Middle school spirituality

I hit my spiritual prime in middle school. It was the only time I admitted to spirituality without caveat, that it was a badge I wore proudly, that I considered some of my daily practices 'spiritual.'

I understand that when you hit puberty, besides periods, crushes, deodorant, etc, your brain also develops to the point when you start to have more questions about the metaphysical. Your view of yourself develops, your view of your parents develop, you start to wonder about big issues like the root of violence or whether there actually is a God or not. With a tinge of adolescent hysteria.

The primary location of my spiritual life was in my writing. In 6^th grade I started keeping a journal. I wrote in the journal every night before going to sleep, usually in the 9 or 10 pm hour, with Mix 100.3 playing on the radio. (This was when tortured boy bands like Vertical Horizon and Creed were popular.) I hated having to skip a day. It was ritual: I would lie on my stomach in bed, my face just inches from the open window, and write as the breeze breathed on me.

I wrote in the second person. I would pour out my thoughts to an undefined You. This You knew everything that I had previously written about. This You was a confidante, was the linearity I created for my life. Maybe You was not God, but it helped me to think that I was addressing something out there, separate from me.

Once I woke up at my Grandmother's house in the middle of the night, sat up, and wrote on a sticky note to remember later: “god is the glue that holds the circle of life 2gether.” Did I actually believe it or like the idea of it? Not sure.

In my case, the big questions started to seem big around the time that I started having the drawn-out, ridiculous infatuations with boys that we all hope to never have again past age 14. So my middle school spirituality was, embarrassingly, tangled up with my crushes.

I would write excessively about whatever boy I was pining after, and sentences later I would write about things I had never considered before-- was there a meaning to life? How do people cope with cynicism? If there is no god, is there no meaning? Are there souls? I grappled with 9-11, with my parents' divorce, with my first feelings of deep sadness and loneliness. I also gushed about exciting homework assignments, assigned great meaning to silly moments I shared with my friends. Because I was writing these things down for the first time, certain events I wrote down stood out, seemed mythic.

I signed every entry like a letter: “Love, Kelly.” I continue to end my entries this way, automatically.

I made my own metaphors and symbolism, and noticed them during the day, and then wrote about them. A paper crane, the coyotes howling outside, certain songs, all had special, crucial meaning. For some reason I no longer understand would write the names of my crushes on tiny pieces of paper and hide them in a ceramic jar I bought at the Renaissance festival labeled “freckles.” So freckles had certain meaning too.

I was restless and superstitious, sentimental and dramatic. But I could tell I was heading towards bigger thoughts, bigger epiphanies. My thirteen-year-old self described it thusly:

Feet won’t stop moving,

the cold nose grass

on my toes

watching the moths

fumble across smoke

on my nose it smells like night

My view out my window in those days was the suburban cul de sac of Eliza Court and the rolling fields behind it. I memorized my neighbors' nighttime habits-- the chubby man in long white shorts walking his dog, the moody college student that stood and smoked on the driveway of the gray house. They were important parts of the ritual too.

After I closed my notebook and turned the light out, I would lie with my head on the windowsill, eyes up at the stars, and listen to the coyotes in the distant fields howling and killing small family pets. I learned to follow the movement of the larger constellations, to greet Mars as a friend as it slowly travelled across the sky (and in 8^th grade, grew larger than it will ever be again in my lifetime). When my mind felt too full and my heart too tumultuous to sleep, I would sometimes talk very quietly out the window, out to the night. I would continue to talk to “You,” ask it questions, express my hopes and concerns. I considered it my own means of praying.

In 7^th grade, I had a crush on a boy in my class that primarily played out over aol instant messaging. We rarely hung out at school, but in the evenings we would have long conversations, usually about a topic of his choosing, usually about something existential. He was a bit older than I and seemed incredibly wise. We would also email poetry back and forth that we had written. His verse was formal and philosophical and (I thought at the time) very deep. I still remember how one began:

Love

What a joyous folly of the heart

In the end, he ended up 'dating' a 6^th grader and I got roped into accompanying them on one of their movie dates and I moodily walked through the fields in a snow-pink night after parting ways. Ridiculousness aside, he did challenge me to ask bigger questions, which I continued asking long after I got tired of him.

I had a special tree at the park that I would sit in to think about such questions. In reality, it was a bent up, half-dead mess of a tree in a drainage ravine right next to the local park. Teenagers would go smoke and drink there at night, leaving stray beer cans and smudges of graffiti on the tree. On weekend days, I would put on my soft, red baseball hat, backwards (like Holden Caulfield, whom I had not heard of yet), and walk the half mile to the park. I'd duck off the sidewalk onto a dirt trail and push through a wall of willows, descending to a tiny 'creek' of drainage water. The tree's bark was worn smooth from climbers, and the trunk was twisted parallel to the ground at one spot, where I could sit above the water and be hidden from the park visitors. I considered it the best place to be alone and think.

I cringe and laugh to read what I wrote in those days, but I do love remembering that phase of my adolescence. For all of the self-consciousness that comes with being 12 and 13, I was not self-conscious about my 'spirituality.' It was not meaty or well developed, but it was natural and I accepted it for what it was.

Introduction

I am currently completing a year in a Christian service corps program, and my coordinator, S., is fascinated that I identify as “not religious.” I like to consider metaphysical questions and discuss the uncertainties of human existence, but I was not raised religiously, nor do I operate day to day with a firm  sense of God or even a commitment to atheism. If I were religious, I would probably not be Christian. Yet here I am, fresh out of college with a degree in religious studies-- with a focus on Christianity-- living in a historical New York City church and, for the third time in my life, receiving paychecks from a church.

I'm one of those people that Christians probably talk about behind her back. “She may not know it, but she'll be Christian one day,” they'd say. “She seems riper for conversion every day.”

During our biweekly, one on one meetings, S. holds her backpack to her chest as we sit in a cafe and leans over it like a cheerful kitten clutching her first mouse. She is a woman of wisdom, but sometimes her manner, and her massive and adorable eyes, remind me more of youth than middle age. Her brow furrows slightly as she leans forward, and asks,

“Do you feel... spiritual at all?”

It's a genuine, fascinated, uncritical question, but it puts me on the defensive. Around S., I find myself trying to be even less spiritual than I actually am, lest she snatch the word 'God' out of my mouth and start a mad, joyous jig in a circle, right there in the cafe, singing, “She is! She is! I knew it!”

So I say, "not really."

One night, the other volunteers and I sat in our apartment living room holding a book club meeting with S. and the church reverend. I had recommended Franny and Zooey, one of my favorite books, for that month. After the reverend and I batted back theories about the book back and forth for awhile, S. got her thinking face on.

“Would you say,” she said, holding the book out with one hand and bobbing it up and down with each word as she spoke. “Would you say that this book,” (dramatic pause) “defines your spirituality?” My housemates all exchanged glances with each other, half anticipatory, half amused, and I feel bouyed up by them-- for all of their spiritual goals, they have been wonderfully supportive of me and my religiousless-ness, and we've joked before about her questions to find me otherwise.

“No.” I said flatly.

But in truth, yes. Franny and Zooey does mean a lot to me spiritually, even as I hesitate to use the word. In that, it's been formative to my thinking and feels deeply right in many ways. I always finish rereading it and feel like bursting open some elaborate french doors and breathing in all the glory of life as birds sing and young girls luxuriously roll over in bed.

So I am left to wonder: why has this year, in which I am living in an intentionally Christian world, been all about my own defensiveness about and denial of my own beliefs? It's not genuine, and frankly I don't really like it. I'm tired of defining myself as the “apartment atheist,” an epithet I've fed to my roommates.

It's not that I'm not an atheist-- I just don't feel particularly atheist sometimes, nor do I feel theist, nor do I like the idea of being agnostic. But that's where my difficulty lies-- muddled in metaphysical currents on all sides, as a young woman who has studied religion from the outside for so long and been so fascinated by faith, I am unclear on what I believe. I do not know how to talk about it, which words to use.

Belief is notoriously hard to put into words for most people, but its a difficulty that the more Christian of my housemates encounter in the different way. I stand wistfully listening over the stove, waiting for my spaghetti water to boil as they sit on the couch beside me snacking and comparing church services, discussing their own struggles with the church, their changing conception of Christ in specific terms.

I can, though, point to stories, poems, ideas, experiences, and places that affect me in a deeper way than mere admiration or inspiration. And in writing, I feel like I transcend my worldly self in some way, and tap into a more boiled down essence of myself.

So these series of writings are meant to start at other people's words and arrive at my own. This writing intends to be a more trusting revelation to my dear housemates; a more complex answer than the atheism I conform to alongside my sister and some of my dearest friends; and it is a more genuine answer to S.