sin and my smartphone

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really like systems and rules and structures. Clear, explicit expectations for my performance are reassuring and comfortable, and vague instructions make me anxious and tense.

So the major cause of my stress during this Lent is that, for the most part, I don’t have a nice clear set of rules to follow. Let me explain:

I need to break my addiction to my smartphone, particularly Facebook. For a long time, my phone became the thing to flip open when I was so stressed I couldn’t think—when I was dealing with an existential crisis and a dissertation and if left to sit in silence my choices were to doubt the existence of God or to doubt the existence of a valid argument in chapter three. In those situations, a Candy Crush or bubble shooter app is essential for maintaining sanity. And you know, I don’t begrudge myself that coping mechanism. It wasn’t optimal, but coping mechanisms usually aren’t—they’re for dealing with non-optimal situations, after all! But it became a habit, and now that the stress is gone, I still have a phone in my pocket that I pull out every time Things stop happening for more than fifteen seconds or so. Or even if the Things in question just don’t seem to require my full and undivided attention, which has given me the sinking feeling for some time that a lot of Life is happening when I’m not looking.

There are a couple of problems with simply giving my phone up for six weeks. For one thing, my smartphone IS MY PHONE. We don’t have a home phone. So why not just give up Facebook? Well, me giving up Facebook for Lent would also mean forcing my family and friends to give up news and pictures of grandkids for Lent (I mentioned this to my mom, and she assures me that not giving up Facebook is the right choice :-P) Living three (or more) hours away from all my people limits my options as far as cutting myself off from temptation goes.

So for the past week I’ve been making little rules for myself about when using my phone is and isn’t ok. Like, “Ok, you can check Facebook once during the day while you’re nursing Blaise before his nap, but then no more!” or “Don’t do anything online once Margaret is home from school!” or—well, you get my drift. But then I check Facebook real quick in the morning while I’m waiting for the water to boil for coffee and the kids are in the living room looking at books anyway, or I have to get online to look up the recipe for tikka masala for dinner after Margaret’s home (because that’s a lot of spices that I never remember), and then I feel like a failure.

The other day I read this blog post on Lent, which on the one hand felt very familiar to me with the sense of shame at failing an easy fast (neither this blogger nor I are Catherine of Sienna!) and on the other hand just felt very off. I remembered a friend who had posted on Facebook on Ash Wednesday, “Giving stuff up is to Lent as Christmas shopping is to Advent. ‪#‎notthepoint.” While Voskamp’s conclusion, that “[g]rief is what cultivates the soil for the seeds of joy,” is true and beautiful, I can’t help but think that spending our days trying to beat ourselves into perfection and then feeling bad when we fail isn’t actually what we need. There’s already enough grief in the world to cultivate vast acres of joy without deliberately increasing our reservoir.

The point isn’t that I shouldn’t be using Facebook—it’s that I should be present and listening to God and to the other people around me, and Facebook distracts me from that. Feeling guilty over checking Facebook, on the other hand, doesn’t make me more present. It just makes me more distracted and depressed over my failure.

Then what am I doing to make myself present? So far what has worked best is simply not keeping the phone in my pocket. It’s on the kitchen table, where I can get to it easily if I need to, but I can’t indulge the reflex every time life slows down (which is frequently these days).

I would like to think there are broader implications here than just Lent. What do you think?

dust

Last year, Lent marked a major transition in our family. There were big decisions made about how we were going to practice our faith and hand it down to our kids. This year is different. The choices I'm making feel smaller and less spiritually and emotionally fraught. Which of course makes them more difficult in some ways, because there isn't the same sense of urgency. I'm giving up little things that have taken on way more importance in my life than they merit, to try to make room for silence before God and vulnerability before other people. These little things are not particularly impressive--I'm not even giving up Facebook, much less tea, chocolate, booze, or coffee. This year my challenge is to be quiet and find God in the everyday of nursing a squirmy toddler or doing laundry or sighing over job applications.

We're finding a place for ourselves in a new faith community and completing our first full year of following the traditional church calendar. Last night Margaret and I went to our first Ash Wednesday service together. I'm the grownup so of course I acted like I knew what I was doing, but I think inside I was just as nervouscited as her. 

She sat on my lap and doodled in her notebook for most of the time, except when we were singing or responding. Then I held her on my hip like a baby (7 o'clock is sleepytime for Margaret) and she said the Lord's Prayer with everyone else.

From Margaret's notes during the service

After we got home, she asked why the pastor had put ash on our foreheads. "Well, do you remember what she said to you?" I asked.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return.

She asked what that meant, so we talked about the old story that God had a beautiful, beautiful world and no one to enjoy it with him, so he took some dust and shaped it into a body and poooof--blew his breath into the body and it became the first living person. And someday when we die our breath will go back to God and our bodies will turn back into dust.

She made me retell it several times before I finally insisted it was time for bed.

The one time I gave up church for Lent (with footnotes)

Today (Ash Wednesday) marks one year since I gave up church for Lent. Giving up church for Lent sounds very dramatic, or maybe melodramatic, depending on how generous you’re feeling towards one of those immature, narcissistic Millenials who leave church, even temporarily.

Lent, to me, isn’t so much a time for giving up something bad so much as a time for giving up something that’s not helpful right now to make space for something better, to ask where life is out of sync with where it ought to be, and then try to reset it. After watching my friend practice Lent like this over the first few years of our friendship, I had begun to feel that this was something I should do, too. But I didn’t grow up in a tradition that observe Lent formally, and the church I had been part of for the past ~10 years was opposed to anything resembling a liturgical calendar, so most years Lent came and I briefly panicked about maybe doing something, and then gave up on the idea.

Last year, though, I was growing increasingly depressed with my relationship with my church, which had been complex for years. Something I had always admired about their tradition—the gorgeously coherent metanarrative called a “worldview”—was becoming a serious problem for me, a postmodern academic with a deep and abiding suspicion of metanarratives.* At the time I don't think I would have pinned the problem on that—I would have said it was their views on gender, or God's justice, or inerrancy, or the definition of a Christian, or any number of other things—but most of these issues stem from this urge to force everything to fit into a set of predetermined categories.

Once upon a time, the idea that all the bewildering complexity of Life, the Universe, and Everything could be addressed within a single, comparatively simple system was deeply appealing.** I enjoy making lists and sorting stuff. In high school I shelved my books according to genre, author, and sometimes even publisher. But then there was that one book of essays that I couldn’t make fit into any category, so I shoved it on the end of one shelf and hoped no one noticed. No one did, of course, because not only did no one but me care about my bookshelves, hardly anyone could get in my room anyway. In spite of (or because of) my best efforts at organizing, my room was always a disaster. The level of systemization I tried to force onto my life couldn’t make my room make sense.  It also didn’t work on my locker, my backpack, or my binders full of notes when I was in graduate school (it’s a wonder my dissertation ever happened). What often happened was that I would give up and just leave things on the floor rather than trying to figure out where they should go.

There are lots of people for whom their systems do work. They are not me.

When I was 18 and first attending a church in this tradition, I figured the points at which the narrative didn’t jive with observed reality were just because I wasn’t wise enough, or knowledgeable enough about Greek, or Hebrew, or whatever. Surely it would make more sense as I got older and learned more. But the more I learned, the worse it got. By the time I was in graduate school, it wasn’t just my life that didn’t fit with the metanarrative—it was all these other lives (both real life and textual) that didn’t fit either, and they all didn’t fit in different ways.***

You can probably use me as a case study on why you shouldn’t sent your kids off to get advanced degrees at state schools.

Over the years, the points of intersection between my life and the metanarrative crumbled. For example, the only way I could be happily married was to jettison the how-to-be-married part of the narrative altogether, followed by a good chunk of the parenting part when Margaret, Destroyer-of-Paradigms, was born.**** The summer that Blaise was born, the connection between the metanarrative and the world as I experienced shattered completely. I floundered along for a few more months, but finally one Sunday David and I realized we shouldn’t go back to that church.

Then I discovered that Lent began that week, and it seemed like a good time to formally give up the system, in favor of….? I knew I was giving up the thing that wasn’t good for me right now, but I wasn’t very hopeful about what I could possibly be making space for.

*not that I’m the only person who has ever had this problem, or that only academics are suspicious of metanarratives and worldviews, just that this was how I experienced it.

**physicists like making things fit, too, and have had just as much luck as me, which is to say, not much, thanks to the discovery of a large family of time-traveling teleporting telekinetic subatomic particles.

***and let’s not even start talking about all the different ways that that single anthology of texts, the Bible, can be and has been read over the millenia.

****which may have been part of why Margaret was usually the loudest kid in church when we still went there, but I have no regrets in this regard except perhaps for keeping her there long after we had realized that this was not the place for us.

No U-turn

So, as you’ve probably noticed, lots of state roads were very sensibly planned to take advantage of other roads that had already been built. For awhile you’re driving on State Road 26, then you enter West Lafayette and the signs for 26 are accompanied by signs for State Street, until you cross the river and you’re driving on South Street, and then, way out in the cornfields it’s back to just plain old 26 again. But the whole time you’ve been on the same road.

However, sometimes this very practical arrangement means that occasionally, when Google Maps tells you, say, to stay on State Road 25 for 36 miles, you’ll actually have to jog right or left if you want to stay on that same road. Hopefully the shift is well-marked and at a stoplight. Sometimes it’s not—there’s one in particular in Logansport that David and I used to miss almost every time we drove to Koppys’ house from Lafayette. And when that happens, you’ll be driving along down the same road you had been but growing increasingly uneasy that you’re not going the right way anymore. And finally, you pull up your map app and discover that indeed, the little blue dot that marks your vehicle is no longer traveling down the blue line that indicates your route.

Sigh.

Anyway, I was working on a conference paper the other day when I got that feeling. The “this is not my route anymore” feeling, the “I have the sudden and overwhelming urge to panic and turn around” feeling. Of course, sometimes when you’re driving, you zoom out and discover that you’re not actually that far off from where you need to be. Sometimes panicking and turning around actually wastes more of your time than zooming out a bit (though please—if you’re driving, pull over for this part, or make your passenger do this for you!) and getting a better view of the whole situation. Because sometimes it’s better to keep going the same direction for a bit before you turn.

So what am I doing about that feeling? Zooming out is harder when the space you’re trying to get a better view of includes temporal space. I’m not going to give up on the paper and withdraw it or anything crazy like that on the strength of an uneasy feeling. Especially because the paper in question is my excuse for going to my favorite conference to see some of my favorite people :-) I did send a long and grouchy facebook message complaining about the directionlessness of it all to my friend Kate, who wisely helped me back up and see some pieces of that bigger picture. And now I’ll take a few deep breaths, set the paper down for a bit, and try to see where I’m going.

Regrets?

Of course, shortly after boldly announcing that I was going to post every week, my laptop power supply died. It’s now somewhat precariously held together with electrical tape until there’s time for a more permanent solution. In the meantime, like any good academic I added a subtitle to my blog. Because of course.

I’ve only been graduated and job-free for about a month and a half now, so it’s way too early to give up hope of—well, hope of anything. But between the job market and my own location-bound position, it’s pretty clear that whatever happens to my career isn’t going to be what I envisioned six years ago when I was looking towards the start of my PhD. As it turns out, there are lots of people in similar positions trying to find their way after completing a PhD but not finding the type of employment they were expecting. And a common thread running through their stories is regret. Regret at having given up 5-8 years and gone tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get this degree that has actually made them less employable. So I’ve been pondering what happens if I end up taking a path that doesn’t depend on me having finished this degree that I worked so long and hard to get. And I realized—

I have no regrets. For many reasons. First, I didn’t go into debt for this (thanks to five years of funding and to my wonderful committee members who helped me scrape together that extra semester). Also, I made lots of brilliant, interesting, wonderful friends who I treasure and would have never met otherwise, and I developed a lot of those PhD skills that all the alt-ac people point out, like self-motivation, multi-tasking, research stuff, teaching stuff, blah blah blah.

Furthermore, I never put my life on hold for this one thing. For the most part I did what I wanted—I got married, I bought a house, I got a dog, I HAD A BABY?! In fact, I had two babies. Who has babies in grad school?? That would be me :-) This is not to say, of course, that everyone in grad school should do the things that I did in order to be happy. But I had a life in grad school—I never “gave up” those years for my degree. The degree had to take its place alongside all the other things I care about, instead of taking over. And yeah, I could have been more productive without babies. I would have probably gotten another article out. But for me, article < babies. The *way* that I parent, relate to my husband, and take care of my dog is definitely affected by me having spent years in grad school, though.

Finally, from studying literature, I learned there are many ways to read a text. I don’t think I can overstate how big an impact that realization has had on how I related to the world, to other people (for the most notable examples, see above: husband, babies, dog) and to God. There’s a lot of say about that, actually, and I want to write about it more later.

To make a long story short, I am the person I am because I went to grad school. And for the most part, I really like myself, and I like the ways I have changed since I started grad school.   I don’t regret becoming this person—I’m sure non-grad-school-Erin would also be a wonderful person, but she’s not me.