So, the largest source of income in my freelancer-extroardinaire lifestyle is now gone. My twice-my-age, married, father-of-two boss has asked me out, and I no longer feel comfortable working for him. Since this job was minimum wage and had no upward mobility, the main reason I kept it was that it was stabler and lower pressure than some of my other jobs have been-- but now the latter isn't really true anymore. So, I quit. Actually, I spent a couple days moping and thinking how much it sucks to be me, and then, today, I finally quit. But now, I'm realizing that even on a bad day, I'm far from the poorest person on the planet. I'm not even in the top 100. I've probably never even been in the unluckier 50% of the world. So here's my brief reflection on how even a sucky situation can clearly illustrate...

...Three Reasons Why It Doesn't Suck To Be Me

1.) I'm in a financially stable enough position that I can quit. Economic times being what they are, the option to leave a job is not a given everywhere in America, let alone some of the poorest countries. So, I am thankful for my prosperous situation.

2.) I had been thinking of quitting this job anyway, in order to free up my time to pursue a career in my actual fields of film or theater. I hung onto what was supposed to be a temp job to get me through school for way longer than I should have because it was a security blanket. But this incident gave me a push to action. So, I am thankful for my sheer luck in timing.

3.) I'm not my boss's wife. However insulted I may feel, she is definitely the most wronged party in this situation, even if she doesn't know what's going on. So, I am thankful for my own non-cheating boyfriend.

These are far from the only reasons it doesn't suck to be me, either. These are just the ones that are most glaringly obvious in this particular story. So today, I resolve to think twice before whining and moping, even on days when I'm just SURE that it "sucks to be me..." and remember that I've been wrong about this before. :-)

Researching Persephone myths and devotions a few months ago, I discovered this beautiful poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Be to her, Persephone,
All the things I might not be:
Take her head upon your knee.
She that was so proud and wild,
Flippant, arrogant and free,
She that had no need of me,
Is a little lonely child
Lost in Hell,—Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee:
Say to her, "My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here." 

I appreciated its beauty, but it was not quite what I was looking for at the moment—I was seeking inspirations for a Persephone-centric sequence of rosary prayers, mostly for the purpose of personal devotions/meditations rather than appeals for dead loved ones. Also, I didn’t like the idea of using “Hell” synonymously with “Afterlife” in my daily prayers—while I admire Persephone in all the various versions of her story, I don’t believe in a literal Hell or a Hell-like Underworld, and I don’t wish to create such negative associations in my mind with constant repetition.

However, I found that this poem kept coming back to me throughout the rest of the day. Even having only read the lines once or twice, I found I had almost completely memorized the poem, basically by accident. The image of the lovely goddess drying a little girl’s tears was too beautiful to push aside over a quibble about exact wording. I realized that I liked the essential message of the poem—the idea of a queen of life and death so gracious that she sees every frightened child—even ones that won’t always admit they need help—as worthy of her time and affection.

So, I adapted the poem for my own personal devotional use, attempting to evoke the same beauty of the original poem’s story but infused with a slightly more hopeful worldview. Here is the result. I usually whisper it before bed, or whenever I am feeling vulnerable:

Show to me, Persephone,
All the things that I must be:
Though I am so proud and wild,
I am inside a little child
Lost and scared,—Persephone,
Take my head upon your knee:
Comfort me, "My dear, my dear,
There never was a thing to fear." 

Now, I just want to be clear that I do not think my adaptation is “better” than Millay’s original! I rewrote it to make it more relevant to my own spiritual needs, not to “improve” upon its artistry. Some lines are changed to reflect the fact that I say the prayer for myself or to reflect an appeal for Persephone’s wisdom and comfort in life and not just in death. Some lines are cut to make the poem a set of four rhyming couplets, for the simple reason that it’s easier for a tired/stressed brain to remember it that way… but as art, the original has my utmost respect!

I feel like a character in a movie, with all the headlines on the news sending me spiraling into a fit of flashbacks and philosophical musings…

As of Friday night, same-sex couples in my home state of New York are officially free to marry. I am very proud that we have finally made this step. I have several gay and bisexual friends living here and I could not be happier to know that they will now have the legal ability to commit to whomever they choose. However, I know that many, many people in New York, including people I know and love, are not happy about this development. And I know that many of them feel this way because of their faith. According to MSNBC.com, New York State’s Catholic bishops say they are “deeply disappointed and troubled*” by the legislation.  I do not share these Catholic bishops’ views on either homosexuality or marriage in general.  However, I do share their experience of feeling disappointed and troubled, in fact by this very issue, though in a different way.

I was thirteen years old and was still learning the intricacies of the Christian perspectives on sexuality—particularly the hot button issue of homosexuality—when I met a girl who would become one of my best friends to this day. Maria** was imaginative, outgoing, fiercely loyal—and bisexual. She also had some pretty big issues with my religion, Christianity, many of which were caused by her more religious relatives’ refusal to accept her orientation.  

Now, I had never thought very deeply about homosexuality before, but it seemed that the being my Sunday school friends and I had honored with countless “God Is Love” banners written in glitter glue couldn’t have a problem with two people falling in love, even if they seemed for whatever reason an odd couple to other people. So I figured any Christians who would judge my friend must be doing it completely out of their own personal prejudice and didn’t know what they were talking about when they used Christianity to justify themselves. After all, God was Love, and the Bible was God’s Word, so all this nasty homophobia business couldn’t possibly have any foundation in the Bible… right? So, I set out to do a little research and show Maria that my faith was 100% innocent of causing her and the rest of the LGBT community any pain or sorrow.

And that was how my poor, idealistic, 13-year-old self learned an ugly truth—that a great deal of my comfort and faith in the Bible was a result of not having studied it very hard. Between my family’s extensive home library and the power of Google, it didn’t take me very long to find

Leviticus 20:13

“If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.***”

Ouch.

There had been other elements of the Bible that had bothered me before—some of the bloodier acts of the Old Testament God had been a lot to take for a little girl who wouldn’t even crush insects—but this was the first one that I was simply unwilling to try to accept or at least put out of my mind. If the Bible said that being gay or bisexual was somehow evil, then it seemed that in this case the Bible was just plain wrong. I felt tense and guilty to even think privately to myself that the Bible could have made a mistake, but not a fraction of how tense and guilty I felt at the idea of accepting the Levitican viewpoint on homosexuality.

So, for a while I figured that was that. I could still be a Christian and disagree on this one little point. God would forgive me. But that one little point turned out to be a “gateway issue” of sorts with the Bible. As the years went on, I discovered that there were a lot of troubling things in the Word of God that could really keep a teenage girl up at night. Reading the rest of Leviticus (searching for surrounding context that would provide some kind of loophole in 20:13) introduced me to some of the more unsavory Biblical attitudes towards women. So, I figured, maybe this wasn’t about the Bible at all. Maybe it was just that the whole hateful text of Leviticus somehow got dumped into the Good Book by accident. But what about all those other things that had bugged me as a kid? They only got worse when I read the actual Bible texts instead of the kiddie versions of the stories I had always been given. Why was God so keen on exacting revenge on people who hadn’t been responsible for what had angered Him? Why was God’s measure of a person’s loyalty based on whether they would kill their child Just Because I’m God And I Said So? Most importantly, why was God’s first big Rule For Mankind for them to avoid learning the difference between good and evil? Would God be angry at me for doing exactly what I was doing now—trying to figure out what was right and wrong, true and false?

This all culminated in what is commonly known as A Crisis Of Faith. Not the fun, dramatic kind you see in the movies, not the kind that lasts for one bad night and then disappears with a morning epiphany. I couldn’t possibly describe in this post every philosophical turn my mind took and every conclusion I came to on these and other issues, but it suffices to say that it was a long, confusing, exhausting road that I still haven’t finished traveling. It was a long slow process of figuring out what kind of God I believed in and what kind of God I wanted, and whether they could possibly be the same thing.

And I am grateful for every minute of it.

Though my simple childhood faith was easy and comforting, I could not have held onto it forever. My current spiritual path is a challenge, interspersed with periods of doubt or frustration, but it is incredibly rewarding. I find I am now excited at the prospect of spending my life actively developing my religious beliefs and practices, rather than disappointed that I was never able to find quick and simple answers to the questions that troubled me when I was younger.

However, I admit that there are times when I look at how sure I used to be of all my religious truths, and think how much safer and simpler things would have been if I had never started down my road of questions. I imagine that is what troubles many in the Christian world about this legislation—that in exploring uncharted territory like gay marriage, they will lose sight of all they knew and loved about their original beliefs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. My experience is not everyone’s. And even while I have strayed far from the mainstream Christian doctrines, I still find much to believe and love in my mother faith, and am in fact very glad that I was born into it.

I am not saying that the New York Catholic bishops are troubled by the new legislation and homosexuality in general have are troubled for the same reasons I am, or will come to all the same conclusions, but I hope someday they will have the same luck I have had on my spiritual journey. I hope that if things like this that trouble them keep them awake late at night, it is with a purpose—that they may use these sleepless nights as time for reflection, reexamination, and redefinition, while holding on to all the wonderful parts of their faith that will allow them to move forward without fear.

*Michael Gormley, "NY Becomes Sixth and Largest State to Legalize Gay Marriage"

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43507672/ns/politic...

**Not her real name. She’s VERY much out of the closet at this point, but this is still the internet.

***New International Version