God as a Vending Machine

This morning I read Glennon Melton's most current blog post, about not trying to pray away mental illness any more than you might try to pray away physical illness. Her exact quote was, "If you wouldn't go to your minister for a mammogram, don't go to her for depression."

Now, before you get all outraged, neither Glennon nor I are suggesting that people not pray, or that God can't sending healing, or that ministers don't have a place in society. What we're saying is that mental illnesses-not transient feelings of sadness or worry, but crippling conditions like depression and anxiety--need to be seen for physical illnesses that they are. You can pray to God to cure your cancer, but you also need to see an oncologist. Sometimes God is healing you with a big whopping dose of chemo, or with an operation, or--dare I say it?--by gifting you with antidepressant medicine for the rest of your life.

I see more than one big, big, big problem with people relying on faith and prayer alone to cure for mental illness. The first is that prayer by itself isn't nearly as effective as medicine and real, non-faith-based therapy (there are some really cool therapies coming out of the latest findings in neuroscience--Google brainspotting for a start). The second is that people with untreated depression sometimes kill themselves, or abuse their children, or fail to thrive in many different ways that have permanent negative effects. The third is that when prayer alone doesn't work, mentally ill people can feel neglected by God--they can in fact be driven away from God.

The biggest problem, though, stems from the root thought behind this approach, which is the same as that behind the Prosperity Gospel (you know, where you pray to get lots of money, and ponies, and a Cadillac): it turns God, the divine incomprehensible Creator of all things seen and unseen, into a common vending machine. A vending machine in the service of humans.

Here's how it works: we deposit prayers, like coins. We chuck some prayers, some faith, some Bible verses, into our God vending machine, and we push the little button to select the result we want: health, wealth, children, a Cadillac. We push the button, and whoosh! a miracle cure, or a pony, falls into our hands. Or doesn't. If it doesn't, we throw in some more coins, and try again. The argument is that if we just put in coins enough, the machine will automatically cough up the prize.

This is not faith. This is the absence of faith. Faith is the sort of trust that says, Here's what I want, and I'm doing all I can as a human to get it, but God, I know everything isn't up to me, and in all cases Your will be done.

That's a hard sentence, because it doesn't guarantee you a prize. Ok, God, I'm doing everything I can do--using every gift you've given me, including medicine, including therapy--and I want to be well, but if it doesn't happen I trust that your understanding exceeds mine. I'm okay with whatever comes next. 

It's a hard sentence, but a hopeful one. It means that you don't have to worry about running out of coins. It means that you're allowed to use all the science at your disposal, and--this is important--it removes the shame from mental illness. Because while people aren't ashamed of having cancer, they're often still ashamed of becoming depressed.

When I fell to pieces, a decade ago, I said to my therapist, "Wait. You're saying that depression is caused by chemical irregularities in my brain. You're also saying that in my case my depression is caused by or made worse by my history of childhood abuse. In order for both of those things to be true, the abuse would have had to cause physical changes in my developing brain."

And she said, "Absolutely."

I felt this shimmering relief.

That was ten years ago; more recent neuroscience--a fascinating field, if it had existed when I was in college I very well might have majored in it--confirms and expands upon it.

And so, I went to weekly therapy for several years. I still have occasional sessions--a recent brainspotting one was absolutely amazing, and I'll certainly blog about it at some point. I take antidepressant medication every single day. I tried coming off it once; that was bad for everyone, my husband, my children, and me. I won't try it again.

I also take asthma medicine every single day. For years I struggled to keep my symptoms under control, but now with this new stuff, Advair, I'm doing great. I've had three separate physicians tell me that I was very lucky not to have died from asthma as a child. They weren't kidding. But now I'm able to exercise without a flare. I used to take four separate medications for several days in advance every time I competed cross-country. I haven't had to do that the last three years.

It's awesome, this healing. I thank God every day for it. But also, I take my medication. I'm pretty sure my faith in God requires that I do.

Sarah Time

"When I'm talking to my friends," my daughter said, "And I say, 'Sarah,' they say, 'Which Sarah--Sarah the horse or Sarah the priestess?'"

I love several things about that sentence:

1. That I named my horse after my friend. Because, let's face it, the likelihood of naming a daughter after her was getting extremely small,  and yet, what a pleasure to say her name every day.

2. Also, the horse named Sarah is fabulous.

3. That Sarah-my-friend is, in fact, a priestess--an ordained Episcopalian priest, no less, not one of those odd wiccan types. She doesn't usually go by priestess, but, you know, I think she should. It sounds badass.

4. Especially this: that when my daughter says 'Sarah,' her friends know that one of the options is Sarah-the-priestess, despite the fact that my daughter hasn't seen Sarah-the-priestess since her ordination, in January 2010.

Sarah-the-priestess is one of my childhood best friends. She's trilingual, with degrees from Yale and Vanderbilt as well as her seminary. She's a nun living in an semi-enclosed community with a monastic devotion to daily prayer. She's also my daughter's godmother. In Haiti, where Sarah lived for several years, the position of godmother is so important that the word for it is "co-mere," as in "co-mother." Sarah has mothered my daughter very well from afar, with lots of letters and postcards, emails, Facebook postings, and love.

For the past three days Sarah and I have been taking a watercolor class together, in Linville where our mountain house is. It's been tremendously fun--more on that later--but, since my daughter already started high school and my husband and son were out of town, we ended up commuting back and forth. We'd get home late, and I'd cook dinner. I felt exhausted by the end of all three days--a combination of intense concentration during the class, three hours of driving, and no yoga--but then we'd hang out in the kitchen, Sarah, my daughter, and me. Sarah and I would sip some wine. Sarah would take photo essays of my recipes, for her blog. My daughter would tell us all about her school day, and about the horses, which she took care of in my absence, and other things, and then we'd eat dinner at the table by candlelight.

Twice when I went up to bed my daughter and her godmother stayed up talking, cozily. Whenever I can swipe a bit of Sarah's summer vacation, I take it. But she was ordained and then she was in Haiti, and then spent all last summer seeing her mother through a terrible accident--I went to see Sarah then--at any rate, I don't get this opportunity as often as I'd like, or as often as my daughter would like. We're reveling in it, in every precious moment.

Visiting Jane Eyre

My daughter just now left the house for the start of her senior year of high school. I didn't take a photo, though I should have: her standing on the steps holding a sign saying, "Twelfth grade." She wouldn't have let me but it's a nice idea.

Last night we were both sprawled on couches, reading. I finished Kate Atkinson's new novel, A God in Ruins, which was brilliant. My daughter was reading Jane Eyre, her assigned summer reading. At one point she let out a sad sigh.

"Helen Burns?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Not like you couldn't see that coming, but still."

My daughter told me she'd skipped most of her volume's introduction: "lonely Yorkshire, children dying, all the survivors writing, Branwell crazy, blah, blah...been there."

She wasn't merely being sarcastic: she has been there. We spent two nights in Leeds, England, on vacation this year, and one of the places we visited was the Bronte parsonage in Haworth.

Now, I don't know what images you retain from reading about the Brontes in high school, but when I read about the desolate, windswept, Yorkshire moors I mostly pictured the family struggling on a barren crag, miles from the nearest neighbor. Also, given the rate at which the Brontes died off (mother before her youngest child was two, then the eldest two daughters at ages 11 and 9, then Anne on the living room couch and Emily by the sea, Branwell drinking himself to death, and Charlotte, the survivor, making it all the way to age 38) and the wretched tubercular school the girls were sent to, I pictured a fairly poverty-stricken existence, small fires unable to adequately heat draughty comfortless rooms.

Well. Not exactly. The Bronte parsonage is, like Jane Austen's cottage in Chawton, remarkably unchanged (or restored) from the time when that wildly talented family lived there. It sits like on crown atop Haworth, a village resembling an Italian hill town, all small cobbled lanes winding upwards, and, for the time, it was pretty lush. Carpets, wallpaper, good furniture. Pretty writing desks, books. You can see the actual sofa on which Anne died, as well as her still-bloody linen handkerchief (not making that up), one of Charlotte's dresses, and many samples of writing in the sisters' hands. Haworth has a bustling, intimate feel--of course, it's a prosperous little tourist town now, with open-air seating at Branwell's favorite pub. From what I read and the photos I saw at the little Bronte museum, Haworth used to be fairly unpleasant, with open sewers running alongside the streets and a water supply tainted by the fact that the cemetery was at the very top of the hill. Charlotte's father, in fact, petitioned for a new water supply, and got one. Life expectancy in Haworth during the Bronte's time was not good--but not as bad as in the parsonage itself.

I didn't feel the awe at Haworth that I felt at Chawton, but that's probably because I don't love the Brontes as much as I love Jane Austen. I do like them pretty well, however, and I retain a strong affection for Jane Eyre.

"Is there something wrong with Jane?" my daughter asked, at the start of her reading.

"No," I said, "she's just sad and lonely. Why?"

"Everyone's so mean to her."

"That's because they're hateful," I said. (Is there a tiny bit of Jane Eyre in my character Ada? Maybe. Never thought of that before.) "It gets better," I said.

Reader, she marries him.

Lunch With My Girlfriends

Yesterday I had lunch with some of my girlfriends, for the first time all summer. We've been trying to get together, really trying to coordinate our schedules, since school let out at the end of May.

I'd say that's unfortunate except that I don't believe it. We've all been running around with our arms full of such good things. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago we could meet more regularly for lunch. We went to kid-friendly places and commandeered all the highchairs and stuffed our babies and toddlers inside them. We talked while dumping Cheerios onto trays and spooning baby food and wiping noses.

It seems like yesterday. S-- ran out to the car to grab something, and her small son swiveled in his high chair, stared at me in horror, and said, "Hey! Where's my mom?" T-- took a photo at one of these lunches of my daughter, perhaps two years old, playing with a small toy on the table. That photo is framed and sitting on my bookshelf.

We grabbed coffee before preschool pickup. We chaperoned kindergarten trips to the Nutcracker. We met at endless, endless t-ball games, endured grade-school "talent" shows, talked about discipline and spelling bees and what age our children should get cell phones.

Now we've got one child graduated from college, recovering from surgery, looking for a job. Another serving in the military. Several applying to college. One getting his first apartment. One planning to study abroad. All our children are starting to figure out what they want from life, what they love, who they want to be.

Yesterday we couldn't wait until these kids got out of diapers. Today we're amazed how this summer has flown. Tomorrow we'll get together for lunch again. Only somewhere with a wine list, please.

First Review

My husband does not love to read. He reads for information more than pleasure, and though the occasional novel catches his eye, he mostly sticks to nonfiction. However, because he loves me and because he knows that it's important to me, he reads all of my books as soon as I tell him I'm ready for him to do so.

For the sequel to The War That Saved My Life--very, very tentatively titled The War I Finally Won--that came last week, when I finished the first full draft. I printed out all 270 pages, and my husband sat down and read a chapter or two a day.

I appreciated this very much. He knows I do.

He didn't make a lot of comments, since this was still a rough draft. I did get, "Hey, you mis-typed Maggie as Maddie," (Whoops! I once had a horse named Maddie) and "This sentence says, 'A half hour ago, when Lady Thorton got home half an hour ago...'" (Whoops again) and "What's isinglass?"

"Isinglass is a powdered natural form of gelatin made from the air bladders of certain fish," I said, from my office two rooms away.

"What?"

"POWDERED FISH BLADDER."

"WHAT??"

"NEVERMIND. YOU CAN STORE EGGS IN IT. THAT'S ALL."

Muttering from the living room.

[Please note: Susan stored the eggs in isinglass for winter because they didn't have a refrigerator. Refrigerators caught on very quickly in the 1920s in the United States, but in Great Britain, which has a more temperate climate and much cooler summers, they really weren't popular until after WWII. I once wrote an article about the history of refrigerators. I can talk refrigerator for a long time.]

Anyhow, at the start of yesterday evening, my husband had about 110 pages to go. After awhile I noticed that he wasn't stopping. He'd quit commenting, too, though I doubt my typos had disappeared. He just read. He kept reading.

I started feeling very happy. Now, I know the opinion of someone who loves me is necessarily invalid. Of course my husband is going to like my book. He loves me. But still, I had a fairly reluctant reader who Kept. Reading. Until the end. When he blinked hard several times.

It was awesome. 

What I Think About Cecil The Lion

Lately the news has been full of the death of Cecil the lion, who lived on a protected reserve in Zimbabwe, was illegally led off the reserve, shot by a rich American dentist, tracked injured for 40 hours and finally killed.

National public outrage has been immense.

I've been to South Africa, twice, and also Botswana. I go on photo safaris. I've seen Africa's Big Five, live. I love South Africa. I can't wait to return. And ever since I've first visited the open Velda I've been unable to stomach going to zoos.

It's not that I think zoos are wrong. I recognize the role they play in global conservation. I understand why my young nephews love to visit the zoo; I did once, too. Most people aren't lucky enough to go on safari.

I hate that Cecil was baited and illegally killed. I find all trophy hunting repugnant. There are all sorts of places in Africa where you can, for a very high price, shoot big game in fenced fields. I don't understand this at all. I don't mind hunting for food--it would be hard to be against that while I remain willing to eat meat.

But. The American outrage over one lion is chafing my nether regions. One lion, folks. One lion.

How many African children die from preventable causes in one day? From malaria, HIV, malnutrition?

How many children are worth one lion?
How many lions would you trade for the life of your child?

The outrage is in the wrong place.

Uprooted, my Babcia, and me

It seems like the deadline part of my summer is behind me now. I'm left with the piles and piles of stuff I ignored in deference to stuff that had to be done by a certain time. Yesterday my son and I finally started sorting through my children's playroom--a cozy slanted room above our garage that when we designed the house was intended as an attic space, but that when framed in proved too cute not to use. My children have outgrown the playroom, however, and eventually I'm going to move my floor loom up there, though I'm certainly keeping the best of our toys.

After that I read Naomi Novik's new novel, Uprooted. I'd been saving it for when I could read it in one or two long goes, because it was the sort of novel that needed real attention. Naomi Novik is primarily the author of the Temeraire series--intelligent dragons helping to fight the Napoleonic wars. I don't read a lot of fantasy or science fiction, because I absolutely hate it when it's done poorly. If I can poke holes in the world-building or the science, I lose my mind. (I'm also not a fan of endless world-building. I used to love Robin McKinley but her recent stuff bores me senseless.)

Anyway, I read the reviews of Uprooted and figured I'd like it, and I trust Naomi's writing ability. What I didn't expect was the memories her book brought back to me.

Some of the reviewers on Amazon call Uprooted a Russian fairy tale. It's not--it's Polish. It's not a traditional Polish story--I believe the whole plot is Naomi Novik's creation (and I looked her up--she's a first-generation Polish immigrant)--but it's completely Polish in the place names, and the character names, and, somehow, in the language itself. It brought to mind a flood of very early childhood memories, visiting my babcia and dziadek (I just looked those spellings up in Google translate; I pronounced them "bushy" and "jah-jee.") in their little house in Gary, Indiana. Babcia, my mother's mother's mother, would pour me a little glass of 7-up and then, with a smile, dribble a bit of cooking sherry into it, so that it turned pink. Dziadek was blind from an accident in a steel mill. He'd come to America as an adult and never spoke English well. According to the rest of my family he'd been a stern parent and a somewhat disinterested grandparent, but when I sat on his lap in the front room he would run his fingers gently over my face. Then he would smile and say the only English word I ever heard him use: pretty.

Everyone spoke Polish, words floated around my head, all those comforting phrases. Babcia had a little garden out back, with tomatoes, I think. She also brewed her own beer. They came down the front steps very slowly, blind Dziadek leaning heavily on Babcia's arm, when we picked them up to go to Mass. Their parish priest spoke Polish, too.

I remember them as being the oldest people I ever knew, and was shocked to learn, years later, that they were both in their early 70s when they died. Dziadek's funeral postponed my seventh birthday party. After that Babcia came to live with my grandmother. After a few months she decided to visit her younger son, my Uncle Johnny, in California, and we all drove to O'Hare to see her off. We waved and waved as her big jet pulled away. A few weeks later she had a heart attack while Uncle Johnny was at work, and died.

My family stopped speaking Polish as there was no longer any need. I still use a few phrases, most of them rude. But I remember more than I realized; Uprooted brought it all back.