Sister Justine Nadely--an historical monologue

As mentioned, I write every summer for the Candlelight Tours at Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, VA. These tours take visitors on a path through the cemetery and feature short monologues and scenes based on the lives of people buried there. I've worked up a bit of a reputation as having some of the more, well, progressive and aggressive pieces in the tour, which a fair amount of people seem to appreciate and which seem to get everyone, regardless of their taste for the pieces, talking.

However, last summer, I wrote this piece that did not get shown. I had a wonderfully honest and open and dialogic conversation with the staff of Candlelight Tours where both parties agreed to keep the piece on the backburner--I couldn't imagine saying anything other than what I'd said, and they understandably weren't hot to show a piece in Central Virginia where I implied all Confederate soldiers were sinners.

I went back and read it today in preparation for this summer's monologues. I still like this piece. I am not a Catholic--not really even a Christian--so it was challenging to write from a nun's perspective. I am sure Sister Justine Nadely, though she was the youngest nun and nurse helping at the hospital in Lynchburg during the Civil War, wouldn't have said these things quite this way. But if I were ever going to be religious, this is how my religion would function.

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Sister Justine Nadely (20-24) stands, almost at attention, or as if in prayer. Her "wings" sit atop her head, and her hands are out of her robe, and covered in blood.

Somewhere nearby, there is a basin full of clean water.

There are rights and wrongs. Beyond my church or yours, there are. I know this now. 

War is hell, is hell here on Earth. I know this now, too. 

I hadn't even taken my final vows yet. I was supposed to, in a year--but then the war came, and instead of waiting, they asked me to take them so that I could attend to the sick and the wounded as a Sister. I am not sorry I took my vows. I am glad to be a Sister, to be of service, to care for the poor boys whether they come to me in blue or in gray. God sees no color, except for, perhaps, red.

She does not look at her hands, but we feel her see them.

See, freedom makes man a moral subject. A man is free to choose his path, free to choose his next action, free to choose which side he does or does not fight for. I was free to become a nun, and I was called, and so I chose. The call went out, in the North and the South, and men chose to heed it. But there are still rights and wrongs. We ask ourselves three questions in the Catholic Church. Is the object chosen for your act a good toward which your will directs itself? Is your intention to do good? And what of the circumstances--what do they make of your choice? 

Many of these boys tell me they had no choice, not truly. A call went out and they answered it, afeared of the scorn of their families, the loss of their community, the label of a coward. They did feel it was the right thing to do--the right choice. It is not my place to say who chose right and who chose wrong, which call was good and which was evil. That verdict has no bearing on the boy whose arm I try to keep on his body. I am here to save, to serve, to salve. I am not here to judge. 

And yet--freedom and morality are inextricably bound. To be free, to be one of God's creatures, is to choose constantly between good and evil. Forgiveness is promised to us, of course--that is God's prerogative, to forgive us for our sins. But now, at the height of this conflict, in the depths of this misery, I see many who've forgotten the ending of that phrase: for our sins. Forgiveness isn't free. It costs. We pay for the forgiveness we will receive with the blood, sweat, and tears from our mistakes. My God is a benevolent God--and your Protestant God is no different. But it is up to me, up to you to make amends, confess your sins, and deserve the forgiveness that is promised to you. 

Sometimes, in the morning, when I have a fresh batch of boys to tend to, I do not want to forgive, I am tired of forgiving. That is why I am not God, merely a servant, merely a Sister. But I do not claim to be God, and there are those who'd have you think otherwise, about themselves. No man is God, and yet here we are, caught between the shores of the North and the South, tossed upon the waves of Right and Wrong. Yet all we must do is call out to our God, confess, and come home. 

I am a humble woman, a Daughter of Charity, a helper, an aide. It gives me joy to mend the wounds of a soldier, see the color come back into his face, blot his brow and catch a smile spread across his lips as he opens his eyes and sees a friendly face--mine. I am all these boys have, here at least, now at least, everything to them. And yet I am only human. If I chose not to attend to some of them, chose to turn my ear away from their please for help, chose to condemn some of them to death, and not some others--what would you say of me? If I decided that those with blue eyes were lesser than, were inferior, were fit only for back-breaking work and a lifetime of servitude--what would you think? Those decisions are not up to me, and so I do not make them. So would I go to war, to defend my right to make decisions that do not fall under my purview? 

And yet, I must tend. It is not my position to decide who lives and who dies, no matter who is right or who is wrong, and so I tend. God is a shepherd; he, too, tends--no matter the color of skin, no matter the place in society, no matter who came from where on what Godforsaken ship. God tends to all, and loves all, and forgives all. 

And yet, I cannot say this, or I will not be forgiven by those men who would have me fight for their cause. I cannot say this, or the town whose hospital I help support would turn on me, run me out as a traitor to their home. And yet, you look across the battlefield, at those who would oppose you, and you curse them for infringing upon your freedom--when you would fight to imprison another man. It is a battle that cannot and will not be won, no matter the victor--ultimately, God will decide. Ultimately, God will forgive--but you will have to ask for it, and to ask for it, you will have to confess to your sins.

To those of you listening, I say: repent. Though the tides of these currents might bear us this way and then the other, you know, in your heart of hearts, that this is wrong, that there should be no war. The same freedom you purport to bear arms in defense of is the freedom you deny another of your kind. 

"If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen." 1 John 4:20-21.

See God. Love your brother, whether he be black or white. Confess your sins. And you will be forgiven.

Sister Justine Nadely bends to the basin of water, and begins to wash the blood off her hands.

END OF MONOLOGUE

On Meditation, part 2

In part 1, I wrote a bit about a twitter thread that left me shook and made me reconsider the way I move through my world. Part 2 deals with the book from that twitter thread, and how it convinced me to start meditating.

I'm not sure when it began exactly, but for most of my adult life my anxiety has centered around judging, repressing, or attempting to completely detach myself from my own emotions. I took up journaling at the end of high school because I hadn't found a habitual way to really communicate my innermost feelings to people, despite having a tight-knit group of close friends. It wasn't that I never shared feelings, it was that I had many more feelings besides the ones I'd finally share--and even most of that sharing happened over AIM, a text-based confessional that gave me the safety of impersonality. And I journaled all through college, and post-graduation, and well into 2015 with prolificacy. I remember nights of deep sadness, pouring over my past journals, attempting to chart out how I'd gotten to where I felt I was, where the fatal flaw in my emotional life had first shown up, but drowning in my own thoughts only served to draw me deeper into myself.

I hate emotions, hate feeling emotional, hate having emotional responses but hate anyone else being privy to those emotional responses even more. I still have a handful of very close friends; very few of them have seen me cry more than once, and yet I cry a lot on my own. I have always been on the hunt for the thing that will allow me to push down my emotions and conquer them, purge myself of the humanity of feeling so that I can be the logical, rational person I so desperately want to be, and present as, and am on one side of my brain. I associated emotions with delusions--things that were untrue but that a person could deeply invest in--and nothing could be worse to a rational mind that acting under the influence of intense delusions.

Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True starts off with a Matrix metaphor, comparing Neo's red-pill-blue-pill dilemma to that of anyone contemplating taking up meditation. Do you want to start to see the truth through meditation, or continue to blindly accept the dream/delusion? I knew what my answer was, and Wright already had me hooked.

But from there, he didn't dive straight into meditation, and if he had, that might been the end of the book for me, too quickly dropped into the pool of new age philosophy and Patchouli-scented lingo (sorry for the Patchouli jab). No, after appealing to my deep-seated fear of delusion, Wright went on to discuss evolutionary psychology and natural selection, and how all of our emotional responses can be traced back to a small handful of basic human needs designed to ensure the continuation of our species, but that the upside of where we've gotten to as a species is that our brains can now understand where those emotions/impulses come from, and choose to supersede the ones that don't serve us anymore.

As a woman who doesn't want kids and currently, at 29, feels no doomed countdown of any biological clock, I've spent a lot of time wrestling with other people's blind belief in biological impulses that I feel are outdated. Humanity is not in danger of dying out; intellectually I firmly believe that, while my genes may be pretty good, if I want a kid then I can choose from one of the millions of them who already exist and are not being provided for; I don't have womb pangs every time I see a baby. The most common response I received upon sharing that I didn't want kids was, "But you'd make a great mother!" which, firstly, how the fuck do you know, and secondly, I'm not sure that gives me the right to bring another person into existence just to prove that. The second most common response was, "Well, if you meet the right man, you'll change your mind." Firstly, fuck you, and secondly, again, I think the narrative of meeting the "right man" with the right genes and succumbing to the totally inaccurate assumption that the world needs more of you would be relinquishing control to forces and impulses that helped Neanderthals survive but perhaps do not have to be true for me. Those people, who I know were mostly acting on good intentions, did nothing but reinforce my very stubborn assumption that I could out-think biology that didn't serve me anymore.

If Robert Wright had a target audience, at this point, it was me: averse to delusions, resistant to biology.

But wait--he wasn't finished with me yet. The topic he picked up next is perhaps what sealed the deal for me, only 5 pages into his book:

"Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much."

I didn't need convincing of this fact: I knew it to be true. I had journals upon journals, pages upon pages, thousands upon thousands of words intended to help me understand the source of my suffering...and it hadn't gotten me very far. I felt I was no closer to being able to change anything about my suffering, despite all the apparent resources I had at my fingertips. Most of my anxiety, actually, centered around knowing so much, and yet being able to change very little.

It's wholly illogical to assume we can get away from our emotions--we wouldn't be human without them--but it is supremely logical to believe our evolved brains can observe them, understand where they're coming from and why we might feel that way, and then either let those feelings go or act on them in a more measured and informed way.

And that's, in a nutshell, what meditation helps you do. Wright's arguments aren't going to appeal to everyone, but they spoke to me--they undermined my skepticism by connecting meditation to science and rationality, they corrected the fatal misunderstanding I'd been operating under about emotions and how to deal with them, and they didn't feel condescending or too conceptual, mostly because of Wright's secular examples, his dry sense of humor, and his admission of imperfection. Not just for meditation, but for any self-improvement, I find I really need testimonies from people who were once non-believers, who are still grappling with how to do something, and who admit to failing as often as they succeed: it gives me permission to do the same.

I've meditated every single day of 2018: 101 sessions, 28 hours total, 15-20 minute sessions every morning. It has made a big difference in how I handle my anxiety, in my sleeping patterns, in my ability to handle conflict, emotion, and stress. Why Buddhism Is True was the first stepping stone. I don't want to ruin the rest of the book for anyone who might be interested in reading it, but hopefully, if you're like me, I've given you enough reason to check the book out for yourself.

(Click here for an Amazon link to the book, if you're ready to dive in.)

Next time, I'll write about some highs, lows, and observations from my meditation journey so far.

On Meditation, part 1

If you'd asked me 10 years ago, 5 years ago--hell, even 1 year ago--if I could ever picture myself meditating, I'd have laughed in your face. Meditation, like yoga, was something that was so anti-me: I didn't have the patience, didn't have the flexibility, it didn't appeal to me, I didn't need more alone time with my thoughts--I would have given you all these reasons and then some.

See, I pride myself on my mind. It's the thing I hold most dear in this world, the thing I attribute all my success to, the thing that makes me me. Or, I felt that way for a long time; my mind had become a kind of superhero, infallible to the extreme and above reproach in my eyes. I constantly analyzed my own thoughts, and that's what I assumed meditation was, so I didn't need any practice doing that. Because I valued my mind so highly, I didn't really care about what my body could do, or attributed it to my brain, so I had no interest in practicing yoga--it made me frustrated, sad, and anxious, things my mind did not want to feel. I was a brain, and my brain helped me do wonderful things: write, act, devise, collaborate, make jokes, give friends advice, read fast, comprehend faster, on and on and on.

Of course, superheroes are never infallible--a good superhero needs a weakness, right?

I have always been anxious, ever since I was a kid, most obviously in the way that my sleep suffers if there's anything to think about. I left sleepovers a lot when I was young, worried that something would happen to my parents and I wouldn't be there. I'd wake them up in the middle of the night crying loudly over a bad grade I hadn't told them about. Kids shouldn't have anxiety, they're kids--and it's not like reasons to be anxious decrease as you get older. So my anxiety dug its heels in and made itself a part of me, and I spent these first three decades of my life embracing it, protecting it, and supporting it.

If I ever broke my top secret security clearance and told you I was anxious, our conversations about the subject probably went something like this:

This meme is especially perfect to me and represents the conundrum I found myself in to a fucking T--because if I was going to personify my anxiety, it would come out like Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in LotR: calm, serene, all-knowing, all-powerful, and only terrifying if she considers taking on power that is too great to imagine. The biggest way my anxiety convinced me to let it live was by appearing as anything but anxiety.

It told me I only worked fast because I spent hours thinking of every possible outcome to a situation. It told me I only made personal progress because I analyzed everything I had ever done, then beat myself up about it, then tried to plan out how the future would unfold knowing what I knew now. It convinced me that the reason I was empathetic towards people was because I worried about what they were thinking and feeling and put that above and beyond whatever I was thinking or feeling, and it told me that if I stopped considering everyone before myself then I'd turn into a terrible person. 

And it told me all this in a calm, normal voice that sounded a lot like mine, with the conviction of a supremely logical being who is only looking out for you. I had made my anxiety Supreme Ruler of everything I was, everything I did, and every thought I had. Yield, and you shall be rewarded; resist, and you will suffer the consequences. In reality, I'd put my own personal kryptonite on the throne, and it had slowly broken down almost everything good I had to offer. It had reduced talents to hidden embarrassments, authentic emotional responses to internalized insecurities, impulses to immovable observations--it had built up around me and subdued my spark.

And, to top it all off, I'm high-functioning as fuck, so I still had plenty of evidence to make those admissions sound overdramatic, which kept me locked in a cycle of fighting against my anxiety only to have it make it feel worse in the end for even trying.

Over the last couple years, I've had a lot to be grateful for, proud of--I excelled in grad school, moved in with a loving, supportive partner and then married him, helped get an arts center off the ground, starting teaching right out of grad school, bought a house, got a dog, organized a reading series--the list of good things goes on and on in a way that makes me embarrassed to write out. And, simultaneously, as good things piled onto my plate, my anxiety, my self-esteem, and my communicative abilities got worse and worse and worse. 

When things are all bad, it's easy to feel like an inner world full of fixation, low self-worth, and anxiety is warranted; I'd spent a lot of time in the past rationalizing why I had a right to feel bad, why it was logical to worry, why the only rational solution was to agonize over this and that and the other. But suddenly, things were good--they were really good--and nothing about my inner life reflected that.

Given the circumstances, and with the help of my partner, I realized I needed some help. But that isn't what got me started on meditation--nope. My brain still was like, "Nah, we don't need that." No, what got me started on meditation was stumbling upon this Twitter thread:

That's right--what led me ultimately to meditation was an appeal to my other great love (and other big crutch): my introversion.

Wait, I thought, are you saying it's possible my own brain has been relegating us to horrible social interactions just by assuming we're horrible at them? Does my personality just falsely believe it has a big scar that people are staring at?! 

It sounds silly in retrospect, but in that moment, I was shook. I had never once considered that the horrible feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I think about going out and interacting with people could have been purely and totally self-created, self-fulfilled, and self-sustained. What if my brain had essentially created its own prison, and then tricked me into thinking it was where I wanted to be, was home?

So I bought the book, fully expecting to read the introduction, encounter some New Age-y mumbo jumbo, and laugh myself right back into my comfort zone.

But that's not what happened--not at all.

Next, I'll write about the book and what ultimately convinced me to start meditating.