Carbonated Holiness: From reaction to response

Words of wisdom from writer and guest blogger, Kbart. We’ve all been in that space where we react to a situation, and Kbart offers some ideas for bringing our reactions into the context of prayer and finding a new way to respond.

“Help!” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray—with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, “Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.”

—From: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott.
New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

For a few weeks now, I have been struggling with comments that expressed, from my perspective, a very regressive Catholic (with a CAPITAL C) view. I was able to ignore a few, but their views stayed with me no matter how hard I tried to skim over them. And I was totally unprepared for the spiritual explosion they caused that blew my personal religious closet door wide open. Out crashed the stuff that has always bothered me about being Catholic, and all the things that I remember my Gramma Cleo saying would happen to me if I didn’t obey the teachings of the Church.

So I backed away for a few days to try and sort out what was going on with me. Just a few comments had made me react, and I was angry, hurting, and sad. And worse, I was not strong enough in my own faith to be able to responsively comment back to this voice with something that might dust off their views with fresh air. And now here were all these closet things on the floor that I had to deal with. I have been thinking about all this while walking our dog Button; going to and from work each day; during quiet times when I thought I was doing nothing; and especially at night when trying to get to sleep. And while I don’t consider these spontaneously combusted conversations prayers – I think God does.

I am a big believer that God sends messages in whatever way you will hear the message most clearly. Several days later, I picked-up Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, at the Library where I work. I had never read anything by Anne Lamott but knew others who had really enjoyed her writing. And while our Library has most of her books, this one pretty much leapt from the shelf and into my arms. Lamott is funny, serious, spiritual, questioning, searching and all of these at once. As a writer myself I could feel her struggle to find the right way to express a particular thing she was feeling or going through. I could hear her voice clearly as I read, and her words were speaking directly to me.

I would never have thought that my internal conversations were a prayer for help, but after reading Lamott, I know that’s what they are. And in the process of dealing with the spilled contents of my spiritual closet, I have begun to process what things need to be in the closet and what can be thrown away. The things in my spiritual closet will never be neatly stacked on shelves or hung up in an orderly fashion, and I will continue to “collect” things that make sense to me spiritually. My spiritual self is not clean and shiny, and I have dents and scrapes. But on some level I know that I am loved by God and that God is responsible for the gifts in my life. Not all gifts are easy to accept, but it is within that acceptance that we grow in our spiritual journeys. A couple of weeks ago I could only react to something that bothered me deeply. Having been shaken up, I am now learning that sometimes the best response is to laugh, and move beyond, because, as Lamott says: “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”

Has there been a time in your life that you have found yourself REACTING to something that has distressed you deeply? What was it that helped you get to a place that you could respond and laugh?

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