Guinness and tofu

So there were a lot of things I wanted to do before I leave for Michigan on Friday. (Michigan! I know! Why couldn't they get married in, say, Bermuda? Hawaii? I'd even settle for Texas at this point. Wherefore art thou, Sunshine?!)

(Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty afraid to go to Bermuda. Anyone else read way too much about the Bermuda Triangle when they were impressionable grade schoolers?)

I wanted to: apply copious amounts of self-tanner to my pasty white legs. Get a haircut. Pay a professional to do something about my appalling eyebrows. Research how to counteract ankle-swelling when flying during the third trimester. Find a book I won't want to put in the freezer.

But this is about all I've done so far: made a Guinness cake (and eaten the leftover ganache with a spoon.) Slept. Cried over the fact that I do believe I waddled home from the lake yesterday. Shook my fist at the universe as you know who was first to the mat on The Amazing Race. Learned more than I ever wanted to know about ecospirituality. And bawled at my husband for not telling me how absolutely gorgeous I am in fifteen minute intervals. What is wrong with him?

And this is about all I plan to do before Friday: Haul myself to a yoga class. Sleep. Eat the rest of the Guinness cake. Nerdily obsess about getting Arwen's autograph. Try not to think about the fact that my one single maternity dress makes me look like a pink elephant.

Yes. I've been (and will be!) oh so productive. 

So do you want to hear about ecospirituality? I knew you would!

Except I was pretty frazzled for most of the weekend, due to somehow getting roped into Being In Charge of things I had no idea how to Be In Charge Of. So I was worrying about childcare and evaluation forms and running out of name tags and, of course, the guy who suddenly had a panic attack in the back pew, all of which made it sort of difficult to focus and be retreaty. But anyway. First and foremost I want to say that the speaker was ten kinds of awesome. He was engaging and clear and cheerful and knowledgeable and interesting and had an excellent sense of humor, which should be required for anyone with an actual honest-to-God degree in Eastern Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. He was not at all fazed by the woman whose hearing device emitted the high-pitched sound of going insane for nearly half an hour, which only endeared him to me more. In fact, I don't think I have ever liked a speaker so much and, at the same time, came away from his talks thinking, "Well, THAT was a load of bunk."

Because, really. After he drank a sip of water he said, "The old cosmology would say that the water is inside me. But I would like to suggest that we adopt a new cosmology, a cosmology that says, 'We are the water'."

Go ahead and draw your own conclusions. After the Friday night session a group of us young-ish folks gathered outside to debrief and one of us said, "Tomorrow we're going to hear about Gaia." And while he never ended up mentioning Gaia (we were so disappointed), we sat through what amounted to Biology AND Astronomy AND Chemistry 101, and Internet, I made sure to avoid all of those things like the plague when I was in college. It was interesting, to be sure, and I don't even know that I disagreed with his point, which amounted to something like "When we destroy the earth, we destroy the divine" or something like that. But, I swear, he did not get around to the God part of the discussion until the very last 15 minutes and by then I was no longer paying attention. And I only half caught the part where he argued that the idea of a 'soul' is a holdover from a "mechanistic cosmology". Honestly, there is only so much Big Bang talk my poor English major brain can handle.

My final reaction was, "So?" Which isn't really what I was hoping to get out of a Lent retreat.

However! What was most interesting to me was how reactions to the retreat could be broken down by demographic. The elderly people were all pretty much, "Uh, this is a bit too scholarly for me. When do we start the Ignatian prayer?" The young-ish folks were, for the most part (and obviously excluding my vegan friend who spent 6 weeks on a commune learning how to, uh, live communally) not completely convinced.   And the people our parents' age were totally stoked. "It was FASCINATING," they kept saying. "I SO ENJOYED IT."

Blah blah blah. I went home and made a Guinness cake. And babysat a non-screamy, non-shrieky but still not interested in napping 5-month-old for a few hours until her mother came over bearing vegetarian phad thai for dinner. I think if I'm going to worship something "of the earth" I am going to worship phad thai with tofu. YUM.

Comments

[Arwen]

On the autograph front: Tee hee.

On the retreat-speaker front: Uhhhhh.

That is not plain old garden-variety bunk. That is what we in the theology biz (okay, the amateur theology biz, but still) like to refer to as "not Catholic teaching." When it's proffered by someone calling himself Catholic, we call it "heresy."

(And here is where I would normally go into a rant about how I'm not asking that they read Aquinas, but why is it too much for these people to open a freaking CATECHISM? but I will spare you.)

Let me say, though, that from a Catholic point of view he's wrong. You are distinct from the water you drink. There is such a thing as a soul. The earth is not God - in fact, it's not even an eternal creation like we humans are. And that old, tired cosmology has been working pretty darn well for Christians for more than two millenia.

You were right to be skeptical.

(Oh, and sorry if I come off as too gung-ho here, but the fact that people are spreading this junk at parishes all around the nation while a growing percentage of Catholics don't even have a basic working knowledge of their faith... well, it gets my goat a little. You know.)

[Laura]

Hey .... glad you are heading out for some fun..even if it isn't tropical : ) Oh, and the humidifier...Hello Kitty... Target! Go get yourself one and maybe a cow or frog for your little one.

[E.]

You got out of biology 101? Are you magic or something? I majored in English too, but we were herded like chattel into biology 101. Seriously, 800 students in my class. No, not my graduating class, my biology 101 class.
Sorry to just pop up out of nowhere and start stalking your blog, but I love your writing style.