Communion With Saints

Here I am, day one of my blog, and I really don't know what the hell I am doing. But that really doesn't matter, because nobody (except for a few, long-suffering and devoted family members and friends) is going to read this. So, aside from my dignity, I really have nothing to lose.

Allow me to tell you a little about myself. I am a 40-something poet/husband/father/teacher/Christian (not necessarily in that order). I teach writing and literature part-time at a local university, and (much like Dante at the beginning of The Inferno) I find myself at a crossroads right now in life. I have a great wife, beautiful daughter, and hilarious son. I have everything that a person could want--jobs that pay the bills, friends that listen to my problems, a house that doesn't belong on Extreme Makeover, and a good car. I go to church, teach Sunday school, sing in the choir, play the pipe organ, and keyboard in a Christian rock band. I also deal (sometimes well, sometimes not-so-well) with my wife's bipolar, various personal and family addictions, and a severe case of ennui. Facing all of these things (good, bad, and just plain irritating), I find myself wanting something more, even though I don't know what that something is. That's why I started turning to the Catholic saints...

Yes, Catholic saints. I grew up reading a book called The Lives of the Saints, a text that I think was given to all Catholic children on their First Communion days. I remember the copy I had as a child, a fat, red-covered tome with black, red, and white illustrations of holy men and women and children. Some of the portraits showed smiling monks and nuns looking as if they just stepped off a Bahaman cruise. Others pictures were a little gruesome--martyrs riddled with arrows and gushing wounds, stalked by shadowy soldiers and pagans. As a child and adolescent, of course, I was more intrigued by the grislier stories of burning and dismemberment. (I grew up in the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th generation.) As an adult, what I recall is that, no matter what the art work depicted, all of the saints looked happy, joyous, ECSTATIC. It didn't matter if they were impaled with spears or holding their eyes on a plate (I swear to God I remember a picture like that!). They all looked like they had just won an Oscar for Best Saint.

So, a couple years ago, when I found myself dealing with a whole load of crap in my life, I remembered those smiling people in that crimson-covered book. I thought to myself, "I gotto get me some of what they're on." I went to the local Catholic supply store and bought a two-volume set of Lives of the Saints. I started reading it. Every day, I focused on the feast-day saint. (For you non-Catholic readers, the feast day is when the Church celebrates a particular saint. Usually, a saint's feast day is the day he or she died. I thought that was a little morbid at first. I would want my feast day to be my birthday. A saint, however, is celebrated on the day they went to heaven. Go figure. I think that was my first lesson in following in the footsteps of the saints.) I don't know if this exercie improved my attitude or psyche right away, but when I would come across a particularly gory martydom, I'd say to myself, "Well, at least I'm having a better day than him!"

So here I am, two years into the process. I am in a better place than when I started, I think. However, as I wrote earlier, I still have these nagging moments of unrest or emptiness or unfulfillment (is that a word?). So, I decided to start this blog. I hope that my one or two readers will put up with my whining and pertpetual pessimism. I promise to try to be more saintly. That's what this is about, after all. Learning how to find joy when facing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to quote the Bard. I hope you'll take the walk with me. I promise to stop for ice cream every once in a while...