. Marriage shouldn’t be a disposable item. Once you decide it doesn’t fit you can’t take it to Goodwill and trade it out for another one in a different style.

Marriage isn’t for everyone. It is really hard. There isn’t really anything that prepares you for how strange it can be. Often it is a weird blend of two people who have a lot of baggage and problems. Then you realize it is a weird blend of two families who have the same issues. While you are trying to work out your own mess you have another person’s mess to deal with. There sometimes is no getting around the idea that you are both very different people with very different needs and ideas about how to do things.

Perhaps classes on nonviolent conflict resolution would be helpful. Certainly both should take home economics classes. There should be counseling available if you think you might want to have children. There should be further counseling to teach you how to prevent having children if you don’t want them.

Right now we leave this all to chance. We assume that parents teach their children all these skills. It has become woefully obvious that this isn’t happening. People are getting marriage advice more from TV and movies than from real people.

There also needs to be a mindset change that it is OK to be single. There are a stunning amount of books for women who are over 30 who haven’t found “Mister Right” yet. Why are women so encouraged to find a man? Why aren’t women encouraged to be whoever they need to be? Why are women made to feel that they aren’t quite complete unless they are married? I think this contributes to a lot of divorces. If you enter into marriage thinking that this someone else is going to fix all your problems then you just have created another problem. Another person can’t fix you. Two broken people don’t make a strong union.

Perhaps marriage needs to be seen as an option rather than an expectation. It is should be the same way with children. There is an immense amount of pressure to have children. When I got married everyone felt that it was their business to ask when I was going to have children, and to then bully me when I said I wasn’t interested. What, are they salesmen? Is there some bonus prize for making the population bigger? Total strangers would hound me about my private life. What is it about getting married that says it is anybody’s business if I spawn or not?

A simple “No” does not suffice. When I say that I don’t want children, people would always counter with “That attitude will change once you have them.” I would always answer – “What if it doesn’t?” They aren’t like puppies. You can’t give them back. You are stuck with them. Well, you can put them up for adoption, but that is a long process. I know far too many people who were obviously overwhelmed with their first child who then proceeded to have more. I hear that it gets logarithmically harder with each one. I know plenty of adults who are still raising themselves and have no business trying to raise children.

But then this leads us back to the beginning. What is the impetus to get children baptized when the parents don’t go to church? If you don’t believe in raising your child as a Christian, then why baptize your child in a Christian church? Is there some “just in case” magic that is going on here? Does baptism hedge bets? This was driven home when I talked with a chaplain at a children’s hospital. It was very common for parents of a child who was dying to ask that the child be baptized. If baptism alone is enough to ensure you’re “In” then why even go to church at all?

I used to smoke not only clove cigarettes but pot. With both I was trying to avoid my problems. I used to get really fidgety if I couldn’t have a smoke when I wanted it. When I was at work I would look forward to getting home so I could smoke as much as I wanted. This was especially true when I’d had a bad experience. Perhaps somebody had yelled at me, generally over a misunderstanding. In my opinion the majority of the blame was always on them. (Here lies another problem.) All I wanted to do was get home quickly so I could smoke and start feeling good. Then one day I thought about it differently. I was letting them “win”. The patron who was driving me up the wall was driving me to smoke and ruin my health. Of course, that patron didn’t have a gun to my head. I was doing the smoking. I was choosing something bad to counter something bad. This makes no sense but it happens all the time.

I had a friend who had posted that she saw a roach in her house. She was so freaked out that she had to smoke. I commented that the cigarette was doing her more harm than the roach. She then absolutely went thermonuclear on me. This is someone who knows that both my parents died from smoking so this is a really sensitive and important subject with me. Her rant went on for quite a long time. Either Facebook has a limit on how much you can say in a message or she kept coming back up for air in her rant. Boy she was mad. There were at least 6 long messages, one after the other in quick succession. I didn’t even read every word. I said “I’m sorry” as honestly and sincerely as I could and that was all. That kind of reaction cannot be soothed by anything, so it was best to be short.

The part that really interests me is that she then said that my comment to her made her go smoke more. Really? It doesn’t work like that. I didn’t force her to do anything. In fact, I was trying to encourage her to stop smoking. She chose to smoke. She chose to make it a situation where she felt powerless. She chose to feel as if my statement caused her reaction. This is a sense of giving over your power to another human being. How is this different from being a puppet or a slave?

If I had that much power I’d use it far better. But I don’t have that power at all. Her reaction was proof that she was acting in the passive. She was not in control of her own actions or I suspect even her own life. I know from previous talks with her (they weren’t really conversations so much as monologues) that she was physically abused as a child. This story came up apropos of nothing. It was a bit embarrassing to be shown her dirty laundry right there sitting at a friend’s table while we were painting.

While I feel grateful that people trust me with really deep private stories, I feel embarrassed and helpless when the stories come up unbidden. It is as if a friend is sick but has no symptoms. Then she starts throwing up – and I wasn’t prepared with a bucket. I need a bit of warning to know how to handle those big emotions and feelings that occur when someone tells something really heavy.

In a way, I’m glad that she told me her story in that way. It let me know how deeply damaged she is. I’m sad for her and I know that I’m not qualified to carry that burden for her. It also gave me an insight into why she blamed me for her smoking. She is used to being the victim. She is used to things happening to her. She does not see her life as her own, and the feelings she had as a child were unbearable. Feelings that aren’t processed will come out later in really unusual and often disturbing ways.

It is like a hackberry bush. You can try to cut it down, but if you don’t dig up the entire thing it will send out new shoots and be bigger and more difficult to manage than ever.

I’ve read about processing grief – and this is grief. Grief isn’t just about a death of a loved one. It is about loss. Losing a job, divorce, moving, a diagnosis of a chronic ailment – these can all produce grief. If you don’t get grief out it can manifest itself in addictions and compulsions that cause even more problems. In all those situations there is a sense of powerlessness. Things aren’t as we think they should be. Life is not following the script.

There are things you can do in the sense of overwhelming grief that help. The best results were from cultures that really wailed about grief. They got really loud and waved their arms. This is totally foreign to white American culture. It is normal for us to grieve in private or not at all. We feel that grief is embarrassing and should be done at home, silently. Perhaps we see grief as too personal.

Perhaps we have a problem when anything from “inside” ourselves gets “outside”. In the same way we have prohibitions about nudity, we have prohibitions about showing too much emotion. It is seen as gauche or tacky. It isn’t civilized.

Sometimes there are new ways to express grief. Sometimes I think they miss the point. There are those roadside memorials that are for people who have died in car accidents. I feel like they have been around only in the past ten years. These little reminders of death in the midst of life are odd to me, partly because they aren’t reminders to me at all. I didn’t know this person. I don’t even know their family or friends. Why is this display here? Why are they for traffic accidents and not everything? Are we going to have memorials everywhere for everyone? Am I going to walk into a building tomorrow and see a memorial for someone who died of a heart attack right there by the elevator?

Then there are those car decals. These have appeared in the past few years. They usually say something like “In loving memory of Dustin.” Sometimes there are praying hands. Often the birth and death dates are there. This to me is stranger than the memorial tattoos. This is more public, and more anonymous. If you have a tattoo of your loved one on your arm, I’m not going to see it all the time. I’ll only see it when you show it to me or if we are both working out at the Y. But on your car, I’m going to be able to read it when I stop behind you at every traffic light on the way to Target.

People have a habit of memorializing their dead relatives on Facebook. “Happy Birthday Granny! You would have been 103 today! I miss you.” This creeps me out the most. What is the point of the message? I could understand it more if the post was more like “Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She died 17 years ago and I still miss her.” At least there is an audience for that post. Your friends can read it and console you. But in the first post the audience is dead. It feels like I’m reading mail that was misdelivered. And how long is this going to go on? Every year? When is grief over? I like the Jewish concept of grieving. There are specific time periods and specific actions for grief. There are levels that are allowed, and there is a time that you must get back into the community. You can’t wall yourself off forever.

Perhaps we all need better ways to process our grief. Perhaps we need better ways to identify it first. Perhaps we need regular rituals to get it out.

Or is this just another way to compartmentalize it and shove it away in a box?

Death used to be something we did with family. Now it is handled by professionals. Aunt Bertha used to die at home, surrounded by family. Her body was lovingly washed and then clothed in her favorite dress. She was laid out in the living room for friends to gather around. These days, Aunt Bertha would die in a hospital, and if she wasn’t alone when she died, she’d be with strangers. The nurses would note her passing. They’d write her name on a chart. They’d call the attendants who would take her out like so much trash. Then the funeral home guys come, and a stranger processes the body. Just reading about that process makes me want to die in a house fire rather than in a car accident. At least in a house fire my body is automatically cremated, rather than embalmed and stuffed. I don’t want to look “natural” at my funeral.

But really, I don’t have a choice. What will happen will happen. I can tell my loved ones what I would like but there is no guarantee it will happen. Everything about death is loss of power. You aren’t in control. You have no say as to what happens. It is an inevitable event. It will happen. It is the great equalizer.

Perhaps people keep the same boyfriend or spouse who is at worst abusive and at best lazy and unmotivated out of that same sense of fear. Perhaps people stick with the same dead-end job for the same reason. Perhaps all sense of powerlessness comes from a root fear of death. Perhaps the root of this comes from a sense of a loss of control. Perhaps our need for control is the problem.

In order to take something on, you have to give something up. There really is only so much time in the day. What with going to work and having to sleep, you sometimes have to learn to multitask in order to have time to do what you really want to do. Sometimes by giving something up you actually gain a lot more.

A few years ago my husband and I had to make a lot of sacrifices because the roof, water heater, and A/C unit all needed replacing. We didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money saved up. We had to get a second mortgage, which would mean having to pay an extra $200 a month to the bank. So little things went away first. The home phone service was cancelled in favor of our cell phones. Then we dropped cable TV. Oh, and there went the weekly sushi dinners. Everything adds up. $5 a day for fancy coffee doesn’t seem like much, but in a year that is nearly $2000. Even my car got axed. We had a Mini Cooper, and it was $438 a month. Wowzers. When I think about how much money we spent on that car alone I’m a little embarrassed. So we traded it in for a car that was half the price.

There was a weird advantage to doing this. It caused us to reassess what mattered and what was important. In a way it was good that everything broke at the same time – it meant that we got all the big stuff over with. It will be many years before anything major breaks. But then there was something even better. The second mortgage was for a fixed amount. We couldn’t get exactly the amount we needed – we had to get a little more. It turned out that we had enough money to build the screened porch we’ve always wanted. That porch has been a nice addition to the house and a way to enjoy each other’s company in a new way because there are no electronic devices out there competing for our time.

Another sacrifice ended up creating much more. I wanted to start going to the Y, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to afford it. I had eaten lunch out every day when I went to work. It was a great way to escape work. That break was enough to convince my head that it wasn’t an 8 hour day or a 10 hour day. It was like having two part-time days. But that was a lot of money that was being spent. So I committed to eating a healthy frozen dinner at least three times a week.

I was very resistant to this because I thought I needed that escape. But then I realized that I had more time to read. And then I started bringing jewelry projects to work on. Both of these were fun, and gave my mind a break. Then I noticed that it was a really pretty day outside, and there is a walking path just outside the break room door. So I went on a walk. I now go on a walk for 20 minutes every day before lunch. It is a sacrifice, but it is also a gain. People are noticing how much weight I’ve lost. I feel better. I sleep better. And the slight exercise is like a little vacation for my head in the same way that leaving for lunch was. It turns out that I gained all this extra time because I didn’t have to drive to and from the restaurant. In losing something I thought I wanted, I gained so much more. I’ve taken this lesson with me. When I’m faced with something new that I’m resistant to, I’m trying to see if it creates a better opportunity that I hadn’t noticed before.

Sometimes the thing you have to give up is time. My Dad constantly talked about his Beethoven book. Throughout my life he said he was writing a book on Beethoven. He loved everything about that composer, and found great solace in listening to his work over and over. I lost track of the times I’d found him lying in his recliner, earphones on, eyes closed. But when Dad died, there was no trace of a manuscript to be found. I had hoped that I could piece it together and create the book for him, but it was all in his head. This taught me not to wait. You can talk about your dreams and goals all you want, but you have to give them form sometimes. You have to take time to make them real.

I’d like to write more in this blog. But there is only so much time in the day. So something has to go. Currently I’m giving up writing in my journal in the morning. If I write my thoughts on the computer instead of in a journal, I can then shuffle them around so they make more sense. I can add in or delete sentences that work. I think that perhaps what I say in my journal and what I say here will be different things. I’ll have to see if this works. I might need that private voice. I might need that morning exercise. It is all a work in progress.

To find more time and more peace of mind I stopped reading the news a few years ago. I thought that was going to be a hard thing to give up, but I’ve realized since that I don’t really want to read the news that is offered. The “news” really means “bad news”. Have you noticed that every time you go to the news on the Google page, the only thing it tells you is about some new war or somebody dying? Have you noticed that it is gossip about celebrities that you get from the MSN page? Have you noticed that it is all Chicken Little stuff from the Yahoo page? You’d think the solar flares would have wiped us all back to the stone age by now, with all the times that they say they are going to interrupt cell phone and internet activity. So I get my news from friends and Facebook, which is itself another time-suck and is going to require a lot of discipline. I’m still trying to figure out a proper balance with that.

Sometimes the only way I can get anything done is to do the important, must-do things first. Sometimes figuring what those things out is the hard part. And sometimes part of my problem is that what I think is important isn’t important at all. Sometimes I’ve done things that way for so long that I don’t even remember why I’ve done it that way, and it has lost all its significance. Sometimes having to give something up is really freeing. Sometimes a loss is really a blessing in disguise.

I’m getting tired of people telling me that I am angry. They also tell me that “frustrated” equals “angry”. I’d like to think with an English degree I could use better words than “angry.” “Angry” is such an ugly word. So gauche. So Jerry Springer white trash. Nobody wants to be “angry.” It doesn’t have any style. OK, sometimes I’m upset or unhappy that things aren’t going the way I think they should. Does that make me “angry”? My husband says that I get angry at him. This is really embarrassing. Is “embarrassing” yet another word for “angry?”

Am I not justified in my anger? Am I not allowed to be upset/frustrated/unhappy that things don’t go the way I think they should? Am I not allowed to be upset about how life doesn’t go as I plan?

Is telling me I’m “angry” another way to control me? Is it the new term for what I heard in my high school and college years – “You think too much.” Boyfriends who said that were dismissed quickly.

My spiritual director thinks I should say I’m angry. My pastoral care teachers think this too. Funny, I feel OK. Pretty good, until some authority figure thinks I should think I’m angry. Right now the thing that makes me angry is people thinking I’m angry.

I get frustrated when folks won’t try to help themselves. I see my obese coworkers who are pre-diabetic sneaking cupcakes from the break room. They have noticed all the work I have done to get better (I used to be 200 pounds). They comment frequently about how they wish they could get in shape. Then they sit and read all of their lunch while there is a great walking path right outside the break room door. Every hindrance they name I can find a solution for but then they come up with another excuse. I get frustrated with them. Does this mean I’m angry? Is “angry” the same as getting upset with someone who says they want to get better but refuses to take action? Is it “angry” to note that the American way says to do whatever you want, and then take a pill later? No work required.

Perhaps “anger” is tied to attachment. The world is not like how I think it should be. It isn’t that someone has something I think is mine. Part if it is that they aren’t doing things the way I think they should. They put don’t put stuff back where it came from, so I can’t find it when I need it. They have their music on too high so it annoys me. Is “annoyed” another word for “angry?”

Maybe I am angry. Maybe I should say so. I’m angry when people don’t do what they say they are going to do. I’m angry when I have to return something that isn’t what I ordered. I’m angry when a transaction shows up on my credit card bill that I didn’t expect. I’m angry when people expect me to pay for their laziness. I’m angry when I find something that I bought and lost, only to have bought another one. I’m angry when people refuse to take care of their health and then seem surprised that they get sick. I’m angry when people fritter away their lives on meaningless things.

Perhaps my anger is the reason I write. Perhaps my anger spurs me on to try to make changes within myself and within the world. Maybe there is a lot of power in being angry. Sometimes anger can be transformative. Sometimes it is the fuel that makes change happen.

I remember a story of a horrible, tragic car accident. The wife was pregnant and had gone into labor early. Her husband was out of town on a business trip. She didn’t have a babysitter for their young son, so he was in the car as well as she drove to the hospital. There was an accident. Only the young son survived, but he was badly hurt. When the father was able to get to see his son, he was numb. His entire family had been reshaped in an instant. His hopes and dreams for the future had crumbled away. It was days later that he changed and started to be angry. The chaplain thought this was an excellent sign – that then he could begin to accept his loss and go on. I remember this surprised me. “Anger” is good?

Perhaps “anger” is related to grief. Therapists tell us that anger is one of the stages of grief – but perhaps anger itself can teach us about grief. Perhaps anger points to a sense of loss, of not-right-ness. Perhaps knowing that can give us a sense of those situations that need attention. I think anger is the opposite of complacency. I think anger can be used as a force to change unjust situations.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was angry. He was angry that people were being treated badly simply because of the color of their skin. His anger helped lead a movement of nonviolent resistance that fostered change. If he hadn’t been angry, he would have simply accepted things the way they were and let them be. People would still be separate and not equal under the law. Jesus got angry at all the hypocrisy he saw – about how the letter of the law was being followed but not the spirit.

Maybe it is a good idea to get in touch with your anger. Maybe anger is a useful tool. Maybe I should stop being embarrassed by my anger and just start naming it for what it is. And then I should learn how to focus it and direct it so it can be used as a force for change.