Fencing Bear at Prayer

At the San Jose airport, thanks to another $6.95 to connect to the Internet and a long cry back in the hotel room with my amazing roommate, I seem to be sane again. Script of the storm after I finished writing my last post: sign-off, think, "Oh, I seem to be feeling a little better even though the end of that post was somewhat depressing, maybe it helps just not to pretend that I'm going to be able to fix things by thinking about them," get in shower and start crying again. Come out of shower and start flinging clothes around the hotel room in a semblance of trying to pack, collapse into tears and self-recriminations for the next, oh, 45 minutes; no, make than an hour. Amazing roommate waits it out (bless her, she did not sign up for this when she agreed to share a room with me; should I have warned her?), and then, when I try to apologize for crying, says, "This is part of it. You need to grieve." And perhaps she was right. I've spent my whole life be...

I have a confession to make: I was not entirely open with you in my post last Sunday about what I experienced in church . When I started writing, what I wanted to tell you about was the great joy I experienced in singing praises to God and realizing that this in itself was the way to free myself from the anxieties about my own performance, whether on the fencing strip or, as here, at the keyboard. But as I started writing, the anxiety returned, and gradually I realized I was no longer saying what I had set out to say. I was hiding and apologizing and doing everything I possibly could to avoid saying directly, "When I was singing in the midst of our church, I felt a great weight lift from me, and I knew, even if only for a moment, that this--praising God--was the real purpose of life, for which everything else is simply a preparation, not an end in itself." Even now, my words are inadequate, perhaps inevitably so, for, after all, what we were doing was singing and the only ...