Category: Rules To Live By

The Gospel According to Louise Nevelson

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This chapel is a gem. It is small and all white. It is Louise Nevelson. It is modern. Ah.

I was on my lunch hour, running to midtown to get Chris’s visa to India (where he is going in October for medical healing and treatment). But I was turned away at the 53rd Street visa office because I was missing Chris’s birth certificate. Ugh.

I had planned to run into St. Patrick’s Cathedral for my church-of-the-day visit. After Riverside, that’s the place. But then, it was too far to walk. I had to get back to work. And this — this bright, clean, small worship space tucked into that Citicorp Center (or whatever that complex is called) at 54th! This small, clean, hidden space — so much better than St. Pat’s! Lovely.

I knelt and prayed. For some reason, I remembered a friend of Chris’s, Robert Farber, who died of AIDs. I thought maybe Robert had recommended Chris and I visit this church years ago and listen to someone, a mystic, who channeled the word of God. Chris doesn’t remember a mystic. It was a dim memory of sitting in the big St. Peter’s sanctuary with a hundred people who believed in the mystic, a middle-aged guy, who rambled his dreams. I don’t remember his name. (I am embarrassed to say, it may have been my ex-husband, Jim, not Chris, with whom I visited St. Peter’s to hear the mystic ramble. It’s moot.)

I think I met Chris’s friend, Robert, who was a painter, once in the early 1990s, back when AIDS was a death sentence and not a chronic condition. We visited him in his West Village apartment. He was very weak, wrapped in a blanket in the summer. We went to see his art show in Tribeca. God, I haven’t thought of Robert in years. Visiting churches was making me think too much of death.

I startled. A doorknob rattled in the back of this Louise Nevelson chapel, which I’ve learned is called the Chapel of the Good Shepherd.

A young man, perhaps Latino, sat down. Then, another door opened in the front. There are five walls in this little church, two doors, every which way you looked, there’s Nevelson’s boxy, sculpture. Really cool.


An Anglo priest began setting the altar for mass, laying the cloth, lighting the candles. The young man and I just sat there watching. I felt I should help. The priest left.

“Is there a service here now?” I turned and asked the other parishioner.

“At 12:15,” the young man said.

Wonderful, I thought. Only a few minutes to wait for the word of God. But then the priest came back in. “Are you staying for Mass?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. God must want me to be right here right now I thought. Count me in. I hope it’s relevant. The priest handed me a red prayer book.

“Mass is at 12:30. It used to be 12:15. 12:15 is better and I’d rather it was 12:15. But it’s 12:30.” He shrugged apologetically and left.

So I sat a few more minutes. I pulled out the beige kneeler, it was covered in carpeting. I knelt there.

Then I left. I felt bad leaving when I said I’d stay. But I couldn’t in all clear conscience wait ten whole minutes for the Word. I had to get back to work, for God’s sake.

I felt a twinge of guilt leaving, but overall I felt refreshed. And the refreshed feeling lasted a little while. Thanks to Louise.

“I never feel age….If you have creative work, you don’t have age or time.”

– Nevelson.

She was a genius. This chapel is genius. I highly recommend.

Riverside

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Riverside Church. This is an easy one. Right next door to where I work. Maybe I should’ve saved my visit to this church for a rainy day. Not a beautiful, blue-sky day. I ran over there at 4:15 the way a smoker busts out of the office for a cigarette. A quick puff of spirituality. 5 minutes away from my desk. I’ll BRB.

Really beautiful church. To get there I had to walk past a film in production using the church as a holding location. I am such a jaded New Yorker — I could care less what they were filming. I just hoped no young NYU film student working as a PA tried to stop me on the sidewalk. That’s right, some of my best friends when I went to NYU were PAs and I never let them stop me. But no one stopped me. Then I felt guilty for expecting trouble. The guys at the door just shrugged me in. No fuss.

This church is a destination church. Tourists snap pictures of the stained glass.

I sat in the middle of the the vast church. I couldn’t help but remember the last time I was in this sanctuary. In probably a similar spot. I don’t really want to remember that day. It was truly awful. The funeral for two of my friends and colleagues, Sam Dixon and Clint Rabb, who died in Haiti. I sat there not wanting to remember. But I remembered Judith Santiago’s beautiful liturgical dance; uplifting, in a time of collective sorrow.

I wanted to ask God, Why? Why do good people suffer? Why do people doing awesome, wonderful, kind things get killed?

It was hard to concentrate on the big questions today. The piano was being tuned. A handful of tourists were taking pics.

The note on the piano kept getting hit over and over. I felt like I was in a Philip Glass concert.

In the late 1990s, I heard Thich Nhat Hanh speak at Riverside Church. God, he was awesome talking about engaged Buddhism. He said we we can meditate on peace, but also take action for peace. He preached forgiveness, as a Vietnamese monk in the United States. Forgiveness was everything.

I remembered hearing the former minister of Riverside William Sloane Coffin speak (on Charlie Rose, I think) after the death of his adult son. How he would honor his son’s death by not letting one sign of Spring escape him. He would mark his son’s death by living. He would celebrate every single bud of Spring on every new tree. I often remember his words in the Springtime.

I walked back out into the blue-sky Summer day. I went back to my desk. And, okay, I went out for happy hour with a couple of work peeps agaain. (Thanks Melissa and Emily!)

Yesterday, the schedule was beer, bra, church. But today it was church, sangria, manicure.

If you are like me, visiting a church a day, visit Riverside Church. (And there’s a chapel there too, so you can go twice.)

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A beer, a bra, then church

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I’m full of ambition. This morning I resolved to work 10 minutes a day on my novel. (Only one more hour in this day to complete that goal.)

And here’s a new one. Visit a church a day.

I was sitting in Havana Central after work with my work spouse, sipping a beer tonite. I was showing him a new app for my phone, Church Finder. He and I have the same phone. We love our phones. We often talk about our phones when we get together. Fondly, we talk about their newest and best features, like the phones are our darling children. (My real children are still in the country while I am in the city, hence the ability to frequent a bar, a bra shop, a church, guilt-free.)

On Church Finder, you can request the nearest church to your location. So we searched for the nearest United Methodist Church.The address that showed up? 475 Riverside Drive. We laughed. Because, the United Methodist Church at 475 is our beloved place. But it’s not a church. The God Box at 475 is a church headquarters. It never would occur to me to list 475 as a church.

In any case, we two parted. I did a little shopping.

If you must know, I purchased a bra (okay, two!). One of the ladies at the Town Shop bra store once told me, “Honey, I know titties.” Going to a classic bra store is almost a religious experience. The saleswoman joined me in the small pink fitting room to give me just the perfect fit. I was giddy with gratitude, because I’m not easy to fit. But I am way off topic here. My point is —  I went for a beer, for a bra, then I needed something more.

I was right around the corner from All Angels’ Episcopal Church. Chris and I used to go there, in the late 90s when Hayden was a baby and I was pregnant. It was evangelical.

On one of our first visits there, I was so surprised to see that one of the ministers was Doug, an ex-crush, acting student friend of mine from NYU. The other pastor, Rev. Goode was lovely, earnest, English, I recall. Both of them were fabulous pastors — kind and smart. (I can’t really recall why we stopped going. At some point, the church felt too conservative, I think.)

Back to the present, I asked the gentleman at the All Angels’ front desk, “Could I sit in the sanctuary for 5 or 10 minutes?”

He was pleasant, but seemed surprised. He may have been closing up shop. It was around 8:30 ish.

“Well, there’s someone playing piano,” he said, apologetically.

“Great,” I said, enthusiastically.

As soon as I got into the sparse sanctuary, a young man in the black tee shirt stood up from behind the piano.

“I’ll leave you alone,” the young man said.

“No stay. You can play,” I said. I realized I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted him to play.

“No, that’s fine. I’ll come back.” He left.

So I was alone. The life-size wooden angel in the back of the church blows a trumpet. And the quiet was all around me — even though the church is just off Broadway. I sat in a back row. I closed my eyes. I remembered when I went to All Angels’. I remembered going through a very tough time. I felt comforted there. I just let the quiet wash over me. I remembered how one Sunday night when I was attending All Angels’, I went to serve dinner to the homeless. I was very pregnant with the twins, and one of the homeless guys made me sit down and he waited on me. I remember feeling so grateful for that fried chicken dinner with the homeless folks.

I didn’t want to stay too long. I didn’t want to keep the piano player from his music.

Sometimes a church doesn’t feel like it belongs to you. Sometimes a church feel like a place only for goody goodies, the well-dressed, the righteous, the connected, the believers. But I felt good sitting in the sanctuary of All Angels’.

Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the new bra, maybe it was the quiet angel near the door. Maybe it was my own past, that memory of a time I needed help and being back in a place where I found it.

Life is a Sonnet

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Let’s say each of us lives in a poem. I am living in a sonnet. My inner life is free verse, stream of consciousness. I am unwieldy, feminist, wild. I feel required to be tame, to serve, to rhyme. To tie it up in a cuplet.

I have to — simply must — follow the rules, the conventions, the beats, the script. The kids need to be at school, at the bus stop at a certain time. My husband, too, requires structure, doctors’ appointments, reminders to take his medicine several times a day. My coworkers rely on me to be collegial and productive.

So it’s true, I feel confined within a sonnet’s rigid structure. I long for freedom of expression. Shakespeare created a world that followed, “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” Ah, genius! To take a world and implode it — and still live within it. To throw rocks at the Catholic Church while standing in the church’s front yard. Harder to take away a piece of the Berlin Wall if you were a world away, watching it all unfold on TV.

Change the sonnet’s structure while living within it.

On one of my earlier blogs, I wrote about how I cried over the story of the confined whale who killed the beautiful, helpful, passionate trainer.  https://mbcoudal.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/passion-leads-to-death/

It broke my heart. But I know why the caged whale kills. I know why the caged bird sings.

Sure, there’s safety in confinement, in living in a sonnet, in coloring inside the lines. Safety is appealing. Birds make their nests in homes that are familiar, made of ordinary twigs. They tidy them up with bits of string. But the whales in captivity are going blind because their eyes are not meant to only look up at their trainers. And their dorsal fins are getting floppy.

Creative birds and whales may find that safety is the enemy of art. The artist must break the mold. The bird wants to fly. The whale wants the expanse of the ocean. The actor considers the exit.

Remember in Sartre’s “Huis Clos” (Yes, I love speaking French!) (“No Exit”) when the door opened, not one of the three who had been confined got up to leave? Given a door creaking open on my stage set life, would I pass beneath the open door? And leave the play?

I might! There are times. Yes, I admit, when I long to stop caring — stop caring for others. Stop caring what others might think if I left the sonnet.

I long to smell the roses. To lie down beneath a rose-colored rose bush on a hot summer afternoon. I want to dig my fingernails into soil and taste the humidity, thick against my lips. To just slow this life down to a crawl and skip the appointments, skip the work-a-day world. Skip this one day, sit it out.

I do know, as I am about to leave through the open door, that wild abandon is not the only venue for creativity to flourish.

Love and meaning, definitely flowers, can bloom when fenced-in. I find freedom when I write. It is my way to buck the system, to explore, to travel to new, untrammeled territory. To let go of poetic convention.

Writing in fragments. Thinking in haiku. Dawdling over a dissertation for no degree. There are ways to live in a sonnet.

To be in any relationship — mother, wife, Christian writer — there are certain expectations. There are certain freedoms you must not entertain. But writing about them, singing about them — within your caged existence, within your “No Exit” stage set? Ah, sure, go ahead! Sing away! The other poets in their cages may sing along too. And then, stop and listen to the song. Get out of your own head and into someone else’s poem.

The act of singing, of writing, of expressing the truth can vault the singer, the poet, farther than their confinement. The songbird is never free. Yet the song may travel far. The tune may be repeated. The song lives. Shakespeare died but Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Ah that sonnet lives on.

I’m sure I should end this with a cuplet, but I have none. So I will give you his.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

– William Shakespeare

Staying in Bed

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One Sunday afternoon, the kids and I went to see our bff and babysitter, Josie, at her art show at Cooper Union. It was a multi-media art piece about her summer visiting the national parks. Awesome.

After Josie’s show, we wandered into a sparsely-attended lecture in the auditorium. It was all about the lessons of the sloth. (I think the organizers followed the sloth’s example and didn’t exert themselves by promoting this awesome, free event.) I learned that as Americans (New Yorkers?), we are over-worked and could learn a lot from the sloth.

This morning, I was on vacation. I lay in bed wondering whether to go for a run or work on my novel. I contemplated my choices. I clicked on my phone to check in with the Twitterverse.

Two links appeared on my Twitter feed. One link sent me to a website dedicated to mothers who aim low http://aiminglow.com/ (follow Amy Lo on Twitter), a comic reaction to the perfectionism thrust on modern-day mothers, and the other link connected me to an article in the United Methodist Reporter on The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture (interview with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove by Robin Russell), all about staying put in a society that is perpetually on the go, http://www.umportal.org/article.asp?id=6959

The universe (Twitterverse) was telling me something.

I scanned the website and the article. (Nobody reads, we just scan.) It all made perfect sense. Why am I trying so hard? Why be an overachiever? Give it up! I hung out with my kids, laying (lying?) in the green grass and then laying (lying? whatevs!) at the beach. I was reading my book, hanging out.

And it was good enough. I’m a good enough mother (wife, friend, sister, what-have-you.)

Good enough. I’m staying put… I’m staying in bed.

Your Messy Life

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It’s amazing that when authors admit their flaws, weaknesses, suckishness on their blogs or in books like Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” people love it. Admitting you have a lousy life frees people to admit they do too. Being brutally honest creates some kind of safety net or hope.

If I blog about how awesome I am, how brilliant my kids are, how pristine my house is, I will lose readers. But if I write, ‘Dangit, I am having the worst day. My husband and my job are so annoying.  My kids are spoiled. I have caught three mice in my kitchen over the last month,’ I will keep my 29 readers (and hope to eventually lose the mice). 

I don’t know why this works. Maybe readers feel, ‘Thank God I don’t have her life. She’s a mess. My life’s not so bad. My house is much tidier.’

The trick is not to make the everyday honesty seem like a perpetual state of complaining or whining. Throw in a little bit of your awesomeness after you hook people with your chaos.

And make the mess of your true life story seem real and funny. Like, you don’t take yourself or your sucky life all that seriously. Because it is true, this difficult life will pass, perhaps to be replaced by challenges even more difficult, and therefore potentially even more humorous.

My advice to bloggers? Throw open the curtains to the mess of your life and you find you are not alone.

So you open the shades wide into the living room of your difficult life and let everyone, including the sunshine, in. Let the party start. Eventually, the party will wind down. Let everyone go to home.

And then, close your curtains again. Create mystery. I’m not really sure how to do this. I personally am much more with the TMI camp — I like hearing all the details about peoples’ messy lives. I don’t like that my life is difficult. But I like that your life is difficult. That makes me happy – and human.

The Other Fellow First

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I wasn’t supposed to go to the outdoor chapel service at Camp Dudley today, Sunday. I was supposed to wait at least a week to see my camper briefly after chapel. It’s a rule at Camp Dudley, the oldest boys’ camp in the country. Even if you’re a local family, which we sort of are, since my husband Chris’s family has summered down the road from Dudley for more than 50 years. The rule is parents are not supposed to come the first Sunday.

But I couldn’t wait a week.

I sat in the back of the service as the Rev. sermonized about the difference between having greatness and being great. He said having greatness was related to the Camp Dudley motto, “The other fellow first.” Being great, you could be a sore loser; but having greatness meant you could teach someone how to grow. I think that’s what he said.

I couldn’t concentrate. I was distracted by the breeze, by the birdsong, by the Cedar trees creaking.

I stared down at the rows of young men clad in blue blazers, searching out the back of my boy’s head. I should know my boy among the 200 or so boys. I should know him by the back of his head, I thought, the swirl of his Alfalfa cowlick. But I did not see him. He was already indistinguishable from the other brown-haired boys.

So I sang half-heartedly along to the earnest young guitarist, leading us in, “Blowing in the Wind.”

I noticed Chris, who cries easily, was tearing up at that song. Chris is proud of his ease with tears. He’s sensitive, my husband, and this sensitivity seems to be exacerbated by his Parkinson’s lately. “Please don’t dare cry when you see him,” I said.

“The same for you,” he said. I nodded.

My son and I had agreed if we were to meet one of his four Sundays at camp after chapel, we’d meet by the hymnal nook, a wooden enclosure for the red-bound books. I was walking there when this young man approached me. For a moment, I didn’t recognize that the young man was my son.

Already, he was tanner, taller, thinner. He’s a long, cool drink of water my son is, I thought. I somehow had imagined my 9-year-old Hayden, not my 13-year-old Hayden.

“Hi Mom,” he said. His voice sounded, I swear to God, deeper. Croakier. ‘He has only been gone since Tuesday. What have you done with my boy?’ I wanted to find the camp director and shake him. I felt panicked. They took my boy; they made him a man! No wonder I’ve put off sending my only son to this damn camp. They take your kid away. And I loved that kid.

I admit it. I wanted clingy; I got cool.

His lips barely moving, like a ventriloquist, he leaned beside my ear and whispered, “I love you, Mom.” Then he looked at me kind of strange as if he barely recognized me too, but really did love me.

He hardly paid any attention to Chris, so there were no tears.

Hayden started to walk away from me.

“Wait, wait. I heard you’re playing a lot of basketball?” I asked him. His Aunt Shoshi works at the camp and she’d reported this to me.

“Yes, yes, it’s fun. It’s great. I had a long talk with Shoshi. You can talk to her.” As if she’d do in his absence. He gave me another hug, a bony, young man kind of hug. Not the kind of hug that pulls on your skirt or wraps its arms around you and never lets you go. No, just a hug, like an I’ve-gotta-get-going hug.

He said, “I love you,” again. Then he walked away from me down the hill. And he never once looked back. But I could tell that he knew I was watching him walk away. He was putting on a brave show, I thought.

As we walked to the car Chris asked, “Do you think he was embarrassed by us?”

“Oh, definitely,” I said, laughing. “And he’s not using sunscreen.”

But it was more than his embarrassment, his tan, his hugging me awkwardly. Seeing him at chapel today was some kind of a rite of passage for him, for me, for us. Our son is growing up. He is on the cusp. And he is on his own. And actually, that has greatness in it, although it’s not great.

Kids at Camp=Freedom

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Every time I travel for work (or pleasure) I’ve left my darlings with my darling husband (DH). My DH has PD (Parkinson’s Disease) and so I’ve never felt a clear conscience about traveling. I worry. I have worries that they’ll be late to school — they are. I have worries that the house will be a mess when I return — it is. I have worries that they’ll stay up too late — they do.

So the idea of sending the kids to camp — of having people in charge of my kids who are not chronically ill or chronically worried — is a huge sigh of relief.

And it’s not like I’m sending them off to work the fields. These places are situated on beautiful lakes, with Arts n Crafts, horses, swimming, camp-outs, possibly S’Mores!

I have one child to drop off tomorrow. With the first two, I have felt like I’m shedding clothing on a hot day. Or dropping ballast from my hot-air balloon. Just briefly, I am traveling lighter. I am less worried, and yet, slightly untethered. The kids are my compass, their needs are always pointing my way.

They’ll only be gone a few weeks. In that time, I intend to stay late at work, work on my novel, http://gettingmyessayspublished.wordpress.com/ , work out, http://runningaground.wordpress.com/ , throw a party, paint the dining room, get my financial house in order, get to a museum,  http://mybeautifulnewyork.wordpress.com/. If I can sneak in some Arts n Crafts time myself, I’ll be happy.

Make Up Your Own Rules

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I have written my 7 Rules as a way of staying sane, given the challenges of my life – with Chris’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease six years ago; our kids growing up; and my full time writing work. All of which I love, but my life can be hard, and, at times, lonely.

My 7 Rules boost my happiness quotient. But you can write your own rules. Make them pithy, creative, reflective of you. Throw in one that is literary, one that is obscure, one that is spiritual and at least one that is cliché.

When I was at Taizé monastery last fall, I met Simeon, a piano tuner from The Netherlands. In our Bible Study, he said, “God’s rules for one person won’t work for another.” He was so right. He was such a spiritual, religious and compassionate person. His words reminded me why everyone should follow their own God-inspired rules.

I know that as Christians we have guidance for how to live when we try to live like Jesus did. I want to be as loving and justice-seeking as Jesus was. Yet, I believe Jesus made up his rules as he went along too. He was human. He turned over tables in the church. He listened to his own intuition/guidance/spirit/God. His rules were rooted in his own faith, family and personal history.

Completely random thought – Did Jesus ever lack confidence? Did he ever doubt his purpose the way I do? I guess it’s fine to doubt yourself so long as you do not live in that self-doubting place forever. That’s key — that if you are doubting or critical of yourself and your purpose, you cannot reside in that negative place for too long. You have to find humor in your predicament. Otherwise, you will never get anything done. Or let anyone in.

Getting things done and letting people in – these two human instincts are important to me. I like being productive and I like being communal. I’d like to add these two rules to my 7 Rules, but, well, I’ve already got 7 and I might as well stick with my 7. If I were to add 2 more, that would be 9. Nine Rules for Living? That’s a different blog.

My 7 Rules

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Every six months or so, I think I should repeat My 7 Rules.

  1. Pile on the people. Or — pile on the useful people. This is hard. And you may need to pay real money here.
  2. Escape through literature. Proof in point — I am writing this on a plane going to San Francisco on route to Napa Valley with my book club. Literature leads to good things. We were talking about this at a recent book club meeting when we were talking about, “A Short History of Women: a Novel” by Kate Walbert. (Good and substantive.) The historical and present-day women in that book, like the suffragette, were definitely leading lives of quiet desperation. “Why don’t they join a book club?” asked one of the book club members. People in book clubs think other people should join book clubs. People who read think everyone should read. (Incidentally, our book for this California meeting is, “A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth, and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma” by Alan Deutschman. (Kind of fun and trashy.))
  3.  Hold on to your hoops of steel. This is my rule based on a Shakespeare quote. And I throw it in so I appear literary. And though I can’t, at this moment, even remember what play this quote’s from, it means keep the ones you love close. My work and my family – these are my hoops of steel.
  4. Cultivate a secret garden. Can’t say much about this. But if you plant, grow, weed a secret garden, keep it close to the vest, like your cards at a poker game. Don’t ask; Don’t tell. So now that I’ve thrown you a bunch of mixed metaphors, like seeds to the wind, I hope you follow the trail to your own secret garden.
  5. Expect the best/love what you get. This works well when training animals, rearing children, and getting along with annoying coworkers.
  6. Live every day as if it were your last. This is the Carpe Diem rule. And one day, it will be your last day, so you might as well live fully today. As mom always said, “They can’t repossess your vacation.” True words to contemplate while on a plane bound for a vacation.
  7. Embrace uncertainty. I had a friend who would smile whenever she said, “I don’t know.” I try to do that too. It’s difficult for me. I like knowing everything. I like being a know-it-all.

Those are my 7 Rules.