So: even when I succeeded in shifting my addiction once again and left it sitting in front of a supermarket display of vanilla cupcakes like an idiot child in front of Teletubbies  (“we can look but we can’t buy”), I still had the Consequences to deal with, and the Consequences had me shaped more or less like a rain barrel. After a year of Bill and Dr. Bob, there was a whole lot more of me than there had been, and it was all parked where I could keep an eye on it, right out in front. I do not get charmingly chubby. I looked like I was due any old time now.

Hence the situps on the folding machine at the gym. Hence the gym itself (which turns out to have been a major source of love and comfort). Hence the exercise bike and the around-town bike and the treadmill. Also a kayak, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet. Now it’s those 20 pounds down and another 10 or so to go.

I came to a point eventually where I stopped exercising to lose weight and started exercising because it made me feel good and any weight loss was, as it were, icing on the cake (or cupcake. Vanilla.) And now it’s part of my life, at least an hour a day, at least 6 days a week, preferably 2 and 7. I am too much a researcher to believe that sit-ups will make me skinny around the middle, because skinny around the middle is not in my physical makeup; I was constructed by God and my genes to be built like a Golden Retriever, not a whippet. But situps do strengthen my core muscles — what I have taken to calling my Inner Spanx, after the trendy flab-displacing undergarments.

The gym is good for the Inner Spanx, as is working out in the local indoor pool, which will become more a part of my routine when the @#$%# tourists finally get themselves home (yes, we welcome tourists, upon whom the local economy depends, but they are frankly A Pain). But I needed something more, something both to focus on my middle and perhaps to get my clumsy, neglected feminine tushie into rhythmic motion that didn’t involve large, over-decorated, solemn running shoes. Or men, those dangerous critters.

So the bike and I mosied on down, at noon, to our local amateur-performing-arts establishment, the delightful Dreams in Motion, which offers all sorts of goodies from kids’ performances of major musicals to a comedy course and dance classes and the like. Dreams in Motion was having a sign-up day, and I thought I might give a try to something like dancercize or line dancing. But it was not to be.

Instead, I felt into the hands of a delightful lady with a bare (and not skinny, but reasonably shapely) midriff and jingly chains around her hips.

I am going to sign up for Belly Dancing.

Dammit, don’t laugh. There isn’t better exercise for the Inner Spanx, and it will be easy on my knees (a little more vulnerable than they used to be) and my feet, which sometimes hurt a lot (plantar fasciitis). I like Middle Eastern music. I have an extremely strong sense of rhythm. I can learn the moves at my own pace, and I don’t have to wear anything that leaves my bellybutton out there getting chilled and nervous. No jingly stuff, no veils: just core exercise. I swear. Only a supplement to the serious stuff (treadmill, gym, bike). Really, truly. Former Girl Scout’s Former Honour.

And if I fail to honour these promises, NO PIX. Photographs bad. Like vanilla cupcakes.

p.s. When I told this to my resident offspring, he did that eye-shading thing face-palm with his hand and said “You’re weird, Mom, you know that?”

It’s an eye-opener for me, seeing how a person properly handles grief, because I haven’t often seen it done right before. In the circles I’ve usually moved in, we don’t “do” grief. The motto is “We don’t air our dirty linen,” and the unspoken corollary is that tough emotions such as hurt, fear, anger, grief, sorrow, confusion, guilt, shame, are dirty linen. I was brought up to believe in an ethic of extraordinary stoicism. I’ve known others who were brought up to believe in an ethic of extraordinary cheerfulness, which, frankly, I sometimes find a little maddening. “Count it all joy,” my foot.

The fear is, I think, that if we allow people to grieve, they’re going to wallow in grief, like Queen Victoria over her Albert — refusing to get on with the business of living. That does happen, of course, but I suspect that the opposite is more common: we deny people the chance to mourn at all. We want “closure”; we want to move on. And so we skip the process ourselves, or keep it brief and perfunctory, and we expect others to do the same. We “celebrate the life” of the dead person, without acknowledging that frankly, we’re going to miss that person like hell. We silence grief because it’s “negative”, when in fact it is the other side of love.

Of course people in grief may want their privacy, and that’s something to respect. But that’s not William. He’s upfront about his grief; it’s natural to him, nothing to hide or feel ashamed of, nothing that he needs to feel embarrassed about. It’s a simple index of his love; it’s the mirror image of the joy he remembers. It is appropriate and right, something to be taken seriously without owning the entire landscape.

On the other hand, sometimes people in grief want company more than anything else; they want to talk through the grief, have someone to sit and remember with them. When we “respect their privacy” without finding out whether, in fact, they want privacy, we can easily silence them. It’s hard to speak up from painful places when nobody apparently wants to listen. When we skim past grief, we devalue it; we want it simply to go away and not bother us any more. But then that leaves the mourner very much alone.

Skipping the process never works, because grief — like pain — is too important. We’d like to be able to select which emotions we indulge (the fun ones) and repress the ones we don’t enjoy, but it doesn’t work that way. If you want to skip the tough emotions, you have to shut down the whole shop, something William refuses to do. For William, to skip the process of mourning Keith would be to deny the importance and validity of the love they shared. That, William says, runs counter to everything he believes about integrity and faithfulness. And so William mourns appropriately and well, even as he gets on with getting on.

William is Christian; Keith was Buddhist, but both valued Jewish spirituality. On Friday, in the late afternoon, the rabbi who conducted their marriage collected William and took him home for Sabbath supper; they were going to the synagogue afterwards so that William could say Kaddish for his spouse. I’m glad of this; it feels very right and good and appropriate. I like the notion that William will indeed tackle what he needs to do in the days to come, but that, according to Jewish custom, he will stop periodically and mourn, in the company of those who respect mourning and give it space, ceremony, and dignity.

When my father died, my mother forbade any mourning; that would have been poor form, self-indulgence, emotional pretentiousness. And so when my mother died, I found I could not mourn at all.

Maybe, just maybe, William can teach me how.

But wear it to church I did, loving the beauty of it and the soft warmth. In church, I looked for my friend William, with whom I usually sit; I didn’t recognize him at first because he too was wearing a shawl — a tallis, a Jewish prayer shawl in white and silver. I’d forgotten that he has a special affinity for Jewish spirituality. He had his tallis drawn over his head as he sat in a back pew, quietly rocking. At a guess, half of the rocking was William davening; the other half was William grieving. His husband* Keith is dying of bone cancer. As I slipped in beside William, he whispered to me that he’d taken Keith to our local hospice-care hospital on Tuesday, and the end was close. I put my shawled arm around him and passed the kleenex.

We got through the service together; we were lucky in the hymns and lessons, which William found comforting. Sometimes I had my arm around him; sometimes he put his arm around me. We kept accidentally sitting on each other’s shawl ends and having to extricate ourselves. During the Prayers of the People, Irene, the prayer leader, asked prayers for the two of them, and William suddenly sang out the hymn “The Lord’s my shepherd,” the whole thing, moving me and some others to tears. Irene improvised a beautiful extempore prayer, and the service went on. William wept softly off and on. His shawl gave his grief a different dignity, an appropriateness. The Jews are right to sit shiva; we’re the ones who err by saying “we don’t air our dirty linen, and grief is dirty linen.”

I know all about that. In my family, we don’t “do” grief; it’s considered indisciplined, self-indulgent, impolite, a sign of weakness, an imposition on those who have to witness it. Stoicism is the idol, the measure by which we’re judged. That’s the dynamic I inherited, but it’s not the dynamic my soul and body feel. I am, I learn, more Hebrew than Greek. I cry a lot in church, however little I like it. So I knew how William felt on his way back down from the communion rail, facing the congregation with a face blotched with tears. His shawl sheltered him without concealing him. I wrapped my own shawl close around me as I followed him, protecting my reflective grief with its beauty.

Later this afternoon, I took myself to the spinners’ and handweavers’ guild room, where the looms stand sentinel around the big shabby space, everything from the tiny table looms to the 128-inch behemoth that takes two weavers sitting side-by-side to operate. With the exceeding great patience, kindness, and infinite tolerance of my elders and betters (several of whom rescued me from catastrophe), I’d managed to warp a loom and start work on a shawl — the simplest of weaves, as far from my Tibetan shawl as a barn is from the Taj Mahal. But I’ve learned of late that barns have their beauty too, and this shawl is beautiful in its way. Humbly I wrapped my shoulders with a modest but fine Indian shawl, handwoven in cotton sewing thread — 1500 threads across, 2500 to 3000 threads long, give or take a couple of hundred, each thread exquisitely set, reminding me both of how much the “third world” knows that we’ve forgotten and of how far I have to go.

I wove steadily: one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, carefully placing each weft strand. Weaving is far more mindless than knitting, I find, because of the counting mantra. I find I vanish into some other state when I’m weaving, one in which I’m keeping company with the Indian and Tibetan weavers who made my two exquisite shawls. It’s a peaceful place. Whatever I need to fret about disappears; here is only the shuttle and the beater and the steady quiet rhythm.

As I wove, I thought of swaddling clothes and shrouds and the tents that Moses’ people carried through 40 years of exile and the sails of Paul’s ships, every inch of thread spun with a drop spindle. I thought of prayer shawls, knit and woven. Maybe every church should have a shawl or three, to wrap around those in need of comfort.

By the time I will cut this shawl from the loom, Keith’s soul will most likely be nestled safe in the palm of God’s hand — although you never know; souls and bodies have their own decisions to make at the end, their own schedules, often independent of what the mind decided.

I’ve got enough warp on this loom for a second shawl. I think I’ll pray through weaving it for William.
———————
Note: Whatever readers’ feelings about same-sex marriage may be, it is legal in Ontario, and William prefers the term “husband” to “partner”.

But today, it’s a head exercise.

Damn.

The theological voice in my head knows better, of course. It can marshall all its forces of argument, all the creeds I can say without reservation because I do truly believe them. It can reiterate the promise of Providence, the belief that God is here, sustaining and upholding me, that God’s love is real and solid and trustworthy. But today, it feels as though God’s on one side of a plexiglas window and I am on the other, and God’s usual reassuring whisper isn’t anywhere to be heard.

Instead, today I’ve got That Other Voice. The voice that notes that God doesn’t seem to be very busy in the Middle East or Iraq or North Korea — in fact, that highly religious people behave just as badly as the other guys. The voice that recollects what some darling Christian folk have inflicted on me and mine — and what I, a self-proclaimed Christian, have inflicted on others. The voice that undercuts hope and faith with negativity and cynicism. It’s the voice of doubt.  I suppose I should call it Richard Dawkins, but in fact it sounds exactly like a woman who, in my youth, used to “correct” me in a big sisterly way by ripping strips off my hide, usually over the phone.  I’d listen obediently as she told me exactly how messed-up I was. It never occurred to me at the time (though it certainly would now!) that I could simply hang up.

I’ve struggled with this voice for years now; I’ve cowed before it, bowed down to it, tried to run away from it, hated it, feared it, fought with it, given in to it, rebelled against it. What I’ve never managed to do is to silence it. As I sat in church trying to cultivate an attitude of gratitude, it was grousing gently in the background. “Work will never come in,” it whispered. “You’ll stay stuck where you are, your life half-rebuilt. God’s got nothing to do with it — if there is a God.” Right in the middle of the sermon. Oh, thanks.

One thing has, however, changed of late. I no longer beat myself up for feeling doubt; I’ve learned that so far from being a black sin against God, it’s where I do my best work. I saw a diagram recently of two overlapping circles, one labeled “theology”, the other labeled “experience”; it was a diagram of how pieces like the Sabbath Blessings get developed. I take theology in one hand and experience in the other and overlap the two, and that overlap is where I work stuff out. If the circles are congruent (say, “God’s goodness” and some happy news), then there’s little or no work involved. It’s when the two circles are in opposition (say, “forgiveness” and “betrayal”) that the work happens, and the greater the disparity, the harder the work.

But that’s also the richest and most complex work, and the most deeply soul-satisfying. It’s this experience that all the simple solutions — Dawkins’s thundering atheism on one side or the God-the-divine-clockmaker “true believers” on the other — miss out on. It ultimately leads the soul to bump up against Mystery and fall back into God’s lap like a tired child, knowing that whatever deep truths there are, the deepest is likely “it ain’t that simple”. Doubt isn’t a weakness in faith; if it were, I’d have been out of the faith business years ago. Doubt is fundamental to faith; it keeps faith honest and makes it real.

Doing what I’m doing at the moment is stressful (find me a freelancer who doesn’t hate marketing!), but that doesn’t mean that God’s not at work in the landscape, only that it’s early days yet. Beating myself up for doubt only adds to the stress. God know where I am, and why I’m here, and God knows I do try to do my best. Including writing this piece, which didn’t much want to be written.

I told my kid sister about the voice in my head. She laughed and said, “Slam down the phone!” “I’m too Canadian!,” I answered, “I should say ‘Sorry’ and hang up gently.” “You were born and bred a Yank,” she said. “Slam down the phone, as hard as you can. Pound it right into the floor.”

I don’t know if I can quite do that. But I don’t have to listen.

If there were two things I could export from Canada to the United States, they would be (first) the loonie and toonie — our one- and two-dollar coins, which are exceedingly sensible objects — and (second) our date of Thanksgiving. Which is, in fact, today –Monday, October 9th.

I cannot imagine a better time of year to stop and give thanks for Creation. This tends to be one of the loveliest times of year, with few exceptions. Today, it’s so mild that I’m working outdoors with my laptop. The sky is the sort of blue that chocolate would be if chocolate were blue. The trees are just about to turn; we’re perched on the cusp between summer and glory. The light glints off the lake surface, turning it to a sheet of rippled silver, sliced white by a boat’s wake and dotted with sails as everyone hustles to get in one more afternoon on the water before bringing her inshore for the winter. The apples are in, and they are beauties this year; there are pie pumpkins piled up for sale at the farmers’ market, and fresh cabbages and mild, sweet, white potatoes.

It’s a very good time to stop, take a good deep breath, and hold Creation lovingly in attention. It’s an especially good moment because it’s also that time when we know that we’ve lost our grip on summer and that winter lies on the other side of Fall Mud Season, a few weeks away. There’s nothing like the expectation of loss to make you truly appreciate something, and this beauty (we know) will be pretty much gone in about three weeks’ time, succeeded by a quieter, thoughtful loveliness.

Which sounds gloomy and pessimistic, but it isn’t. It’s a statement of reality, and of a reality I particularly treasure. I honestly don’t think I could live in a place that didn’t have true seasons — that didn’t undergo the shifts and turnings that we live with, those of us who are a certain distance from the equator. I may bitch about winter, especially during its sluggish tail into Spring Mud Season, but I’d miss it dreadfully. I’d miss the bite and the beauty. Other climates doubtless have their virtues and their adherents, and that’s fine, but without competing with them, I’d argue that my landscape’s climate has its particular spiritual virtue. It makes Creation (and therefore, if you’re thinking along those lines, the Creator) a matter of power and immediacy.

There is nothing bland about this season; it sings and it shouts. It sings of glory and it shouts thanks for the summer’s completion and the incoming harvest. Its beauty is uncompromising and in-your-face, full of power and vibrancy, overflowing in splendour. It stops you dead in your tracks, caught by a flash of gold, of God. That’s why it’s such a good time for Thanksgiving.

More than that: you know, if you live here, that the seasons swing around with a sameness that’s deeply comforting and reminds us that huge, important things lie outside our lives and our control. The fate of nation or a church may lie in our hands, but the season’s don’t; they’re the Earth’s business and far beyond us, just as the Sun was there long, long before our primate ancestors snuffled for bugs and will be there long after this rock is cold, old, and done with us. It was good — a deeply humbling good — that God chose to spend some time dwelling with us and walking among us, bridging the gap between us and Godself; it is (to me at least) the deepest comfort that God is steadily, unchangingly, bigger than all Creation, vast as Creation is. It means that there’s a steadiness under my feet, a trustworthiness.

The season reminds me of that. It reminds me that my worries are tiny in comparison with the greatness of God. It reminds me that, however often I miss it, God’s love shines like the golden light under the trees throughout my life, and that I should stop fretting and remember that. It reminds me to trust in the turn of things and wait for the time to turn around again, as the seasons wheel.

It reminds me to stop and rest and be thankful for all the ways in which God’s hands have been over and under me, even in Interesting Times. It reminds me that beauty is always there, if I can remember to look for it. Always.

It’s a good time, Canadian Thanksgiving. And having dual citizenship, I get to celebrate the other one too.